Tao Haisheng had let the words “lowly servant” flow too freely from his lips just now, and found himself in an awkward position with no easy way out. He could only stammer as he tried to backtrack: “I was discourteous—I took him for a servant… had I known this person was old General Yang’s close personal officer…”

Before Tao Haisheng could finish finding his way off the ledge, Chu Linlang had already turned to face Tao Huiru, her tone cool and sharp: “Reverend Wangchen, setting aside the fact that His Majesty long since ordered you to a temple for spiritual cultivation and that you are ill-suited to step back into the mortal world—even if you were not a person who had entered religious life, you should not be appearing at the Situ estate!”

Tao Huiru had originally defied the imperial command with the Crown Prince’s assistance, and then fled entirely. If she were truly to be judged by His Majesty, the crime of defying an imperial decree would be inescapable.

However, she was not particularly alarmed in her heart. She had already learned from Tao Haisheng that the old Emperor had suffered an increasingly severe stroke and was now with a crooked mouth and skewed eyes, unable to speak.

At a time like this, the Emperor was a candle flickering in the wind, barely hanging on—who would he be attending to the trifling matter of whether she was at a temple or not!

Now that the Crown Prince had begun to take hold of real authority, though her relationship with the Crown Prince and Crown Prince Consort was not amicable, she was still Tao Yashu’s own aunt!

As long as her brother backed her up, Tao Yashu could hardly move against her own aunt before she had even become Empress!

Even if she were dragged back to the temple today, she had already staked everything—she would not stop until Situ Sheng acknowledged Tao Zan’s brotherhood with his own lips.

Tao Zan was innocent! He had done nothing wrong at all. He rightfully deserved to inherit the Marquis title and carry on the Yang Family line!

Thinking this, taking advantage of Chu Linlang’s opening, Tao Huiru fell to her knees before the bride with a thud, her face brimming with tearful entreaty: “Linlang, all the wrongs and all the errors—every one of them is my fault. You and Situ Sheng’s child may cut me down or execute me as you see fit. Only do not, out of resentment toward me, transfer your anger to Tao Zan. He has always held deep admiration and respect for his elder brother, and has always been proud to be the grandson of my father-in-law. He asked us as his elders to bring him here today because he wanted to offer his elder brother a gift of congratulations—nothing more than that!”

Tao Huiru was well practiced at feigning frailty and vulnerability. She wept with such pitiful sorrow, her posture so soft and yielding it seemed boneless.

Properly speaking, she was genuinely Chu Linlang’s senior in generation—an elder kneeling before a younger person was something that could not be justified anywhere.

If Linlang had been an understanding and properly decorous woman, she should have immediately helped Tao Huiru to her feet, smoothed over the dispute, and invited her husband’s half-brother through the door for a cup of celebratory wine.

After all, these were grudges within the family. To let them explode into a scene on such an occasion would appear unbecoming and lacking the composure and magnanimity expected of the mistress of a household.

But Linlang’s expression was one of detached calm. She looked down from above with cool, indifferent eyes at the old Buddhist nun weeping so piteously, then glanced at the visibly embarrassed Tao Haisheng, and then took a quick look at Tao Zan—who from the moment all of this began had been unable to make sense of the situation, his mouth hanging half open, staring blankly at her.

She gave a slight smile. First, she ordered someone to help Tao Huiru up. But Tao Huiru declared that if Linlang did not personally forgive her with her own words, she would remain kneeling and refuse to rise.

This kind of tactic that forced people into forgiveness might actually prove somewhat effective with a woman of thinner skin who cared about her reputation.

Regrettably, with Linlang, this sort of shameless behavior was not to be tolerated even in the slightest.

She simply let Tao Huiru go on kneeling, and spoke with cool clarity: “Reverend Wangchen, you are quite without reason. You came here today without an invitation and insisted on forcing your way into the Situ estate to observe the rites, making things difficult for the hosts—and then you keep speaking of ‘elder brother’ and ‘younger brother’ as though it were the most natural thing. On what basis, exactly, do you make that claim? My husband was entrusted as an orphan by his grandfather on his deathbed, adopted into the Situ family line, and carried on the Situ family’s posterity—he is the legitimate son of the Situ household. Your son, on the other hand, in order to protect himself, followed his mother’s surname and was entered into the Tao family registry. I have never once heard of a person who has been adopted out being able to still address the original family as brothers. Even if the Tao family has no objection, Lord Situ is not a person who forsakes righteousness for personal gain. You want him to acknowledge a so-called younger brother—are you trying to put Lord Situ in a position of compromising his integrity?”

In any dynasty, the thing most strictly avoided in matters of adopted sons and heirs was an adopted son who had been raised to adulthood then clamoring to return to his birth family and reclaim his ancestral roots.

While Situ Sheng had won His Majesty’s official exoneration and rehabilitation of his grandfather’s name, he had declined to return to his ancestral roots and claim the old General Yang’s Marquis title, choosing instead to remain on the Situ family register in order to repay his adoptive mother’s grace in raising him.

Such conduct and breadth of spirit was something anyone had to secretly admire.

By comparison, Tao Huiru’s behavior of wanting her son to flip back and forth between families was truly contemptible!

Someone nearby could not hold back and murmured quietly: “They’re both adopted out—how do you even make the case for calling each other brothers? Could it be that now that Lord Situ is in a position of glory, they’re brazenly trying to claim kinship?”

Though Tao Huiru had taken the hidden sting in Chu Linlang’s words, she clenched her teeth and held her ground unmoved: “When Tao Zan changed his surname back then, it was entirely my own decision, made in order to preserve a last trace of the Yang Family bloodline. He has always admired and venerated his grandfather and has always been asking me to help him return to his ancestral roots and reclaim his heritage. The Yang Family line is dwindling. Now, the only people who share the same bloodline are these two brothers! Lord Situ, out of obligation to carry on the Situ family line, is unwilling to return to his ancestral roots—that is indeed admirable. But one cannot simply allow old General Yang’s line to have no one to carry on his name and keep the incense burning! I am asking Lord Situ to acknowledge Tao Zan and allow him to inherit the Yang Family line—I am not forcing him to be unfilial. I only hope he will recognize Tao Zan and allow him to continue the Yang Family bloodline in his stead!”

Having said this, Tao Huiru began kowtowing repeatedly on the ground, murmuring something about her being full of sins and transgressions and not having the right to offend Lord Situ and Madam Chu. It was as though Tao Zan’s inability to return to his ancestral roots was entirely the fault of this husband and wife holding a grudge and blocking the way.

As for Tao Zan himself, he had been completely unable to make sense of the situation from the very start.

His mother’s thinking was muddled—why would a woman who had lived peacefully within the inner household want to get entangled in the power struggle over the imperial throne with the former Crown Prince, until he could not even serve his leisurely temple post in peace and had to flee here and there hiding with her?

Now that they had finally made it back to his uncle’s household, his uncle and mother had dragged him along to attend Situ Sheng’s wedding.

But then they were stopped at the estate gate, resulting in this scene of shouting and uproar, making his face burn with embarrassment.

He had the urge to persuade his mother to go back, but his mother glared at him and told him not to cause trouble.

But it was not until Chu Linlang appeared before his eyes—dressed in that radiant bridal gown, her head crowned with jeweled ornaments and a phoenix coronet—that he suddenly realized with a jolt that this so-called elder brother of his had taken as his bride the very woman who had been wandering through his dreams in the dead of night!

In that moment, the young man tasted the bitter sting of heartache for the first time—a bitterness so sharp that even his eyelids began to ache and swell. His mind lingered in a daze on a single thought: she had married Situ Sheng, which meant she was now… his elder sister-in-law. Had he known it would come to this, he ought to have…

But what exactly he ought to have done, Tao Zan found himself with no clear answer, his thoughts all in a tangle. Because at the time, everyone around him had been saying that this Chu Linlang could not bear children, was of low birth, and was not fit to be taken into a proper household as a wife.

He had not liked hearing it, but had felt there was some reason to it. His admiration for Chu Linlang had always been pure and simple—yet he had never actually contemplated the idea of taking this woman as his wife.

Who would have thought that this woman whom others deemed unfit to marry would one day appear in a phoenix coronet and ceremonial bridal robes, as the new bride of a First-Rank official of the highest standing—a woman placed at an unattainable height?

Yet just as he had not yet shaken off the despondency of this heartbreak, his mother, without any regard for the situation, dropped to her knees before Chu Linlang and began kowtowing with such force that her forehead was soon broken and bleeding freely.

This… how was this any different from beggars showing up at the door to demand things?

Tao Zan was so mortified that his entire face burned scarlet. Under his mother’s complete disregard for all consequences, the young man’s dignity shattered entirely and scattered into a thousand fragments.

Without waiting for Chu Linlang to speak, he strode forward quickly to pull his mother up: “Mother, what on earth are you doing? When did I ever say I wanted to return to the Yang Family and reclaim my roots? Get up, please!”

Tao Huiru felt her son was being impossibly foolish.

She was not truly begging at all—she was seizing this once-in-a-thousand-years opportunity to strike the most lowly of postures. By conducting herself in such a humble and self-abasing manner, genuinely kneeling and acknowledging her errors—if that Situ couple were to make things difficult for her in the future, they would appear petty and small-minded, and she could go to her brother weeping for his protection.

She intended not only to kneel before the Situ couple, but before the Crown Prince couple as well. A person in a position of lowliness had far less to worry about than a person in a position of pride.

She would sacrifice every shred of her dignity if it meant kneeling her son into the future he deserved!

Chu Linlang had not anticipated that Tao Huiru would abandon all self-respect so completely and kneel there pleading for forgiveness.

But seeing her in this state, Linlang felt all the more grateful that it was she herself who had come out to deal with this shameless woman.

If Situ Sheng had come out, as a proud and upstanding man—no matter how he responded to what was nominally his stepmother’s prostration—he would have given people something to gossip about, damaging his official reputation.

Just then, some people, seeing Tao Haisheng’s visibly uncomfortable expression as the Crown Prince Consort’s father, began “helpfully” playing the role of peacemakers, coming forward to urge: “Enough, enough—in this city everyone runs into each other all the time. On a day of such great joy, there’s no need to make it look this ugly. Why not just invite them in for a cup of wine and be done with it?”

Tao Huiru’s manner had stirred some sympathy in people’s minds for how she had singlehandedly raised her son Tao Zan through such hardship. Many people did not know about her hidden and despicable conduct, and they stepped forward to help support her, hoping to smooth things over and stop the uproar first.

But Linlang had absolutely no desire for any false semblance of peace.

She would die before letting Tao Huiru step through the gate of the Situ estate today.

Thinking this, her tone turned cool and measured: “Reverend Wangchen, you had better put that notion to rest. You will not be drinking a cup of this celebratory wine today. If you insist on being so shameless and brazen as to demand that Lord Situ acknowledge Yang Family kin, there is a birth mother, Wen Shi, presiding in the great hall above. He has his own birth mother—he has no need of you, a stepmother who has severed all ties with the Yang Family, to come play the elder here.”

Hearing these words, Tao Huiru’s pupils contracted sharply. She had truly not known that Situ Sheng had actually found and brought back Wen Shi!

That Wen Shi… was actually still alive in this world!

Seeing that Tao Huiru had completely abandoned all shame, Chu Linlang decided she might as well join in and let a few family scandals air themselves out.

Thinking this, she turned to address the gathered guests who had been trying to smooth things over, raising her voice: “I believe many of the elder guests here should be aware of what happened in those years. My mother-in-law Wen Shi was driven out of the Yang household through a conspiracy plotted by this so-called close friend of hers, Tao Huiru, together with several of the Yang Family’s uncles and elder sisters-in-law. At the time, old General Yang was away. Wen Shi had a gentle temperament, having married far from home with no relatives to rely on, and with a child still in swaddling clothes—yet she was bullied and mistreated with no one to appeal to, ending up with mother and son separated, isolated and without support. These old matters—anyone in the capital who has been around for a while knows every detail of them. Tao Huiru, what kind of face do you have, to dare come before my husband and play the role of his elder? Do you think after all these years, no one still knows about the disgraceful affair of how you seduced your close friend’s husband—how you were caught in flagrante on the bed?”

The moment these words were spoken, a commotion broke out among the crowd. In an instant, no one came forward to support Tao Huiru—because if Chu Linlang could say these things, she was certainly not making baseless accusations out of spite.

Family scandals of this nature—if one had not been pushed to the very wall with nowhere left to turn, who would ever speak of them in public?

If they were to continue kindly pressing Linlang to accept this so-called stepmother who had persecuted her own mother-in-law, they would truly be treating the Situ couple as less than human, forcing them to swallow something utterly foul…

Moreover, these matters concerning Tao Huiru had quietly circulated among the capital households in those years—only, out of deference to the Tao Family’s power and influence, no one had ever brought the scandal out into the open.

Now that Chu Linlang had spoken of it, it confirmed the rumors that had once spread in shadows, and made everyone suddenly recall a long-forgotten scandal.

Tao Haisheng had also not anticipated that such a young woman would open her mouth and speak directly of these old matters. Where had she heard all of this from? Had Situ Sheng told her?

Yet this woman was altogether too lacking in proper restraint—why was she casually bringing up all of these matters concerning her elders? Was she not afraid that Situ Sheng would suffer a loss of face along with her?

He immediately burst out furiously: “You… you woman, spouting slander! Wen Shi contracted a serious illness and was expelled from the Yang household by the Yang Family—what does it have to do with my sister Hui Ru!”

Chu Linlang looked at him and said coldly: “Lord Tao, your determination as an elder brother to protect your sister is indeed admirable. However, these old matters are not entirely without witnesses. I happen to have some at hand. If you are unconvinced, we can go to the yamen tomorrow and file a proper case to examine what happened in those years. You knew full well what she did to Situ Sheng, yet you indulged her in running to my estate gate on this day of great joy to cause us disgust, thinking we would swallow it all to preserve so-called face and just let it pass—that is not going to happen. If she has no shame and insists on kneeling, I ask that she find somewhere else to do it. I find her blood filthy—it will contaminate the stepping stones of my household!”

Saying this, she gave not the slightest consideration to the Crown Prince Consort’s father’s dignity, and actually summoned the household servants to bring clean water to splash on the ground, so as to clear away the inauspicious miasma and spare the honored guests of the estate from its foul influence.

Tao Huiru’s one and only miscalculation today was that this Chu Linlang, on this day of all days, rather than going to sit in the bridal chamber, had gathered up her bridal garments and come to confront her.

She had thoroughly experienced firsthand how fierce and difficult to deal with this Chu Linlang was. This woman was of humble origins, without any of the restraint and reserve of a proper lady of a great household, and was completely uninhibited.

Chu Linlang had actually stood in front of all these people and spoken of the affair with Yang Yi from those years. If she continued to confront this woman, there was nothing shameful she wouldn’t feed to her!

She had just started to rise when the household servants had already come tipping bucket after bucket of water over the area—splashing not only all over Tao Huiru, but also soaking the garments of Tao Haisheng and Tao Zan standing beside her.

When had Tao Haisheng ever suffered such indignity? He was on the verge of roaring at Chu Linlang when he noticed someone standing behind her.

He looked with a vague sense of familiarity, then stared carefully—and it was unmistakably the former daughter-in-law of the Yang household: Wen Shi.

It turned out that after the wedding rites concluded earlier, Wen Shi had been meant to return to her room. But for some reason she had grown agitated and restless, and had been wandering back and forth through the estate gardens.

The maidservants attending her had all received instructions from Lord Situ: so long as there was no danger, no one was to restrict Wen Shi from moving about freely within the estate.

And so it happened that the commotion at the estate gate drew Wen Shi over as well, and the scene at the entrance unfolded directly before her eyes.

When Tao Huiru’s somewhat aged face fell into Wen Shi’s view, it was like a dagger plunging straight into her heart.

It pierced through the fog that had obscured so many forgotten memories, drawing them all back one by one.

She stared blankly. That Tao Huiru—who had always been clever and smooth in how she handled things before her—was now kneeling at the feet of a woman dressed in bridal garments, weeping and pleading for something.

Yet the bride remained unmoved, looking down from above with cool detachment, scolding that brother and sister until their faces were thoroughly wretched and they could no longer hold their own.

Wen Shi momentarily could not separate dream from reality.

Was this woman in bridal garments not exactly the kind of person she had yearned to become? Someone who could face Tao Huiru—that deeply scheming, venomous woman—with calm composure and steadiness, without being like herself: hysterical, driven to despair, picking up a blade to kill the man she had once loved…

When Wen Shi had gone mad in those years, beyond the depression of being driven out and ostracized by the Yang Family after giving birth, a greater part of it had been her own self-loathing. She despised herself for acting so impulsively—for being unable to control her reason in those circumstances and hurting Yang Yi.

When Yang Yi’s chest had been soaked with blood, Wen Shi had truly believed she had killed a man. The shock had been too great, and her behavior had descended into madness.

This was also the reason why, after Yang Yi had later brought her to his side, and she had deliberately suppressed the memories of the past, her condition had improved—she had seen with her own eyes that Yang Yi was still alive, and having forgotten those memories of unendurable pain, she was able to hide quietly in the corner of peaceful, undisturbed days, pretending none of the suffering had ever existed.

Yet even in her deliberate forgetting, in one corner of her memory, there was always a small figure that circled around her.

That small child called her mother, washed clothes and made meals for her, and would mold many beautiful clay figures for her—talking about how, when he saw other children with their mothers, he felt such envy in his heart.

But now he had found her, and would always be with her. That small body, when it held her, was like a pair of warm and powerful wings wrapped around her, giving her a moment’s peace.

So she would also, when this child fell asleep, quietly plant a kiss on his cheek—just as, long, long ago, she had once kissed a baby in swaddling clothes in exactly this way…

Only later, this child was no longer to be seen. She seemed to glimpse him in her dreams, dimly recalling that she appeared to have a son.

But recently, a tall young man had started appearing before her again. He would carefully trim her fingernails, wash her face, and sit at her side making clay figures for her.

Whenever she saw this young man, she always found herself involuntarily thinking of that child who had once kept her company…

He too called her “mother”—saying he had searched for her for a long time, and that he would always be at her side, mother and son never to be separated again.

And so, having recognized Tao Huiru, with all those old memories rushing in upon her one after another, Wen Shi for the first time was no longer entangled in her love and hatred and life-and-death emotions regarding Yang Yi. Instead, she recalled—she had indeed given birth to a son. His eyes were very large, shining with boundless vitality. His grandfather had given him the name Jiexing. But Wen Shi had not liked that name at all—she had given him a childhood name herself: “Sheng’er,” meaning vigorous life force, and a bright, promising future.

She wanted her child not to be as weak as she was—to become a man standing upright between heaven and earth…

But where was her child now? Why couldn’t she see him?

Thinking this, she stumbled toward Tao Huiru, and in her anguish cried out to her: “Tao Huiru, if you want to take my husband from me, then take him. I only beg you—do not pretend to care for and look after me in front of people, and do not deliberately come near me! I cannot compete with you. Whatever you want, take it all. But you must give me back my son. He is still small… he cannot be without his mother. I will give up everything else—I want my son!”

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