Xie Qingyan stared at Chun Cao and spoke with firm finality, “What does this prove?”
Chun Cao sucked in a sharp breath. She was not foolish, only blinded by anger before. Now, with Miss Xie’s guidance, everything clicked into place.
“It proves… it proves he has a serious problem!” Chun Cao’s voice trembled. “So serious that… every family in the Capital avoids him at all costs!”
“Exactly!”
Chun Cao’s face turned deathly pale, the color draining from it even more completely than when she had been furious earlier. She covered her mouth instinctively, a far more terrifying possibility surfacing in her mind, something worse than marrying that ugly man.
Her voice quivered through her fingers. “Could it be… that he has some hidden illness? Or… that he is incapable…?”
Tears welled up in Chun Cao’s eyes again. “Miss, this… this…”
“Heh.” Xie Qingyan, however, smiled.
She lifted her calm eyes, devoid of the despair one would expect from a sixteen-year-old girl. “Chun Cao, you guessed the latter half correctly, but you failed to understand the first.”
Her fingertip lightly tapped the paper listing eight concubines.
“These eight concubines are the proof.”
Her voice was soft, yet it pierced Chun Cao’s heart like an icicle. “I’m afraid he did not take those concubines for pleasure, nor for children.”
“It was for testing.”
“Testing?” Chun Cao was confused.
“Testing to see whether the land is barren and cannot grow crops, or whether the seeds themselves are defective.” Xie Qingyan’s words were blunt, almost crude, yet they struck directly at the truth.
“They tested eight times and got no result. Now the Wang family is truly panicking.”
“Their prized legitimate son is nothing but a patch of saline land that cannot yield a single crop. If this matter were to spread…” Xie Qingyan curled her lips in disdain, “then forget a Third-Rank Censor’s family, even the richest family in the Capital would not be able to marry any legitimate daughter of a Seventh-Rank county magistrate.”
“Reputation.” She tapped the table. “In the Capital, reputation outweighs everything.”
Chun Cao’s face was no longer merely pale, it had turned ashen. At last, she understood the true purpose behind this marriage.
“So…” her voice trembled uncontrollably, “that’s why they came all the way to Leping County to find us… because our family is small and easy to manipulate…”
“Not just that.”
Xie Qingyan leaned back against the cold wall. “They need a proper wife, a wife destined to bear no children.”
“Once they marry me, a year or two later, I will naturally remain childless.”
“And then…” Chun Cao continued shakily, “they will divorce you and accuse you of failing in filial duty, saying that having no heir is the greatest offense!”
“Divorce?”
Xie Qingyan seemed to have heard a joke.
“No.” She shook her head, a trace of pity flickering in her eyes, whether for the original host or for Chun Cao’s naivety, it was unclear.
“Divorce would be too inelegant.”
She enunciated each word, revealing the most vicious part of the scheme.
“They will pin the blame for infertility squarely on me. Then, the Wang family will graciously keep me as their jealous or barren legitimate wife.”
“And Wang Ping,” Xie Qingyan’s gaze passed through the window, as if she could already see that hypocritical residence in the Capital, “will present himself as devoted and unwavering.”
She let out a soft laugh. “You see, his reputation for virtue, affection, and magnanimity will spread far and wide.”
“Using my entire life’s purity and despair in exchange for the Wang family’s flawless dignity.”
“Chun Cao,” she concluded, her tone as if evaluating a business proposal, “this is truly a most profitable deal.”
Chun Cao collapsed onto the ground, her whole body chilled by the bloodless scheming behind this marriage. She had thought it was merely marrying an ugly man, never imagining it was stepping into a living hell built upon sacrificing her mistress’s entire life.
“No… no…” Chun Cao shook her head in despair. “What do we do? Miss, Master will never let us off.”
“What do we do?” Xie Qingyan repeated, her voice hoarse yet cold. “Chun Cao, remember this. When your enemy tries to kill you with reputation, the only thing you can do is tear that reputation to shreds.”
She raised her pale, slender hand and gently brushed the ghastly purple-red bruise around her neck.
“He wants his reputation, doesn’t he?”
“Then I’ll make sure he has none.”
Xie Qingyan moved slowly, leaning close to Chun Cao’s ear, her voice barely audible as she calmly laid out the first plan of her reborn life.
“You don’t need to explain or defend anything.”
“Go find Zhang Ma in the kitchen, Old Liu in the back courtyard, and that gossip-loving peddler in the west of the city…”
“You must cry.”
“Cry about how miserable your Miss’s fate is, cry about how the Master is pushing his own daughter into a pit of fire just to enter the Capital.”
“Cry about Wang Ping, thirty-two years old and incapable. Cry that his eight concubines are eight living graves, eight patches of barren land where nothing grows.”
Her speech was slow, yet every word was like a poisoned nail, striking precisely at the darkest corners of the human heart.
“Miss…” Chun Cao was shaken by the unnatural calm in her eyes.
“Remember.” Xie Qingyan interrupted her, wiping away Chun Cao’s tears with her fingertips. “Your tears must be real, but your words must be false. Make it seem like you let it slip unintentionally, as if grief made you careless. The more accidental it appears, the faster people will believe it.”
“Rumors are never spread deliberately, they are leaked.”
Leping County was not large, but it had everything it needed.
Rumors never took more than three days to ferment.
On the first day, they spread from the Xie family’s backyard.
At the riverside, where Zhang Ma was washing clothes, the rhythmic pounding of her laundry stick was mixed with her hushed exclamations. “What a sin! Our eldest Miss was driven to hang herself by the Master!”
“Why?”
“What else could it be? That Wang family from the Capital! I heard that young Master Wang…” she lowered her voice mysteriously, “looks impressive but is useless. A silver spear with a wax head! Eight concubines in his house, and not one of them has a swelling belly!”
On the second day, the rumors exploded around the theme of the magistrate selling his daughter for advancement.
In the teahouse in the south of the city, the storyteller slammed his wooden block, but instead of recounting tales of the martial world, he spoke of local gossip.
“Ladies and gentlemen! It is said that even tigers do not eat their young, yet our Magistrate Xie, for the sake of his official career, is marrying off his beautiful legitimate daughter to a sickly man from the Capital who cannot perform!”
“Is that true?”
“How could it be false? That maid Chun Cao from the Xie family fainted from crying outside the pharmacy yesterday! She said the Wang family is a pit of fire, that this marriage is a sham, and they only want a scapegoat to silence public opinion! Poor Miss Xie, so resolute that she would rather die than submit a single rope…”
Crash!
A teacup shattered on the ground.
“That beast Xie Wenyuan!” a local gentryman trembled with rage. “He has disgraced all of Leping County! Trading his daughter for promotion, worse than an animal!”
By the third day, the rumors had even turned into a vulgar nursery rhyme.
Children clapped their hands in the streets as they sang:
“Laba beans, roll around,
Marry a wife who can’t bear a child.
Why can’t she bear one, you ask?
Eight bellies flat, none can last!
Magistrate Xie, hang your head low,
Sold his daughter for official clothes!”
This time, everything exploded completely.
Xie Wenyuan smashed his favorite inkstone in his study in fury, while Wang Shi fainted from crying. He stormed in to confront Xie Qingyan, only to be stopped by her hoarse words.
“Father. Which line in that nursery rhyme is not the truth?”
“You—!”
“Does Father wish to beat me to death now and confirm the crime of selling a daughter for gain? Or would you rather go to the Capital immediately, kneel before the Wang family with a rod on your back, and tell them you have ruined this fine arrangement?”
Xie Qingyan sat there on the bed, medicinal bandages wrapped around her neck, her gaze as sharp as a blade as it fixed on him.
Xie Wenyuan, an ambitious Seventh-Rank magistrate, felt a chill spread through his entire body for the first time under his daughter’s stare.