Chapter 1

Chapter 1

The little girl’s haughty face went as white as paper in an instant.

“What right do you have to hit me? In front of all these people, are you really going to throw your weight around and bully me? I-”

Before she could finish, one of the guards brought his staff down hard on the back of her knees.

With a thud, she dropped to her knees before the heated sedan chair, right at my feet.

Nanny Li lifted the curtain, allowing me to see that small face flushed with a mixture of humiliation and pain.

The moment our eyes met, her pupils trembled.

“You dare hit me? Aren’t you afraid Huaiyu will divorce you? I am-”

Her threat never made it out.

Smack!

The first bamboo paddle landed hard across that endlessly chattering mouth.

The two-finger-wide strip of bamboo cracked sharply as it struck her full crimson lips. They swelled at once, red and protruding, her sharp little mouth suddenly looking like a sausage hung high before the New Year.

It hurt badly.

Tears welled in her peach-blossom eyes.

Nanny Li curled her lips in a mocking sneer and shouted sternly, “What is wrong with all of you? Did none of you eat today? You can’t even put strength into a paddling. Do you want to be sent to the estate to feed pigs?”

The little girl’s peach-blossom eyes flew wide.

Smack!

This stroke landed with particular force.

Blood vessels appeared in her trembling, swollen lips.

The arrogance with which she had lorded herself over us so-called feudal remnants suddenly cracked.

Even the stubborn defiance on her lips, the image of an unyielding backbone that would never bend, could no longer be maintained.

As she screamed, she actually began begging the old feudal fossils for mercy, her words muffled and slurred.

“Stop hitting me. It hurts so much. If you keep going, you’ll ruin my face.”

“Oh? Now you know you were wrong? Too late!” Nanny Li mocked.

“To insult a titled lady of the court is punishable by one hundred strokes of the cane under the law. My lady is kindhearted. Granting you thirty bamboo strokes is already leniency. You ought to remember my lady’s grace today for the rest of your life.”

Smack!

Another bamboo stroke fell.

That sharp tongue of hers, the same one that had publicly denounced women of the inner courtyard as incompetent and useless, was now bleeding.

As she screamed again and again, tears mingled with blood and soaked the front of her clothes.

I found it rather dull.

My eyes drifted half shut as I leaned against the gold-threaded cushion and rested.

Outside the sedan chair, goose-feather snow fell thick and fast, freezing Xiang Tunan until she shivered.

Inside the soft sedan, however, the brazier burned warmly, as if it were the height of spring.

After the time it took an incense stick to burn, Nanny Li lifted the carriage curtain.

“She has fainted.”

I nodded and opened my eyes.

Just in time to see Xiang Tunan, her face swollen like a pig’s head and no longer recognizable.

She was pinned in the snow, both knees soaked through with muddy meltwater, her body covered in filth.

The heavy snow came tumbling down, battering that once overbearing face into a sorry mess.

The grand principle of equality she always kept on her lips had not saved her.

I shifted slightly, and the guards understood at once, dragging her over before me.

Mud and snow mixed along the way, her knees carving two long tracks through it.

Xiang Tunan was barely conscious, her face full of confusion and disbelief.

I leaned down and explained to her, “You are only a Transmigrator. You are not the first. But one who does not understand the law, does not know rank or propriety, and comes to someone else’s door asking to be beaten? You are the first.”

The curtain fell. I ordered coldly, “Throw her by the roadside and make her kneel there. Let every passerby take a good look at what happens to someone who knows no manners.”

The carriage wheels creaked.

And that farce of self-inflicted humiliation was left behind us.

After returning to the estate, I held a book and sat in the study, accompanying my son and daughter as they read and practiced their characters.

Nanny Li pushed the door open, leaned close to my ear, and said softly, “The Marquis carried her away and settled her in a courtyard in the south of the city.”