Chapter 1

The next day, our household was in uproar.

My sister wept prettily, her eyes swollen to the size of peaches.

A young lady of a noble family gave her personal jade pendant only to her future husband. If another man acquired it, her reputation was destroyed.

In my previous life, I had taken my sister’s pendant while she was distracted at a banquet and slipped it into a drunken wastrel’s hand.

When he sobered up, he had marched to the minister’s residence with his seven concubines to propose, declaring that he and my sister had already exchanged private tokens of affection.

Father had fainted on the spot with rage.

My sister had sobbed and threatened to hang herself.

Of course.

She had not died.

Before she could even secure the rope, the maids had pulled her down.

But her reputation was ruined.

The marquis’s heir had originally been expected to marry her.

In the end, the match had gone to me.

Now maids and older serving women scurried through the courtyard, their skirts flying as they searched. They had even turned over the soil in the flower beds.

I bent down too, making a show of looking.

Noon approached, but the wastrel still had not come.

Instead, Pei Zheng, heir to Marquis Yongning, arrived.

He spoke privately with Father in the study for a long time.

When they came out, Father was all gratitude.

“Thank goodness you found my daughter’s pendant, my lord. Had someone with ill intentions picked it up, her reputation would have been ruined.”

Pei Zheng inclined his head.

“Rest assured, Minister Cui. I shall say nothing of this. Your eldest daughter’s good name will suffer no harm.”

My sister stood beside Lady Liu and shyly raised her eyes to him.

Pei Zheng was as aloof and immaculate as ever, like an immortal from the highest heavens, untouched by earthly dust.

But I knew.

He had been reborn too.

And there was no one he hated more than me.

Just before leaving, he stopped. He turned his head, cast me an indifferent glance, and said,

“Minister Cui, may I speak frankly?”

“On the day your eldest daughter’s pendant went missing, your second daughter seemed to be standing nearby.”

“She must have seen something.”

After he left,

my stepmother, Lady Liu, raised her hand and slapped me hard.

The force knocked my head to one side. My cheek burned.

She stared at me, her eyes full of venom.

“So you really did mean to harm my Shuer!”

My sister, her eyes red, clutched her handkerchief and pointed at me.

“I never take that pendant off. How could it simply disappear?”

“You must have stolen it!”

Even Father, who had always called me sensible and well-mannered, regarded me darkly, suspicion gathering in his eyes.

I dropped to my knees at once. Tears rolled down my face as I looked up, bewildered and wronged.

“Father, I am innocent!”

“I do not know why Lord Pei said that.”

“People were coming and going throughout the banquet. How would I notice a jade pendant falling to the ground?”

I cried helplessly, every word earnest.

Father sighed. In the end, he believed me a little.

But Lady Liu sneered.

“Do you know who Lord Pei is? Would a man like him give false testimony?”

Father loved her and my sister best.

Even without evidence, he found me guilty.

He had me dragged away, beaten twenty times with a heavy paddle, then thrown into the ancestral hall to kneel all night.