Everyone knows that Shen Letong, the legitimate daughter of Chancellor Shen, is hopelessly in love with Pei Yuzhi, the young heir of the Marquis’s household.
When the Pei family is under attack from the court officials and backed into a corner, she marries him and does everything she can to protect his family from disaster.
He tells her, “An elder sister-in-law is like a mother. Take care of my younger siblings at home and wait for me.”
And so Shen Letong works herself to the bone for twenty-five years. Her husband dies on the battlefield, they have no children, and she pours her heart into raising the younger generation.
At last, her efforts seem to pay off. Every one of them achieves success, but by then she has worked herself nearly blind and ruined her health.
As she lies dying, her brother-in-law tells her, “You’re neither kind nor compassionate. You don’t deserve to be my sister-in-law. She’s the wife my eldest brother acknowledged himself!”
Pei Yuzhi arrives with Shen Letong’s half-sister and their two children, and tells her:
“You know perfectly well that I married you only because my family forced me to. Now that things have settled down, how could I betray Jiner?”
Even the sister-in-law closest to her looks at her with disgust. “We knew all along that my eldest brother wasn’t dead. Chancellor Shen gave him a new identity. You treated me cruelly, took the dowry my mother left me, and forced me to marry an old man. How could anyone expect me to call my enemy my sister-in-law?”
After devoting decades of genuine love to them, Shen Letong never expected the younger generation to hate her so much. Their words enrage her to death.
After she dies, her vengeful spirit lingers. In the third year after her death, someone brings her favorite plum wine and clears the weeds from her grave. Later, he overthrows the ruling house, becomes the most revered emperor, and marries the wisest empress. The Pei family, having backed the wrong side, is executed to the last member.
Only then does Shen Letong finally let go of her resentment. Reborn into a new life, she refuses to do it all again.
