Gentle Yet Generous

The day Lu Yourong’s engagement to the marquis’s household was called off, the whole capital waited for her to cry. She didn’t. Instead, she pulled out a stack of old IOUs and asked whether the household planned to repay its debts along with ending the engagement. A sickly scholar named Zheng Jingren arrived in the rain, wearing an old blue robe and carrying a battered umbrella. He coughed as if he wouldn’t live another three months, yet he dismantled the marquis’s fake accounts in just a few words. Lu Yourong thought he was short-lived, poor, and easy to manipulate, making him the perfect pretend husband to divorce three months later. Only later did she learn that he was a secret agent of the Censorate, sent by imperial decree to investigate Qingping’s fraudulent accounts. His courtesy name was Bierou, but he was anything but gentle. She crunched the numbers; he set the traps. She also made mistakes, and a single note of approval from Chancellor Gu stained the reputation of her accounting firm. After hitting rock bottom, husband and wife stood side by side, investigating everything from petty market debts to major court cases. They traced an old Nanzhou case all the way to the throne room and turned a sham marriage into a true account of a lifetime together.