Why Should the Brocade Zither Have Fifty Strings?

This isn't a feel-good story about a maid rising to become the mistress of the household, though she does indeed rise. More than that, it's a story about how trauma passes from one generation to the next. She spends her whole life climbing upward, only to discover that once she reaches the top, she has become the very kind of person she hated most. There are no purely good people, and no purely bad ones. Everyone struggles within their own circumstances, and every choice has its reasons. You think she's cruel? She crawled out of a pile of corpses. You think the young master is heartless? He spent his whole life trapped by filial duty and rigid rules. You think the daughter is innocent? She used the cruelest words to stab her mother's deepest wound. I crawled up from the dust, and I spent my whole life climbing. Only when I reached the mountaintop did I realize: the wind up there is far colder than it is at the foot of the mountain.