Chapter 312 Reverse Interrogation

"Xue Ning, what are you talking about?" Tai Cheng asked, concerned. "Why did you even go back to the restaurant? It could be dangerous!"

"Dad, trust me, I'm not the one in danger! There are three dead men lying outside our restaurant!" Xue Ning shrieked. Technically, there was one man that was on his literal last breath, and by not calling the ambulance, Xue Ning doomed him to death.

"Ah." Her father said, finally understanding why his daughter was panicking. It wasn't every day that someone stumbled on a dead body, let alone three. "Don't worry about it, it was an accident. Dad just overdid a little."

"No fucking shit Dad!" Xue Ning exclaimed sarcastically. Before her father could scold her for foul language, she continued. "Did you know I nearly tripped over something? Can you guess what it was?"

"A leaf?" Tai Cheng asked.

"No! Dad, I stepped on someone's severed finger!" She burst out. "Dad, if you killed someone by accident I could still understand, but how could you chop off their fingers?"

Tai Cheng sighed wearily. "It was necessary. I needed to interrogate them, and this was the fastest, most effective way."

"Sure," Xue Ning said, heaving in a deep breath. "Then Dad, my next question is how on earth did you know this? The interrogation, the sword skills, even stealing Mayor Poh's fucking truck! That's not something a normal person would know! And Mom too, Mom gouged out the eyes of two men - that's not normal! Who are you really?"

With every word, her voice grew louder. By the end of her tirade, her voice was loud enough to echo throughout the house, attracting her mother's attention. Li Yue Niang walked to the living room, exchanging a worried glance with her husband.

"If I told you that running a restaurant gave you such skills, you wouldn't believe me, right?" Tai Cheng asked with a wan smile, suddenly looking decades older.

"Of course not! I'm not that dumb! If all chefs could do this, there'd be murders during lunch hours." Xue Ning protested. "Tell me the truth!"

"It's a long story though." Yue Niang said.

"Then you guys can sit down and tell me." Xue Ning said, crossing her arms.

Tai Cheng sighed. What could he say? The room fell into an uneasy silence, and Xue Ning glowered.

"How about you ask a question first, and we'll try our best to answer?" Tai Cheng offered after the silence grew nigh unbearable.

"I asked so many questions just now, you didn't even answer one," Xue Ning grumbled to herself, before she looked back at her parents and asked. "Firstly, where did you learn those knife skills and interrogation tactics from?"

"The knife skills were passed down from my mentor, the interrogation skills were honed with time," Tai Cheng said cagily. His daughter stared at him, unimpressed.

"Dad, can you answer me seriously?" Xue Ning demanded. "Fine, maybe I should be asking better questions instead. Have you and Mom ever killed people outside of today? On purpose?"

"...." Husband and wife stared at each other, and then the floor.

There was an awkward pause, and Xue Ning crossed her arms, waiting expectantly for an answer.

"Mom, Dad, it's a very simple question with a very simple answer," Xue Ning said, feeling remarkably like their roles were reversed. She recalled her mother saying something similar when she found her sneaking fruit from the neighbour's fruit trees.

"Yes or no?"

"Sometimes in life, you have to make tough decisions." Yue Niang said primly.

"So I'm assuming the answer is yes," Xue Ning said, rubbing her temples. "Great. The both of you are assassins. Or mafia hitmen."

"Xue Ning ah, it's not as though we were trigger-happy serial killers," Yue Niang clarified, deliberately not addressing her daughter's last sentence.

"We just had pretty rough lives before we settled down here! Sometimes, you need to do what you need to do to survive! And thankfully old habits die hard - if they didn't, you'd be kidnapped now!"

"I see…" Xue Ning said, her brow furrowing. She recalled their lives so far - it made sense that her parents weren't born rich. They were clearly used to suffering.

And it didn't escape her notice that her parents didn't deny the mafia hitmen accusation.

As she was deep in her thoughts, she missed the look of relief her parents shared. They didn't want to tell their daughter the whole truth, but perhaps they could let her draw her own conclusions.

"Besides, if we were cold-blooded murderers, why would I let Poh Jin Lian and her gang of merry harpies live for so long?" Yue Niang added. "I would have chopped them up and fed them to their own family members!"

"Wife, please," Tai Cheng said, a pained look on his face. They were supposed to sound less murderous!

"I'm just being honest," Yue Niang said, shrugging.

"Then if both of you had these skills, why didn't you just teach me when I wanted to learn? You wouldn't need to waste the money on sending me to class! Also, why didn't you strike back at Poh Jin Lian years ago - you didn't need to kill her, but you could have just beaten her up. Why suffer unduly?"

"Our skills are not appropriate for children to learn. Kids should be kids. And we wanted you to make friends!" Tai Cheng said firmly.

He was forced into rigorous training and had to master these skills as a child to survive - he would never put his own daughter through that sort of torment!

"Xue Ning-ah, beating her up would just rain more trouble on our heads," Yue Niang added. "Not worth it. We moved here for a peaceful life!"

They had to keep a low profile, lest Sun Haowei found out where they hid. Of course she had to hold her fists back. But with Sun Jingwei coming into the picture, there was no point in staying hidden. She might as well borrow his status to get revenge!

Xue Ning twitched. Her life here was peaceful, but it was by no means happy, thanks to all the terrible townspeople! With her parents' personality, they logically should have done everything they could to ensure they weren't bullied, but instead they just endured it silently.

Something wasn't adding up. This cowardly behaviour…

"Who were you hiding from all these years?" Xue Ning demanded, and both parents froze, their eyes widening at the sudden question.

"Hiding? What makes you think that?" Tai Cheng asked, but the words escaped too quickly from his mouth. Xue Ning narrowed her eyes.

"You and Mom definitely were on the run from something. Or someone." Xue Ning insisted, her eyes lighting up with sudden realisation. "You were trying to keep a low profile to make sure someone didn't find you, right?"

"And this must have happened before - people invading your house, if not, why were the both of you so ready to just pack up and leave?" Xue Ning's voice trailed off as everything started to come neatly together.

The way they just accepted the vitriol of the townspeople instead of moving someplace else.

The way they would rather suffer humiliation than pick a fight.

They refused to let Xue Ning go to the big city, until she threatened to shave her head.

Her father claimed to know bigshot lawyers for contract drafting.

The way both parents insisted that she should never trust rich powerful men like Sun Jingwei.

How her mother could shatter Poh Jin Lian's wrist in a simple twist, and have enough strength to gouge out two eyeballs of fully grown men.

How her father could gather incriminating information from their neighbours so easily.

How her father could take down three men - no wait, five men, with only two knives.

"Our daughter is really too smart," Tai Cheng mused to his wife. "Told you she would figure it out before she turned 30."

"Nah. If she hadn't met him, she wouldn't have," Yue Niang pointed out, crossing her arms. "Aish, the one time she gets a boyfriend and he happens to be one of the biggest fishes in the ocean. What is this luck?"

"Mom, I'm right here. I can hear you," Xue Ning said. "So I'm right?"

"Sort of." Tai Cheng said, shrugging, giving Yue Niang a quick questioning look. Yue Niang nodded.

He didn't want to talk about his dramatic past as Sun Haowei's bodyguard and friend, and how he accidentally ended up falling in love with Sun Haowei's fiancee and how the both of them abandoned him when he asked for too much. And he definitely wasn't going to bring up Yue Niang's past if she didn't want her daughter to know.

Some things were better left unsaid.

"But Dad has a favour to ask of you. Now that you know about this, please keep it a secret from your brother! If you're taking it poorly enough, your brother might just lose his mind."

"Got it," Xue Ning agreed, but then she frowned. "Wait - then is it safe for the both of you to go back to Shanghai? What if the person is still trying to get you?"

"He wouldn't," Yue Niang said, a strange little smile growing on her face. "Recently, we got the news that he's hospitalised. He won't be bothering us anytime soon."