On the first day she entered the house, her mother-in-law gave her a cup of herbal tea, "Kneel down and pay respect. The tea is cold, and the rules don't let it get cold."
Shen Yiqiu knelt down, and the guests in the hall watched as she, a girl from a scholarly family, knelt on the futon and raised the cup of herbal tea above her head until her arms ached.
The mother-in-law didn't answer, thinking she had resigned herself to her fate. The husband stood next to his mother, not daring to say a word.
It wasn't until the gold bracelet in the dowry was stolen, half a page of blood-stained account was wrapped in the old handkerchief, and a corpse from twenty years ago was hidden in her mother-in-law's delivery room - she discovered that every bowl of herbal tea in this house was brewed with human blood.
Her mother-in-law wanted her to kneel and serve herbal tea for the rest of her life. She insisted on making every new daughter-in-law of the Lu family drink hot tea when they entered the house.
Herbal tea is the rules, and the rules are the knife. But the person holding the knife needs to change.
