The General’s Wife

Chapter 0 Mistress of the General’s Household I have always been gentle and quiet by nature, and what I excel at most is endurance. After I witnessed my father conspire with my aunt to poison my mother to death, I endured it for five years. I watched with my own eyes as my father and the aunt who had taken my mother’s place played the loving couple right under my nose, treating each other with perfect courtesy and affection. Until I turned thirteen. Then, when my aunt was on the verge of giving birth, I tricked her into going to the outskirts. With one swing of a club, I shattered her kneecaps and pushed her into the freezing pond. After that, I hid in the shadows. When my father plunged into the water in a panic to save her, I smashed his head open with one blow, sending their family of three neatly on their way to apologize to my mother. They did not know how to swim. By the time they were discovered, their bodies had rotted through. It happened to be right before my eldest sister was to enter the palace, and the marquis household found an extravagant funeral far too inauspicious. So they could only bury them in haste, under the excuse that they had slipped and drowned. As an extra reward from me, even the bones of those wronged ghosts were sealed beneath talismans. I am meticulous, leaving not a single drop out of place. But in the third year after I married into the General’s Mansion, my husband, Li Xun, brought back a local specialty from the frontier-a helpless orphan girl who had saved his life. And I knew it was time for me to act again.