A Willing Mistake, My Lady – Chapter 49
by Little PandaShocking Secrets
An Uncharacteristically Passionate Chenyu
Hearing this, the Chief studied him seriously, the smile at the corners of her lips widening.
General Shen felt a prickle of unease. To ensure her troops could safely pass through Tianxian Peak, she was really pushing her limits. She figured she would just trick the woman first and then escape; after all, they couldn’t just sit here and wait to die.
“General Shen, your looks are far too magnificent,” the Chief said, looking genuinely apologetic. “I prefer a gentler, more scholarly appearance. Besides, I’m just a crude brute who plays with swords and staves. I really can’t summon any interest in someone who only knows how to kill and fight. My apologies.” She seemed truly sorry, likely aware of how bizarre it was to reject a general in the prime of his youth.
“Haha… Haha… Your vision is indeed excellent, Chief.” Since she had volunteered herself but the other party still wouldn’t budge, she had no choice but to laugh awkwardly.
The group sat back down in resignation. Ye Huaiqing asked about the provisions, glanced at the map in his hands, and after a moment of silence, finally spoke up. “How about I stay for a few days while you go ahead? Once you’ve cleared Tianxian Peak, you can come back and get me.”
“Are you really going to stay here and make babies with her?” General Shen fretted. “That Xiang Hongyu is no different from any other bandit. I’m afraid you won’t survive her.”
“Look at what you’re saying. I’m a grown man; if I’m unwilling, can she really force me?” Ye Huaiqing cast aside his embarrassment. The situation was tense, and crossing this treacherous peak was of the utmost urgency.
“Fine, stay then. Since she has taken a fancy to you, you probably won’t be in any mortal danger for now.” She passed on what little experience she had, knowing that in this critical moment, they had no choice but to sacrifice him. “But if my biaoxiong loses his innocence, this didi won’t be able to make it up to the family. You must take good care of yourself. Keep your tongue sweet—if you can coax and deceive her, absolutely do not do anything for real. Do you understand?”
Hearing this, Ye Huaiqing’s expression remained strained.
“Hurry and negotiate with the Chief of Hongying Stockade,” Ye Huaiqing said, waving his hand. “I’m afraid I’ll regret this in a moment.”
“Alright… I will come back for you,” General Shen said, looking solemnly at her biaoxiong.
A day later, with the assistance of Hongying Stockade, General Shen and Vice-General Zhao Chenlan led their five thousand troops safely across Tianxian Peak, arriving directly on the plains on the other side of the mountain. They even hauled away ten carts of grain, which the stockade claimed was Ye Huaiqing’s betrothal gift1.
Her high-born, noble biaoxiong was worth only ten carts of grain. Her elegant, refined biaoxiong had been detained just like that, and as for whether he could guard his chastity like jade, she had no way of knowing.
When Shen Hetang woke, she found Jiang Chenyu lying beside her. The two of them had fallen asleep in the study just like that. She adjusted her posture and pulled Jiang Chenyu closer into her embrace. Every time she dreamed of those past events, she was left with a profound sense of emptiness, a lingering feeling of loss as if she had misplaced something precious.
Outside, the sky was beginning to pale with the first faint promise of sunrise.
Nanny Zhao, who had been bribed from Wu Manor, had managed to reconstruct Madam Lin’s diet sheet from her time there. Although some details were missing, it still provided enough clues. After showing the diet sheet to Dr. Sun, the physician explicitly confirmed that there was indeed something wrong with it.
At this point, Jiang Chenyu was almost entirely certain that Wu Daoyuan was guilty. Her mother’s death had undoubtedly been orchestrated by him.
But while she could understand him targeting her own mother—perhaps for her wealth—why would he target Li Qingmei’s mother? If he despised her, he could have simply chosen not to marry her in the first place. Why go through the trouble of marrying her only to torment her? Wu Daoyuan did not seem like someone who had completely lost his mind, making this truly bizarre.
In any case, she had to seize what remained in his hands first. Given his indecent designs on her, if her maternal grandfather knew that Wu Daoyuan had not only inherited the Jiang family’s legacy but also harbored such vile intentions toward his granddaughter, the old man would have clawed his way out of his grave in sheer rage. If she allowed Wu Daoyuan to continue squandering her grandfather’s hard-earned estate, she would be utterly unfilial.
Currently, Wu Daoyuan only had seven shops left. The three cloth shops were unprofitable and had suffered significant losses recently due to poor inventory sourcing. The two rice shops were substantial and had always generated enough income to cover the manor’s daily expenses. There was also a general store that, as an established brand, brought in a handsome profit each year. It had only remained successful because of her grandfather’s lifetime of hard work; since it was her grandfather’s legacy, she did not intend to touch it.
The last was a jewelry shop, but because Wu Daoyuan constantly bought inventory at high prices and sold it cheap, the business merely broke even and was essentially negligible.
Therefore, she would start with the rice shops. Ruining them would cut off Wu Manor’s primary source of income, and they were the easiest targets to strike.
Wu Daoyuan had indeed been plagued by terrible luck lately. His injuries had barely healed when disaster struck again. Watching Nanny Wu pace back and forth in a frantic circle, he snapped impatiently, “Qin-jie, can you stop being so clumsy and frantic? You’re already at this age, yet you still haven’t broken that habit?”
“Master, this is bad!” Nanny Wu burst into Wu Daoyuan’s bedroom, her face pale with panic. “Someone from the rice shop just ran over. They said a customer fell unconscious from poisoning after eating Wu’s Eight-Treasure Rice! They’re on their way to report it to the authorities. You must go and take a look quickly!”
“How could such a thing happen? It must be a competitor who can’t bear to see our business thrive and set a trap to frame us.” Wu Daoyuan had not completely lost his merchant’s instincts.
“But the troublemakers brought people to search the shop!” Nanny Wu cried. “They even found a sack of moldy rice that had been washed to look clean. They’re claiming they have both human and physical evidence, and they’re going to sue you at the yamen!”
“What? They even found evidence?” Wu Daoyuan bolted upright in bed. He hadn’t even arrived on the scene, yet they had already gathered the evidence. This was going to be troublesome.
He threw on his clothes and rushed to the rice shop. A dense crowd of onlookers had already gathered outside the entrance.
“It is only right and proper that a murderer pays with his life, just as a debtor pays his debts! Call your owner out here to face the authorities with us! I will make sure he rots in prison!” a young man dressed in fine satin shouted relentlessly.
Judging by his attire, he did not look like someone who was starved enough to resort to extortion. Yet he was clamoring to go to the authorities, leaving Wu Daoyuan uncertain whether the man was genuinely aggrieved or merely looking for trouble.
“Little brother, we can discuss this. I am the owner of this rice shop. Let us go inside to speak!” Wu Daoyuan stepped forward and clasped his hands in a polite bow.
“What is there to discuss with you? Come with me to the yamen!” The young man’s aggressive demeanor left absolutely no room for negotiation.
More and more onlookers gathered outside, and some even began chanting that this was a dishonest shop. Cold sweat broke out on Wu Daoyuan’s forehead as the situation spiraled completely out of his control.
Before long, the yamen bailiffs actually arrived. After questioning both sides, they took them both away. The unconscious victim was examined by a physician, who confirmed that the vomiting and coma were indeed caused by consuming moldy rice.
This time, Wu Daoyuan was in serious trouble. To make matters worse, one of his shop assistants testified that Wu Daoyuan had explicitly forbidden them from wasting the spoiled rice. With both human and physical evidence stacked against him, there was no way to deny the charges. Caught entirely off guard, Wu Daoyuan was thrown straight into jail.
Of course, an incident of this level was not enough to keep him behind bars forever. Having run a business for many years, he possessed some connections. Since the poisoned victim had not died, it was ultimately just a matter of spending a significant amount of silver. But by the time he was released from prison and went looking for the shop assistant to settle the score, the witness had already vanished without a trace.
Yet that was not his greatest concern. Far worse was the state of his rice shop. The entrance was now deserted enough to catch sparrows2. It looked so bleak and desolate that it might as well have been shut down permanently. After the toxic rice scandal, who would dare risk their life to buy grain from the Wu shop?
Although Jiang Ning had mobilized her connections within the yamen to orchestrate this, the scheme was kept entirely from Shen Hetang. Seeing Wu Daoyuan meet with disaster, Shen Hetang spent her days eagerly watching the drama3 from the sidelines, even recounting it to Jiang Chenyu as a fascinating piece of gossip upon her return.
Jiang Chenyu listened with a look of sheer astonishment, her bright eyes blinking in perfect coordination.
In the end, Wu Daoyuan’s shops could not hold out for long and had to be sold. Because of the heavy losses, Wu Manor’s finances were completely drained. Due to the scandal, the rice shop had been sold off at a dirt-cheap price, leaving the family’s assets severely crippled.
With new blows compounding his unhealed wounds, Wu Daoyuan collapsed entirely.
According to the informants Jiang Chenyu had stationed, however, Wu Manor had actually grown increasingly lively. Nanny Wu spent her days painting her brows and putting on makeup, dressing up like an old hag4. She would often spend half the day in Wu Daoyuan’s room. The servants even suspected that Wu Daoyuan had lost his mind, wondering if he was actually having an affair with a maidservant in her forties or fifties.
But Jiang Chenyu felt something was off. After receiving such consecutive devastating blows, would Wu Daoyuan really have the heart for such pursuits? Moreover, Nanny Wu was supposedly a relative from his clan. If they wanted to be together, why would they wait until she was in her forties or fifties? This matter was highly suspicious.
Before she could make sense of it, Nanny Zhao returned with another report. Wu Daoyuan was indeed bedridden and had been unable to get up for several days, yet Nanny Wu had suddenly become the absolute authority of Wu Manor. Her word was law, and Wu Daoyuan trusted her completely, tacitly consenting to every arrangement she made.
Why would an aging servant’s sudden old-age vanity5 drive Wu Daoyuan into such a mad frenzy? Jiang Chenyu simply could not grasp the crucial link.
On a sudden whim, she dispatched her people to Wu Daoyuan’s ancestral hometown to investigate his relationship with Nanny Wu.
The news they brought back caused Jiang Chenyu to drop her teacup, shattering it on the floor. For someone who was always so calm and collected, her mouth hung open wide enough to swallow an egg.
There was no distant cousin named Wu Guiqin at all. The only woman matching her age, appearance, and temperament was a woman named Wu Liu-shi. She was Wu Daoyuan’s child bride6, seven years his senior. Since both of them had lost their parents, Wu Liu-shi had worked tirelessly to support Wu Daoyuan’s studies. Later, filled with guilt because she had failed to bear any children, the two of them had formally divorced on paper.
But Jiang Chenyu knew that the divorce was merely a cover. At that time, her maternal grandfather had feared her mother would be crushed by her previous failed marriage and encouraged her to remarry. Of course, to ensure his daughter would not be mistreated, he had decreed that they would only accept a matrilocal husband.
Back then, Wu Daoyuan had claimed he had no living family members left, making him the perfect candidate. Yet within his second year of marriage, he had brought Nanny Wu into the household, claiming she was a distant cousin from a branch of his clan who was widowed, childless, and had no one to rely on. He had asked to arrange a servant’s job for her in the Jiang household, a simple request that Jiang Chenyu’s mother had readily granted.
Thus, Nanny Wu had settled into Jiang Manor, taking on the role of a managing maidservant.
After all, who would ever suspect that a dark-skinned, heavily wrinkled woman could have any intimate connection with a handsome, young Xiucai scholar?
Wu Daoyuan’s hometown was incredibly far from Qingyuan Town, and sending someone there and back had taken nearly two months. Fortunately, she had previously ordered Nanny Zhao to secretly retrieve Wu Daoyuan’s household register. By using his registered birthplace, her people had located his ancestral home and unearthed this shocking secret!
When Jiang Chenyu finished hearing the report, a deep chill seeped into her bones. It felt as though a sharp blade had been hanging directly over her head all along!
That night, she draped herself over Shen Hetang, taking the other woman’s crimson lips into her own to kiss her again and again. She even arched her body slightly, pressing her lips deeper into her partner’s mouth.
Ah Tang was overjoyed by this rare display of bold passion. Though she knew that abnormal occurrences boded mischief7, she decided to worry about that later and simply lose herself in the arms of the beauty before her.
Jiang Chenyu’s delicate brows knit tightly, her face flushed red as she rested her chin against the top of Shen Hetang’s head, her fingers gently tugging at her hair. Like a tender blossom battered by a heavy downpour, she swayed, trembling as waves of warmth washed over her body from every point of contact, gradually melting the coldness in her heart…
Footnotes
- Pìnlǐ (聘礼) refers to the traditional betrothal gifts or bride price presented by the groom's family to the bride's family to formalize a marriage contract.
- Mén kě luó què (门可罗雀) literally means 'one could stretch a net to catch sparrows at the door,' a classical idiom for a place that is deserted or completely lacking visitors.
- Chī guā (吃瓜) literally means 'eating melon,' a popular Chinese internet slang term for being an onlooker to drama or gossip.
- Lǎo yāojing (老妖精) is a highly derogatory term literally meaning 'old vixen' or 'old hag,' used to insult an older woman who dresses provocatively or behaves deceitfully.
- Lǎo lái qiào (老来俏) refers to 'old-age vanity,' a term used to describe an elderly or middle-aged person who suddenly starts dressing in a stylish, youthful, or flashy manner.
- Tóngyǎngxí (童养媳), or child bride, was a traditional practice where a family adopted a young girl to raise as a future wife for their son.
- Shì chū fǎncháng bì yǒu yāo (事出反常必有妖) is a traditional Chinese proverb meaning 'when things are highly unusual, there must be mischief or hidden motives afoot.'
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