Siheyuan: Silly Zhu, Why Does Your Uncle Beat You Every Day?

Other protagonists in the Siheyuan: outsmarting their neighbors and squabbling over half a jin of cornmeal and two side rooms.

Cao Chen returns to the Siheyuan with a Type 54 pistol at his waist and command of the armed forces on his shoulders. From the start, he blows the roof right off the place!

After ten years of fighting on the battlefield and earning a special-class merit award, he is ordered to take charge of security and wartime preparedness at the Hongxing Steel Mill at age twenty-five.

When he gets back to the courtyard, he finds his brother He Daqing has run off, his nephew Silly Zhu has become the Jia family's unpaid laborer, and his niece Yushui is skin and bones!

Cao Chen sneers and reaches for his belt. "Anything belonging to the He family is off-limits to outsiders. Touch it and I'll charge you with stealing military supplies!"

He knocks some sense into Silly Zhu, lays down family rules, confiscates his wages, and lays out a twenty-jin pot of beef stew and two thirty-jin grass carp, making the entire courtyard drool!

Granny Deaf pretends to be sick to get meat? A licensed army doctor comes over and exposes her sham!

Jia Dongxu breaks the rules to snatch a job and ends up breaking his leg? Cao Chen shoves the accident report in his face and sues him for damages!

The beasts can't take it and try to use their connections to crush him?

An urgent telegram races eight hundred li from the southeastern front to the capital. Li Yunlong personally shows up to take charge:

"Little Cao is my best scout! His nephew is my nephew, too! Anyone who gives him trouble, I'll shoot first!"