That Day at the Village Entrance, the Bodyguard Kicked Open the Ancestral Hall Door - Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Under normal circumstances, I would have definitely called him a lunatic.

But that day, when I opened my mouth, my throat was as dry as if I’d swallowed sand; I couldn’t squeeze out a single word.

Liang Xubai didn’t wait for my answer either.

He pressed me down into a seat at the long table by the entrance of the Ancestral Hall. Standing before the table himself, his gaze swept across the faces of the surrounding crowd one by one.

“Those truly here to collect a debt, step forward.”

“Those just here for the spectacle, get lost now.”

His voice wasn’t loud, but it was hard as flint.

The men he had just brutally flattened were still rolling on the ground in pain. No one else dared to move.

A woman holding a child was the first to step forward. She slapped several crumpled receipts and medical records onto the table.

“My man was working on your construction site. He fell from the scaffolding, and the foreman told him to see a doctor on his own dime, saying there was no money. It dragged on until last month, and then… he was gone.”

Her voice was soft, but those last few words felt like they slammed against my ears.

Gone.

I instinctively looked at the child. The boy was as thin as a kitten, the tip of his nose red and cracked, shrinking into his mother’s arms while stealing glances at me.

Then, more people stepped forward.

Road builders, stone transporters, medicinal herb planters, sewage trench diggers-they brought their knee injuries, their lung diseases, and their family debts, laying them out before me one by one.

I had originally thought it was just a few hundred thousand in arrears, plus some compensation at most.

But the more I heard, the colder my heart became.

Wages, industrial injuries, material costs, hush money.

This wasn’t just a minor glitch in a single project; the entire line was rotten to the core.

An old woman with silver hair suddenly squeezed to the front.

She didn’t curse me, nor did she cry. She simply placed a pair of old, mud-stained canvas shoes on the table.

“These are the shoes my son wore while working last year.”

“He’s buried now, but I couldn’t bear to throw the shoes away.”

I stared at the shoes, suddenly remembering a time when I was very young and my mother brought me to Jiahe.

That year, I complained that the village roads were too dirty and refused to get out of the car.

She stood in the rain, the edges of her shoes covered in mud, yet she still bent down to pick up a child who had scraped their knee. She turned back and said to me, “Ruoqi, if you can’t remember people in the future, remember the dirt on their shoes first.”

At the time, I thought she was being meddlesome.

Now, those words suddenly pierced back into my ears.

Liang Xubai shoved a pen into my hand.

“Record it.”

I gripped the pen but didn’t move. “Why aren’t you doing it?”

He stood to my right, the setting sun casting deep lines across his profile.

“These are the Zhou Family’s debts.”

“Your surname is Zhou.”

His retort left me breathless.

But he didn’t look at me again, only tilting his chin toward the people in line. “Next.”

I took a breath and wiped the sweat from my palms.

This time, I didn’t ask any more questions. I lowered my head and began to write.

Names, types of work, amounts owed, injuries, dates of death, foremen’s names.

By the end, my fingers were trembling.

When the total was calculated, I stared at the numbers on the paper for several seconds.

9.13 million.

And that didn’t even include the disability compensation that hadn’t been tallied yet.

The weight of that number made my wrist ache.

I had grown up in the Zhou Family, accustomed to projects worth hundreds of millions. To the board of directors, nine million was just “marginal costs,” but to these people, it was their families’ lives.

“Do you understand now?”

Liang Xubai asked suddenly.

I looked up at him, my throat tight. “My father said the Jiahe Project had already been settled.”

He let out a short laugh, tinged with a faint trace of mockery.

“You actually dare to believe anything that comes out of Zhou Yuming’s mouth?”

I wanted to argue, but the words died in my throat.

Because I suddenly remembered the authorization form the CFO had brought over last week.

I had just finished a fight with Zhou Yuming and was incredibly frustrated; I only glanced at the header before signing it. One column in that document read: “Zhou Ruoqi, as the initiator of the group’s public welfare image, shall participate in the coordination and external communication of the Jiahe Medicine Valley Project.”

If they added a few more pages later, stuffing in project liabilities and on-site confirmations…

Then all the filth could indeed be dumped on my head.

My face went pale instantly.

Liang Xubai saw it, but he had no intention of comforting me.

“Figured it out?”

I stood up abruptly. “Did you know about this all along?”

“I found out yesterday.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me?”

Liang Xubai finally turned to look at me.

His gaze was heavy, devoid of anger, but it made my chest feel stifled.

“Because yesterday, you were still asking me if I should change into a decent pair of shoes before entering the Zhou Family’s gates, so I wouldn’t embarrass you.”

I froze on the spot.

He hadn’t said a single harsh word, yet it felt more painful than a slap to the face.

After a few seconds, he fished an old phone out of his pocket, tapped on a surreptitiously recorded video, and handed it to me.

The footage was very shaky, but I still recognized the person standing at the entrance of the abandoned warehouse.

The Zhou Family’s head of drivers-he had been with my father for over a decade.

He was handing cash to several men with unfamiliar faces, saying, “Make the scene bigger. It’s best if blood is drawn. If she can’t get out of the village today, that next signature will be even easier to get.”

My fingertips went numb.

So today’s setup wasn’t meant for me to provide comfort from beginning to end.

It was meant for me to be sent to my death.

Liang Xubai took back the phone, his voice dropping lower.

“Zhou Ruoqi, if you still want to be the Zhou Family’s obedient daughter, go back now.”

“But if you want to live, and you want these people to live, then starting now, investigate your father as if he were your enemy.”