Chapter 2

Chapter 2

In truth, I am not Princess Xunyang at all.

I was once a simple herbalist who descended the mountains at dawn, damp with dew, and returned home bathed in the silver glow of the moon.

When I was seventeen, I saved a young gentleman dressed in white. He told me his name was Shen Zhao and that he was a mere scholar.

He praised me, saying, “Ah Yue, your eyes are truly beautiful. They look like a lake filled with stars.”

I was uneducated and illiterate. Since childhood, my mother had done nothing but beat and scold me, calling me a freak with yin-yang eyes and a dead person’s face. The neighbors in the village always said I could see ghosts and that I was a harbinger of ill fortune.

No one had ever spoken to me so gently, and no one had ever used such beautiful words to describe me.

From that moment on, my days were filled with joy.

A year later, Shen Zhao and I were married. He opened a school, I opened a clinic, and a year after that, we had a daughter.

Shen Zhao asked me to name her. I said, “Let’s call her Ningning. May her years be peaceful, and may her heart be serene.”

These were words I had overheard at the school. They were truly lovely, representing everything I hoped for in life.

Shen Zhao’s eyes flickered with emotion as he lowered his head to play with our daughter. “Ningning, Ningning…”

There was an immense tenderness in his voice whenever he spoke her name.

I thought it was his love for our daughter.

It wasn’t until six years later that I realized the truth. It was because the woman he truly loved went by the nickname-

Ning Ning.