Chapter 3

Chapter 3

I brought up the matter of the True Daughter.

It made my eldest sister cry her heart out. That very night, she came down with a high fever.

The entire manor was thrown into chaos.

When Zhou Huaixu received the news, he was still handling a case on the outskirts of the city. He did not even have time to change before rushing over.

He arrived travel-worn and dusty, stubble darkening his jaw.

The refined, noble young master he usually appeared to be had vanished completely in the face of his concern for Cui Mingzhu.

With his heart fixed on my eldest sister, Zhou Huaixu hurried past and knocked into me so hard I stumbled.

He was the heir the Zhou Family had so carefully raised.

Calm and composed in everything he did.

Yet in front of Cui Mingzhu, he still lost his head.

In the third year of my marriage to him, Mother still brought Cui Mingzhu back to the manor.

Her life had not gone well.

Her husband had died young, leaving her with a child.

At the time, I was pregnant, and the pregnancy was unstable.

Mother brought Cui Mingzhu to visit me.

Her little boy was mischievous. While roughhousing in the room, he knocked me to the floor.

Blood poured from beneath me, staining the ground red.

Zhou Huaixu did not even furrow his brow.

Calmly, he ordered the servants to help me back to my room and summon a physician.

The child could not be saved.

I lay numbly on the bed, staring at the canopy.

Tears slipped from the corners of my eyes, one by one, soaking into the pillow.

Zhou Huaixu’s tone was perfectly ordinary. “The child is innocent. It was our child who came at the wrong time. Don’t blame anyone else.”

He said Cui Mingzhu’s child was innocent.

He said my child had come at the wrong time.

He never once thought that I was innocent too.

I was not the one who had come to his door and asked to marry him.

Nor had I deliberately taken Cui Mingzhu’s place.

So why was I the only one to blame?

Was it simply because I was not Cui Mingzhu?

The medicine prescribed by the physician was bitter.

Cui Mingzhu had been pampered since childhood and refused to take medicine.

To coax her, Mother tried every method she could think of.

In the end, she spent a great deal of money to buy a recipe for candied fruit. Only then would Cui Mingzhu take her medicine.

But making that sort of candied fruit was extremely labor-intensive. Someone had to watch it at all times.

One moment of carelessness, and the flavor would change.

Mother had never had much patience. Yet she refused to leave it to the servants, so she handed it all to me.

After my eldest sister developed a fever, the old maidservant who attended Mother came to wake me.

She relayed Mother’s message. “Mingzhu fell ill because of you. She fears bitterness, so prepare freshly made candied fruit for her every day. Consider it your apology.”

I stayed up all night and finished making the candied fruit, but my eldest sister still refused to take her medicine.

Mother decided I had not tried hard enough and punished me by making me prepare another batch.

The kitchen was filled with the sweet fragrance of candied fruit.

But I found it cloying.

After the miscarriage, my body was damaged.

The physician prescribed many bitter medicines.

I could not swallow them.

For once, Zhou Huaixu softened his temper toward me.

He held out candied fruit and coaxed me.

The moment it touched my tongue, I knew it was the kind my eldest sister loved.

The same sweet, soft, sticky taste.

Yet it could not suppress the bitterness of the medicinal soup at all.

It made me want to retch.

I picked up the plate of candied fruit my eldest sister had rejected and stuffed the pieces into my mouth one by one.

The sweetness spread across my tongue.

But at the root of it, I could still taste the bitter medicine.

That medicine truly was too bitter.

I bent over and dry-heaved.

Tears smeared across my face.

Through my blurred vision, a pair of black boots appeared before me.

I looked up and saw Zhou Huaixu’s eyes, full of disgust and impatience.

I had seen that look countless times before.

In bed, he would always wear that expression.

He would cover my face and ravage me without the slightest tenderness.

When I begged him to stop, he would coldly say the cruelest things.

The memory of that pain from my previous life made my body tremble uncontrollably.

Zhou Huaixu looked down at me from above, his voice as disgusted as ever.

“Mingzhu may not be your blood sister, but she has been your sister for all these years. Can you really not bear to see her well?”

“If there is a next time…”

He approached me coldly.

Terrified, I backed away and nearly fell.

Fortunately, a pair of hands, callused and steady, caught me firmly.

I turned to look.

It was the True Daughter.