The north wind wailed and howled, and the white snow swirled like funerary paper.
Before the vermillion gates of the Kangle Marquis Mansion knelt a figure covered in snow; she had remained there, motionless, for three days.
Carriage wheels ground through the thick, white drifts, leaving deep ruts behind.
A carriage came to a halt on the left side of the mansion’s gates. Thick curtains were pulled back, and two handsome young men, strikingly similar in appearance, stepped down one after the other. The elder of the two then stood by the carriage to assist a middle-aged man, dressed in official robes and a cyan cloak, as he descended.
The three of them walked toward the snow-covered figure at the gates, the older man in front and the two younger men following behind.
When they were still four meters away from the figure, it suddenly moved. The three men recoiled several steps in shock, and the youngest nearly tumbled to the ground.
The shink-shink of a blade being sharpened echoed against the sobbing north wind, sounding even more piercing and desolate. It was a sound that chilled one to the bone.
Dou Shichang watched the old woman sharpening her knife, his brow furrowed in deep disgust.
Had this madwoman not used her brute strength to injure dozens of the Marquis’s guards, inciting the Marquis’s fury, Dou Shichang would have been happy to never see this murderous harridan again for the rest of his life.
“Yingliang, Yingcai, kneel. Invite your mother home.”
Upon hearing this, Dou Yingliang and Dou Yingcai, who stood beside Dou Shichang, knelt next to the snow-covered figure. They kowtowed and pleaded in unison, “Mother, stop this madness. Let’s go home.”
Dou Yingliang looked at his mother, who was focused only on sharpening her knife, and urged, “Mother, Ji Yingjun and Ji Yingming’s lives are already ruined, but our futures are still ahead of us. You must think of me and Yingcai.”
“If you bring that wanton Ji Yingjun and that catamite Ji Yingming back home, what will become of the Dou family’s reputation? How could Yingcai and I ever show our faces in the capital again?”
Dou Yingcai opened his mouth to join the persuasion, but hearing the harsh rasp of the sharpening stone, he ultimately remained silent.
Dou Yingliang continued his earnest exhortations: “Mother, you are an educated woman. You should know the Three Obediences: a woman obeys her father before marriage, her husband after marriage, and her son after her husband’s death. After Father became an official, he didn’t look down on you for being a butcher’s daughter. He was willing to demote you from wife to concubine just to let you into the manor. You should be deeply grateful and serve Father and the Madam faithfully, instead of going around offending people and causing Father trouble like this!”
Ji Jinyu remained deaf to her eldest son’s words, continuing to wipe her bone-cleaver stroke after stroke.
“I know you doted on our youngest siblings, but their current plight is entirely of their own making!”
“If it weren’t for the Madam’s grace, how would a crude country girl like our little sister have the right to enter the Marquis Mansion as Dou Yixuan’s dowry maid? If it weren’t for Dou Yixuan’s magnanimity, Little Sister would never have become a bedchamber maid after falling pregnant with the Young Marquis’s child.”
“She didn’t do it willingly,” a desolate voice rang out.
At the thought of her youngest daughter, who had been proud since childhood, being threatened with her mother’s life by Dou Shichang and his sons into becoming a dowry slave; at the thought of her daughter, who refused to be a concubine, being set up by Dou Yixuan to be raped by the Young Marquis and becoming a bedchamber maid through pregnancy—Ji Jinyu felt as if ten thousand arrows were piercing her heart. The pain made it difficult to breathe.
Dou Yingliang’s tone carried a hint of impatient disgust. “Does that matter? Isn’t being the Young Marquis’s bedchamber maid better than being the wife of some penniless scholar? She had glory and wealth within her grasp, yet she chose to be difficult and unchaste. As the Young Marquis’s maid, she had the gall to use her pregnancy to seduce the Marquis himself, disregarding all human morality and muddying the Marquis’s bloodline.”
The sound of sharpening stopped. Dou Yingcai looked up, but Dou Yingliang, oblivious, continued his complaints.
“If Little Sister’s temper hadn’t been as stubborn as yours, and if she had just confessed her crimes, the Marquis Mansion might have spared her life. In the end, she was lashed hundreds of times until she was at death’s door—that was entirely her own doing. What does it have to do with the Marquis? She was the one who didn’t know what was good for her, didn’t understand status, and acted like a lunatic by cutting open her own belly to retrieve the child to prove her innocence. Dying was just her fate—uggh!”
Before anyone could react, Ji Jinyu turned and plunged the bone-cleaver into Dou Yingliang’s chest.
Or rather, no one had imagined that Ji Jinyu, as his mother, would personally kill her own son.
Ji Jinyu looked at Dou Yingliang as he spat blood and stared at her in disbelief. Her gaze was dark and predatory, her voice like a cracked gong. “I bore you, raised you, saved you, and now I kill you.”
“Dying by my hand is your fate.”
“Mother…”
Dou Yingliang’s voice was drowned out by the sound of the vermillion gates creaking open.
As Ji Jinyu pulled the cleaver from Dou Yingliang’s heart, Dou Shichang and Dou Yingcai fell back in terror.
She turned toward the mansion gates and saw servants carrying out a corpse and dragging a blood-drenched person.
When the servants saw the bloody cleaver in Ji Jinyu’s hand and Dou Yingliang collapsed in the crimson snow, they dropped the bodies and fled back inside, terrified.
Ji Jinyu looked at the bodies discarded in the snow and stumbled forward, leaning on her cleaver for support.
The person with the collapsed belly, covered in blood and filth, half-naked and lifeless, was Ji Jinyu’s youngest daughter, Ji Yingjun. The person clinging to life with broken legs and gouged-out eyes was her youngest son, Ji Yingming.
It was her. It was she who had caused her children to fall to this state.
Years ago, when Dou Shichang—who had been missing for fifteen years after joining the army—sent a letter, Ji Jinyu had seen the four words “demote wife to concubine” and had no desire to take her children north to seek him out.
But within half a month, her hometown was struck by constant earthquakes and floods, and overrun by river pirates and bandits.
To keep her family alive, Ji Jinyu had intended to flee east, but her eldest son had forced her to go north by threatening his own life.
The decision to go north was Ji Jinyu’s greatest regret in life.
If she hadn’t been coerced by her eldest son, her elderly parents and granddaughter wouldn’t have died of malaria on the road. Her youngest son, Ji Yingming, wouldn’t have been swept away by floods and sold into slavery, eventually becoming a catamite for the Kangle Marquis because of his beauty.
Ji Yingming, the lost catamite, and Ji Yingjun, the dowry maid, had recognized each other within the Kangle Marquis Mansion. But not long after their reunion, the twins were both broken and destroyed by the house.
Ji Jinyu, locked away in a woodshed in the back courtyard, only knew all this thanks to her eldest daughter-in-law, who had been divorced by Dou Yingliang and turned into a servant. If not for her care and knowledge of medicine, Ji Jinyu might not have survived to this day.
With trembling hands, Ji Jinyu removed her linen outer garment. As if dressing her daughter in childhood, she wrapped Ji Yingjun’s exposed, broken body and tied the corpse to her own back.
She gently patted the top of her daughter’s cold, hard head and whispered, “Don’t be afraid, Jun’er. Mother is here to take you home.”
Then, she knelt and tearfully gathered her youngest son’s bloody, mangled body into her arms. Her palms shook as she looked at his hollow eye sockets.
Sensing a familiar, comforting scent, Ji Yingming, whose tongue had been cut out, let out a bloody, mournful cry.
Scalding tears fell onto his face. Ji Jinyu held him tightly, her voice trembling with grief. “Don’t be afraid, Ming’er. Mother is here to take you both home.”
An incoherent wail rose from him. Ji Yingming’s twisted fingers gripped his mother tightly, as if crying out his grievances, hatred, resentment, and despair, until the last spark of life faded away.
At the moment her youngest son died in her arms, Ji Jinyu felt her heart shatter. Her hope was extinguished.
Though her grief was absolute, she could not shed another tear.
Ji Jinyu took her bloody son and tied his ruined body to her front. Now, no one could ever separate the three of them again. She would never lose her children again.
Dou Yingcai looked at his mother’s demonic state and knelt trembling on the ground, not daring to speak or run, terrified that he would be the next to die.
But Dou Shichang was driven mad with fear. As he turned to flee, a flying bone-cleaver severed both his legs cleanly. Then, a voice that seemed to come from hell itself whispered in his ear.
“Do you know who sold our youngest son into the Marquis Mansion as a slave?”
“It was you! You, the corrupt official who acts as a pimp for the nobility!”