Past Events, the Vicious Mistress

After the meal, Jin Yan'an and his younger siblings cleared away the bowls and chopsticks. Meng Yun also wanted to return to her room; she felt she should make herself scarce, as taking the initiative to withdraw was better than being shooed away later. At this thought, a sense of discomfort lingered in her heart.

"Father, Mother, you talk amongst yourselves. I'm a bit tired and want to go back to lie down for a while," Meng Yun said, standing up to leave.

"Yuner, sit down for a moment. There are some things in this family you ought to know," Zhou Yaru said, reaching out to pull Meng Yun back down.

"Oh," Meng Yun murmured as she took her seat.

"Yuner has probably sensed a few things already. It's not that we intentionally kept it from you, but because of Chuan'er's condition, the fewer people who know about these matters, the better," Zhou Yaru explained.

"Mother, I can understand," Meng Yun replied.

"A-shan and I are not Chuan'er's biological parents. A-shan was a bodyguard to Chuan'er's father, and I was the personal maid of A-chuan's mother..." Zhou Yaru began to recount Jin Yanchuan's background.

As it turned out, Jin Yanchuan originally bore the surname Jin. His biological father was Jin Wanjun, the Prince of Yunan. Jin was the imperial surname, and the Prince of Yunan, Jin Wanjun, was the current emperor's half-brother by the same father. On account of the throne, more than a dozen brothers had fought bitterly and plunged the capital into turmoil. Yet Jin Wanjun had made his stance clear early on: he would not participate in any struggle for the imperial succession, nor would he take a side or voice an opinion.

In the end, the current emperor won the struggle for succession and ascended the throne, while Jin Wanjun was merely enfeoffed as a lesser Prince of Yunan, tasked with governing the Yunan Prefecture and paying a certain amount of taxes and grain to the emperor each year.

Jin Wanjun strictly followed the imperial decrees and never dared to overstep his bounds. Consequently, for many years, Jin Wanjun lived quite securely and peacefully as the Prince of Yunan.

Yet, his household was far from tranquil.

Jin Wanjun's primary wife was Chu Sisi, the legitimate daughter of an official family in the capital. Chu Sisi was beautiful and had studied the precepts of female virtue since childhood. Kind-hearted by nature, she followed Jin Wanjun to his fiefdom in the Yunan Prefecture shortly after their marriage.

Years earlier, Zhou Yaru had been sold by her mother and drifted through various hands until she reached the capital. When she fell gravely ill, the human trafficking agency refused to pay for a physician and cast her aside. By chance, she was rescued by the unmarried Chu Sisi. From then on, she remained by Chu Sisi's side and accompanied her upon her marriage to the Yunan Prefecture.

In the second year after their arrival in the Yunan Prefecture, Chu Sisi gave birth to a son, Jin Yanchuan. For three years, Chu Sisi and Jin Wanjun lived the blissful, harmonious life of an immortal couple.

Yet everything changed because of a single woman.

That woman was Hu Jiaojiao.

The Yunan Prefecture bordered the Liangguang Canal, where water transport was highly prosperous. There, the Canal Syndicate formed an independent power faction, and even the local government officials had to tread carefully around them. Although Jin Wanjun was a prince and the master of the fiefdom, an overwhelming force struggles to suppress local tyrants. Jin Wanjun's multiple requests to meet with Hu Guangsheng, the leader of the Canal Syndicate, were repeatedly rebuffed. Eventually, Hu Guangsheng paid a personal visit to the Prince of Yunan's estate, and the ultimate outcome was that Jin Wanjun was forced to take Hu's daughter as a secondary consort, while the Syndicate leader ceded three waterways of the canal transport as the bride's dowry.

Jin Wanjun agreed without the slightest hesitation.

When Chu Sisi learned of this just one day before the new bride entered the estate, no amount of displeasure on her part could change the outcome.

The arrival of Hu Jiaojiao shattered the history of the Prince of Yunan's estate having only a single mistress, and it broke the legend of the deep, unbreakable devotion between the Prince and his Primary Consort.

After entering the estate, Jin Wanjun spent nearly every night in Hu Jiaojiao's courtyard. Combined with Chu Sisi's profound disillusionment with Jin Wanjun, Hu Jiaojiao quickly established a firm foothold in the household.

The maids and elderly matrons were adept at reading the faces of their masters. Anyone with eyes could see that the Primary Consort's influence had waned, whereas the Secondary Consort was beautiful, knew how to handle people, and invariably rewarded the servants with flakes and nuggets of solid gold. Backed by a powerful maternal family, Hu Jiaojiao carried herself with unyielding arrogance.

Later on, when Hu Jiaojiao became pregnant, she grew even more pampered. Her maternal family—consisting of five older brothers with their wives, and six older sisters—took turns every few days delivering gifts, ensuring that nearly every servant in the estate received bountiful rewards from her family.

Hu Jiaojiao's position in the estate became rock-solid, while the legitimate wife, Chu Sisi, was left neglected and ignored like withered autumn vegetables.

Had it only been a matter of choosing not to contend or fight, living out the rest of her days in quiet obscurity might have sufficed. However, Chu Sisi and three-year-old Jin Yanchuan were frequently subjected to the cold violence of the maids and matrons. Meals were deliberately served cold or undercooked; the charcoal provided was of the lowest quality; and even the garments made for them were unfinished, defective scraps. Worse still, three-year-old Jin Yanchuan was once thrown into the lotus pond, several lackeys and maids merely standing on the bank to watch him thrash about in the water. It was Zhou Yaru who, ignoring her own terror of deep water, leaped into the lotus pond and rescued the young boy.

On another occasion, a lackey placed Jin Yanchuan to sleep high up in a ten-meter-tall tree. When the child awoke and shifted his body, he plummeted down. It was Jin Shan—known then as A-shan—who happened to pass by and caught the child just in time.

By the time Zhou Yaru finished recounting these events, she was already weeping uncontrollably.

"Didn't that Prince do anything? He just let his side-wife bully his primary wife and legitimate son?" Meng Yun's fists were clenched so tightly that she longed to beat that wicked woman right then and there.

"Do anything? Whenever the Young Madam and Chuan'er told him they were being bullied, he would say that the Secondary Consort was virtuous, kind-hearted, and would never do such a thing. He also claimed that her father was the leader of the Canal Syndicate and her second brother a high-ranking official in the capital—implying that even if the Secondary Consort were at fault, it was not a matter he could easily intervene in." At the thought of that faithless and treacherous man, Zhou Yaru's face turned pale.

"Back then, A-chuan and I had already set our wedding date, but seeing the Young Madam living in such misery, how could I abandon the estate and leave her to her fate?"

"That night—the Qixi Festival, such a romantic occasion—the Prince accompanied the Secondary Consort to attend the lantern festival, while the Young Madam's Xiaoxiang Courtyard suddenly caught fire, the kind of blaze that could not be extinguished no matter how much water was thrown. The Young Madam was struck by a falling crossbeam, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't shift it. Just then, A-shan arrived and rescued A-chuan and me. When he went back inside to save the Young Madam, she had already stopped breathing. A-shan's leg was crushed and his face disfigured in the process. Daring not to stay a moment longer, we fled with A-chuan for our lives."

"The Canal Syndicate possessed immense power, and their pursuit was like a giant net closing in around us. We hid along the way, enduring dozens of assassination attempts, until every scrap of money we carried was either spent or lost."

"The entire Yunan Prefecture was as heavily fortified as an iron wall; the three of us simply could not escape. In the end, A-shan said that to find a path to survival one must court death, and that the most dangerous place is the safest place. We went to the Python River, found an inconspicuous spot, and leaped into the water under the cover of night. Just like that, we drifted unwittingly through the night, having no idea where we were, the three of us clinging to a single plank of wood like homeless children—blind and utterly desolate."

"Later, I thought of returning to Zhou Village, because aside from the Young Madam and A-shan, no one knew where my maternal family was. So the three of us returned to Zhou Village."

"A-shan's appearance was rather frightening back then, and the villagers were afraid to take us in. Later on, I knelt and begged the elders of the ancestral clan, imploring them to act as our guarantors so that we could stay. We began our life here, and the following year, Yan'er was born."