Shen Jin was once the sharpest blade of the Lu family of Jiangning. The name of the head of the family’s hidden guard was enough to frighten children into silence.
Until the fire five years ago. The eldest daughter of the Lu family died protecting her brother, and Shen Jin had “arrived too late.”
The family head, Lu Yanzhou, dragged her back from the brink of death and personally shackled her. “Shen Jin, I want you to live, and spend the rest of your life remembering what you owe Qing’er.”
From then on, the blade stayed sheathed, and the shadow followed.
She became the silent shadow at his feet, shielding him from attacks both open and covert, and protecting the new darling of his heart, Su Wan’er, an orphan who looked just like his late younger sister.
When she coughed up blood from her injuries, he said, “Your life is mine. I won’t let you die so easily.”
When she found something suspicious, he sneered, “You’d make up a lie like that just to clear yourself?”
In the winter of the sixth year, the evidence finally came to light:
The fire that had burned away every last thing she believed in had been a calculated scheme from beginning to end.
And the “crime” she had paid for with her own flesh and blood had never existed.
In the water prison, she snapped the hairpin he had never given her.
“Lu Yanzhou, I’m done atoning.”
“Year seven: sentence served.”
Later, a renowned shop called Yun Jin House rose to fame across the realm south of the Yangtze.
At its mistress Shen Jin’s side stood her gentle, physician husband, while a little child babbled in her arms.
People said she was a shrewd businesswoman who had built a commercial legend in just three years. No one knew how much longer it had taken her to learn how to grow her own backbone from the ashes.
And Lu Yanzhou, head of the Lu family of Jiangning, went gray in the winter of the seventh year.
He knelt at all seventy-two temples south of the Yangtze and begged every god and Buddha for help, but all he got was one sentence from her: “Family Head Lu, the past is ashes. Let’s each live our own lives in peace.”
