Chapter 11

Chapter 11

The two sisters had just finished washing up and changed into their nightgowns to sleep when they heard a knock at the courtyard gate.

Xiaowu entered with a sour expression to report, “It’s Third Master Luo.”

Yilian immediately stood up. “He’s come for you? Perhaps I should head back first.”

Mengyu shook her head and instructed Xiaowu, “Tell him I’ve already retired for the night. Whatever it is can wait until tomorrow.”

“How can you refuse him?” Yilian asked anxiously. “What if you provoke him and he stops coming to see you? What will we do then?”

Mengyu countered with a question of her own: “Sister, do you truly understand your husband?”

Yilian was stumped by the question. She always felt as though Luo Ruizhi stood amidst a thick fog-tall and imposing, yet ethereal and unreachable.

“His heart is impossible to fathom,” she said painfully.

Mengyu looked at her quietly. “You look up to him, Sister. Naturally, you cannot see his face clearly.”

Yilian seemed to understand, yet not quite. She murmured to herself, “But he… he is my husband.”

A woman was meant to follow her husband after marriage and treat him as her heaven. How could she not look up to him?

Mengyu felt as if she were playing a lute to a cow.

But such was the way of the world. The clever, the foolish, the good, and the bad were all tossed together to weather their days.

When luck was good, kindness was repaid with kindness, and evil with evil.

When luck was bad, those who were both foolish and wicked happened to be one’s own flesh and blood.

“Sister, you may not understand your husband, but surely you understand human nature? Things obtained easily are discarded just as easily. A single night of pleasure with him would serve no purpose other than to ruin my reputation. If that happened, even if I could stay in the Luo Manor to accompany you, we would just be two forsaken women. Who would be left to protect whom?”

When Mengyu compared herself to a mere plaything, Yilian finally understood.

She looked up at Mengyu with eyes full of hope. “Sister, you are always more brilliant than I am.”

Mengyu tucked Yilian in and said softly, “Go to sleep, Sister. Have a good dream.”

Yilian’s sleeping face looked so innocent it bordered on foolish. Mengyu recalled that back at home, Yilian hadn’t been like this.

Yilian had grown up in the countryside. She knew how to make kites and how to tend to the few fruit trees in their yard.

After she married, the fruit trees at home stopped bearing fruit.

Mengyu’s childhood had come to an abrupt end along with it.

Thinking of the past, Mengyu’s hardened heart softened. Yet, when she looked at Yilian again, that wrinkled face seemed to slowly sprout fangs under the flickering candlelight-

Everything had changed.

Mengyu realized that the person who used to pick fruit for her now saw her as the fruit itself.

The name Yilian would gradually vanish, replaced by the title Lady Gu of the Luo Family.

Mengyu blew out the candle by the bed. As the darkness crept in, her heart grew cold once more.

If an unfortunate person allowed themselves to be soft-hearted, they were merely stabbing themselves with their own hand.