After Being Offered to My Ex-Husband

A beautiful woman trains her dog.

Mu Nianzhen was born into a noble family. Not long after coming of age, her family arranged a marriage for her with a suitable match.

The third son of the Cui family commanded a powerful army. He was handsome and flawless, as elegant as an orchid and a jade tree, and an ideal husband.

The marriage looked enviable to outsiders, but only Mu Nianzhen knew that her husband was proud and would never lower his head. He was also away from home most of the time, so they rarely saw each other and their affection for one another was thin.

So, after a year of marriage to the Cui family, Mu Nianzhen ignored the objections of both families’ elders and asked for a divorce herself.

When Cui Sanlang returned from leading troops abroad, all he found was a divorce letter his wife had left behind. Though deeply dissatisfied, he knew how proud she was and could not bring himself to humble himself and coax her. He simply put the letter away.

The realm was in turmoil, and trouble was brewing on all sides.

Not long after Mu Nianzhen returned to her family, they began looking for another suitable husband for her: a young, rising star, gentle and considerate, nothing like Cui Sanlang, who had no idea how to treat a woman.

At the same time, the Cui family won victory after victory and set their sights on the capital, becoming the power everyone wanted to court.

The Mu family, having backed the wrong side, saw their influence plummet. They were separated from their group while heading south and captured by someone with ulterior motives, who presented them to the Cui family with the suggestion that Cui Sanlang could do as he pleased with them.

The two families had broken ties in a very public dispute.

Everyone thought that, since the Mu family’s daughter had once cast him aside, Cui Sanlang would make her and her family suffer.

Then the whole world learned that Cui Sanlang had hung himself on the same tree twice.

**

Cui Zhaoyu remembered that he had first met Mu Nianzhen when he was seventeen.

A friend of his father’s, the newly appointed governor of the Mu family’s commandery, was ambushed by enemy forces on his way to take up his post at the border.

The spirited young man, full of righteous bravado, took just over a dozen light cavalrymen and rescued the party amid flashing blades.

Beneath a sky full of stars, he rode through the night with the lone girl he had saved from the enemy. Their horses’ hooves crossed the frost, leaving the green hills behind as they fled into a desolate desert to escape their pursuers.

As the years passed, Cui Zhaoyu forgot the feelings stirred in him by that fleeting glimpse of her in his youth.

Now she had been presented to him.

Cui Zhaoyu had said that he would never see her again in this lifetime. He would never make the same mistake twice.

He would never, ever forgive her.

But she lifted her stubborn face, and the moonlight fell upon her.

It brought him back to that night.

The sky had been clear, the bright moon shining for a thousand miles. She and he had leaned against a stone wall, their breath misting in the air as they huddled together for warmth. She had told him about the scenery of her hometown in Jiangnan.

The girl’s eyes held the moonlight of the northwest, like a spring in the tender glow of springtime.

She had been bathed in light just like this.

So that night, he held the moonlight in his hands once more.

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She said Jiangnan was enchanting, its thousand mountains as dark as painted brows, its flowers all so lovely.

But when I traveled to Jiangnan and saw its flowers, not one could compare to her.

Theme: Honesty and openness are important in a relationship.