The coffin opens, and the legitimate daughter returns!
At thirteen, Su Wan should have been the pampered eldest legitimate daughter of the Marquis of Zhennan’s household. Instead, under the pretext of “recuperating,” she was abandoned in a derelict house south of the city to fend for herself.
I woke to bone-chilling cold and a sharp pain in my palm. Before my eyes was a coffin lid!
Outside the coffin came the voice of Zhao Zhong, the old steward of the marquis’s household: “Eldest Miss, it’s time. We must prepare your body for burial.”
Memories of my past life came flooding back. When she was fifteen, her maternal family was executed, and no one at the marquis’s household answered her pleas, though she knelt for three days and three nights. Her stepmother, Madam Liu, feigned kindness and married her off to an old man as a “good-luck bride.” When she resisted to the death, they broke both her legs. She watched her half-sister, Zhao Lian, wear her mother’s cloak and jade bracelet and flirt with her fiancé, Gu Yun, outside her window.
And her father, the Marquis of Zhennan, had pushed her out of the household when she was seven. She never saw him again before she died.
The coffin jolted with a crash, its lid about to close! Su Wan thrust up her hand and held it back. I pushed the lid open, my nails bleeding from the strain. The pain brought her fully to her senses: she couldn’t believe she had returned!
Using the coffin Madam Liu had prepared for her as her stepping stone, she came back to life and ordered Zhao Zhong to ready a carriage for the return to the marquis’s household. “I am Su Wan, the eldest legitimate daughter of the Marquis of Zhennan’s household. If I want to enter these gates, no one can stop me!” Hidden in her sleeve was half a piece of ice jade left by her late mother, its bloody mystery yet to be solved. She gazed at the looming estate, crouched in the night, sparks burning in her eyes.
In this life, her weakness was gone, and her sharp edge was on full display!
Madam Liu’s mask of hypocrisy, Zhao Lian’s usurpation of her place, her father’s cold indifference...
The daughter once cast aside had returned from the coffin, vowing to collect every blood debt she was owed, with interest, in her own hands!
