Chapter 16
Chapter 16: A Tree Demon Earned a New Nickname—Bottomless Pit—and Someone Blocked the Pit, Looking for a Fight
“Wow,” Jiang Tea Tea said with genuine interest. “One disagreement and he goes straight to violence. That’s a personality.”
She lifted her hand and pointed behind Huang Da Zhuang. “You mean like… him?”
Huang Da Zhuang turned.
There was no red-black dragon hatchling in sight.
Instead, a beastfolk male stood near the cafeteria entrance, hands in his pockets, wearing a blue-black first-year Combat Department training uniform. His hair was tied in a high ponytail with a red cord, and two small red-black horn buds jutted from his forehead.
His aura screamed one thing: stay away—or die.
Huang Da Zhuang went stiff as a board.
His throat bobbed. His legs started shaking. “Sister Tea… you’re my real sister, right? You’re scaring me on purpose, right? I’m just a delicate beastfolk who hasn’t awakened abilities. If Chief Sui Xuan Chu finds out I was gossiping about him, he’ll punch me into the ground so deep nobody will ever dig me out.”
Jiang Tea Tea shoved him. “Turn around. Look at him.”
Huang Da Zhuang stumbled obediently.
“Why are you scared?” Jiang Tea Tea said. “We were praising him, not insulting him. Why would he ‘dig you out’?”
Huang Da Zhuang still couldn’t bring himself to look directly. “Mom… Dad… his aura is terrifying. Even from here, it feels like he could appear in front of me any second and twist my head off.”
Sui Xuan Chu’s gaze slid off Huang Da Zhuang like he wasn’t worth noticing. His eyes swept over Jiang Tea Tea and Chong Xing Qi, and then he walked into the cafeteria without breaking stride.
Jiang Tea Tea clapped Huang Da Zhuang on the shoulder. “There. He went inside. Stop shaking. Let’s eat.”
Huang Da Zhuang’s eyes lit up like someone switched his brain back on. “Really? Wait—Sister Tea, wait for me!”
Jiang Tea Tea headed in briskly. On the way, she casually hooked an arm around Lu Ling Er—who was still talking to Chong Xing Qi—and dragged her into the cafeteria too.
Lu Ling Er ended up paying the bill.
The academy’s largest cafeteria lived up to its reputation: clean, bright, minimalistic, packed with service robots that collected dishes and wiped surfaces nonstop. Not a scrap of food waste lingered anywhere.
Food stretched across the serving area in endless rows. Students grabbed what they wanted and paid by weight. Prices ranged from two star credits to twenty thousand star credits per jin, depending on the dish.
Jiang Tea Tea’s gaze swept over the meat section like she’d found religion.
She turned to Lu Ling Er and asked three times in a row, “Little Lu Er—you’re treating, you’re paying… do you have enough money?”
Lu Ling Er planted her hands on her hips, offended. “Jiang Tea Tea, I already admitted I was wrong to bully you. I promised I’d treat you. You don’t have to look down on me this hard.”
“Misunderstanding,” Jiang Tea Tea said quickly. “I’m not looking down on you.”
She paused, expression sincere. “I just eat… a little.”
Lu Ling Er snorted and sized her up. “With your skinny little body, how much can you eat? Eat whatever you want. I’ll cover it.”
Jiang Tea Tea’s eyes lit up. “Really?”
Lu Ling Er nodded hard. “Who do you think you’re underestimating?”
Jiang Tea Tea smiled sweetly. “Then I won’t hold back.”
Lu Ling Er thought that meant one portion of meat, some vegetables, rice, soup.
She was wrong.
Jiang Tea Tea didn’t scoop portions.
She carried whole basins.
Roasted lamb legs. Roasted lamb ribs. Braised beef. Stewed pork. Braised chicken legs. Marinated shrimp. Roasted fish chunks…
More than ten basins.
Their ten-person table almost couldn’t hold it. People around them forgot to get their own meals. They just stared.
Lu Ling Er and Huang Da Zhuang were the worst. Both of them stood at the register paying, stunned into silence, completely forgetting to take food for themselves.
When they finally sat down opposite her, Jiang Tea Tea looked at their empty plates and asked, “What are you two doing with empty plates? Planning to chew the plates?”
Lu Ling Er snapped out of it and stared at the mountain of meat—no vegetables in sight. Her mouth went dry. “Sister Tea… can you actually finish all that?”
“If the table were bigger, I’d take two more,” Jiang Tea Tea said, dead serious. “I saw venison. And bear paws.”
To a green tea tree demon like her, meat was organic fertilizer. And organic fertilizer was life.
Lu Ling Er and Huang Da Zhuang swallowed hard.
“Venison and bear paws are specialties,” Huang Da Zhuang said weakly. “If you really want them… we can go get you a little—”
“That would be great,” Jiang Tea Tea said warmly. “Bring all of it over. Thanks.”
Lu Ling Er and Huang Da Zhuang froze.
They’d been polite.
She’d taken it literally.
Jiang Tea Tea rolled up her sleeves. No chopsticks—she grabbed a roasted lamb rib with her hands and bit in, eating like she was trying to defeat the concept of hunger itself.
A basin of roasted lamb ribs—more than twenty bones—vanished in minutes.
She tossed the bones back into the basin and said thoughtfully, “A little overcooked. A little too salty. If it were more tender and lighter, it’d be perfect.”
Lu Ling Er and Huang Da Zhuang wanted to beg her to stop talking.
Because the cafeteria head chef had been drawn over by the commotion.
And instead of getting angry, he looked… thrilled.
Jiang Tea Tea didn’t notice. She was too busy eating.
Students crowded closer, drawn by morbid fascination. Someone even snapped a photo of the table and posted it on the school forum with a poll:
Option 1: She can finish it.
Option 2: She can’t.
Jiang Tea Tea moved from one dish to the next like a machine.
Roasted lamb legs—more than thirty of the small ones. Gone.
Braised pork. Gone.
Stewed beef. Gone.
Braised chicken legs. Gone.
Lu Ling Er and Huang Da Zhuang never even got the chance to fetch venison and bear paws.
The head chef fetched them himself.
Jiang Tea Tea critiqued each dish as she devoured it, and the head chef peppered her with questions—where to improve, how to improve. She answered seriously, like she was mentoring him.
The head chef looked like he’d finally met someone who understood his soul. He even paid out of pocket for extra venison and bear paws just to watch her eat.
Jiang Tea Tea ate for an hour and a half.
She cleared everything.
And her stomach still looked flat. No bulge. No burp. Not even a satisfied sigh.
Huang Da Zhuang had claimed that presenting flowers to His Highness Chong Ming tomorrow would make Jiang Tea Tea famous across the academy.
He’d said it too early.
One meal did it.
By afternoon, the whole Royal Military Academy knew: the Pacification Department’s powerless human had a stomach like an abyss.
A bottomless pit.
As Jiang Tea Tea walked back to class, she caught countless stares. Even Lin Feng Feng’s group watched her with a new kind of fear, too intimidated to start trouble—like if she got hungry enough, she might actually eat them.
Jiang Tea Tea went through the rest of the day peacefully, studying like a model student.
After school, she left the classroom and headed for the dorms.
At the dorm entrance, someone was waiting.
Jiang Yi Cheng—the fake heiress’s adoptive brother and the real heiress’s biological brother—stood in a third-year water-element uniform.
Jiang Tea Tea walked straight past him without slowing.
Jiang Yi Cheng reached out and blocked her path. “Sister. I need to talk to you.”
Jiang Tea Tea stopped and looked at him with pure disdain. “Who’s your sister? Jiang Yi Cheng, you’ve got the wrong person.”
Pain flickered across Jiang Yi Cheng’s face like he’d been struck. “Sister… even if you’re not my biological sister, Dad and Mom raised you for eighteen years. We loved you for eighteen years.”
“This time, Dad and Mom were wrong,” he said quickly. “They shouldn’t have sent you to Zhou Jian. I’m apologizing in their place. Please forgive them.”
His voice dropped, urgent and pleading. “Tomorrow, when you welcome His Highness Chong Ming… ask His Highness to spare them. Don’t let them be punished.”