The Top Scholar's Wife

[Screenshot taken on 2022.12.7]

Zhan Mingzhu lost her mother at the age of three. For more than a decade, she had lived in constant fear under the thumb of her stepmother and a whole pack of concubines. Her greatest wish in life was to escape the Zhan family and make a living on her own.

At last, the year she came of age, her family arranged a marriage for her. Her intended was a handsome scholar famous for miles around. But he came from a farming family with little money, so marrying him would be a step down for her.

Zhan Mingzhu packed her bags and climbed into the bridal sedan without a second thought.

The year Chen Qiushan turned seventeen, he was forced to marry a woman he had never met.

He had heard that his bride was the daughter of a wealthy county merchant, raised in silk and satin and pampered like a precious jewel. Chen Qiushan took stock of his own assets: a few acres of land, a few rooms, a job as a bookkeeper, and the title of a licentiate. He was respectable and clean from head to toe, but couldn't scrape together even a single silver ingot.

The Zhan family's daughter was bound to suffer if she married him.

So after the wedding, he treated her with impeccable courtesy and never overstepped, simply waiting for the day she could no longer bear the hardship and asked him for a divorce.

But he never imagined that in their first month of marriage, his faded robe would be replaced with a new one; in their second month, his wife would open a little restaurant in town; in their sixth month, they would move into a bigger, more spacious house; and after a year, his landholdings would have doubled...

Some uncountable number of months into their marriage, he quietly tore up the divorce papers he'd long kept hidden in his sleeve.

From then on, they would share their wealth and weather every hardship together.

★ An imperial-examination and farming story

★ The male lead is a true gentleman, as warm and refined as jade

★ The female lead is great at making money

Theme: A young married couple stays together into old age