Every late spring, the azaleas behind Dazhao Temple in the capital bloomed across the mountains, vibrant and flourishing like flames.

Walking along the bluestone path behind Dazhao Temple, Zhou Shaojin felt her life resembled these blooming azaleas—seemingly brilliant, yet lasting only a few days before nothing remained but the loneliness of withered petals.

She couldn’t help but lift her gaze toward the pavilion atop the mountain.

Amid the verdant greenery, the red pavilion stood out brilliantly, its upturned eaves exquisitely delicate. A man in a blue robe stood tall and elegant, leaning against the railing as he gazed into the distance. The mountain wind lifted the corners of his robe, making them flutter like butterflies and revealing his snow-white knee breeches, as if he might ride the wind away at any moment—like a figure from a painting, ineffably graceful and carefree.

Zhou Shaojin’s eyes stung with sourness as she tightly clenched her sleeves.

Her fingertips met something cold and hard.

Her spirit steadied slightly as she slowly walked toward the mountaintop.

“You came!” The person in the pavilion’s face lit up with joy as he came forward to greet her.

But Zhou Shaojin stopped dead in her tracks and said coldly, “Cheng Lu, you don’t actually have any letter my father personally wrote to Uncle from the Cheng family, do you?”

The person called “Cheng Lu” looked startled, then frowned with displeasure. “Shaojin, who’s been feeding you nonsense again? We grew up together—don’t you know what kind of person I am? Back then, if Wu Baozhang hadn’t deliberately ingratiated herself with my mother and caused that misunderstanding, how would my mother have sent someone to the Wu family to propose marriage? How would you and I have become estranged, giving Cheng Xu the opportunity to…”

Hearing Cheng Lu mention “Cheng Xu,” Zhou Shaojin’s face immediately turned deathly pale, her hands and feet trembling uncontrollably.

Cheng Lu realized his slip of the tongue, a flash of regret crossing his eyes. He hurriedly changed the subject. “All these years I’ve been thinking of you constantly. When I heard the Cheng family was executed down to the last member, I rushed here overnight from Ningbo, afraid you’d be implicated because of your father…”

Zhou Shaojin took a deep breath to steady her emotions. Seeing that Cheng Lu still treated her like an ignorant woman to be deceived, she couldn’t help but interrupt him with mockery. “So you wanted to file that accusation, claiming my father was the Cheng family’s faction member, colluding with them as their accomplice?”

“You wrong me again!” Cheng Lu’s expression changed repeatedly, his tone urgent. “If I’d intended to denounce your father, I would have sent the letter to the Provincial Governor’s office long ago—why wait until now! I only said that to make you come out and meet me!”

Zhou Shaojin fell silent.

He was right!

If she hadn’t worried about her father’s safety, she—a woman of the inner quarters—would never have come out to meet him, no matter what Cheng Lu said.

Seeing this, Cheng Lu couldn’t help but breathe a sigh of relief. “Shaojin, your father is the Cheng family’s son-in-law. The Emperor intends to destroy the Cheng family utterly, but he’s concerned that the Cheng family’s in-laws are all great families of Jiangnan with scholarly traditions passed down through generations. He fears causing unrest among Jiangnan’s scholarly circles, so he swiftly cut the Gordian knot, limiting guilt only to the Cheng clan. But who can guarantee the Emperor won’t settle accounts afterward and purge the Cheng family’s students and old friends? Your father will certainly be implicated then. Even your brother-in-law Liao Shaotang, as the heir of the Liao family, will have no choice but to distance himself from the Zhou family for the sake of the Liao family’s centuries-old foundation!

“What will you do then?

“Surely you can’t bear to drag your sister down at a time like this?

“If you and Lin Shisheng treated each other with mutual respect, that would be one thing, but Lin Shisheng is the type who favors concubines over his wife. You’d been married barely a year when he took a concubine on the grounds of your ‘barrenness.’ After your mother-in-law died, he even sent you away to a country estate under the pretext of ‘recuperating,’ letting that concubine manage the household’s domestic affairs while he fathered three children with her.

“He no longer has eyes for you! Once you lose your support, with his nature, it would be good if he doesn’t kick you while you’re down. To think you could keep your position as legitimate wife—that’s absolutely impossible. What’s truly frightening is that he might decide to go all the way, secretly giving you poison and claiming you ‘died of illness’ to the outside world… Are you really going to just sit and wait for your demise?”

As he spoke, he took several steps forward until he stood before Zhou Shaojin, softening his voice. “Shaojin, come away with me! We’ll never mind all these worldly troubles again and single-mindedly live our own little life like immortal companions, all right? I’ve achieved modest success in Ningbo now. Everyone who sees me respectfully addresses me as ‘Master Cheng’—I’m no longer that powerless, influential-less Cheng Lu who depended on the Cheng family! When the time comes, I’ll build you a courtyard like Wanxiang Residence, plant a magnolia tree by the gate, and set up a grape arbor in the yard. Come spring, you can paint by the window while I read beside you. In summer, you can dry your hair under the grape arbor while I comb it for you, just like when we were children, all right?”

Ten years without seeing her, she no longer possessed a young girl’s tender shyness. Her already slender figure had become thin as bamboo. Her delicate skin no longer had its former rosiness, pale as plain silk. Two shallow wrinkles had formed between her brows from long-term furrowing, and her expression carried an undisguisable melancholy. Yet even so, she remained startlingly beautiful. In fact, because she was so thin, she possessed a fragile, ethereal elegance she’d lacked before, inspiring protective affection in anyone who saw her, fearing she might be blown away by the mountain wind.

Such a woman should be cherished and cared for like a treasure!

Once this thought arose, Cheng Lu couldn’t help but embrace Zhou Shaojin, his tone revealing expectation and tender affection. “I’ll protect you! I’ll never let anyone bully you again! Whether it’s the Cheng family or the Zhou family, we’ll forget them all completely and start anew…”

His words stopped abruptly as he released Zhou Shaojin with a shocked expression.

Zhou Shaojin’s eyes had turned red at some point, and she stared at Cheng Lu with a gaze full of hatred. “Go with you? Then how do you plan to deal with your wife? Don’t forget that when you were at your lowest, it was your father-in-law who took you in. When you were most helpless, it was your father-in-law who helped you do business and supported you in establishing your own enterprise, which is how you became today’s ‘Master Cheng’! Or have you simply never considered divorcing your wife to remarry, but merely intended to deceive me into eloping with you?”

That Zhou Shaojin, always gentle and timid, who couldn’t bear to even pluck a flower, would actually harm him?

Cheng Lu was utterly shocked, completely unable to attend to anything else.

He looked down at his abdomen.

A gleaming golden pair of scissors was deeply embedded in his belly. Bright red blood flowed along the scissors, slowly soaking through his clothing and staining red those pale, translucent hands gripping the scissors tightly… It stung Cheng Lu’s eyes even more.

“You’ve gone mad!” He stared at Zhou Shaojin in disbelief and shoved her away forcefully.

The frail Zhou Shaojin staggered two steps and fell to the ground. Her palms were scraped raw, her hair disheveled, her body covered in dust. But she immediately scrambled up and lunged recklessly at Cheng Lu, who was clutching his abdomen. “Even now, you still want to deceive me! I’m no longer the Zhou Shaojin of ten years ago. That day I saw you standing under the rose bushes, wearing those dark green shoes with cloud patterns. You watched that bastard Cheng Xu bully me without making a sound… Now you threaten me, claiming you have evidence of my father colluding with Uncle from the Cheng family, saying my sister and brother-in-law will be implicated by the Zhou family, saying Lin Shisheng will kill me… When it comes down to it, you just want me to surrender myself to you… I wish I’d never known you! You despicable villain!”

Tears flooded uncontrollably from her eyes.

She wanted to stab Cheng Lu again, but her hands covered in blood made her limbs weak, unable to pull the scissors from Cheng Lu’s body. Yet to give up this chance to kill Cheng Lu left her unwilling to accept it, so she could only twist the scissors wildly.

This actually made Cheng Lu’s injury worse.

The pain made him break out in cold sweat as he came to his senses.

Having the incident from years ago exposed, and finding that Zhou Shaojin, who had always obeyed him, actually dared to turn against him, filled Cheng Lu with furious rage.

He viciously slapped Zhou Shaojin across the face and cursed, “You slut! You’re nothing but a pair of worn shoes Cheng Xu slept with and discarded—what right do you have to question me? Isn’t this exactly why Lin Shisheng never enters your room? You think you’re still that Second Miss of the Zhou family…”

Zhou Shaojin neither dodged nor evaded, letting him slap her across the face.

She merely pressed her lips tightly together, gripping the scissors for dear life.

Only then did Cheng Lu realize Zhou Shaojin’s intention.

He couldn’t push Zhou Shaojin away, and the stabbed area hurt as though his intestines were severed, which frightened him.

Could he actually die here?

Instinctively, he grabbed Zhou Shaojin by the throat and said in panic, “You think you can kill me like this? Stop dreaming! I might as well tell you honestly—when the Cheng family was raided, although Fourth Master Cheng escaped and later stormed the execution ground to rescue only Cheng Xu, the authorities are hunting them everywhere. Last time they were discovered in Huaihua, Huguang, and Cheng Xu had one arm chopped off! So what if he’s the legitimate eldest grandson of the Cheng family’s main branch? So what if he was the top candidate at nineteen? Now he’s nothing but a rat crossing the street that everyone wants to kill, unable even to protect himself! Rather than hoping he’ll rescue you, you’d be better off properly sleeping with Lin Shisheng once. Perhaps, considering you’re Cheng Xu’s beloved, Lin Shisheng might leave you a way to live!”

Cheng Xu!

Hearing this name again, Zhou Shaojin was momentarily dazed, no longer caring about Cheng Lu’s viciousness.

She remembered those first few years after arriving in the capital, when Cheng Xu would kneel at her sister’s door on the twelfth lunar month for her birthday.

Snow would fall on him, piling up until he became a snowman.

Later, Fourth Master Cheng came and had people carry him onto a carriage, and he never came again!

But now, even if he did come, she wouldn’t be afraid.

She’d never planned to leave Dazhao Temple alive!

Either killed by Cheng Lu!

Or by her own hand!

She knew perfectly well that scissors weren’t enough to kill Cheng Lu.

But she couldn’t find anything better to stab Cheng Lu with inconspicuously.

Moreover, at this time her father still held high office at court, her sister and brother-in-law were still safe and sound, and Dazhao Temple where she met Cheng Lu was a place where she’d worshipped Buddha for years. If she died like this on the mountain behind Dazhao Temple, Cheng Lu couldn’t escape the charge of forcing himself on a virtuous woman!

Even if he wanted to frame the Zhou family, he couldn’t succeed!

This was enough!

In this life, because she’d fallen for Cheng Lu, she’d made her upright and proper father lose face completely, made her gentle and capable sister worry herself sick, and caused estrangement between Uncle from the Cheng family and the main branch. All she could do now was give her father one less enemy, give her sister one less danger, so that when she met Uncle from the Cheng family in the Yellow Springs, she could at least bow to him with her face covered.

As for her reputation, it had been destroyed ten years ago—what was there left to worry about!

She lifted her head to see the azure blue sky above.

So beautiful!

Just like what she’d seen as a child lying in the Cheng family’s back garden.

Back then, her sister hadn’t yet married, Cheng Jia hadn’t yet died, and they hadn’t yet paired her with Cheng Lu.

They’d imitated the ancients with floating wine cup banquets, playing the qin and blowing the xiao, chasing butterflies and playing grass games, laughing and playing together…

She regretted it so much!

How could she have ever fallen for that hypocrite Cheng Lu?

If only she could return to the past.

She would definitely open her eyes wide, see clearly into people’s hearts, no longer be so weak, and stay far, far away from Cheng Lu…