Chapter 37 My Brother! The Champion!

An hour later, at home.

"Let me review everything that happened during your month out at sea, and you help me confirm if there are any mistakes. First, your height suddenly shot up by more than ten centimeters?"

"Yes, adolescent growth spurt, totally normal."

"You won the championship at the Kendo Tournament on Asakura Island?"

"Yes, I accidentally took home the title."

"And you happened to smash a huge conspiracy on the island, becoming a well-known figure in the East Blue?"

"Yes, but not that famous. The hype comes in waves; people will forget soon enough."

"And then you became a multi-millionaire?!"

"Yes, four hundred million Berries in total. I withdrew fifty million, and the rest is still in the bank. Look, here is the card."

Bellemere took a deep breath, trying to calm herself down. But when she looked up at the towering young man standing before her, her vision darkened, and she fell backward.

Xiano quickly caught her. "What's wrong, Bellemere?"

"I'm fine. Let go of me and give me a moment to process this..."

Bellemere sat cross-legged on the carpet, staring blankly at the coffee table for a long time.

She took the glass of water handed to her by Xiano, drank it all in one gulp, and finally began to accept reality.

"I told you so. I knew it," she muttered. "A little guy like you definitely doesn't have a simple bloodline. You start awakening once you hit a certain age. Your parents must have been some incredible big shots. For all we know, you're royalty..."

"No, this really doesn't have anything to do with bloodlines, does it?"

Xiano was baffled. "I just won a tournament and made some money, all good things. Why is this so hard for you to accept..."

"I'm talking about your height! Your height! It's great to grow during puberty, but who grows more than ten centimeters in a single month?!"

Annoyed, Bellemere hammered Xiano's shin with her fist. "What on earth is wrong with you?! Do you have any idea? During the month you were gone, I knitted two sweaters, three pairs of thermal pants, half-finger gloves, full-finger gloves for you..."

"Now none of them fit, completely useless, I'm going to have to unravel them all, boo-hoo..."

So she was upset about this!

Xiano rubbed his forehead, suddenly noticing the thick stack of newspapers piled on the wooden cabinet nearby, and let out a soft exclamation. "You've been buying newspapers every single day while I was gone?"

"I was afraid you wouldn't buy them all out there and might miss some."

Bellemere curled her lips. "I didn't even read them; the newspapers have just been sitting here. Your exploits on Asakura Island were all over the place recently. I only found out when the neighbors talked about it, and I couldn't sleep well for an entire night."

"What about Nami and Nojiko? How did they react?"

"What do you think?" Bellemere asked, exasperated.

At the time, she was both worried and somewhat comforted, tossing and turning all night without getting a good night's sleep.

Nami and Nojiko didn't think that much; they were beyond excited, especially Nami, who looked like she wanted to jump up to the sky.

Every single day, she ran from the front of the village to the back to show off, desperate to let everyone in the village know that her older brother had become an incredible big shot in the East Blue.

Even the big white dog at the entrance of the village had its ears pulled by her every day to hear the news a few times, to the point where it would tuck its tail and flee whenever it saw her later on.

Not to mention the two peach-faced lovebirds raised by the neighboring family. Their favorite phrase to repeat now was, "My brother! Champion!" and "My brother! Hero!"

Xiano was sweating profusely listening to this.

From now on, the chickens, ducks, and geese in the village would probably all look at him with a rather strange gaze.

He shook his head, picked up the stack of newspapers, and sat down on the sofa.

Just as he was about to read through them to see if there was any news worth paying attention to, the door suddenly creaked open just a crack. A dirt-smudged, orange-haired little figure tiptoed inside, carrying her shoes, and sneaked past the back of the sofa toward the bathroom...

"Get over here!" Bellemere said fiercely. "Do you take me for a blind person? I can't see a little mud monkey entering the house, and I can't see two trails of dirty footprints on the floor?"

Oh no! A foolproof plan with one oversight! Nami turned her head to look at the two rows of black footprints on the ground, slapping her forehead in vexation. If she had known, she should have sneaked in through the kitchen window!

"Tell me the truth, what were you up to? Didn't you say you were going to the bookstore to read books when you went out this morning?"

"I wasn't lying, Bellemere. I went to read books at first, but that bookstore was too small. Navigation techniques, nautical charts, all the things I'm interested in, I pretty much finished reading them all... Huh? Big brother?!"

Nami, who had been walking with her head down halfway across the room, suddenly noticed someone lying on the sofa next to her. Once she recognized that familiar face, her eyes widened in pleasant surprise.

"When did you get back?!"

She shrieked happily, leaped into Xiano's arms, and raised both hands to pinch his cheeks. "You didn't even call for me when you came back, that's so mean... Wah! It hurts!"

As it turned out, she had lunged forward with too much momentum and slammed the tip of her nose straight into Xiano's hard chest. A sudden wave of soreness hit her nose, and she almost shed tears from the pain.

"Tsk tsk tsk, you've turned into Buggy."

Xiano looked at her red, swollen nose and teased her with schadenfreude.

However, when he looked down and saw his shirt covered in mud splatters, and glanced in the mirror to find two dirty palm prints on his face as well, his expression darkened, and he couldn't laugh anymore.

"Hehe, bleh~~"

Having succeeded in her mischief, Nami made a funny face. "Serves you right! Who told you to sneak away all by yourself that morning without even saying goodbye to me and Nojiko!"

"That was because I was afraid the two of you would turn into little crybabies."

Xiano rubbed his face vigorously with a towel and retorted, "Besides, I still trust Nojiko. But a troublemaker like you—if you had followed us to the dock that morning, you probably would have sneaked onto the ship behind our backs when we weren't looking. I don't want to drag a burden around everywhere I go."

"Who's a burden?! I've grown up a lot now, and I'm really good at fighting! Just a moment ago, two monkeys in the mountain teamed up and I still beat them until they ran around in circles!"

"Monkeys in the mountain?"

Bellemere keenly picked up on something, her anger flaring up. "Wait! You got yourself this filthy just because you went to the mountains to fight monkeys?!"

"I couldn't help it either."

Nami blinked, looking utterly innocent. "I held up the newspaper with your photo and told them my older brother is the champion, but they just kept eating fruit in the trees, rolled their eyes, and totally ignored me. So I got mad, threw a rock at them, and then we started fighting."

This cursed child!

Bellemere gritted her teeth, grabbed Nami by the ear, and dragged her toward the bathroom. "Go scrub yourself clean right now! Honestly, if there's a next time, just you wait and see how I deal with you. I don't even ask you to be like Xiano, when will you ever be as sensible as Nojiko?!"

Creak.

The door was pushed open once more. Xiano on the sofa and Bellemere at the bathroom door both instinctively turned their heads to look.

A dirt-covered blue-haired girl appeared in the doorway, bruised and battered with several tears in her pants, and only one shoe left.

When she saw Xiano, her eyes instantly lit up with pleasant surprise, but immediately afterward, she met Bellemere's murderous glare. She shrank her neck back slightly and forced an awkward smile.

"Um, there's a reason for this. I was chatting with the big goose at the entrance of the village about Big Brother Xiano, but it lost patience halfway through and tried to run away, so I started fighting it. Too bad I missed just by a little bit and didn't win..."