Chapter 5

Chapter 5

After that day, I won Wang Long’s favor and was allowed to spend every night in his room.

When Eldest Madam learned of it, she was delighted. Rewards flowed like water to the servants’ quarters, all things meant to nourish blood and qi: red dates, mountain ginseng, cordyceps, and the like.

But I couldn’t bear to eat a single bite. Instead, I secretly sold them off for silver.

The weather was growing colder. My two elder sisters were still trapped in that old house, and I had no idea whether, in the months since I had left, they had gone hungry, grown thin, or fallen ill.

While Madam was in good spirits, I asked to go home for a visit.

She had always been merciful, so she agreed.

My home and the Marquis’s Residence lay west and east of each other, in opposite directions. But before I even reached home, snow suddenly began to fall.

Beneath the snow-lit window, my sister was wrapped in a tattered quilt, shivering as she bent over the desk to work.

I quietly came up behind her, only to hear her murmuring to herself, “Even His Majesty had humble beginnings. There are tales of men borrowing light through a chiseled wall, of reading by fireflies and snow. What does my little bit of hardship amount to?”

With that, she breathed warm air onto her right hand and went back to writing furiously.

I looked outside. A pair of padded trousers was still hanging in the courtyard, standing ramrod straight in the snow like a person.

Frozen as stiff as her mouth was stubborn.

My sister was still writing when she saw me come in carrying the trousers. She was stunned. “Xiao Jing, why are you back?”

“To visit my family.”

Seeing me bustle about lighting the stove and drying the trousers, she sighed. “…Is Hanlin Wang’s household mistreating you?”

By Hanlin Wang, she meant Wang Long’s father.

Back then, Wang Long’s father had let his elder brother inherit the title while he himself entered officialdom through a special imperial examination and rose to the Hanlin Academy. For a time, court officials and villagers alike praised it as a fine tale, and even women in the inner chambers had heard of it.

“No. The Wang family treats me very well.” I thought for a moment, then gritted my teeth. “I have now been… raised to the status of concubine.”

At that, my sister fell silent for a long while.

A trace of sorrow surfaced at the dim corner of her eye. “If the Yu Family were still what it once was, even as a wife, you would have been worthy.”

She did not know that I was not even a concubine, only a bed servant who could never be presented openly.

For a moment, there was only the soft rustle of falling snow, and the world was cold and still.

With her right hand, covered in chilblains, my sister reached under the desk and took out a pouch of money.

“Take it.”

I weighed the pouch in my hand and was shocked. “Where did you get money?”

She said stiffly, “I just sold two manuscripts!”

My eldest sister had been clever since childhood, even called a child prodigy. Thinking of all these years, of how she had supported us sisters by selling her books, my eyes filled with tears.

How could I not regret it?

But if I had not sold myself, someone in this family would have frozen to death this winter.

I lowered my head, my voice as thin as a mosquito’s whine. “Sister, I will do my best to serve Second Master. When his health is better, I will beg him to erase my slave status. Please don’t be angry with me anymore.”

Hearing this, she sighed deeply. “If your slave status is erased, does that mean you are no longer a slave?”

At this point, thousands of words had lost all meaning.

Just as I was so ashamed I wished the earth would swallow me whole, those chilblain-covered hands reached out and gently stroked the top of my head.

“Don’t be afraid. Your sister will save you.”