Shen Weiwan asked, the corners of her mouth couldn't help twitching: "Then what?"

"Then your mother, with her hands on her hips, said to the old eunuch in the imperial kitchen, 'If you don't have the money, take off your dragon robe and use it to pay the bill. I'll have the eunuch in the kitchen hang this lecher up and beat him!'" The emperor mimicked the queen's tone perfectly, even raising his orchid finger realistically. "I suddenly had an idea. I grabbed your mother's hand and said..."

He suddenly grabbed Shen Weiwan's wrist (scared her so much that she almost jumped up), put on an affectionate look, and his eyes were so cheesy that they could drip honey: "My dear, although I have no money, I have a heart that loves you. Do you think this heart can pay for food? If it is not enough, how about I add the position of the crown prince?"

Shen Weiwan: "......"

Xiao Yu: "..."

The students below erupted in deafening boos, and the purple-robed Hanlin laughed so hard he slapped his thigh: "Your Majesty, this isn't just shirking your responsibility, it's clearly being a hooligan!"

"That's called romance!" the emperor puffed his beard and glared, his throne creaking as he rocked it. "Later, your grandmother chased me for three blocks with a feather duster, but your mother secretly slipped me a silver ingot, saying, 'Your Highness, I appreciate your kindness!' Tell me, isn't this fate due to shirking a debt?"

Just as he was spitting, a young eunuch ran into the garden, breathless and his jade belt loose, saying, "Your Majesty! The Minister of Revenue is waiting outside the palace. He said you lost a chess game with him last month and you should pay him back 100,000 taels of silver..."

The emperor's face suddenly paled. He leaped up like a cat whose tail had been stepped on, and scurried back behind the dragon throne. The hem of his bright yellow formal attire dangled over the back of the chair, revealing the hem of his undergarment embroidered with mandarin ducks. His dragon boots scraped against the stone slabs as he hid behind the chair and shouted, "I'm not here! I've gone to the Cining Palace to give the Empress Dowager a leg massage! Little Li, shield me! Just say I've passed away... Bah, that's wrong, just say I've ascended to heaven!"

Shen Weiwan looked at the tip of the dragon boots exposed behind the dragon throne and sighed helplessly: "Father, your defaulting on your debt is too ungraceful, like a street thug."

"Nonsense!" The emperor poked his head out from under his chair, his beard curled up like a cat's whiskers, his eyes wide. "I call this a 'strategic retreat'! A true debt-debtor knows how to assess the situation and retreat when necessary! Haven't you heard the saying 'As long as there are green mountains, there is no fear of running out of firewood'?"

Xiao Yu stepped forward and said to the young eunuch, "Go tell the Minister of Revenue that I have paid off your Majesty's gambling debt."

"My son-in-law is so sensible!" The emperor immediately emerged from behind his chair, patting Xiao Yu's shoulder with a grin that nearly knocked the gold thread off the cuffs of his dragon robe. "Weiwan, look, Yu'er is so sensible. Unlike me, his father-in-law, who can do nothing but shirk his debts."

Before he could finish his words, Kengkeng and Wawa rushed over, holding up little notebooks stained with ink. Kengkeng's nose was still stained with ink. "Grandpa! We learned it!" He pointed at the crooked words on the notebook and said, "Use the kingdom to pay off the debt. I've got it!" Wawa held up a piece of paper with a heart and a dragon throne drawn on it and shouted in a baby voice, "Grandpa also said to use love to pay for food. I drew it too!"

The emperor's beard trembled with joy. He bent down and picked up Wa Wa. The hem of his dragon robe dragged on the ground and was stained with croton powder. He said: "Good grandson, good granddaughter! Follow your grandfather's example in the future. I guarantee that you will cheat the whole world-"

"——You can't cheat the good either!" Shen Weiwan interrupted in time and knocked on the children's heads, "Remember? Only cheat the bad guys. If you dare to cheat the common people, I will beat your butts!"

That night, the warm room of the Prince's Mansion was filled with the scent of osmanthus and ink. As Chen Weiwan was telling a story to the children, Kenken suddenly crawled over, clutching a rolled-up copy of "Thirty-Six Strategies for Tricking People." A few croton seeds fell from the pages. "Mom, Grandpa said we'll teach 'Paying Off a Debt with Poetry' next time, and he's asking me to be the class representative!"

Chen Weiwan took the book and looked at the annotation written by the emperor himself - "The second strategy for defaulting on debts: make friends with poetry, and recite poems if you have no money! Appendix: A poem about having no money: I was born with talents that will be useful, and even if I spend all my money, I will get it back... The moonlight shines brightly in front of my bed, I wonder if it is frost on the ground, I look up at the bright moon, I really have no money to pay back!" - she couldn't help laughing, and her shoulders shook like sieves.

"Your Highness," Chen Weiwan turned to look at Xiao Yu, who was reviewing the memorials. The candlelight reflected a gentle look on his face. "Do you think that this academy of yours will really produce a group of experts who are good at defaulting on their debts? If that happens, the streets will be filled with scoundrels who pay their debts with poetry. What will we do then?"

Xiao Yu put down his wolf hair brush, walked over, and put his arm around her waist, his chin nuzzling the jasmine scent of her hair. Moonlight streamed onto the carpet from the window, illuminating the "silver vault" that Kenkeng and Wawa had built with croton powder. The two brats were arguing fiercely over "repudiating" each other's croton. He smiled helplessly yet dotingly, "Let them be. As long as Father is happy, that's all. Besides, with a 'deceptive goddess' like you around, who's to worry about them learning bad habits?"

"Who is the deceiving goddess!" Shen Weiwan hit him, but couldn't help laughing, "But seriously, the crooked logic of the emperor today..."

"Oh?" Xiao Yu raised his eyebrows, a sly look flashing in his eyes, "For example?"

"For example, if you want to default on a debt, you have to be 'unexpected,'" Shen Weiwan poked his chest with a smile, her fingertips rubbing the dark dragon pattern on his clothes, "Just like I don't have the money to repay your emotional debt now, I can only use my whole life to pay it off. How about it? Forget about the interest?"

Xiao Yu lowered his head and kissed her, his voice low and gentle, with a smile: "Then I will reluctantly accept it. But as for the interest... I want a lifetime of coquettishness and kisses, is that enough?"

"Go to hell!" Shen Weiwan smiled and pushed him away, but she heard the emperor's laughter faintly coming from the direction of the Cheating Academy under the moonlight outside the window, floating into the warm room intermittently: "...So, using "Quiet Night Thoughts" to pay for the wine, the key is to recite the poem miserably enough, preferably wiping tears while reciting, so that the shopkeeper can't bear to ask for the debt..."

The flickering candlelight in the warm room illuminated the smiles exchanged between Shen Weiwan and Xiao Yu, as well as the "silver vault" of castor beans the children had piled on the carpet. Shen Weiwan leaned against Xiao Yu's chest, listening to the distant laughter. Suddenly, she felt that with such a family of treacherous people around, her life was destined to be filled with laughter, a tale of absurdity that even the historians wouldn't dare record in the official history books. And the emperor, who used the throne as a podium, probably didn't realize until his death that his side hustle was more talked about by the people of the capital than the ten frontier rebellions he had quelled.