This old man was really kind-hearted but also very simple-minded, unable to recognize even the most basic deception, and instead worrying about implicating Yang Chuxia.
Yang Chuxia patted the old man comfortingly, "Old man, don’t say anything yet. Just watch from the side."
After comforting the old man, Yang Chuxia turned her attention to the goatee man, "What’s the hurry, boss? On one hand, you’re demanding money, and on the other hand, you’re demanding the recipe, and then you want him to be taken to the county government office. What exactly do you want to achieve with this?"
The goatee man didn’t take Yang Chuxia seriously at all, so he didn’t bother responding to her question. Instead, he just directed his helpers to continue grabbing people from the crowd.
Seeing the goatee man treat her so disrespectfully, not even listening to her, Yang Chuxia couldn’t help but get angry. She kicked the two helpers who were coming over to seize the old man.
Then she looked at the goatee man with a cold smirk, "It’s really funny. You said you bought the old man’s peanuts to look after his business, and then you put them in your restaurant to sell to customers. So, the problem is, the customer was poisoned in your restaurant, what does that have to do with the old man? Who knows whether someone in your restaurant poisoned the customer’s food?"
"And! Did the customer really get poisoned? If he did, where are his family members? I believe that if they heard that it was the old man’s peanuts that caused the poisoning, they would have come to find him by now. But where are they now?"
One point after another in Yang Chuxia’s analysis, "And you want to take the old man to the county government office, so where’s the poisoned person? And where are the poisoned peanuts? When the county government investigates a case, they need human evidence and physical evidence, right? Who saw the old man really poisoning the peanuts?"
"What confuses me the most is the compensation of 100 taels of silver. Is the poisoned person dead or alive? If dead, according to the law, it’s no more than 50 taels of silver; if still alive, even with medical expenses, nutritional supplements, and indemnities, it shouldn’t cost more than 10 taels of silver at most. So where does 100 taels come from? One last thing I can’t understand, as the restaurant owner, shouldn’t you be the one seeking justice for your customer? Why do you want the old man’s peanut recipe? Is the customer asking for it? If the customer didn’t ask, why are you insisting on it?"
After all her points, Yang Chuxia concluded with a cold snort, "In summary, I have reason to suspect that you are slandering the old man in order to steal his peanut recipe. So today, there really will be a lawsuit, but instead of you suing the old man, the old man will be suing you for slander and defamation."
Yang Chuxia’s well-founded arguments made the onlookers think, indeed. Many astute people had already seen that this was a setup. They just thought that the old man, a country bumpkin, wasn’t worth offending a restaurant owner for.
At this point, the goatee man’s face turned green with anger after hearing all that Yang Chuxia had said.
To be honest, there was no poisoned person at all. As a restaurant owner, how could he let anything happen to his own restaurant? That would be just nonsensical.
Just as Yang Chuxia had suspected, he did all this for the old man’s peanut recipe. When he accidentally bought extra roasted peanuts one day, he began selling them at the restaurant and found that many customers liked them. As a result, he continued to buy them daily. But as the number of customers eating the peanuts increased, he became dissatisfied with buying just a small amount every day and began to covet the old man’s recipe after investigating him.