“Yunyi, my dear brother-in-law, you have to stand up for my child!”
On the other end of the call was his sister-in-law’s sorrowful wailing. Amplified by the speakerphone, her voice echoed through the entire abandoned warehouse.
“Say you’re busy!”
The man sitting across from Si Yunyi growled, brows furrowed menacingly. He held a butterfly knife in his hand, the blade pressed tightly against the side of Si Yunyi’s face.
“Don’t say another word—unless you want me to accidentally slip and put a few slashes across that pretty face of yours!”
Si Yunyi’s hands were tied behind his back, his knees spread apart as he knelt on the floor. His white shirt collar was stained with a few smears of blood. Yet his voice remained calm and steady.
“Sister-in-law, I’m busy.”
“Busy, always busy! Do you even realize your eldest nephew is about to be pushed into a pit of fire?!”
“The damned Yan family somehow dragged out a man from who-knows-where, claimed he’s their eldest son, and now they want him to marry one of our Si family’s children!”
His sister-in-law’s sobbing grew more desperate, sharp enough that the surrounding men standing nearby couldn’t help but frown and instinctively lean away.
“Oh, and yes! They even brought a paternity test—issued by one of our own Si family’s medical institutions! Yunyi, what do we do? We only have one grown child in the family! The younger one’s only three years old, just started preschool, and is already being bullied by other kids…”
Once she started complaining, she just wouldn’t stop. The man holding the knife finally lost his patience. Without caring about anything else, he reached out and ended the call.
He took a deep breath and tossed the phone aside, then continued with what he was originally about to do.
The cold blade of the butterfly knife lightly tapped against Si Yunyi’s cheek. A cruel smile slowly crept onto the man’s face.
“Young Master Si, I think you know exactly who you’ve offended.”
Si Yunyi said nothing. His eyes lowered slightly, long lashes casting a shadow beneath them.
“The one who hired us wants your tongue—and two fingers.”
“You only have one tongue, so there’s no choice there. But the fingers—if you make me feel good, maybe I’ll give you the privilege of choosing which two.”
Grinning, the man used the handle of the knife to lift Si Yunyi’s chin.
He had to admit—‘The White Peacock of Harbor City’ was a name that truly fit this Si family young master.
Those cold, upward-tilted eyes were strikingly beautiful and seductive. His nose was straight, lips pale yet defined, and his long black hair contrasted against his fair skin. With a face that looked distant and restrained, he exuded a frosty allure—making him all the more tempting to break.
“How much did Boss Li pay you?”
Si Yunyi tilted his head slightly, eyes calm as he looked at the man opposite him, voice tinted with curiosity.
“What, you’re offering us double?” The man raised a smile. “Boss Li is very generous, you might need to throw in a bit more.”
“How about an extra villa, and two virginal children with their eyes still bright? Want me to burn all that as an offering for you—will that be enough?” Si Yunyi lifted his gaze, a faint smile playing at his lips.
“You—!” Realizing he was being mocked, the man was enraged. He lunged at Si Yunyi’s neck with a butterfly knife. Si Yunyi shifted his body to dodge the first strike. As the man moved to stab again, he saw that the ropes tying Si Yunyi had somehow been undone. In Si Yunyi’s hands, the rope was doubled and swung fiercely toward the man’s eyes.
The man, caught off guard, was struck squarely in one eye. He instantly teared up uncontrollably. Blindly, he slashed in Si Yunyi’s direction again, but before he could do anything further, he felt something cold press against his back.
His whole body froze. He looked around with his one good eye and saw that all his men had been subdued. Two of them had even switched sides—one of them being the person who had tied Si Yunyi up earlier.
No wonder!
“Sir, are you alright?” A man quickly brought over a suit jacket and draped it over Si Yunyi.
In an instant, the situation had completely reversed. Wearing the black jacket, Si Yunyi calmly took the seat the man had just vacated.
The man was forced to kneel at Si Yunyi’s feet, trembling uncontrollably.
“I’ve always been merciful.” Si Yunyi looked down at him from above, his eyes frosty as he glanced at the man’s calloused fingers—likely from years of playing with knives.
“I won’t give you the burden of making a choice.”
“Boss Li… he won’t let you off. He’ll—” The man was so scared that a wet stain had already spread on his pants.
“He’s already being watched by the Port City police. And thanks to you, we now have a few more statements.” The man beside Si Yunyi spoke coldly. “We’ve been cooperating with the police from the beginning. They’ll be here soon.”
Just then, the phone that had been thrown aside rang again. Someone hurried over, picked it up, wiped it clean, and held it next to Si Yunyi’s ear.
“Yunyi, are you done?” It was his sister-in-law, her voice still tinged with tears though she’d calmed down a bit.
Si Yunyi pulled a silk handkerchief from the jacket pocket, wiped the blood off his face, then put on a pair of silver-rimmed glasses. With practiced ease, he looped the chain behind his ears. His tone was as refined and restrained as ever.
“Just finished. Go ahead, sister-in-law.”
“The Yan family has gone too far. I sent someone to check on their eldest son. He’s just a supermarket loader—rustic and dumb! He doesn’t even use the Yan surname. Says he took his grandmother’s name—Chu something…”
She trailed off, trying to recall the name. Si Yunyi paused in thought and offered a guess:
“Chu Junlie?”
“Yes! That’s it—Chu Junlie!” she responded emotionally.
A flicker of something passed through Si Yunyi’s eyes—a vague sense of foreboding.
Just last night, Si Yunyi had a strange dream. In the dream, the world he had lived in for 29 years turned out to be a hyper-dramatic, overpowered novel called “The Most Arrogant Live-In Son-in-Law.”
In it, the main character Chu Junlie was extraordinarily talented, orphaned, and the sole heir of the Chu family. He was gravely injured and lost his memory, only to be picked up by the Yan couple in Port City.
The Yan and Si families were bound by an engagement. Unwilling to let their biological son become a live-in husband, the Yans lied and passed off Chu Junlie as their eldest son and handed him to the Si family.
After losing his memory, Chu Junlie was indeed rustic and naive. None of the Si family’s direct descendants wanted to marry him, so the old Si patriarch arranged for him to be married into a collateral branch.
On the surface, that family treated him politely, but behind closed doors, they abused him in all sorts of ways. After the patriarch’s death, Chu Junlie was locked in a basement and fed only leftovers.
Until he regained his memory.
After that, Chu Junlie’s actions were so brutal and ruthless that they shocked all of Port City. The collateral branch of the Si family vanished without a trace. The small villa still reeked of blood even after three months.
As for the main Si family, they weren’t spared either. Under the weight of the Chu family’s influence, they were easily crushed.
Si Yunyi had thought it was just a dream.
But now, even the names were matching.
Something was definitely strange.
Outside the rundown warehouse, the sound of police sirens echoed. Red and blue lights flashed as Si Yunyi walked out, negotiated briefly with the police, then returned to his car.
“Sir, are we heading to the old estate?” his subordinate asked as he opened the car door.
“Yes.” Si Yunyi thought for a moment. “And help me find contact information for the Chu family in Jing City.”
“You’re planning to cooperate with them?” the man asked, curious.
Si Yunyi removed the jacket, got into the car, and smiled slightly.
“Can’t say… maybe I’m just sending a lost child home.”
At the Yan family’s villa, Madam Yan threw a stack of photos at a young man’s face, her voice seething with fury.
“I told you! The Si family would be investigating you these days! I told you to hide in your rental flat and not go out—NOT GO OUT!”
“But what did you do? You went right back to unloading cargo, and let them take pictures of you!”
Her chest heaved with rage. “Now look! Everyone knows you’re some dumb, rustic loader from the countryside. How could the Si family ever accept you as a live-in son-in-law?”
The young man silently bent down to pick up the photos.
They showed him unloading goods for an old man at the supermarket.
In a dingy alleyway, he wore a cheap work uniform. The weather was hot, so he’d tied his jacket around his waist and only wore a black tank top on top. A towel was draped over his shoulder, and on his feet were nearly disintegrating camouflage shoes.
He did indeed look… rustic and foolish.
“Chu Junlie! Was it really that hard to stay hidden for two days?! Did you do this on purpose?” Madam Yan suddenly looked suspicious, her expression darkening.
“You wanted the Si family to see you like this so they’d make your younger brother marry in your place! He’s only just come of age. You’re his older brother—how could you be so cruel?! Don’t you have a heart?!”
“I… I didn’t mean to.”
The young man called Chu Junlie lowered his head and stared at the photo in his hand, his face pale.
“I… I really didn’t have money to eat, so…”
“No money to eat?!”
Madam Yan looked as if she’d just heard the world’s biggest joke. Her hand, which was pointing at her eldest son, trembled.
“When I told you to leave, I gave you three thousand. And now you’re telling me you had no money for food?!”
“That was three months ago,” Chu Junlie raised his head, eyes filled with guilt, and his voice unconsciously softened.
“Renting in Port City is too expensive. The landlord made me pay a deposit plus one month up front. The entire three thousand went into rent.
I wanted to find a decent job too, but I don’t have any education or skills, so no one would hire me.
I worked at a construction site for two months, but there’s no work recently, so I had to take some day labor jobs for loading and unloading…
I didn’t mean for that to happen that day. Grandpa Chang at the supermarket is already in his seventies, and he twisted his waist a few days ago. The supermarket needed a restock, so I helped out.”
“Excuses. All just excuses!”
Madam Yan’s anger didn’t subside.
“Listen to yourself. Was it not enough that I gave you money? You better think hard about who paid for you to stay in the ICU and who covered your surgery when you had that accident!”
Chu Junlie lowered his head, lips tightly pressed together.
Looking at her “eldest son,” Madam Yan took a deep breath, her headache growing.
If it weren’t for needing to deal with the arranged marriage to the Si family, she and her husband would never have taken in this half-dead young man lying by the roadside in the first place.
Back then, when she learned the man had amnesia and only remembered his name, she was even delighted. With a paternity test and a fabricated story, they made him believe he was the Yan family’s eldest son. Now that they were about to marry him off to the Si family, who would’ve thought something like this would happen?
Tonight was supposed to be the meeting between the two families’ children to finalize the decision. What if the Si family rejected this counterfeit?
All her scheming over so long, and all the money poured in—would it all go to waste?
The more she thought about it, the more anxious Madam Yan became. Thinking about the suffering her real son might endure if he had to marry into the Si family, sorrow suddenly overwhelmed her, and she lowered her head, choking with sobs.
Seeing the worn-out shoes in front of her, Madam Yan looked up at the helpless Chu Junlie as if clinging to her last lifeline. She grabbed his sleeve.
“Please, I’m begging you—give your brother a way out.
As long as you can win over the Si family tonight and marry into their household, all our debts will be cleared.
Alright?”
To prove her sincerity, Madam Yan even pulled out all the receipts related to Chu Junlie’s expenses and laid them out in front of him.
Chu Junlie looked down at the pile of bills—everything from a 2-yuan bottle of water to an 8,000-yuan ICU room. Nothing was left out.
Madam Yan suddenly noticed something, pulled out a bill worth tens of thousands, tore it up, and threw it into the trash can.
“This one must have gotten mixed in. It’s not yours.”
She wiped the corners of her eyes.
But Chu Junlie saw it clearly—it was a payment receipt for a pair of limited-edition sneakers. They belonged to his younger “brother,” Yan An.
“Altogether, it comes to 352,000 and…”
Before she could finish, she saw Chu Junlie silently gather all the receipts, eyes dark and unreadable.
“I’ll marry into their family.”
[mfn]If you enjoy my translations, you can show your support by leaving a comment or donating to my Ko-fi. It will be much appreciated. Thank you! [/mfn]
