Chapter 1

When I opened my eyes, I had returned to the day my mother-in-law brought Xie Chengyi home.

She held his hand, her face creased with delight.

“Jingwan, look at him. Doesn’t he have Nanfeng’s very eyes?”

“When I look at him, it is as if Nanfeng is still here at my knee. What a comfort.”

“The legitimate son I chose for you is one in a hundred.”

In my previous life, the moment I saw the child, I too had marveled at the wonders of fate.

It was not merely that his features were the very image of Xie Nanfeng’s. Nanfeng had died while overseeing flood control exactly four years ago, and this boy was exactly four years old. It seemed almost as though Nanfeng had been reborn in him to soothe his mother’s grief over losing her son.

I had agreed at once. I raised him by my side as my own legitimate son, mustered the entire clan to secure him the finest teachers and opportunities, and paved his way to a brilliant future.

Yet I could never forget how he had tormented me to death in my last life.

The locked, dark, damp woodshed. The shackles biting into the flesh of my wrists and ankles. My blinded eyes. The swill that never filled my stomach. The maids and old servants pinching their noses as they cursed and kicked me.

Lost in despair and agony, I had truly believed Xie Chengyi’s claim that I carried some contagious, hideous disease—that this was why everyone loathed me and left me barely clinging to life.

At last, unable to endure another day, I drove a chopstick through my throat.

Only then did my husband, dead for so many years, stroll up to my grave hand in hand with an elegantly dressed noblewoman.

“The son Shuang’er bore me called you Mother all these years and even gave you a respectable funeral. Your life was worthwhile after all.”

“You oppressed Yi’er for years. Leaving your corpse intact was already more dignity than you deserved.”

Xie Nanfeng wanted lifelong devotion with his beloved, yet he could not bear to give up the wealth of the marquis’s estate.

This time, I would make certain that he and his true love stayed together through life and death.

And their precious son would naturally become the tenderest weakness in my grasp.

“If Mother likes him, I have no objection to raising him in my courtyard.”

“I merely think that boy would make a fine choice as well.”

I lifted one graceful hand and pointed to a youth sweeping beneath the covered walkway. Meng Yuan.

He was thin and frail, as if a gust might blow him over, but he worked with quiet care, leaving not one windblown leaf behind.

In my previous life, Xie Chengyi had locked me deep inside the woodshed. Every servant in the estate had fawned on the powerful and trampled the fallen. They would gladly have kicked me a few more times if it won them favor with the marquis.

Meng Yuan alone slipped into the woodshed under cover of night to feed me and dress my wounds.

Even after I died, when Xie Nanfeng placed a corpse-binding pearl in my mouth so my soul could never pass on, Meng Yuan secretly pried open my coffin and dug it out.

I had done no more than give him a few garments and pairs of socks. Yet he remembered that kindness and repaid me with a true heart.

If I could choose the successor to the marquis’s estate, why would I not choose a man who understood gratitude?

My mother-in-law looked troubled. Her fingers trembled slightly around Xie Chengyi’s hand.

“But he is a servant’s child. To make him your legitimate son would be…”

I explained with a smile.

“Meng Yuan lost his mother when he was young. He came to the estate with his father, and only three years later, his father vanished in the flood at Lin’an alongside the marquis.”

“The marquis’s remains were at least recovered and laid to rest. No one knows where his father’s body drifted. He does not even have a gravestone.”

“Whenever I see the boy, I wake in terror at midnight, dreaming that Guard Meng is reaching for me with blood-soaked hands. He must be unable to rest for fear that his only son has no one to care for him.”

“I must choose a legitimate son to raise at my side in any case. Two boys can keep each other company, and the Xie family will earn a reputation for treating its servants well. Is that not the best of both worlds?”

At the mention of Guard Meng’s remains, guilt finally crossed my mother-in-law’s face.

For the body lying in the Xie marquis’s coffin was Meng Zhao. He had been denied even his own name, all to preserve Xie Nanfeng’s dream of lifelong devotion to one woman.

What the declining Xie family needed most was a good name. Naturally, she hesitated.

“But if he becomes your eldest legitimate son, then the heirship of the marquisate…”

In the end, she feared the Xie title would pass into an outsider’s hands. That was why she had insisted on bringing Xie Chengyi home.

“Do not worry, Mother. The Xie marquisate should belong to the more capable boy. Only then can we honor the century of prestige and renown our ancestors left us.”

My mother-in-law still wavered, but when she caught the cunning glint in Xie Chengyi’s eyes, she let the matter drop.

Xie Nanfeng’s son was exceptionally gifted. How could he possibly lose to a guard’s child?