Chapter 533: Chapter 180: The ’80s Drama Queen Is Forced to Perform as a Top Student (15)

"Do you really want us to expose you and tell everyone here the whole story from start to finish?"

Pang and Junzi were furious, too. They had already cut ties, yet this brother and sister insisted on dragging them into their family drama.

Their parents were displeased as well. "All right, that’s enough. Nothing you say is going to work. On one hand, you have a woman who couldn’t wait to be a stepmother and clearly despises her husband’s kid from a previous marriage—why else would she let a little girl end up looking so rough? On the other hand, you have two resentful brats."

"It’s hard to say if what you’re saying is true or not."

"But folks, take a look at Comrade Xiao Xuezhen’s wound. Is that something a normal adult could even do?"

"And besides, just look at that poor child."

Everyone was thinking the same thing. It wasn’t a question of strength, but whether a child could possess such vicious, precise skill.

Of the five people in the Xiao family, this girl was the thinnest and smallest of them all. She was the least likely culprit.

Just then, one of the neighborhood women coaxed Sheng Leyun to come out.

Xiao Xuezhen asked despairingly, "If I told you she did this to herself, would you believe me?"

"The blood on her is from my wound..."

The crowd shot him a look like he was an idiot, their hearts aching at Sheng Leyun’s miserable, pitiful state.

They remembered how just that morning, the little girl had been wearing a white athletic dress. Her skin might have been a bit tan and coarse, but she had beautiful features, and her faint dimples always seemed to be filled with a smile. She would greet everyone she met with a cheerful grin and a "hello."

Who wouldn’t like a pretty, polite little girl?

Most importantly, she had a tragic backstory. Whenever people looked at her, it was through a lens of pity—a lens cranked up to maximum intensity.

So even when she smiled, through the crowd’s thick filter of sympathy, they only saw someone forcing a brave face. It inexplicably made their hearts ache, making them want to give her the very world itself.

And now, here she was, looking so utterly pitiful.

The light in the room was dim. Her hair and clothes were a mess, a smear of blood was at the corner of her mouth, and what looked like scrapes and bruises marked her cheeks and the corners of her eyes. She looked so wretched, as if she had suffered some kind of inhuman abuse!

The crowd glared at Xiao Xuezhen.

"Even if Yunyun was the one who stabbed you with that chopstick, you deserved it!"

Even a cornered rabbit will bite! Why shouldn’t the poor kid fight back when she’s been bullied this badly?

Xiao Xuezhen gritted his teeth. "Take her to a hospital and get her checked out! See where she’s been hit! She clearly did this to herself to play the victim! She’s playing you for fools and using you!"

Someone in the crowd scoffed. "Xiao Xuezhen, you’re a grown man. Why are you arguing with a little girl? How bad can a child possibly be?"

"They’re blank slates. Whether they turn out good or bad all depends on how the adults around them raise them."

"You think everyone is as cunning as you, constantly scheming against others? What would Yunyun’s motive even be?"

"Besides, no normal person would go to all this trouble for no reason. Not unless you did something completely unacceptable!"

It had to be said, the crowd had hit upon the truth. Xiao Xuezhen went completely rigid. The pain from the wound in his hand had faded to numbness, but his mind was now unnervingly clear.

’How could I have let Sheng Leyun provoke me into telling the truth?’

He had only said it for a moment of verbal satisfaction, but now that Sheng Leyun had repeated it, it didn’t matter whether the crowd could find any evidence.

His reputation would be in absolute tatters!

Just as the crowd said, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. The girl was young; if nothing had happened, how could she have come up with a story about her father being framed and killed?

Xiao Xuezhen slumped, defeated. He stopped arguing and said weakly, "Fine. Since you’re all protecting her, we’ll just say I was careless and got stabbed by the chopstick."

"I just hope you all watch your own backs, and your children’s. Don’t let the same thing happen to you."

A murmur of unease went through the crowd.

They looked at the chopstick, and a cold shiver shot up their spines, making the hair on their arms stand on end.

’That must have hurt like hell,’ they thought. ’There’s no way Xiao Xuezhen did that to himself by accident.’

They glanced at Sheng Leyun, whose shoulders were trembling, and shook their heads, pushing the thought away.

"From what I can see, Comrades Xiao Xuezhen and Ren Xingchen are truly not fit to be Sheng Leyun’s guardians," a neighborhood committee official said with a slight sigh, shaking his head.

"This family has caused such a huge scene today. Regardless of who’s right or wrong, the child is the one who will suffer in the end."

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