Cultivation Retirement Plan (BL)

31. Family Gossip

a/n: I forgot to mention this, but the reason Mo Yixuan and Nan Wuyue didn't catch on to Mengmeng's true gender in their conversation with Lady Bai (Ch. 27) is because she (她) and he (他) sound exactly the same in Chinese ("ta"). You can see I tried to hint at it by italicizing the "she" in Lady Bai's dialogue, though!

—

The former Su Clan Head Su Pinglu (蘇枰鹿) had two official wives. The first was named Jing Xiali (靖霞麗) and birthed Su Shiyu, but withered away due to illness in her later years. It was her handmaiden Yan'er (燕儿) that caught the attention of the grieving husband and became his concubine. A year into their marriage, she gave birth to Su Shimeng.

The then 50-year old Su Clan Head was so delighted by his second issue that he promptly made Yan'er the official wife in his beloved's place. Since she had no surname, he granted her his own, thus making her Lady Su in both name and title. By then Su Shiyu was nearing 20 and ready to take over as the future head of the Su Clan. His little brother was too young to contest him for the title, so Su Shiyu simply treated this as one of his father's whims in old age.

And yet a series of tragedies struck shortly after that. Although Su Shimeng was a boy, he was often sickly and weak. Two years after his birth, Su Pinglu himself succumbed to illness and died, forcing the young Su Shiyu to take on the family name. With a weak little brother and a former-servant stepmother who had no head for business, the pressure on the Su family's jade trade was immense. It was a perilous time between their business rivals as many coveted the Su Clan's special jade trade with the Middle Realm cultivation sects. Somehow, the jade at Stonecut Valley was simply purer than anywhere else, sometimes even carrying traces of qi.

For the sake of protecting his family assets, Su Shiyu dealt with countless troubles and nearly lost his life once after tumbling down a cliff. The Su retainers found him half-dead at the base a week later and brought him back with tears in their eyes: the accumulated stress and fall had turned half of Su Shiyu's hair white before his age. Around this time rumors began to spread that Lady Su was to blame for all the misfortune, that she had poisoned her mistress Lady Jing to death to take her place, then did the same with Su Pinglu before setting her murderous sights on Su Shiyu so Su Shimeng could replace him.

After all, she was only in service to Lady Jing three years before the latter died, then married two years to Su Pinglu before he passed, then as Su Shiyu's stepmother when he fell so unluckily down that cliff. When Su Shiyu didn't deny the rumors right away, they intensified to the point that Lady Su all but withdrew to Su Manor indefinitely to avoid public censure.

Eventually, the young Su Clan Head weathered the storm and stabilized the business by the end of the year while still nursing his injuries. By the time Su Shimeng turned three, his older brother had even found a partner-in-arms to continue the family line: the poor yet extremely capable Bai Tingyao, whom he valued for her insight and business acumen. She took a special fancy to Su Shimeng and tracked down a wandering Daoist to divine his fate, thus giving him his girl's name. The rest was history.

—

In the present day, Mo Yixuan furrowed his brows. "The ghost resembled Old Madam Su?" he clarified.

"They're not identical," Su Shimeng admitted, "but she looks like—like mother when she was younger, I don't know. They have the same eyes."

"Sir Su, have you ever seen the ghost in person?" Mo Yixuan asked him next.

"I didn't even realize it had a human form," Su Shiyu frowned. "It's always been invisible when it comes to me—I don't know if the Old Madam's seen anything either."

"What are the origins of this ghost?" Nan Wuyue asked. "When did it first start appearing?"

Su Shimeng had been born almost 20 years ago. Su Shiyu had his first encounter with the ghost girl three years after that.