Crescent Moon Entwined with Branches

Jiang Ling was the daughter of a deceased wife of a minor seventh-rank official in Luoyang.

At the age of six, after witnessing her birth mother set herself on fire, Jiang Ling lost the ability to speak and became mute.

Despite her breathtaking beauty, no respectable family would take a crippled mute as a wife.

In the late autumn of her sixteenth year, a fifth-rank old eunuch wanted to take her as a concubine, and her father happily sent her off.

But the old eunuch was unlucky. He was assassinated and killed that very day, and Jiang Ling was sent back the way she had come.

As a result, she gained a reputation for bringing misfortune, and people were even less interested in her.

In February of the following year, her father sent her to a country estate, clearly intending to abandon her.

Bandits sprang out to rob the road. Hearing their lewd talk about taking her by force, Jiang Ling quietly pulled the silver hairpin from her hair, ready to end her own life.

Just as the long hairpin pressed against her throat, the carriage door was suddenly pushed open. It was not one of the bandits, but a handsome young man with a cool, proud air.

He took the hairpin from Jiang Ling, put it back in her hair, and said lazily,

"Why go so far as to kill yourself?"

Jiang Ling thought they had merely met by chance, so she put off thanking him.

One day, after the spring rain stopped, she sat by the window, lost in thought. Along with the fresh scent of earth came a spring apricot blossom, still beaded with raindrops.

She looked up and saw the young man's handsome, refined face.

"I picked it on the hill next door. One tael of silver per branch."

Jiang Ling silently shook her head. She was poor and had no money to buy the blossom.

The young man paused for a few moments, then changed his mind.

"I suppose I can give it to you."

That day, it was not just a spring apricot blossom that caught her eye.

Reading Guide

A sweet romance

Slow burn

A gentle, fragile beauty with aphasia vs. a cool, proud, secretly innocent killer who acts like a tough guy

Theme: Live toward the light