The Third Year of a Bitter Marriage

Synopsis: Pei Yu does not love his wife, Shen Qingyin. He despises her rigid adherence to convention. He despises how cold and dull she is. He despises that perpetually expressionless face of hers. Most of all, he resents her for drugging him at the Qionglin Banquet years ago, ruining the marriage between him and his cousin. Had the emperor not stepped in to resolve the matter by granting them marriage, his imperial decree making it an unbreakable command, Pei Yu—the legitimate eldest son of a venerable aristocratic family with a century-old lineage—would never have married the daughter of a disgraced rebel general. And so, even after three years of marriage, even with their eldest daughter already more than a year old, Pei Yu remains as cold toward his wife as ever. Day after day, he stands by with cold eyes as his mother and other members of the clan make things difficult for Shen Qingyin and grind her down. Night after night, in bed, he ignores her pleas and takes her relentlessly until the third watch. Even when Shen Qingyin becomes pregnant with their second child, suffering increasingly severe pregnancy symptoms and barely able to eat or sleep, Pei Yu brings his newly widowed cousin home. He announces that he intends to marry her as his equal wife, to make amends for what happened all those years ago. Shen Qingyin readily agrees and calmly settles the cousin into the household. Seeing how virtuous and magnanimous Shen Qingyin is, and how completely devoted she remains to him, Pei Yu is deeply pleased. He thinks that if she can remain this sensible, then perhaps he could try to treat her a little better. Until, at the end of the third year of their marriage, the young general known throughout the capital as the “Jade-Faced Asura” suddenly has his name cleared of all charges and returns to the capital on horseback. On the day of his return, snow blankets the sky. Ordered by imperial decree to ride outside the city and welcome the general, Pei Yu suddenly catches sight of a woman, heavy with child, climbing to a high vantage point to look into the distance. In the swirling snow, she gazes at the general leading the procession. Tears spill down her face in an instant. In a faint voice, she calls, “Tanlang.” The moment Pei Yu sees the woman’s face clearly, he freezes. Only then does he learn that his wife once shared a love so profound with that young general that it has left a scar on her soul. Only then does he understand that Shen Qingyin was never proper and dull by nature, nor was she inherently cold. It is simply that all the passion in her heart, all the love she had to give in this lifetime, was bestowed upon someone else long ago. She had simply never loved him. —— Shen Qingyin’s heart died long ago. It died at the very moment she realized that, despite having someone else in her heart, she had no choice but to agree to marry Pei Yu in order to protect her family. What she never understood was this: If he was the person who had looked down on her most from the beginning, why was he, in the end, the one who refused to let her go? And she certainly never imagined that a proud and noble aristocratic young master like Pei Yu would one day kneel before her and ask, almost begging, “Yinniang, did I not satisfy you last night? Why is your heart still with him?!” — Description from novelcodex.orgFull novel: The Third Year of a Bitter Marriage — read the rest free on N​o⁠v​e⁠l​C⁠o​d⁠e​x⁠.​o⁠r​g⁠