Sheng Ning transmigrated into the orphaned daughter of the Sheng family.
The mourning banners still hung in the ancestral hall when her eight uncles were already clutching forged contracts and forcing her to sign. Around the corner in the corridor, her aunt was pushing her pockmarked cousin toward Sheng Ning's bedroom.
"The Sheng family bloodline must not die out!" When the third elder smashed his teacup and roared, Sheng Ning finally gave in. Fine, she would borrow a seed and have a child.
Xie Jiangshi, head of the merchants' guild, brushed the jade hairpin in her hair. "Marry me, and tomorrow all of Jiangnan will call you Madam Xie. I'll take care of every problem for you."
A Western Regions merchant peeled a gilded grape and offered it to her lips. "Come back to the Western Regions with me. Our children will inherit ten camel caravans and twenty oases."
But in the end, she lifted the tattered curtain of a hut outside the city and smiled sweetly at the pale scholar in the wheelchair. "My lord, I have fallen for you."
Three months later, Sheng Ning listened as the physician declared she had a happy pulse, and laughed with unrestrained delight.
She had deliberately chosen a poor, lame scholar with no family to rely on, then had him thrown out of Jiangnan overnight.
What she did not know was that the Eastern Palace's hidden guards were kneeling by the river with the Crown Prince's robes in their hands. "Your Highness, it is time to return to the palace and close the net."
As the water clock chimed, the once-gentle, jade-like invalid shattered the moonlight filling the room and undid her trembling sash.
"Ning'er, do you still want to keep the child and get rid of the father?" Dark tides more terrifying than a bloody canal gang battle churned in his eyes. "Now, I want to borrow your womb to give birth to the eldest imperial grandson."
Sheng Ning was near tears and could only beg him to let her go.
