“I can see now, Uncle Feng.”
Lu Zhiling smiled softly.
“Really?”
Feng Zhen’s face lit up with joy. He dropped to his knees, gripping her arm tightly. “That’s great— that’s really great!”
“Mm.”
Lu Zhiling nodded lightly.
Then—
Bang!
A sudden noise broke the air.
Both turned their heads.
At the doorway stood Jiang Fusheng, who had been trying to slip away unnoticed—but her clumsy movement betrayed her.
When their gazes fell on her, her face turned pale. Tears welled in her eyes though none fell.
“Madam, I—I didn’t hear anything…” she stammered, her voice trembling.
What a sin.
She was just an ordinary salted fish [Chinese slang meaning “a person with no ambition, just wanting to live lazily”]. After graduation, she’d chosen a simple life—working for the Bo family like her parents. It was easy work: a good salary, a comfortable mansion to live in, and time to spend with her aging parents.
But her parents had disagreed. They warned her that life inside a wealthy household was never simple—that the people there wore smiles as masks and that she, with her soft heart, would be eaten alive.
She had laughed it off back then.
“This isn’t the old days,” she’d said. “Servants aren’t beaten or sold anymore. As long as I do my job well, no one will touch me.”
Yet now—
What had she just overheard?
The new eldest young madam (a term used for the main wife of the heir in noble families) had pretended to be blind, tortured two patients until they fainted, and then calmly claimed she had no foundation to work from…
What kind of scheme was this?
Was she trying to climb to power within the Bo family—step by step, over the bodies of others?
If that were true… then she, Jiang Fusheng, who had accidentally heard everything—
Wouldn’t she be silenced next?
As these thoughts raced in her mind, Lu Zhiling began walking toward her. Step by step.
The calm in her eyes was gone—what replaced it was clarity, sharp as glass.
“I wanted to keep this from you,” she said, voice low and steady. “But you follow me every day. There’s nothing I can hide from you anymore.”
A quiet but suffocating pressure filled the air.
Jiang Fusheng’s back pressed against the door. She trembled like a cornered rabbit.
“D-Don’t come closer—don’t come closer… I’ll scream! I really will!”
Lu Zhiling stopped right before her. Her long skirt swayed faintly with her movement, her expression unreadable and cold.
“Ah—!”
Jiang Fusheng let out a shriek before her eyes rolled back, and she collapsed.
In the ward, three people lay unconscious.
Lu Zhiling pressed her temples, sighing helplessly.
“They really do get scare too easily.”
The afternoon sun poured through the half-open window. A light breeze slipped in, rippling across the water’s surface and lifting the edge of the gauze curtains.
Lu Zhiling sat cross-legged on the carpet, one hand gently holding up her silk sleeve, the other using wooden tweezers to pick tea leaves from a tray.
Each leaf she chose was nearly identical in color—tender green, with delicate curls at both ends. Nearby, the kettle began to bubble. The water was at crab-eye temperature [a traditional tea term meaning small bubbles form, the perfect stage for brewing green tea].
Across from her sat Jiang Fusheng, a notebook hugged to her chest, scribbling every motion down like a devoted student.
“Madam, you look so beautiful when you make tea,” she murmured in awe.
Lu Zhiling’s hands were pale and slender, her fingers long and elegant. Yet they were covered in faint scars and calluses—more than even Aunt Wang, who worked in the Bo family’s vegetable garden. At first glance, they didn’t look like the hands of a girl only twenty years old.
But after a while, those imperfections seemed insignificant. The grace of her every movement—lifting the lid, pouring, placing the cups—made even the scars seem poetic.
“Lu Zhiling.”
Lu Zhiling glanced at her, a small reminder not to address her as Eldest Young madam.
Jiang Fusheng propped her chin on her hands, her gaze soft. The woman before her was calm and patient—so different from the cruel rumors swirling through the Bo household.
Just like that day in the hospital—when Lu Zhiling had quietly explained everything to her, step by step, until all her doubts melted away.
She hadn’t pretended to be blind to deceive anyone or to play some deep family game.
She’d only wanted to avoid unnecessary trouble.
So even when she realized she had been holding a servant’s hand during the wedding ceremony, she’d said nothing and followed through with every custom and bow.
Her goal was never power or wealth. She simply wished to be survive through the Bo family—
To reclaim what once belonged to the Lu family, piece by piece,
and one day, return it all to her ancestral home in Jiangnan [a region in southern China, often associated with rivers, mist, and classical beauty].
It was that simple.
“Lu. Zhi. Ling.”
Jiang Fusheng called her name slowly, each syllable heavy with meaning.
“I looked it up online. The Lu family… they used to be the ruling clan of Country K. Everything they owned was priceless. But with what you have now—” she hesitated, frowning, “I’m afraid you couldn’t even afford to buy back a pair of your family’s old chopsticks.”
The word financial resources felt almost laughable.
After all, when Lu Zhiling married into the Bo family, she brought nothing with her—not even a dowry. The Bo family only gave her a fixed amount of living expenses, and nothing more.