Jiang Qing was betrothed to Fu Bonian. Just as Fu Bonian was due to return victorious from the frontier in six months, disaster struck: the Fu family was framed by villains, and Fu Bonian died on the battlefield.
Fu Shuyi was the son the Fu family had raised elsewhere, Fu Bonian's half brother. When the trouble began, Fu Shuyi knelt in the rain and begged the Jiang family to protect him. But to curry favor with a powerful official, the Jiang family even added a baseless charge to the accusations...
He wandered the streets in a daze. Everyone in the Fu family had been exiled and enslaved...
And then the sister-in-law he had called by that name countless times in the past became engaged to the very villain who had framed them. She was the only woman his brother had ever loved. How could she marry someone else so soon?
He lived by the blade, his life always hanging by a thread, and endured three years. Whenever he felt he could go on no longer, he remembered the woman's merciless words in the downpour:
"What sort of lowlife are you, trying to claim kinship with us? Get lost."
This time, he would make them pay back every ounce of humiliation and hatred, with interest.
The heroine's perspective: Amid the struggle for power, Jiang Qing was no more than an insignificant sacrifice. On the eve of the storm, she resisted by refusing to eat or drink, because her father would not save them. That day in the rain, she had her own reasons for what she said. If she hadn't gone out and driven him away, even the Fu family's last surviving heir might have disappeared. He was her beloved's younger brother. She would rather play the villain and let him think she was a heartless woman.
And she, unwilling as she was, had to marry that man. She couldn't even take her own life, because her father too depended on the favor of others and lived on a knife's edge. She couldn't bear to lose her parents as well...
Three years later, at a palace banquet, they looked at each other through layers of rain. The woman had changed so much he could barely recognize her. The smiling eyes that once shimmered like autumn waters now seemed like a stagnant pool.
Fu Shuyi had imagined their reunion countless times. She would be frightened, ashamed, unable to face him... but never like this.
Jiang Qing was tired. When the man who had grown into a leopard held a dagger to her neck, she felt only relief.
"Kill me," she said, smiling with heartbreaking beauty.
Then she would finally be free.
Instead, Fu Shuyi held her in his arms. He refused. He would keep her trapped for the rest of her life. The best way to punish someone was to make her live in agony.
And then, in an instant, he pressed his lips to hers.
"Sister-in-law, after all these years, you still make my heart race."
The initial inspiration came from the Peking opera Selling Water. The later plot came from the author's personal tastes.
The heroine is not a virgin; the hero is.
Theme: Sincerity
