The militia captain stepped forward, took one look, and sucked in a sharp breath of air. The man on the ground was flushed red from head to toe, reeking of an overwhelming stench of alcohol, with both hands clamped desperately over his crotch. A massive wet patch soaked the front of his pants—he had clearly pissed himself in terror.
“Isn’t this Zhao Dazhuang? Wasn’t he just let out of custody this afternoon?” Frowning deeply, the militia captain gestured for two of his subordinates to grab hemp ropes and hog-tie Zhao Dazhuang’s hands and feet into a dead knot.
The crowd of villagers packed into the courtyard was growing denser by the minute. Recognizing Zhao Dazhuang, the assembly instantly erupted into an uproar.
“Breaking over the wall into the Su family in the middle of the night? What is this piece of trash trying to pull?”
“What else could he be trying to pull? He’s after their girl, obviously!”
“He’s got a death wish, breaking into the brigade leader’s house!”
Roughly hauled to his feet, Zhao Dazhuang’s eyes were red, swollen, and streaming tears from the stinging medicinal liquor, while his lower half throbbed with a pain so intense he couldn’t straighten his back. Yet his wits hadn’t completely abandoned him; hearing the murmur of the surrounding crowd, he realized that if the charge of hooliganism stuck today, he’d be facing a firing squad.
Struggling violently, he stretched his raw, rasping voice into a frantic shriek: “I’m not a thief! Su Nianqiu called me here! She’s the one who told me to scale the wall in the middle of the night! Everyone, judge this for yourselves—this hussy’s belly got knocked up by someone else, and she’s feeling empty and desperate at night, so she asked me to keep her company! Just look at the clothes she’s wearing right now, she’s dressed to seduce me!”
The courtyard fell dead silent for a split second.
Several suspicious glances darted toward Su Nianqiu. She was wearing nothing more than a plain, thin, long-sleeved nightgown; though modest and fully covered, it was light and fit closely against her frame.
Driven completely insane by rage, Li Xiulan snatched up her carrying pole and moved to smash his lying mouth to pieces: “I’ll rip that filthy mouth of yours to shreds, you bastard!”
“Mom.” Su Nianqiu reached out and caught Li Xiulan by the arm.
Stepping out from the shadows, she moved into the brilliant glare of the torches. No panic, no shame, no distress. She walked right up to Zhao Dazhuang and looked down at him from above.
“I called you here?” Su Nianqiu asked, her tone completely level.
“Right! It was you! You put on an innocent act during the day, but at night you told me to come into your room for a good time!” Zhao Dazhuang dug in his heels and refused to budge.
With a cold snort, Su Nianqiu turned and walked back to the doorway of the east wing. She bent down, scooped a long, rusted strip of iron off the ground, and tossed it onto the dirt right in front of the villagers, where it landed with a sharp, clattering ring.
“This fell from outside the door.” Pointing directly at the fresh scratch gouged into the wooden doorframe, Su Nianqiu continued, “If I had invited you in, why would I have bolted the door shut? And just what tool did you use to pry the latch open?”
Stiffening his neck stubbornly, Zhao Dazhuang barked, “Who knows if you didn’t just set a trap to frame me?!”
“I set a trap to frame you?” Su Nianqiu closed the distance, her gaze as sharp as a blade. “Can everyone smell this pungent odor coming off you? It’s the medicinal wine I keep inside my room. The moment you forced your way in with bad intentions, I splashed you with it and knocked you down with a bamboo pole. As you just admitted yourself a moment ago, your mother went to the police station and kicked up a fuss until they dragged you out, and someone pointed out a bright path for you this afternoon telling you to ruin my purity in the middle of the night—claiming that as long as we had a fait accompli, my dad wouldn’t dare make a peep, and might even be forced to let you step into his shoes as brigade leader.”
The moment those words dropped, the entire crowd exploded into a cacophony of shock.
Su Jianguo’s face darkened so intensely it looked like ink was about to drip from it, the veins on the back of his hand gripping the cleaver bulging violently.
“You’re lying! I never said any of that!” Zhao Dazhuang panicked.
Giving him zero breathing room to recover, Su Nianqiu drove home every single word with lethal precision: “You never said it? A good-for-nothing hooligan who can’t even write his own name could ever dream up a plot like ‘forcing a fait accompli to coerce the brigade leader into stepping down’? Zhao Dazhuang, if you spill right now and tell us who’s pulling your strings behind the scenes, my dad might still let you off as an accomplice. If you don’t…”
Turning her head to look at Su Jianguo, her voice rang out clear and sharp: “Dad, breaking into a residence at midnight with a weapon and plotting to rape a woman—under our country’s laws, how many years is that sentence?”
Su Jianguo picked up her cue instantly, his voice roaring like thunder: “That is an exceptionally vile act of hooliganism combined with the crime of sabotaging production and construction! Getting shot by a firing squad isn’t too good for him! At the absolute minimum, he’s looking at twenty years of hard labor on a farm in the Northwest!”
“Twenty years of hard labor!”
The words terrified Zhao Dazhuang so badly his knees buckled. If two militia members hadn’t been holding him up, he would have collapsed straight onto the ground.
The way the villagers looked at Zhao Dazhuang shifted completely. If a few people had harbored lingering doubts about Su Nianqiu’s personal conduct at first, hearing about a “plot to usurp the brigade leader’s authority” made everything click into place for everyone present. This wasn’t just some casual slip in moral conduct between a man and a woman—this was a blatant, tyrannical local bully attempting a conspiracy of extortion and murder!
“Beat the life out of this menace!”
Someone yelled from the crowd, and several hot-tempered villagers lunged forward immediately, letting loose a barrage of kicks and punches directly at Zhao Dazhuang.
“Stop hitting! Ow—stop hitting!” Rolling across the dirt in agony, Zhao Dazhuang streamed blood from his nose.
The militia captain didn’t try to stop them. Only after everyone had vented enough steam did he wave a hand to have Zhao Dazhuang hauled back up to his feet.
“Talk! Who put you up to this?!” the militia captain barked harshly.
Bruised and battered, Zhao Dazhuang had snot and tears smeared all over his face. He wanted to confess, but he honestly had no idea who the person was. That afternoon, while he was dozing off beneath the big tree at the village entrance, he had half-asleep overheard two people chatting behind the trunk, whispering that the brigade leader cared about face above all else, and that if Su Nianqiu were ever actually defiled by someone, Su Jianguo would swallow the humiliation to cover up the scandal and be forced to accept the man as his son-in-law.
He hadn’t seen their faces at all.
“I… I don’t know… I didn’t see who it was…” Zhao Dazhuang wailed tearfully.
Su Nianqiu narrowed her eyes slightly. Didn’t see who it was? That style of operation fit Chen Xiaoman’s green-tea playbook a little too well.
No matter. The monk might run, but the temple couldn’t pack up and leave. Today, she’d finish dealing with Zhao Dazhuang first.
“If you don’t know, that’s fine,” Su Nianqiu told him. “You broke into a house with malicious intent—that’s ironclad and set in stone. And you’ve been running your mouth, dragging my name through the mud and ruining my reputation. Now you’ve been caught red-handed. Dad, send him straight to the commune’s armed forces department tonight. He can’t stay in this village any longer; keeping him here is just leaving a poisonous snake in our backyard.”
Nodding, Su Jianguo turned and barked his orders to the militia captain: “Captain Wang, take four of the lads and escort this bastard straight to the commune tonight. Hand him directly over to the commune party secretary and the police station chief! Tell them the Red Flag Brigade will never tolerate such hooligan bullies! If they dare let him walk free again tomorrow, I, Su Jianguo, will take myself straight to the county committee to file a formal complaint!”
“Understood!” the militia captain shouted back briskly.
Zhao Dazhuang was dragged out of the yard like a dead dog, leaving behind a trail of desperate, sobbing wails for mercy.
The courtyard finally settled into silence.
Turning back around, Su Jianguo swept his gaze across the yard full of villagers, took a deep breath, and bellowed: “Fellow villagers! My daughter, Su Nianqiu, is completely innocent! The child in her belly has a proper, righteous origin! Everyone has just witnessed the fate of this beast, Zhao Dazhuang. From now on, if I ever catch anyone in this village chewing the fat or splashing dirty water on my daughter again, I’ll treat them with the exact same hooligan standard as Zhao Dazhuang—and I will show zero mercy!”
The absolute authority of the brigade leader was on full display in that moment. The villagers nodded in agreement one after another.
“Don’t you worry, Brigade Leader, none of us believed that scumbag’s lies in the first place!”
“Exactly, Nianqiu is such a fine girl, she was clearly set up by this animal.”
The tide of public opinion had completely turned.
Standing in the moonlight, Su Nianqiu watched the retreating backs of the dispersing villagers, a faint, cold smirk curving the corners of her lips.