Chapter 1

Chapter 1

This was a well where many women had died.

The water was not deep. If a person stood in it, it would just cover their lips-not enough to kill them.

But they had come up with other ways. They installed an iron cage inside the well, secured it with a thick iron chain, and locked people inside.

If you behaved, they pulled the chain and let you out.

If you did not, they loosened the chain and left you imprisoned for days and nights.

After enough time passed, they would simply forget. Starving to death, dying of exhaustion, suffocating-those were all minor things.

Because, they said, the ones who died were all women who had no virtue, women who defied the proper order, women who deserved to die.

But I was an exception.

I was a renowned young lady of a respectable family. I had bound feet, served my parents-in-law, and upheld a wife’s virtues better than anyone.

All I wanted was to live.

Yet the favored concubine my husband brought home locked me in the cage and pushed me into the deep well.

She said, “Times have changed. Feudal remnants like you should all die.”

The favored concubine’s name was Jiang Yi.

Her family was poor. She had received aid from a missionary school and studied for a few years.

I could not give birth to a son, and my mother-in-law grew anxious. She gave Jiang Yi’s father a few bits of silver and bought her back as a concubine.

Jiang Yi looked down on my husband.

She said she had only been forced to give herself to him, and once she bore a son and saved enough money, she would leave sooner or later.

My husband looked down on her too.

He and I had grown up together as childhood sweethearts. My natal family paid for him to study abroad and helped him become Yancheng’s most distinguished Young Master He.

At first, Jiang Yi served in the study. Whenever she was there, my husband would frown deeply and scold her.

Just as he had promised me, he never touched her.

But as time went on, my husband said, “She is different from women of the old school. She has real talent.”

And so he began teaching her those foreign letters I could not understand.

In front of my husband, Jiang Yi would point at some foreign word with an innocent expression and ask me, “Young Mistress, do you know what this means?”

Since childhood, I had only learned female virtue and female conduct. I shook my head.

A mocking smile curled at the corner of her mouth. “No wonder Young Master is unwilling to teach you.”

My husband said lightly, “In the end, she is different from you.”

I wanted to learn.

So I took some books and slowly studied them, character by character.

Jiang Yi discovered it. She shoved me to the floor, then cried to my husband that I had stolen her things.

“These books all belong to Young Master. Once she touches them, they become filthy.

“She is a woman of the old school. What right does she have to touch these? She simply cannot stand that Young Master is teaching me.

“I refuse to sink to her level. Sooner or later, I will leave and find my own world. I am not like her, only able to live by clinging to a man.”

She pointed at my nose and convicted me of a crime as great as the heavens.

Yet my husband only frowned and asked her one question. “You want to leave?”

Her eyes reddened.

My husband stayed with her for an entire night and ordered that I was never to enter the study again.

After that, whenever he attended banquets outside, my husband only brought her. Whenever there was something novel or amusing, he only told her.

But my husband insisted all along that he merely saw her as a younger sister.

Later still, as the two of them went on with their lessons, the noises coming from the study grew louder and louder.

She said she did not want it, yet she half-resisted, half-yielded.

He said he did not love her, yet each time he sank deeper than the last.

They often called out my name too.

Jiang Yi would say, “Don’t. Young Mistress will find out.”

My husband would say, “Little temptress, aren’t you hoping she’ll stand right there and watch?”

Jiang Yi would laugh coquettishly. “I hear women of the old school have always been good at enduring.”

So every time she finished serving my husband, she would make me help wash away those traces.

As she washed, she would show off to me.

“Young Mistress, do you know what the foreign word ‘tomorrow’ means?

“Young Master taught me that.

“He said only a woman like me, someone who has accepted new ideas, deserves to learn these things.”

Naturally, I could not answer, and she splashed dirty water all over me.

Contempt filled her eyes. “Your belly cannot give birth, and your brain cannot learn. What meaning is there in living like you?”

The filthy water seeped into my eyes. My face remained calm.

“Since you have gone to school, learned to read, and accepted new ideas,” I asked her, lifting my head, “why must you still make things difficult for me here?”

Jiang Yi’s eyes widened. For a long while, she could not answer.

Then, humiliated and enraged, she waited until my husband left the province to visit friends and pushed me into the deep well.

It was the dead of winter. The freezing water bit to the bone, and my lower abdomen struck the barbs of the iron cage.

I trembled from the pain and let the foul, stinking well water swallow me. It reeked of the dead.

Red blood spread between my legs, and I heard a strange melody coming from the bottom of the well.

There was an extremely tiny hole there, with threads of light spilling out.

The melody flowed from that hole.

“Third Set of National Middle School Students’ Radio Gymnastics, Dancing Youth, begins now.”