Chapter 15

Chapter 15

I lowered my eyes. “She was hounded to death by my father’s legal wife.”

“My father is the eldest son of his family. Since he was a child, it was drummed into him that he must support and look after his younger brother.”

“My second uncle was a gambling addict. He racked up a massive debt, and even selling the ancestral property wasn’t enough to pay it off. My grandmother then forced my father to break off his engagement to his fiancée. He was made to marry a merchant’s daughter who was as plain as salt, all for the sake of her generous dowry to pay off my uncle’s gambling debts.”

Hearing this, Yuan Heng let out a scoff. “Your father is truly a weak-willed fool.”

I nodded with a faint smile.

“My father… he fears his parents above, his wife within, and his superiors without. And now, he fears you, Marquis, his son-in-law.”

“My father’s legal wife has a fierce, shrewish temperament and is quite calculating. That year, when my father passed the imperial examinations and was appointed to the Ministry of Revenue, my grandmother brought the entire family to the Capital City to seek refuge with him. To everyone’s surprise, my father’s legal wife refused to let my second uncle through the door. She produced his gambling debt IOUs and demanded he pay her back immediately and agree to a formal family separation, or else she would report him to the authorities to reclaim her dowry.”

“Seeing just how formidable her elder son’s wife was, my grandmother told my father: ‘If you don’t divorce this shrew today, I’ll bash my head against the wall and die right here!'”

“My father was helpless. He could only beg his wife, asking if she would just kneel and kowtow to his mother so they could put the matter behind them.”

“But she refused to let it go. She hired a scholar to draft a formal complaint overnight, threatening to go to the Ministry of Personnel to report my father for misconduct, marriage fraud, and misappropriating his wife’s property. She was determined to ruin his reputation and strip him of his official post!”

Yuan Heng raised an eyebrow. “What a formidable woman.”

I gave a bitter smile. “Indeed. They say my father’s spirit broke then and there; he simply washed his hands of the whole thing. He brewed a pot of tea and told his mother and wife to drink up to soothe their throats, even telling them to keep their voices down so they wouldn’t disturb him while he balanced the ledgers. My grandmother was livid when she saw her son wouldn’t take her side and was so henpecked. But she also knew that the Ye Family’s future rested entirely on my father, a low-ranking official. She didn’t dare cause any more trouble and took my uncle’s family back to their hometown in disgrace.”

“After returning, the more my grandmother thought about it, the angrier she became. She wanted to punish this formidable daughter-in-law.”

“She heard that a new top courtesan had arrived at a local brothel, a woman of peerless beauty. After some careful digging, she discovered that this woman was originally a lady from an official’s family who had been tricked into eloping and then sold into a brothel. She had suffered a great trauma; she usually appeared normal, but when her condition flared up, she would grab a knife and try to hack people to death.”

At this point, my nose began to sting, and tears fell one by one.

“My grandmother spent a fortune to buy my mother. She found a way to secure her new household registration documents and then wrote a letter to my father, claiming she was gravely ill and feared she didn’t have long to live, and that she wanted to see him one last time.”

“At that time, my father’s legal wife was nearing her due date and couldn’t travel. My father returned to the village alone to tend to his mother.”

“My grandmother lied, saying my mother was a distant niece whose family had fallen on hard times and had come to seek refuge. She had my mother serve my father tea and attend to his ink. At first, my father refused her repeatedly, but then…”

Yuan Heng teased, “And then he fell for your mother’s beauty?”

I turned my head and looked at my reflection in the mirror.

Beauty has always been a rare and precious thing, but sometimes possessing it is no blessing.

When one lacks the means to protect oneself, beauty is nothing but an iron chain dragging one down to hell.

It was so for my mother, and it is so for me.

I choked out, “When my father brought my pregnant mother back to the Capital City, his legal wife hated it, but she had to accept the reality.”

“My mother thought she had married a good man. Little did she know, it was the beginning of her nightmare.”

“My grandmother constantly pressured my mother to compete for my father’s favor and to harm the legal wife, threatening to expose her past as a prostitute if she didn’t. If that happened, her daughter would be mocked and spat upon, and would never marry into a good family. Meanwhile, the legal wife loathed my mother, bullying and humiliating her at every turn. Eventually, she intercepted a letter from my grandmother and learned the truth about my mother’s past.”

“From that day on, she forbade my father from touching my mother, claiming she feared catching a disease. She called my mother a vixen and would frequently burn yellow joss paper in my mother’s room to ‘exorcise evil spirits.’ She called my mother a ‘worn-out shoe’ and called me a ‘little worn-out shoe.'”

“My mother was pushed to the brink. She actually took a pair of scissors and hacked off my hair, wanting me to become a nun.”

“My father found the constant turmoil at home annoying, so he simply stayed away.”

“On my sixth birthday, my mother made me Ying’er jujube paste cakes. She watched me eat and coaxed me to sleep. Then, she hanged herself from a beam.”

Yuan Heng let out a long sigh and lightly patted my shoulder.

“Qing Qiu, are you telling me these stories because you want me to avenge your mother?”