Jiangzuo enjoyed peace, and great clans stood like a forest.
A daughter of a cadet branch of the Xie clan of Chen Commandery was named Hengzhi, with the courtesy name Zhaorong. She mastered the Book of Etiquette at ten, took the lectern at the Imperial Academy at fifteen, and spent ten years annotating thirty-six volumes on ritual. She believed in just one thing: rites are for the living, not the dead.
She beat a drum to defend a woman who had spent forty-nine days mending clothes in mourning, fought for a poor widow in Changgan Lane to keep her ramshackle home, and wrote the names of impoverished scholars beaten under the rod into her own records.
Then an old marriage contract from ten years ago surfaced, requiring her to marry into the Langya Wang clan and wed a young lord she had never met.
Her uncle took up his vermilion brush and painstakingly crossed out the words “willingly” in her annotations, replacing them with another line: An alliance between clans takes precedence over personal feelings.
Shen Zhan, courtesy name Zhonghuai, was a Northern Garrison guerrilla commander, a veteran of a hundred battles on the Huai River, carrying an old saber at his side.
Of the five thousand soldiers in his camp, not one could read. By the classics, they did not count as part of “propriety.”
Once, in a lecture hall at the Imperial Academy, he asked her, “If these people die on the battlefield, do they count as human beings?”
Later, they locked her in a courtyard to prepare her for marriage, and the whole household, draped in crimson and purple, came to escort her to the bridal sedan.
That night, Northern Garrison soldiers blocked the moon gate. “You can't just lay a hand on someone from the Northern Garrison.”
A blood-written letter, old jade sunk in the river, a marriage contract with an altered date, twelve gilt daggers beneath the willows in Xizhou.
She would make history with a book of annotations. He would bear witness with an old saber.
This world forged its rules into ritual vessels and forced people to kneel in gratitude.
Together, they insisted that the living stand tall and say: I will not marry.
Theme: Rites are rules for the living, not man-eating shackles.
