Chapter 5

There was a bang as an invisible force knocked the wooden sword violently from Sheng Nuannuan’s hand.

Before the Sheng brothers could react, she flew through the air like a kite with a severed string and slammed into the ground.

“Big Brother, Baby hurts! Baby thinks her waist is broken.”

Sheng Nuannuan wept as though her heart would break, tears pouring like beads from a snapped string.

Her eldest brother rushed to examine her. Sure enough, a horrifying bruise had appeared across her waist.

She had been cherished from the moment she was born. No one had ever touched so much as a hair on her head, much less injured her this badly.

“You dare hurt a member of the Sheng family? Do you have a death wish?”

All eight brothers turned in fury and roared at the dark figures by the entrance.

The people in the shadows ignored their rage. One of them merely lifted a hand.

The thick rope binding me and the cross itself instantly crumbled into powder.

By the faint light, I recognized the four figures at the gates: Mom, Dad, my brother, and my sister, all home from their vacation.

Mom reached me in a few quick steps. When she saw the burns covering my body, her eyes reddened with pain.

As she healed me, she cursed through gritted teeth,

“You little fool. Be too gentle and people will walk all over you. If it were me, I would’ve drained every last one of them.”

“And if you didn’t live on vegetables, would your healing be this pathetic? You can’t even withstand a little sunlight.”

Her scolding did not upset me in the least. Instead, warmth filled my chest.

My sister had been standing farther back, listlessly painting her nails. All at once, her hand stopped.

She frowned slightly, catching the faint scent of blood in the air.

“No.”

As though she knew what had happened, my sister shot straight toward her collection chamber on the third floor.

The instant she opened the door, her entire body shook with rage.

The blood samples she treasured had been smashed to pieces. Liquid mingled with shards of glass across the floor in a ghastly mess.

Mom and Dad followed close behind and discovered that their own precious possessions had suffered too.

Dad picked up the remains of a wine bottle, so furious that his fangs emerged despite himself.

“That was a superb vintage I aged for three hundred years! I could never even bear to touch it.”

Meanwhile, Mom walked wordlessly to the dressing table and picked up a gemstone coated in pink paint.

Her five fingers slowly closed. The gemstone turned to powder in her palm and sifted to the floor.

Mom had plainly reached the limit of her fury.

Once my brother saw that everyone else’s belongings had been ruined, he nearly blacked out and rushed toward his library.

At the sight of row upon row of books standing neatly on the shelves, he exhaled in relief.

Then he opened one. Every rare, one-of-a-kind volume had become a sketchbook. Some had pages torn out; others were missing their opening sections.

“Who did this?”

Four deafening roars sounded at once, shaking the castle chandeliers violently.

“Baby did it, of course!”

Sheng Nuannuan had not sensed the danger at all. Smiling, she peeked out from behind her brothers.

“The words in those books were packed together and looked horrible. Baby was helping you give them an artistic makeover.”

“And Baby flushed the missing pages down the toilet because they were useless. Wasn’t Baby wonderful?”

Listening to her suicidal prattle, I silently closed my eyes and lit an imaginary stick of incense for her.

Buddha have mercy. I hoped she was tough enough to survive the tidal wave of fury my family was about to unleash.