Meanwhile.
Three hundred meters from the pizzeria, on a concealed balcony on the second floor of a commercial building.
Theresa lay flat behind the railing like a professional sniper, both hands gripping a pair of high-powered military binoculars, her eyes glued to the scene unfolding at the pizzeria's entrance.
The reason she'd shown up here today was entirely thanks to a brain marinated in prime-time soap opera melodrama, which had meticulously plotted out an elaborate "grand interception" production.
The moment she'd taken Cecilia's call, the alarm bells inside Theresa's head had gone straight to maximum-level air-raid sirens.
To keep Siegfried, that peerless great villain who'd "abandoned wife and daughter," from suddenly charging into miHoYo Studio and staging a soul-crushing "father-and-daughter reunion" bloodbath that would devastate a little girl's psyche…
Theresa had cunningly told a lie. Not only did she use the excuse that she had a scheduled appearance and couldn't make it to the airport, she'd also turned around and sent Siegfried a fake address pointing the complete opposite direction from miHoYo Studio!
Her ultimate goal was singular: first trap this scumbag wandering aimlessly around the shopping street, wait until she'd laid her inescapable net, and then make her entrance as the "Envoy of Justice" to vent all that pent-up fury on behalf of poor little Kiana!
"Heh heh, Siegfried, you idiot. Just keep wandering around this maze of a shopping street until the sun goes down."
Watching through her binoculars as Siegfried spun around downstairs like a headless fly before finally, helplessly ducking into the pizzeria, Theresa let out a villainous cackle inside her head.
But just as she was savoring the sight, calculating whether to open with a left hook or a right side-kick, the miniature communicator hidden in her ear suddenly crackled with Bronie's electronic voice:
"Theresa! Emergency! We have a severe plot deviation!"
"What is it, what is it? Did Siegfried figure out the address is fake?" Theresa pressed the earpiece down fast.
"No! It's the BOSS! He suddenly gave Kiana a half-day off today and took her out to hit the shops!"
"Nani?!"
Theresa was so shocked she nearly crushed the military binoculars in her hands.
She whipped the binoculars around and found, sitting right there in the leisure area, a white-haired figure—
Wasn't that her own dear niece?
"It's over, it's over, it's over! What kind of hell-tier probability of a cursed-fate collision is this?!" Theresa spun in circles, frantic.
Through her binocular lenses, an epic scene had already begun to play out.
She watched, helpless, as Kiana turned her head.
Watched as Kiana froze on the spot in an instant, as if struck by lightning.
Watched as that girl knocked over her chair and came charging over like a little cannonball wronged to the absolute limit, seizing Siegfried's beat-up leather jacket by the collar in a death grip!
Though three hundred meters of distance meant she couldn't hear a thing, Theresa's excellent lip-reading skills still precisely picked out Kiana's cracked, tearful roar:
"You lousy old man! You finally deigned to crawl back from the dead?!"
Case cracked!
The case was completely cracked!!
Siegfried, this scum rotten to the very marrow! He absolutely was Kiana's biological father!
The look on his face—that expression of agony, distortion, even full-body trembling, like he'd been constipated for three months—wasn't from guilt at all! It was because he didn't want to acknowledge this illegitimate daughter! He was disgusted by her! He was terrified this shameful, secret affair would be exposed!
This thing lower than a beast!!!
Rage instantly burned straight through Theresa's sanity gauge.
The elegance of a schoolmistress, the poise of an idol—all of it could go to hell!
She glanced around furiously and locked onto the scaffolding beside the balcony, where construction and repair work was underway.
There, resting quietly, lay half a weathered red brick—sharp-edged, solid, and hefty.
Without a word, Theresa walked over.
Under the terrified stares of a group of construction workers, this white-haired l0li of barely one meter forty deftly snatched up the red brick with one hand.
The killing intent radiating off her, in that moment, was practically that of a demon god about to purge the Three Realms:
"Sieg. Fried."
Theresa ground her pearly teeth to bits, hoisted the brick, and, seething with murderous aura, leaped straight down from the second-floor balcony!
"Today, if I don't smack the crown of your skull into a QR code, my name isn't Apocalypse!"
Meanwhile, down at the pizzeria's entrance.
Siegfried was living through the most severe, most catastrophic cognitive crisis of his forty-seven years of life.
The natural, intimate distance between the two of them was driving this old father's blood pressure straight toward two hundred and eighty!
No! I have to get to the truth! Even if it kills me, I'm going to die knowing the whole story!
Siegfried yanked his hands down from his face, sucked in a deep breath, eyes bloodshot, and like an enraged lion thrust out his right hand, seizing Su Yu's collar in a death grip!
"You!"
Su Yu, stunned by the sudden assault, jolted the milk tea in his hand hard enough that a single black pearl popped out of the straw with a little "boop" and bounced absurdly off the back of Siegfried's hand.
"What the hell did you do to my son?!"
The rims of Siegfried's eyes were red enough to bleed.
Su Yu: "???"
"Which back-alley quack clinic did you take him to?!" Siegfried's voice shook violently, even carrying a thread of despairing sob. "Give me back my precious eldest son!!!"
Su Yu's brain kicked into overclocked hyperspeed.
Son? What son?
He turned his head and glanced at Kiana.
Kiana was staring at Siegfried with a complicated, mortified expression, one mixed with a fervent wish to "find a crack in the ground and crawl inside," the milk tea straw still clenched tightly between her teeth.
He turned again to look at this middle-aged man who'd lost all emotional control.
Holy crap!
As the one and only true man in this entire affair with a God's-eye view, Su Yu understood everything in an instant!
Kiana had seen someone who looked exactly like her old man and, on pure instinct, pounced over shouting "Dad."
And Siegfried had seen a white-haired girl who looked exactly like his son Kevin—right down to the way she ate and her habit of avoiding pineapple—calling him "Dad."
So his brain had auto-completed one earth-shattering hell of a conclusion: his son had gotten a sex change! And had even landed himself a boyfriend!
The corner of Su Yu's mouth twitched hard. What kind of ultimate cross-server chat bloodbath was this?!
He'd just opened his mouth to explain this monumental, history-book-worthy misunderstanding when a massive black shadow suddenly dropped from the sky.
"Move it!!!"
"Whoosh—!"
A shrill gust of wind came screaming down from above!
Theresa, wielding that sharp-edged construction brick like a berserker who'd popped her ultimate skill, sliced into the battlefield with the force of Mount Tai bearing down!
"Holy crap!"
Siegfried's agent instincts activated in an instant, and he threw himself into an ungraceful tactical lazy-donkey roll.
With a muffled "thud!"
The brick skimmed past Siegfried's scalp and slammed savagely into the aluminum-alloy tabletop beside him, punching a massive crater into the table on the spot as red brick fragments flew everywhere!
"Siegfried, you scum, you piece of garbage!!!"
"The… Theresa?!" Siegfried's voice was full of ghost-seeing bewilderment. "How are you here? Didn't you say you had an appearance and couldn't come?!"
"Quit playing dumb with me!"
Theresa sprang up from her perch like an enraged rabbit and, with precise, vicious force, planted a kick square into the shin of Siegfried's lower leg.
"Ssss—" Siegfried hissed through his teeth from the pain, his knee buckling, nearly dropping to a kneel right there. "Are you insane, you little shortstack?!"
"At a time like this, caught by me red-handed, and you're still using that Kevin excuse to fool me?!" Theresa was so furious both her twintails whipped through the air. "What kind of man doesn't own up to what he's done?! Do you have any right to face Cecilia?!"
Siegfried was scolded into utter confusion, question marks all over his head. "What excuse? What about Cecilia? What are you even raving about?"
"Still faking it?! Your illegitimate daughter is standing right in front of you, alive and breathing!"
Theresa jabbed a furious finger at Kiana, who stood beside them looking utterly baffled.
"Open your dog eyes wide and look at her! White hair! Blue eyes! Even that dumb-as-dirt cowlick is cast from the same mold as yours! You dare put your hand on your conscience and say she's not the daughter you fathered messing around outside all those years ago?!"
Siegfried shot a dumbfounded glance at Kiana.
Kiana shot an equally dazed glance back at Siegfried.
The two of them fell silent for one second.
Then, at the same moment, they erupted into vehement denial!
Siegfried: "Who the hell has an illegitimate daughter?! This is obviously Kevin! He went behind my back and got sex-reassignment surgery in Thailand! The most absurd part is he even found himself a boy—friend—named Mei! My Kaslana line is utterly extinct now, do you understand my pain?!"
Kiana: "Auntie, what nonsense are you spouting?! I am NOT his son! I'm his daughter! No, wait… hold on! I'm not even his daughter in this life either!!! How did Su Yu, a grown man, turn into Mei?! I'm Kiana!!"
Su Yu simply stood off to the side, silent.
He was still holding the two cups of full-sugar milk tea, sloshing back and forth from all the shock. The pearls in the left cup had already sunk despairingly to the bottom.
Like a total outsider, he watched with a complicated gaze these three people trapped in an ultimate logical death loop.
One was a middle-aged father who'd just been throttling him by the collar, firmly convinced his iceberg of a son had gotten a sex change and found a boyfriend.
One held a red brick, firmly convinced this middle-aged man was a peerless scumbag who'd abandoned wife and child and refused to claim his own.
One was a white-haired girl with a milk-tea straw still in her mouth and ketchup smeared all over her face, reduced by the scene before her into a complete dimwit Paramecium.
Three people.
Three completely different yet each internally consistent sets of logic.
Cross-server chatting like mad on the exact same channel—and yet somehow, damn it all, producing not a single point of intersection!
Su Yu drew a deep, deep breath, trying to steady his twisted mood of wanting to laugh but not daring to.
"Um… this, uh, mister."
Siegfried's head snapped around, both eyes bloodshot as he glared at him like a savage wolf guarding its cub.
Su Yu swallowed. "Do you happen to think you're Kiana's father?"
"I'll say it one more time! I don't know any damn Kiana!" Siegfried squeezed the words out one at a time through his teeth, thick with murderous aura. "My. Son. Is. Named. Kevin!!!"
"Kevin is your son, no argument there—I'll stake my head on it."
Su Yu, with great difficulty, pointed at the now-petrified Kiana beside them.
"But this one—her name is Kiana, and she really isn't Kevin."
"She's female. Born that way, purely factory-original! Absolutely no surgery, not even the tiniest bit of alteration!"
Siegfried's eyes narrowed dangerously, his gaze sweeping back and forth between Su Yu and Kiana.
"Empty words prove nothing. How can you prove it?!"
Su Yu opened his mouth, then closed it.
You're asking ME how to prove it? No—can you Kaslana family members please stop having such outrageous thought circuits?!
Seeing this, Theresa viciously stomped down on Siegfried's foot again, grinding it hard twice for good measure.
"Don't think you can team up with an outsider to change the subject! Siegfried, you confess honestly! Is this girl the illegitimate daughter you fathered with some other woman behind Cecilia's back or not?!"
"I don't have any other woman, damn it!!!"
Siegfried hopped on one foot to dodge Theresa's merciless trampling.
"I, Siegfried, swear to the heavens that in this life I have loved only Cecilia! This white-haired brat is clearly Kevin!!!"
"Kevin is a MAN!! You idiot!!" Theresa stomped and roared, livid.
"That's exactly why I'm in so much pain—he went and got sex-reassignment surgery!!!"
Siegfried threw back his head and howled in total breakdown.
"Do the two of you have holes in your brains?!"
Theresa and Kiana had finally reached consensus, cursing Siegfried in perfect unison.
The scene had spiraled completely out of control, even drawing a formidable crowd of onlookers. Quite a few had already whipped out their phones, ready to film this explosive spectacle for their short-video feeds.
Su Yu shook his head helplessly and set the two cups of milk tea down steadily on the one remaining table that hadn't been smashed to pieces by the red brick.
He pulled out his phone, expertly opened his contacts, and found the number labeled "Kevin."
"Hello? Kevin."
From the other end came Kevin's voice: "What is it?"
"Are you free to swing by the shopping street right now? That pizzeria at the mouth of the shopping street."
"Reason."
Su Yu shot a complicated glance at the three people still clutching each other's collars and yelling, trying to win the argument through sheer volume.
"Here's the thing."
"Your dad just landed. And then, with the worst possible luck, he ran smack into Kiana."
"Now, thanks to some ridiculous Kaslana-family déjà vu, he's firmly convinced Kiana is what you look like after getting a sex change and taking a boyfriend."
"Auntie's here too, firmly convinced Kiana is your dad's illegitimate daughter."
Su Yu paused, his tone heavy and sincere.
"Brother Kevin, I very urgently need you, in person, to show up at the scene of the crime immediately, and use that never-changing iceberg face of yours to prove to your old man that… you really didn't get a sex change, and you're still a genuine, fully-equipped man."
"If you don't get here, your father's going to be beaten to death by Auntie on the spot. And I'm about to become your girlfriend 'Mei.'"
On the other end of the line, a full three seconds of dead silence descended.
Even through the screen, a chill of absolute zero was palpable.
Su Yu could even faintly hear the "crack" of a fountain pen being crushed to pieces from sheer, overwhelming shock on the other side.
"I'll be there in five minutes."
Su Yu hung up and, somewhat drained, leaned against the edge of the table, picking up his own cup of milk tea for a big sip.
The pearls really had lost all their chewy bounce.
Su Yu chewed the pearls expressionlessly, listening to the quarreling beside him that sounded like a few hundred ducks quacking, and silently posed the transmigrator's ultimate soul-searching question in his heart:
What sin did I commit back then that landed me in this world stuffed to the brim with brilliant fools and utter clowns?
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