The Merchant’s Daughter

Tang Wanyue was the most beautiful woman in the capital. Though born into a merchant family, she was as lovely as a flower, with a soft figure and a sweet voice. One word from her was enough to make the young gentlemen of the entire capital weak in the knees. For more than a decade, Tang Wanyue had indeed enjoyed smooth sailing, until one day she dreamed that she was not her parents' child at all. Her so-called parents were only coveting the family fortune in her hands, and planned to give her to Master Liu, a lecherous and vicious man in the eastern part of the city. In the dead of winter, she would curl up in the drafty City God Temple and die miserably, while the man she loved, now the crown prince, second only to The Outcast, would leave with another woman in his arms without sparing her a glance. When she woke from the nightmare, half a year remained before her coming-of-age ceremony. The three members of her hypocritical family were still fawning over her to her face, while secretly grinding their teeth. Faced with the desperate future awaiting her, the once delicate beauty, who could barely lift a finger, gritted her teeth and decisively cast aside her jeweled hairpins and fine dresses, picking up an abacus and account books instead. Only her own money could be trusted!

One day, Mu Siqing passed by Tang Wanyue's Brocade Boutique. The pampered young lady who had once possessed nothing but beauty had become the wealthiest proprietress in the capital. Leaning against the windowsill, her jade-like wrists resting before her, she gazed out at the capital's splendor with bright, beautiful eyes. As lovely as a peony in Luoyang, she no longer looked at him with the infatuation and adoration she once had. The pain of being rejected in marriage proposals again and again suddenly surged through him.