Family Stealing System: your wife, mother, sister, all mine now!
Chapter 21: New Ability

Chapter 21: New Ability

What ability would he get this time?

Just as he was about to focus on the question, Jia waved her hand infront of him. "Are you even listening?"

"What?"

Mia said: "While you guys were at it, I recieved a letter from my mother."

"Hm? What did it say?"

"She wants us to leave your side and go to our brother. Apparently, he is having a change of heart after seeing everything and wants to take his family back."

"Do you want to go back?"

The sisters looked at each other.

The truth was that though they feared and hated their brother, there was a complicated feeling in their hearts.

Both of them sighed.

Then, Mia said: "I don’t want to go. We don’t want to lose our mother, though. And I don’t want you to kill our brother either. That just feels wrong."

He looked at Jia, she felt the same.

"Why have any good feelings for a man who would kill your mother in a heartbeat?"

"..."

The girls fell silent.

Kian sighed. "Idiots."

Jia said: "Kian, you don’t understand it. We watched him grow up. We watched him from when he was a little kid. He used to be our lovely brother. Things just... changed."

Mia nodded, biting her lips. "We do not have much love for him, but having you kill him doesn’t feel like the answer. Whether you can do it or not."

"Yeah..." Jia looked at her tea.

Kian rapped his hands against the wood.

The system chimed once, twice, then settled on a result that made him sit up straighter against the cushion.

[Black Rank Ability — Twin Heart.]

[You can combine two things of equal nature to increase its quality. Only works on Black Rank or weaker objects.]

Hm, what is this ability?

"Kian, is this an unreasonable request?" Mia asked softly.

Jia also looked at him.

He shook his head. "Actually, I am glad you guys asked for this. I would have felt somewhat reserved if you guys didn’t have any empathy towards your own family. No matter what."

"Then, you are not going to kill him?" Jia asked.

The girls didn’t know why, but they didn’t like that choice either. There was a part of them that wanted to say goodbye to their brother. Truly, it was better to kill Hua Shulong. He was becoming a menace for the world, better dead than alive.

Kian sighed. "I will, in fact, kill him in a way."

The girls became silent.

"But I cannot ignore your feelings either. So, I can do something for you. There is a special method in the cultivation world that can completely remove a person’s memory. I will use that to destroy his memory, then change his face, and we can let him live a normal life among mortals."

With his memories lost, he will lose his cruel ambition. And if he starts over in a good mortal village, by the time he had new memories, he would be a normal person.

This plan was so much better.

"..."

"Thank you," Mia said softly, sniffing. She moved beside Kian, then leaned against his right shoulder.

He kissed the top of her head. "It’s okay."

Jia nodded. "That is, assuming you can even hurt our brother. He is very strong."

Kian looked at the girl in thought, making her look away with a blush.

Outside the window, the swan lake caught the last orange light of sunset, three white birds drifting across the surface like unpainted waves, completely indifferent to the three people inside who were trying to figure out how to kill a kin.

Kian stood up and walked to his room.

"Where are you going?" Mia asked.

"Let me be for a while, I want to try some things out."

Mia wasn’t against it, as she had tons of questions to ask her sister anyway.

Mia waited until Kian’s footsteps faded down the hallway, then she turned to her sister with the expression of a cat who had finally cornered a mouse.

She didn’t say anything at first—just refilled Jia’s teacup with exaggerated courtesy, the clay pot making a soft clink against the ceramic rim.

Jia eyed the tea like it might be poisoned. "What," she said flatly, not a question.

"Oh, nothing," Mia said, settling back onto her cushion and folding her hands in her lap like a proper young lady. "I was just wondering how your bath went. You were in there for quite some time. Must have been very... thorough."

She tilted her head, the small beauty mark near her eye crinkling as she smiled. "Did he help you with the hard-to-reach spots?"

Jia’s grip on her teacup tightened until her knuckles went pale. "He scrubbed my back. That’s it."

She took a sip, too fast, and burned her tongue. The wince she made had nothing to do with the tea temperature. "You’re making it sound worse than it was."

"I didn’t say anything about worse or better," Mia said, her voice as smooth. "I just find it interesting that your robe is on inside out, your hair is still wet at the ends, and you’ve been avoiding eye contact with me since you sat down. Also, you’re wearing his robe. Not yours. His." She let that observation hang in the air like smoke. "Did yours get... damaged?"

Jia set the cup down with a little more force than necessary. "Nothing got damaged. I just—mine was—it was in the other room and I didn’t want to walk through the living room in a towel."

She crossed her arms, the oversized sleeves flopping past her wrists. "Why are you interrogating me? You’re the one who kissed him first. You’re the one who spent the whole night with him. I don’t see why my bath routine is suddenly so fascinating."

"I was not the one who said ’I’d never. Oh, never ever." She let out a delicate little hum, her eyes glittering. "The walls aren’t that thick, huh? So, someone knew that while moaning."

Jia was practically combusting.

"I heard you make a noise I have never, ever heard you make before. It was almost... musical. Very high-pitched, I have to say. Right around when you kept saying his name."

Jia’s face went through several colors that had no business being on a human being.

She opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again, and finally settled on grabbing one of the meatbuns left from their earlier meal and throwing it at her sister’s head.

Mia caught it with two hands, still smiling, and took a polite bite as if it had been offered.

Mia said around the mouthful, chewing with deliberate slowness: "Fine. If you won’t give me details, I’ll just have to ask him myself. I’m sure he’ll be more than happy to describe what position you were in when—"

She didn’t get to finish because Jia had lunged across the table, one hand clamping over her sister’s mouth while the other grabbed her shoulder, and the two of them went down onto the cushions in a tangle of sleeves and hair.

From his room, Kian only heard half-suppressed laughter that sounded suspiciously close to screaming.

Shaking his head, he looked at the two things sitting on his desk.

It was time to test his new ability.