Shen Hanzhu was thirteen when her father passed away.
With a marriage contract in hand, she left the countryside, still naïve and bewildered, and went to the capital to seek shelter with Xu Ke, the Crown Prince's tutor and a deputy grand secretary.
After three years of mourning, Xu Ke married Hanzhu as his second wife, as promised.
Everyone felt sorry that the deputy grand secretary had married an ignorant country girl.
Xu Ke was sixteen years older than Hanzhu. He was refined and gentle, like the moon shining in a cloudless sky.
He personally taught her to read and write, as well as the four arts and proper etiquette. His care and favor were the only light in the youth of timid, insecure Hanzhu.
To become worthy of him, she diligently studied etiquette, music, chess, calligraphy, and painting, even though she hated the constraints of propriety.
She endured her mother-in-law's disdain and her sisters-in-law's bullying, swallowing every grievance. In front of him, she tried to rein in her nature and be a quiet, gracious, dutiful wife.
In the five years since she married into the Xu family, her husband had been warm on the outside but cold within, unable to forget the woman he once loved. She had never entered his heart, and no one in the vast Xu household had ever thought highly of her.
Overwork and misery made her ill, and a simple bout of wind-cold took her life. As she lay dying, Hanzhu was consumed by regret and pain.
When she opened her eyes, she was back at sixteen, in the year she had just married Xu Ke.
With rage reddening her eyes, Hanzhu kicked Sun, her younger brother-in-law's wife, off the raised platform for insulting her.
In this life, she would never again be that sensible, sweet, gentle, considerate, virtuous, yet cowardly and useless Shen Hanzhu!
What good had any of that done? She was going to live comfortably and freely!
-
After his wife gave birth to their first child, Xu Ke considered that she was still young and planned to take an anti-pregnancy decoction.
But by chance, he discovered that Hanzhu had taken one before he could.
And that wasn't all. She was no longer as warm toward him as before. For several nights running, she offered one excuse after another, gentle in tone but firm in her refusal:
"I'm not feeling well tonight, my husband. You should sleep in the study."
"I have my period."
"I'm tired. I don't want to."
Later, she even seemed to be thinking of divorcing him and returning to the countryside to make a life of her own...
Xu Ke stared at himself in the mirror, his expression complicated.
Could she think he was too old?
*Marriage first, love later; sixteen-year age gap
*The male lead has a biological daughter, so readers who prefer spotless romantic histories, beware
Theme: Don't let your heart be enslaved by your circumstances.
