Eccentric, sickly, catlike darling sister x gentle, smiling, saintly motherly man
In the twelfth year of Tiansheng, the Marquis of Zhenbei’s household welcomed a baby girl with an uncanny beauty.
Two moles beneath her eyes, red as cinnabar, made her look just like a lynx spirit reborn.
Terrified, the marquis abandoned her in the wilderness, but the young heir secretly found her and brought her back.
And so Shen Youqing was raised by her older brother.
She had no room of her own. The small space in her brother’s room, screened off by a folding screen and gauze curtains, was her entire world. The girl, as beautiful and otherworldly as a spirit, kept her eyes fixed on her brother.
She waited for him to eat with her, to teach her what he had learned during the day, and to sneak her out to play.
They had to be quiet. They couldn’t let their cold, heartless father find out, or let their mother’s remorseful, helpless gaze follow them. They had to escape the servants’ pitying, wary whispers and go to the flowerbeds, the maple trees, behind the rockery, or beneath the table curtain in the ancestral hall.
In the vast Shen estate, only her older brother, Shen Chuji, was gentle, pure, and unsullied. Shen Youqing’s eyes had no room for anyone else.
Late at night, Shen Youqing wrapped her arms around Shen Chuji like vines, burrowing deeper into his embrace and pleading again and again, “Brother, take Youqing away from here. Take me away from the Shen family.”
The heir, who had always upheld filial piety and brotherly duty and considered inheriting the title of Marquis of Zhenbei his responsibility, closed his eyes in pain, then finally agreed. “All right.”
*
Shen Chuji gave Youqing her name.
The marquis’s household refused to add Shen Youqing to the family register, so Shen Chuji told himself he would raise his sister himself. She would bear his surname, not the marquis’s.
He taught her to speak, word by word, and taught her to write, stroke by stroke. As he watched her grow, her features becoming more and more bewitchingly beautiful, Shen Chuji knew his sister was not the lynx spirit everyone feared she was.
He had touched the two cinnabar marks beneath her eyes himself.
Her pale eyes reminded him of molten gold in the setting sun. They were so beautiful they sometimes left him lost in thought, but they were certainly no demon’s eyes.
Those eyes followed him everywhere and reflected his image only because his sister saw him as her one and only, and couldn’t bear to be parted from him.
He bore the responsibility for his sister’s future. As he had wished, he took her away and opened up a wider world for her
After that, Shen Youqing’s eyes no longer belonged to him alone.
He should have been happy for her.
“Brother!”
Hearing her call from nearby, Shen Chuji hesitated, then dismissed the servant who was arranging his long hair and embraced his running sister, his ink-black hair loose around his shoulders.
He remembered that his sister had said she liked him with his hair down. It made him look especially gentle.
His fingertips brushed the smudge on his sister’s cheek. He was still being a good brother, after all. “Who did Youqing play with today?”
Theme: Escape the mire and run toward a better life
