Zi Teng's confidence withered, his nervous sweat manifesting as a visible sheen on his forehead, and it was clear to everyone watching that his panic was the clearest confession of his guilt.
"I knew Brother Ji could never be that kind of person," Baobao chimed in, handing me a crisp, freshly sliced apple as the room's atmosphere curdled around Zi Teng, who, realizing he was trapped, threw one final, desperate Hail Mary.
He suddenly recalled that there was no camera on the staircase, the one spot where he had orchestrated his most elaborate lie, and he clung to it like a drowning man grasping at a blade.
"But you pushed me down the stairs. That is an absolute fact, and I am the one who suffered. I would never use my own body to stage such a thing," he cried, feigning a pathetic, fragile weakness that he hoped would appeal to our parents' sympathies.
As their eyes drifted back toward me with uncertainty, I felt the tension tighten to a breaking point. Zi Yuan, however, suppressed a sound of pure disgust and retorted, "I expected you to use this as your final pathetic excuse, but you clearly forgot that we had a hidden lens installed on the landing weeks ago."
She skipped to the next file, and the footage began. Zi Teng waiting in the shadows near my door. The two of us walking toward the stairs. Him feigning solicitude as he moved in front of me. And then the sickening moment where he turned, locked eyes with me, grabbed my hand, and threw himself backward, dragging me down with him before hitting the ground and erupting into a performance of feigned agony.
The video cut to black, leaving the room in a stunned, suffocating silence, and when the light returned to the table, every single gaze was anchored on Zi Teng, who stood utterly dismantled, his head hanging low in an admission of defeat he could no longer fight.
"Is this truly what you did, little Teng?" my mother asked, her voice trembling with a grief that went deeper than words. She looked as though she were physically disintegrating, completely unable to reconcile the boy she had raised with the monstrous, moral void that now stood before her.
I watched as my father's gaze flickered toward Fang Baobao, and the moment he witnessed the raw, unfiltered disgust etched across her face as she looked at Zi Teng, a volcanic surge of rage overwhelmed him. His son had utterly incinerated the family's dignity, and the shame radiated off the patriarch in waves.
"Zi Teng, you have disappointed us beyond the point of redemption," Du Nan roared, his voice trembling with a potent cocktail of fury and profound exhaustion. "Have we deprived you of food or shelter since you returned? How could you commit such base, wretched acts?"
Before the question could even hang in the air, he stepped forward and delivered a backhanded slap so forceful that it sent Zi Teng sprawling onto the floor. Yet nobody moved to help him. Instead, the entire room regarded him with a chilling, detached coldness, as if we were all spectators at the trial of a common criminal.
Zi Teng, finally realizing that the ground beneath his feet had vanished, frantically scrambled to his knees, his face streaming with tears as he begged for forgiveness, claiming he had been momentarily possessed by a devilish impulse.
But Du Nan merely let out a hollow, defeated sigh. "You aren't apologizing to the right person," he murmured, a signal that Zi Teng understood with immediate, cowardly clarity.
He turned, dragging himself toward me on his knees and sobbing out desperate pleas for mercy, claiming that his actions had come from the heart. I stood there, feeling the weight of the moment and the pathetic nature of his display, and I could only offer an awkward, self-conscious scratch to the back of my head, unable to find the words to navigate this sudden shift from accuser to object of forced contrition.
"You don't understand that you're wrong. You only understand that your life as you know it is over," Du Lizhi remarked, her eyes tracing Zi Teng's form with the same clinical disdain one might reserve for a maggot, making it painfully obvious that she felt no shred of sisterly affection for him.
Sensing the atmosphere teetering on the edge of further volatility, Du Nan clapped his hands, cutting through the silence to dictate that there would be no second chances, and that the next transgression would result in Zi Teng's permanent expulsion from the family, before turning on his heel and exiting the hall with a final, disdainful scoff.
With the patriarch gone, Zi Teng slunk away to his room like a beaten cur, and the tension shifted in an instant. Du Zi Yuan, her demeanor undergoing a dizzying metamorphosis, bounded over to me, her movements animated and youthful, as she asked if she'd been cool during the confrontation, looking for all the world like a little girl fishing for a gold star.
I bowed to her with a dramatic, exaggerated flare of appreciation, promising her a massive celebratory feast as a token of my gratitude, though she pouted playfully, calling my lack of sincerity into question. After a few more minutes of aimless, lighthearted chatter, we all dispersed to our respective quarters.
Fang Baobao was led to the room the sisters had prepared for her, a space situated at the furthest possible point from my own. But as she stepped across the threshold, a knowing, triumphant smile spread across her face. She clearly saw through their clumsy, transparent attempt to create distance between us, thinking it adorable that they truly believed such a thin veil of strategy would keep her from me.
She paused for a moment, her mind briefly snagging on the strange, possessive intensity of my sisters. Surely, even a sister shouldn't be so hyper-vigilant about a brother's living arrangements. But she dismissed the dark thoughts as quickly as they arrived, chiding herself for letting her imagination run wild when they were, after all, siblings, and she cleared her head of the oddity, refocusing on her long-term strategy.