Guanshan Muyu

chapter 53

The girls flocked over to pick up Shaobo, who, with her face still wet with tears, shouted quickly:

“Do not come over! Everyone out! Close the door, no one is allowed to come near!”

When everyone retreated as ordered and the door was closed tightly, Xia Xun picked her up and sat her down on the couch.

Shaobo clutched his arm, too excited to control herself.

Xia Xun looked around and said with relief:

“It seems you are doing well. The decorations in this room are even more opulent than in the former Xia Mansion, and those people have been disciplined by you so well that no one dares to disobey a single word from you.”

Then he carefully examined her face.

“And you have grown so beautiful. You’ve become a real beauty.”

Shaobo, with tears in her eyes, raised her hand and gently brushed Xia Xun’s face, then spread his left hand for a closer look.

“Little Master has not changed… is still so thin, and his hand… has not grown… well,” she said, the tears that had just stopped rolling down her face again. “But, Little Master, everyone said you died in exile, how did you… how did you survive?”

Xia Xun told her as briefly as he could:

“I, together with my big brother Xia Wen, got out by faking our deaths, changed our names and lived in Lingnan all these years. And you? How come you became an embroideress?”

Shaobo dried her tears with a handkerchief and said:

“This slave almost died back then. But I was determined to avenge Little Master and crawled out from the grave.”

Seven years ago, Shaobo, like most of the servants in Xia Mansion, after a month of house arrest in Xia Mansion was sent to prison.

They, a group of underlings without status, naturally could not be sent to the imperial prison of the Judicial Review Court, and men and women together, all went down to the capital city prison.

The annual funding for the city prison from the imperial court was not much, and now dozens of prisoners were imprisoned at once. The head of the prison calculated the costs; just to feed these people would swallow a large sum of money.

He deliberated for a short while and simply cut off the food for these people. If they starved to death in prison, anyway, they were just some guilty slaves, who cared about their lives.

In this way, Shaobo, who did not have a drop of water for several days, fainted from hunger in the cell.

The head of the prison thought she was dead. She was put in a cart together with the rest of the people who died and thrown to the mass grave outside the city, buried under a heap of gravel.

Fortunately, that night, heavy rain fell from the sky and drops of water trickled between the gravel, hitting Shaobo’s face.

Shaobo was so thirsty that she licked the rain on her lips instinctively.

In the pouring rain, she regained consciousness several times and fainted several times again, but one thought in her mind kept her from dying:

—She wanted to kill Qi Yan and avenge Xia Xun.

In prison, she heard people say that Xia Xun had died halfway, not even reaching exile, and the one whose fault it was could only be Qi Yan.

Hatred gave her strength; she took advantage of the little bit of rain that fell on her lips to finally come to her senses.