The one who had just walked in was none other than Su Luoyun — the eldest daughter who had been sent back to the old estate.
Su Hongmeng’s fingers had nearly reached the point of touching her face. She remained perfectly composed, neither turning her gaze nor flinching, and said with a faint smile: “Father is teasing me. The experienced physician you had examine me at the time confirmed it — the meridians were blocked from the blow to my head, and I would most likely never see again for the rest of my life.”
“Elder Sister, the way you walked in just now — you moved as though the ground were perfectly flat! You don’t look like a blind person at all…” The youngest, Su Jincheng, could not help but blurt out.
His words were barely out before Su Guiyan gave him a fierce shove: “Don’t you dare call my sister blind!”
But before he could finish shouting, Su Luoyun had already turned and skirted around a chair, making her way to Su Guiyan’s side. She smiled and reached out to feel his head: “Third Brother is quite right — if I cannot see, what am I if not blind? You’ve grown so tall already — why are you still carrying on like a child and shouting at Third Brother? Come, let Elder Sister feel whether you’ve put on any weight.”
To acknowledge so lightly and serenely the fact of her own blindness — this bore no resemblance whatsoever to the Su family’s memory of the ill-tempered First Young Miss who had turned difficult after losing her sight.
The passage of these two years seemed to have tempered this unfortunate young woman into someone far more seasoned and composed.
At this point, Ding Shi began to rebuke Jincheng in measured tones, telling him not to show disrespect toward his elder sister.
Su Luoyun finished patting her brother’s slight cheeks with mild dissatisfaction, then turned and stood beside Su Hongmeng, her gaze directed at the empty air ahead. She asked respectfully: “Has Father found the journey tiring? I happen to have brought some bitter tea from the mountain — paired with wolfberries and honey dates, it has quite a bracing, refreshing flavor.”
While the tea was being steeped, the whole family gathered and sat together. Yet as they watched Su Luoyun personally pour the water and prepare the tea, her movements were flowing and unhesitating — not a trace of uncertainty to be seen.
Su Hongmeng said: “Your eyes are still unwell, yet I see you… moving quite swiftly about!” If Su Luoyun was truly still blind, why had she walked and acted with such ease just now? It was impossible not to find this puzzling.
Luoyun smiled faintly: “I have lived in this old estate for two years and am naturally familiar with it — moving about daily presents no difficulty. It is only in unfamiliar surroundings that I must feel my way along. As for brewing tea — that is even simpler. The tea tray has a pattern on it, and the maidservant always places the teacups in the same fixed positions, which makes it easy for me to reach them.”
Su Hongmeng listened and could not help but nod with a measure of respect. Whatever else might be said, his eldest daughter appeared to have come to terms with the reality of her condition and grown considerably more sensible — which was at least some comfort to him as her father.
Looking at this daughter now, Su Hongmeng’s inner sigh was heavier still — had Luoyun not lost her sight, with such outstanding looks, even a prince’s household would have been within reach!
And so the father-daughter reunion he had braced himself for — anticipating swords drawn and crossbows cocked — turned out instead to be warm as a spring breeze, suffused with an air of harmony and familial affection.
Su Luoyun was the same not only with her father; in her manner toward her stepmother and younger siblings alike, she maintained the bearing of an eldest sister in full — not the slightest trace of the difficult temperament she had shown when they parted two years ago.
Su Hongmeng had come prepared for a quarrel with his daughter, yet found that in these two years of self-cultivation, she had grown even more steady and courteous than she had been before losing her sight. He could not help but stroke his beard with satisfaction, feeling that his official prospects were running smoothly and that even domestic affairs had taken a turn for the better.
Ding Pei also kept a smile on her face, but inwardly she was deeply astonished. It could be explained, perhaps, that Su Luoyun had memorized the positions of the furnishings from living so long in the old estate.
But just now, because of the laying of the thick felt mat, the pebble markers had been rendered completely useless, and all the furniture had been shifted out of place — and on top of that, there had been a basin of water right beside the door, which anyone not paying close attention might easily have kicked over. Was Su Luoyun truly blind? Why had she moved through the room as though on flat ground, so composed and unhurried?
In fact, she was not the only one with this doubt — even Luoyun’s own younger brother, Guiyan, could not make sense of it.
This was especially so after the meal, when the family strolled through the courtyard of the old estate. With the guidance of the pebbles underfoot, Su Luoyun’s step was even more effortless and light. Passing by the fish pond and the flower beds, she even smiled and extended a hand to point things out, telling her father about the various small changes that had been made here and there around the estate.
Had one not already known otherwise, who would have taken this woman who spoke with such easy confidence for a person without sight?
Once the family members each returned to their rooms to rest, Guiyan finally had a moment alone with his elder sister. He immediately asked with barely contained urgency whether Luoyun’s eyes had improved at all.
Luoyun gave a faint, rueful smile: “Must a blind person stumble and grope their way before others to be considered authentic? The furnishings in the front hall had indeed been rearranged — but Nanny Tian had gone ahead with the maidservant to observe the changes in the hall, then came back and described everything to me. Did you not notice that the maidservant behind me, Xiangcao, would occasionally let out a small cough? Whenever there was an obstacle in my path, she used that to warn me. In this way, she becomes something of a second pair of eyes for me.”
Hearing his elder sister’s explanation, Su Guiyan was filled with disappointment. He looked at her, a mixture of emotions churning within him.
But Su Luoyun spoke with quiet calm: “When Mother first gave me my name, she must have foreseen something of what lay ahead for me. She named me Luoyun — Cloud Descending. The sensation of falling from the heights of the sky is certainly not a pleasant one — yet to fall into the dust is not without its own kind of fortune. Though I have lost my sight, in these two quiet years in the countryside, I have come to understand many things…”
Su Guiyan knitted his brows and asked: “What has Elder Sister come to understand? Is it related to… Su Caijian?”
The accident that had befallen his elder sister had occurred right there in Su Caijian’s courtyard. When the Lu family had come to discuss the marriage arrangement — ten years prior, the two families’ patriarchs had simply agreed to a match, without specifying which daughter of the Su family was to be wed.
Young Master Lu had his heart set on Elder Sister, but Lu’s mother, on account of her close personal friendship with Ding Shi, favored the younger sister, Su Caijian.
A mother cannot always prevail over her son, and in the end, Elder Sister was chosen. Su Caijian, who harbored deep admiration for Lu Shi, came weeping and making a scene with Elder Sister upon learning of it — and then the accident occurred.
Since it had happened in the Second Young Miss’s courtyard, no one outside the Second Young Miss’s own household had witnessed what took place.
Later, everyone heard it from the Second Young Miss’s maidservant Xique — that the First Young Miss had lost her footing herself, struck her head against a stone stump along the path, bled profusely, and lay unconscious for two days. When she woke, her eyes could no longer see.
Although Su Luoyun, upon waking, had insisted that it was Su Caijian who had pushed her, Su Caijian cried prettily with tears streaming down her face and said nothing to refute the claim — very much in the manner of Ding Shi’s fragile, delicate style.
Their father had always been partial to Ding Shi’s children, and with all the witnesses present saying the same thing — that Su Luoyun had simply remembered incorrectly after the fall left her senseless — Su Hongmeng was quite willing to smooth things over. He punished Su Caijian with a single day of kneeling before the Buddha shrine, then forbade anyone from raising the matter again.
After all, both were his daughters. One had gone blind — an irreversible fact. Surely he could not let the other bear the name of having harmed her sister and have her reputation ruined?
Su Caijian, in her everyday life, was a child who would not even dare to step on an insect. How could she have deliberately sought to harm her elder sister? It was an accident. Since it had happened, there was nothing anyone could do.
Lu Shi, however, refused to accept a substituted bride and made such a prolonged fuss that a year ago, the Lu family’s mother had devised a compromise: he would first wed the younger sister, Su Caijian, and after some time had passed, Su Luoyun would be brought into the household as well. In this way, Su Luoyun — an unmarriageable, disabled young woman — would at least be given a place to belong.
In short, after considerable twists and turns, the Lu family and Su family became betrothed.
Yet Su Luoyun, living at the old estate, refused to comply with her elders’ arrangements. She burned to ash the letters she had previously received from Young Master Lu, gathered the ashes into a wooden box, and had it sent back to Lu Shi through a messenger.
She made her meaning plain: she and Young Master Lu were henceforth entirely unconnected. If they met in the future, she supposed she would address him simply as “brother-in-law.” Should he raise the matter of the two sisters marrying into the same household again with the Su family, she would cut off her own hair and enter a convent to take vows.
After that, the matter was never raised again. Only the Second Young Miss, Caijian, was busy and elated, preparing her trousseau and bedding, eagerly awaiting her marriage into the Lu household.
Whatever others might say, Su Guiyan was convinced it was his half-sister who had harmed his elder sister. Hearing Luoyun say she had “come to understand things,” his mind immediately went to that accident.
But Su Luoyun remained unmoved: “Do not speak of that matter again. Everyone says I tripped and fell on my own. If I keep pressing it, it will look as though I am framing my own sister… By the way — have you been doing as I told you these past two years?”
Guiyan nodded at once: “Elder Sister told me to hide my abilities, so whenever the tutor checked our work, I always left a few mistakes and errors. When reciting poems and lessons by memory, I would also be two days slower than Jinguan and Jincheng… The tutor thinks I’m too fond of play and slack in my efforts. Father dislikes it and scolds me often. Sometimes I truly did not want to keep it up — but thinking of your instructions at the time, I held myself back.”
Hearing this, Luoyun reached out and touched her brother’s cheek with fond sympathy: “You are stronger than I am. When I was your age, if only I had been able to hold my composure like that. Remember — do not compete with those two brothers in the future. I have little capability yet, and cannot fully protect you. If you appear less clever, you will have an easier time of it in the household…”
Su Guiyan could actually commit lessons to memory far faster than the Jincheng brothers — sometimes watching those two younger brothers deliberately show off their cleverness was rather amusing to him.
Yet he still could not understand his elder sister’s reasoning behind this arrangement, and the doubt lingered in his heart: “Elder Sister — do you mean that our stepmother would not want me to surpass her two sons?”
Su Luoyun felt for her brother’s cheek and said gently: “The Su family is in a period of rising fortune. The incense shop business alone brings in a steady flow of silver like water. Whoever stands to inherit that shop one day will certainly be a matter that stirs people’s hearts. When I was driven back to the old estate by Father, you as the eldest son had no close kin to support you. If you appear too bright, I fear your fortune may be too thin to bear it.”
What outsiders might not have known was that although Su Caijian was said to be one year younger than Su Guiyan, she had in fact been born a full year before him, and was actually already seventeen this year.
Ding Shi had met Su Hongmeng during his merchant travels in Chengdu Prefecture, and had conceived Caijian while Hu Shi was still alive.
Not wanting Ding Shi’s illegitimate daughter to bear the stigma of a concubine’s child, Su Hongmeng had kept her existence hidden and left her off the family register. It was only a full year after her mother’s death that Su Caijian was entered into the genealogy records — under the proper designation of a child born to a second principal wife, finally making her a fully legitimate daughter of the Su household in name and standing.
In the past, Luoyun had simply thought this younger sister grew quickly and spoke more nimbly than children of the same age, and had not thought further on it. It was not until she was twelve that she came to learn of the hidden circumstances behind it all.
And it was then that she finally understood her mother’s silent grief in the final days before her death. This stepmother who greeted the world every day with a gentle, yielding smile was by no means as simple as she appeared on the surface.
It was also from that time that she began to clash head-on with her stepmother, and increasingly earned Ding Shi’s animosity in return.
These matters, she had no wish to speak of in depth with her brother. He was still young — if he were to get into conflict with Ding Shi as she once had, the one who would suffer for it would be him, a young boy not yet capable of standing on his own.