Ye Yaming finally breathed a sigh of relief.

This ritual crying was even more exhausting than negotiating business deals in the marketplace.

The groom’s wedding attendant came over to support Ye Yaming, with Madam Zhou on the other side, guiding her outside. When they reached the doorway, Ye Jiaxing was waiting there and carried Ye Yaming on his back as they walked out.

With the veil covering her head, Ye Yaming’s senses became dulled, as if they too were covered.

She only knew that Ye Jiaxing carried her from the inner gate to outside the main gate, surrounded by the voices of Ye family relatives, clan members, and strangers—the strangers likely being people from Ye Ruhui and Ye Yaxiu’s husbands’ families.

Amid festive music and a series of firecrackers, she was placed into the sedan chair. From outside came Lu Guanyi’s voice, along with teasing shouts.

Shortly after, when the gongs, drums, and suona music rose another notch in volume, the sedan chair was lifted and slowly moved toward the end of the alley.

The bulky furniture had already been placed in the new room, but the other dowry items were to parade through the streets with the bride before being sent to the Lu family.

With the veil covering her head, Ye Yaming couldn’t hear the voices of people along the road, occasionally catching only exclamations like “I couldn’t see clearly” or “How is it arranged like that?”

Ye Yaming could roughly guess what they were marveling at.

The properties, land, and houses in Ye Yaming’s dowry were truly substantial. Not to mention the tea mountains she had purchased in Huizhou and Minzhou, just the additional gifts from relatives included six or seven estates and shops.

After all the relatives had completed their gifts, Ye Chongming looked at Ye Yaming’s dowry and felt dissatisfied. It was well known that Ye Yaming had not only brought tribute tea to the Ye family but might soon become an imperial merchant. She was becoming the wife of the Xuanwu Marquis’s heir. Even before her fiancé was known, Ye Yaqing had secured a marriage alliance they wouldn’t have dared dream of before.

It could be said that through her efforts, she had raised the Ye family’s status by several levels. In future marriages, the Ye family would have the confidence to discuss alliances with nobility and officials. If a sixth or seventh-rank official from the prefecture wanted to marry into the Ye family now, they would no longer feel overwhelmingly honored.

Not to mention that Ye Yaming’s marriage was personally bestowed by the Emperor.

If her dowry wasn’t impressive enough, it wouldn’t just embarrass the Ye family but might also displease the Emperor.

So he avoided Ye Yaming and privately convened with his sons and daughters-in-law to discuss the matter.

The Ye family’s annual earnings these past two years were several times what they used to make in a year, not to mention the visibly increasing income from the tea mountains in Huizhou and Minzhou. Everyone knew that maintaining good relations with Ye Yaming could bring blessings to future generations. No one wanted to be the villain who offended Ye Yaming and earned her resentment.

Therefore, the family ultimately provided another fifty thousand taels of silver from the common fund to purchase several large farmlands in Tongxiang and other places for Ye Yaming.

One tile represented one room, and one lump of clay represented one mu of land. If a courtyard had twelve rooms, then that load of dowry would display twelve tiles. If an estate had three hundred mu of land, three hundred lumps of clay wouldn’t fit in one load of dowry. Besides, to make the dowry appear more substantial, typically one hundred mu would be placed in one load, so five hundred mu would be five loads, making it easier for the bride’s family, the groom’s family, and spectators to remember.

In Ye Yaming’s dowry, not to mention the estates in Tongxiang, just considering her style of buying entire mountains in Huizhou and Minzhou, one could imagine how many lumps of clay representing land there would be.

The clan members who helped Ye Yaming organize her dowry were bewildered and said to Ye Hongchang: “These properties wouldn’t fit even in five hundred loads. This isn’t just ten li of red trousseau, it’s twenty or thirty li!”

“Hongchang, I knew your family was wealthy, but I never imagined it to this extent. Has your family bought up all the land in Lin’an? Just the amount of property in Niece Ming’er’s dowry is so vast, not to mention what your family itself owns.”

This comment sounded quite envious.

Ye Hongchang had always known that jealousy was the root of misfortune, and Ye Chongming had always instructed them to maintain a low profile among clan members, not to flaunt wealth or appear superior.

He smiled and said: “Ming’er’s dowry mostly consists of mountain land in Huizhou and Minzhou, which isn’t valuable. The price of an entire mountain is equivalent to only about ten or twenty mu of average land here. But as for how to handle this dowry, let me ask Ming’er.”

After learning of this matter, Ye Yaming said: “Our status isn’t high, and displaying too much wealth won’t benefit us. But we can’t be too modest either, as that would invite contempt. Follow my instructions…”

Her family had added estates worth fifty thousand taels of silver to make her dowry more substantial. She couldn’t pass off less valuable out-of-town lands and tea mountains as equivalent, nor could she be overly modest, hiding what was rightfully a substantial dowry.

Besides, although those tea mountains weren’t highly valued now, it didn’t mean they wouldn’t be in the future. Those who dismissed and mocked her now would surely envy her later.

So following her suggestion, the dowry was arranged as it currently was:

Each estate was represented by one load of dowry, densely packed with small-scale tiles, marked with inscriptions like “Estate: 500 mu” or “Estate: 800 mu.” The tea mountains in Huizhou and Minzhou were similarly represented, with small lumps of clay densely arranged in one load of dowry, labeled “One Tea Mountain” or “Tea Mountain: 500 mu.”

Because of this, when spectators initially saw the loads representing properties, they weren’t particularly impressed, but upon reading the labels, they erupted in astonishment.

“At first I thought this dowry was similar to that of any noble family’s daughter, but I didn’t expect such grandeur—entire estates of hundreds of mu in a single load, entire tea mountains in a single load. Impressive!”

“Have you counted how many estates there are?”

“Yes, yes, I’ve counted,” a nearby spectator exclaimed excitedly, as if he had found gold himself. “Just the estates alone number seventeen, and they’re all large properties of several hundred mu each, surely including many tenant farmers. There are also more than ten tea mountains, ranging from one to several hundred or even a thousand mu each. Heavens, how wealthy they must be!”

“Which family is marrying off their daughter? Who is the groom’s family?”

“I asked the wedding escort, they said it’s the Ye family, the great tea merchants of Jiangnan, and she’s marrying into the Xuanwu Marquis Mansion as the heir’s wife.”

“No wonder—great tea merchants of Jiangnan, they must be extremely wealthy.”

“What use is wealth? Merchants don’t have high status. Marrying into the Xuanwu Marquis Mansion as the heir’s wife is like a phoenix soaring to a high branch.”

“Well, that depends on what kind of merchant. I know the Ye family from Jiangnan. Have you tried Longjing tea? It’s from their family.”

“Longjing? The tribute tea?”

“Yes.”