When I was four, Uncle Yamamoto took me home.
He gently put an arm around my shoulders. The look in his eyes was as if a fallen comrade had come back to life in another form through me. He said, "Xiao Wei, from now on, this is your home."
Uncle had a son two months younger than me. Naturally, Yamamoto Takeshi and I became siblings in name: the boy who always gave me a silly smile whenever he saw me and followed right behind me everywhere.
When I was fourteen, my birth mother came back into my life.
It turned out she had faked her death to escape. As a swordswoman, she spent ten years hunting down her enemies and settling old scores. Only after carefully confirming that everything was truly over did she resume an ordinary identity and return to me.
Though I was loath to part with it, my name changed from "Yamamoto Wei" back to "Nishi He Wei." But the Yamamoto family and I agreed that we would always be family.
My younger brother, Yamamoto Takeshi, was both happy and unhappy.
As we were moving, he suddenly gripped my wrist. His hand was dry and warm. I turned to look at him, and he reminded me of a little dog caught in the rain.
The dog said, "I'll come see you every day, Wei."
I said, "Of course. I'll always be your big sister."
But he never called me big sister again. I didn't really mind. We were the same age, after all.
Until I was twenty-four.
I woke up from a drunken night and turned to see a half-naked man sleeping peacefully beside me. I stared in silence for two seconds. When I came to, Yamamoto Takeshi was covering his face, bewildered and saying, "Ow, ow, ow!" But my palm hurt even more.
I asked him what he was doing in my house.
He paused, as if he couldn't understand why I was asking, then smiled at me just like he had when we were children. My once-perfect little brother said, "We're family, after all, Big Sis."
At that moment, I suddenly thought:
There was no way I could keep playing the sibling route in the otome game I'd bought last week.
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1. An idea for an alternate-universe route.
2. The protagonist's personality is the same as in my previous novel. On the outside, she's a hardworking, perfect, outgoing genius, but in reality, she's a nerd. The only person who has ever seen her true self, from childhood to adulthood, is Yamamoto.