The fiercest flash of red at Yanmen Pass is the long saber in the hands of Shen Nanxing, the legitimate daughter of the Marquis of Zhenyuan’s household. She brought a grand bridal dowry and the last of her family’s wealth when she married Lu Yunqing, a new top-ranked candidate from a humble family. For five years, she kept house and cooked for him, toning down her own brilliance, only to hear him say, “After five years without a child, you’re unfit to be my principal wife.”
When Lu Yunqing rented out an entire floor of the Spring Breeze House to throw a lavish first-birthday banquet for the son his mistress had borne him, Shen Nanxing finally saw the vile schemes concealed beneath his gentle, refined exterior. He meant to use his illegitimate son to control her and force her to hand over the Marquis’s estates.
Without a scene or a fuss, Shen Nanxing tossed down a divorce letter on the spot and split the imperial plaque above the Lu residence with one blow. If she couldn’t warm this stone-hearted man, she’d take the whole pot with her! Swift and decisive, she reclaimed every dowry property, stripped the brocade robes from her worthless husband, and sold the treacherous steward to a black mine. Her uncles from her birth family came to urge her to be magnanimous? She leveled her saber, nearly slicing the eaves off the ancestral hall. The whole capital waited to laugh at this childless, cast-off wife, unaware that Gu Changyuan, the Grand Secretary rumored to be bloodthirsty and cruel, and indifferent to women, had already laid out ten miles of red carpet along her path.
