Chapter 1
When the Marchioness came to my home, I was seven years old. My family was poor. My parents never let me starve, but I could hardly say they doted on me.
They were too busy—busy making a living, busy keeping all eight mouths in the family fed.
At seven, I stood out from every other girl in the village. I was far too pretty.
She told my parents that she felt a special affinity with me and wished to adopt me as her legitimate daughter. In gratitude for raising me, she would pay them five hundred taels of silver and allow them to see me twice a year afterward.
After some hesitation, my parents agreed. They never asked whether I was willing, nor did they care whether this Marchioness was genuine or a fraud, whether I was headed to a marquis’s estate or some filthy den.
Five hundred taels was simply too much. The human heart did not stand much chance once money entered the bargain.
Before I left, Mother said she had failed me. She told me not to worry about the family anymore, only to pursue a future of my own.
Whether she meant it or not, I took her at her word.
From then on, we would each live our own lives, seek our own futures, and guard our own skins.
Three other pretty children were brought to the Marquis’s estate with me.
At first, we chatted happily enough. The instant we learned that all of us had been bought for several hundred taels to become the Marchioness’s legitimate daughter, we turned on one another.
There was only one estate and one Marchioness, but so many counterfeit daughters. What else were we supposed to do—hold hands like dear sisters and celebrate the New Year together?
I knew better than to underestimate anyone, even a child of seven or eight.
On the first day after we fell out, one girl was shoved from the carriage while getting down and scraped her face. She was sent away at once. A new girl with a sharp tongue arrived the next day; if anyone bullied her, she hit back with her fists.
Watching the other three brawl and claw at one another’s faces, I shrank into a corner.
“Stop.”
The matron in charge regarded us coldly. The ruler in her hand hurt like the devil.
She did not care whether I had joined the fight. When punishment came, she showed no mercy.
Under the blazing sun, we knelt on flagstones with clay basins balanced on our heads, each filled to the brim with water. We could rise only when every drop had evaporated.
If a basin broke, it was replaced with another, again filled to the brim.
Only when I felt close to dying of thirst did the matron say lazily, “Help the young ladies back to their rooms.”
I decided to run away.
But someone acted before I did—and she was caught.
Right in front of us, they sliced through the tendons in her ankles. Blood streamed across the ground as she begged through her agony, “Matron, I won’t do it again. I swear I won’t!”
Her pleas did not buy her life.
The matron merely flicked one hand. A burly man stepped forward with a cudgel and brought it down again and again on her ruined ankles.
The remaining three of us were pinned down, hands clamped tightly over our mouths.
We could not even plead for her. At any moment, our own lives might have been forfeit.
In that instant, I understood: in this ancient world, nothing was worth less than a human life.
All that remained in the courtyard were the three of us and her corpse.
One living, breathing person—gone in the blink of an eye.
The other two girls were already scared out of their wits, clinging to each other and trembling.
We had not landed in a nest of fortune. We had fallen straight into a den of wolves.
Had we learned obedience? We had.
Would we fight and scramble again? No.
Would we dare run away? Never again.
Whatever little schemes I might have had, I no longer dared move rashly without absolute certainty of success.
We heard that the dead girl had been thrown into a mass grave. The girl who replaced her possessed all the innocence and pride we had shown when we first arrived.
With everyone fearing for herself, no one warned her to watch her words and actions. Perhaps she did not need the warning. She was exceptionally good at pleasing the matron—the most outstanding of the four of us.
Only after half a year of learning the rules did we truly meet the Marchioness.
I knew it. Why would a Marchioness personally visit a village just for a pretty peasant girl?
I also met the girl who was supposedly my legitimate elder sister.
Well… she looked rather strapping.
To put it plainly, she was tall, broad, masculine, and not pretty.
To put it less kindly, she was ugly.
A daughter takes after her father. She looked just like hers—the Marquis of Martial Valor, who had won glory and distinction campaigning beside the emperor.