Chapter 2
Chapter 2
“Help! Someone, help! Someone’s fallen into the water!”
The maid shouted at the top of her lungs.
The pond water was icy cold, flooding into my nose.
At last, that scorching heat burning through me began to subside.
My muddled mind gradually cleared, and I swam toward the bank.
Originally, I had not known how to swim.
But Yan Zhao did.
After we married, he had read a line somewhere in some booklet:
“When the water ripples with the body, a different sort of pleasure arises.”
His interest thoroughly piqued, he specially ordered people to build a warm pool at an estate in the suburbs.
After going there often, and with his personal guidance, I learned how to swim along the way.
And not only how to swim.
He was the second son of his family.
Prince Yan’s Mansion had his elder brother to uphold its reputation.
On ordinary days, he was spoiled by his elders.
Naturally, he was willful and reckless.
I was my parents’ only daughter.
To keep me from suffering in my husband’s household, my parents had intended from the start to find me a husband who would marry into our family.
I had always been used to living carelessly.
The two of us were truly a pair of idlers who had found their match.
Every day, instead of doing anything proper, we spent all our time thinking up ways to eat, drink, and amuse ourselves.
When Shiwei Zhai released something new, we fought to be the first to taste it.
By wild streams, we fished and competed to see who could catch more.
Popular storybooks, we read together.
After we accidentally bought a book of erotic illustrations…
It was even worse. Having tasted the marrow, we indulged day and night, studying tirelessly.
Mother had originally worried that I would be wronged after marrying into such a powerful family.
But the Yan family treated me with exceptional kindness as well.
His Majesty was in the prime of life.
No crown prince had been appointed, and undercurrents surged among the princes.
As the only prince of a different surname in Great Chu, the Yan family had no intention of being dragged into the struggle for succession.
But Princess Anning, the Third Prince’s full-blooded sister, had been in love with Yan Jin for a long time.
To fulfill his sister’s wish and advance his great cause of seizing the throne, the Third Prince bribed a maid to drug someone.
It just so happened that I was wearing a green jacket and skirt that day, almost identical to Princess Anning’s.
It just so happened that Yan Zhao had drunk too much and entered the wrong room.
Through a strange twist of fate, the two of us took the blow meant for his elder brother.
Because of that incident, the Yan family felt guilty toward me too.
Thinking about it, I really had been blessed with good fortune.
I lived comfortably my whole life.
Only at the very end did I learn Yan Zhao had been nursing resentment all along.
What did he mean, “It’s not as if it had to be you”?
Holding my breath, I pushed hard through the pond water.
He should have said so sooner.
It wasn’t as if it had to be him for me either.
Besides, in this world, how could there truly be anyone one could not live without?
Especially when it came to love.
As the saying went, affection grew with time.
So long as both people were decent and knew how to be considerate of each other, they would surely get along well.
If their clans and relatives did not interfere too much, their days would be even more harmonious and happy.
Wasn’t that exactly how Yan Zhao and I had been in our last life?
But since he felt so unwilling…
I could generously grant his wish.
Only, my sweet and adorable Jin’er…
May she be reborn into my Shen Family in this life as well, so our bond as family can continue.
I lifted my head out of the water.
Ripples spread across the surface.
They drifted farther and farther away, vanishing like bubbles without a trace.
Just like this life between Yan Zhao and me.
Our fate ended here.
Surely, he would be happy too.