In her previous life, Sheng Weiwei emptied her family’s treasury of a million taels in dowry to help her impoverished husband, Gu Yunzhou, place third in the imperial exams and rise to the highest offices. She raised his illegitimate children for twenty years, only to be poisoned and silenced in the end, forced to watch her father and brothers die in battle and her family be wiped out.
When she opened her eyes again, she was fifteen. The Gu family had just arrived with two bolts of cotton cloth to ask for her hand in marriage. Her future mother-in-law, Madam Liu, was weeping and complaining about their poverty. Her half-sister, Sheng Zhirou, sweetly urged her to “marry down and earn good karma.” And Gu Yunzhou was still waiting for her to rush into his arms with tear-filled eyes.
This time, Sheng Weiwei would not marry him.
The Gu family wanted her money? She cut off every source of support and threw the records of Madam Liu’s affair right in her face. Gu Yunzhou wanted to ride the Sheng family’s influence to success? She turned around and drove Su Lianyue’s tofu shop out of business, leaving mother and son with nowhere to hide. Sheng Zhirou wanted nothing more than to see her in the dirt? A few words were all it took for Sheng Weiwei to confine her to the west wing, unable even to leave the room.
But the evidence of treason that had killed her father and brothers in her previous life was still hidden beneath the surface, and Gu Yunzhou would not abandon his ambitions so easily. Having lost the Sheng family’s fortune, he would surely find a new backer and return. While building a business network in the capital to earn her own money, Sheng Weiwei secretly gathered irrefutable proof of the Gu family’s collusion with the enemy.
She was waiting for Gu Yunzhou to be driven into a corner, tear off his disguise, and bare his fangs. Then she would make him understand: when she supported him, he was the third-ranked scholar. Once she let go, he was less than a stray dog.
She would collect every last drop of blood debt owed by the Sheng family, one by one. Not a single one of them would get away.
