Break Off the Engagement and Marry My Cousin? I Turn Around and Marry the Disabled Chief Minister

Everyone in Wuyi Alley in Lin'an Prefecture thought Jiang Qingzhu had lost her mind.

She turned down a scholar for a husband, took the compensation for breaking off the engagement, and then brought home Pei the Cripple, who was on the verge of dying in a leaky, ramshackle hut!

The neighbors snacked on melon seeds and jeered, “Just wait. In three days, she’ll be burying that good-for-nothing and paying for the coffin herself!”

A day later, after Jiang Qingzhu massaged Pei Yanchuan for just fifteen minutes, the toes of his foot, paralyzed for half a year, moved.

The neighbors scoffed, “A fluke! He’s just having one last burst of life!”

Three months later, Jiang Qingzhu’s double-sided embroidery had become a tribute to the imperial court, while Pei Yanchuan had tossed aside his crutch and stood tall as a pine.

Auntie Wang next door rubbed her eyes. “Good heavens! How does that good-for-nothing look like an immortal from a painting?!”

A year later, an imperial plaque naming her a merchant of the court was paraded into Wuyi Alley with drums and gongs. Imperial envoys knelt all along the street, welcoming the Grand Secretary back to the capital to resume his duties!

Everyone was so terrified they nearly lost their souls. “That sickly man who spends all day chopping wood and cooking for Qingzhu in the courtyard… He’s the most powerful minister in the empire, Grand Secretary Pei?!”

The Song family, who had once broken off the engagement, had long since been ruined, and Song Wencai was shivering among a crowd of beggars.

Wearing a nine-phoenix crown, Jiang Qingzhu took the arm of her incomparably handsome husband, the Grand Secretary, and climbed into the eight-man sedan chair. She raised an eyebrow with a smile.

“That investment paid off ten thousandfold. Not a bad deal.”