Chapter 72: That Year

Lu Meixi remembers the only time she gave birth in her life. It was the coldest time of winter. The wind and snow were blowing hard outside, but she was sweating all over in the house from the pain and struggle.

The first child is always more difficult, but the baby was finally born smoothly. It was a beautiful girl with a small nose and a small mouth. She cried for a few times and then stopped. She looked at her with half-open eyes and fell asleep beside her.

The midwife picked up the child and asked her mother-in-law, "Do you want to wash it?"

My mother-in-law looked unhappy and said, "Wash it off."

Her parents-in-law took the child out. After she delivered the placenta, she leaned tiredly on the pillow and fell asleep, thinking that the child was born covered in blood and needed to be washed.

In a state of half-sleep and half-wakefulness, she heard the urgent cry of a child outside. Her parents-in-law did not try to comfort her, and the child's cries only grew farther and farther away.

She suddenly woke up in shock, and then she remembered that babies are usually washed only after three days because they are afraid of getting cold. What's the point of washing a newborn baby?

She grabbed her husband who came in and asked him anxiously, "Where is my child?"

The husband said with an irritated look, "Wash it off. Just rest assured and take care of yourself. We will have a boy next time."

She couldn't believe it and asked, "This is our child, don't you want it?"

This thing is unlucky. Here, if the first child is a girl, we usually have to deal with it. He didn't care, saying, "Life is tough, raising a child is hard enough. Daughters are not your roots, and they can't work. They will always belong to someone else's family, and you'll have to pay them a dowry for nothing. What's the point of raising them?"

She was horrified and grabbed the man in front of her, begging him to take the child back.

But under her pleading gaze, he seemed to feel guilty, sat dejectedly at the head of the bed, and said, "If you really want it, we have two sons, and the family has labor force who can work, so we can have another daughter to raise."

Tears welled up in her eyes, but before she could answer, she heard the distant sound of a child crying outside suddenly stop, as if someone had pinched off a gourd vine, and it came to an abrupt end.

She seemed to understand what had happened, jumped out of bed like crazy, grabbed a piece of clothing and rushed to the door.

It was freezing cold outside, and when her body, which had just given birth, was exposed to the cold wind, she felt as if even her bones were frozen.

Her husband called her from behind, but she was like a possessed person, rushing towards the place where the child's voice finally stopped in the wind and snow.

It was the small river that flowed behind the door. On this cold night, a thin layer of ice had formed on it. A baby wrapped in coarse cloth was floating on the gap in the ice on the river surface.

The child inside was facing the bottom of the water, moving and struggling, refusing to sink.

Her parents-in-law stood by the river to stop her, but she pushed them away desperately, threw herself into the water, waded through the broken ice, and struggled towards her child.

The river water was icy cold, piercing her body like steel needles. She was numb and only felt the blood gushing out of her body. The lochia after childbirth dyed the lake red, and her parents-in-law and husband on the shore were so scared that they turned pale, but they did not dare to stop this crazy woman.

The baby in the swaddling clothes was stuck on the ice. She waded to the child step by step and pulled her out of the icy water.

The child, who was only roughly wrapped in coarse cloth, had long been deprived of his breath by the cold. The dim moonlight reflected on the ice surface, making the child's face turn purple.

The child she gave birth to after ten months of pregnancy, the pair of black eyes that once opened to look at her and then at the world, have been closed forever and will never open again.

The blood from her lower body and the tears from her eyes flowed down together, and the warm milk from her chest soaked her clothes, but her child didn't get a single bite.

After she was taken back, she developed a fever and lay dying in bed for a long time. After she left the confinement period, she survived, but she also had a chronic illness. Her menstrual period was intermittent, and it was obvious that she was not doing well.

When she returned to her parents' home, she secretly went to see a doctor. The doctor shook his head and said that she was afraid that she would not be able to have children in this life. If she got pregnant again, it would be like falling on the coffin lid and she would die.

She stole her husband's mercury and secretly took small amounts regularly to avoid pregnancy. She knew it was poisonous and could kill her, but the thought of having a child—or the very real possibility of having another daughter—was worse than death.

Her pregnancy remained quiet, yet the neighbor's second daughter-in-law envied her. After all, she had already given birth to three daughters. The first had been washed away naturally, and the second and third had been plagued twice, but no sons. With her fourth pregnancy, she was heavily pregnant, yet she had to wash clothes, cook, pound flour, and collect firewood amidst beatings and scolding from her in-laws. The exhaustion caused her to go into labor prematurely, and her in-laws had long since stopped her from giving birth in bed to avoid soiling the bedding. Instead, she was forced to give birth in the cowshed, squatting and holding onto the horizontal bar above.

Lu Meixi's last impression of her was watching her give birth through the wall, while she looked up at her in the cowshed, with disheveled hair and a frighteningly pale face.

Her lips moved and she was saying something to her, but because she was exhausted and her throat was dry, she couldn't hear what she was saying through the wall.

She felt she would never know, because the daughter-in-law next door died during childbirth, and the boy the family had finally welcomed with such joy also died soon after due to premature birth.

The family next door sighed and cursed for several days, trying to scrape together money to marry another wife. This time, they told the matchmaker that they must find someone who was good at giving birth, after all, the family had been badly hurt by the previous wife.

The dead woman was hastily buried in the back mountain. When she occasionally passed by, she would help pull out the weeds on the grave at first, but later she stopped because the weeds grew more and more and soon became a deserted grave.

Autumn had arrived, with crimson leaves and yellow blossoms, and everything bearing fruit. She went to pick wild fruit with a basket in hand, and saw clusters of wild jujubes dangling from her grave. She had picked most of the fruit, and as she gazed at the grave, which had no tombstone, blood suddenly gushed from her lower body, soaking her torso.

But she seemed unaware and stood blankly at the grave for a long time, crying uncontrollably.

She finally remembered what the woman who gave birth in the cowshed said to her that day.

She said, Meixi, I am about to die, and you will be too...

But she didn't want to die, she wanted to live. But the road before her was dark and deep, and she didn't know how to go on.

Until her cousin He Pu was about to get married, to a prince from a royal palace, someone their peasant family had never expected.

After receiving the news, she couldn't believe it, but after returning to her parents' home and asking around, she found out that everything was true.

Prince Changhua, a soldier from a frontier army and of foreign descent, was not known to observe Han etiquette. His consort was a shepherdess from Longxi. He fell in love with her and spent nine nights singing love songs at her home, causing her to be unable to marry anyone else. She reluctantly married a then-roguish soldier.

Now the prince is more reliable than his father. It was He Pu who accidentally rescued the prince who was seriously injured in an ambush and took good care of him. As a result, the two fell in love with each other and got married.

For an ordinary girl to marry into a royal palace, the family was naturally very busy. Lü Meixi helped with the preparations at her parents' home, assisted by the ten-year-old Lü Wulin. Though young, he was clever, though even then, his greedy nature had already begun to show. He stared at the red gold plum blossom bracelet on her hand again and again, muttering that he had worked hard to help, but the Changhua Palace had only given his parents silver and nothing else.

How could she have imagined at that time that because Lu Wulin was greedy for the gold in her hand, she would have to go to great lengths to clean up the mess from twenty years ago twenty years later.

Yes, she was indeed too young at that time and had no experience in looking ahead and behind.

She saw the way Yang Haiping's eyes lit up when he saw her and knew she was the eldest sister-in-law of the Prince of Changhua. Even though he knew she was already married, he still told her that at her age, even if she was divorced, he wouldn't mind. After all, he was old, and after his wife died, he had many concubines and maids at home, and he already had children.

But this was great news for her. After she got married, she wouldn't have to have any more children. She just needed to maintain a decent appearance. They would both get what they wanted and it would benefit both of them.

The only problem was, she already had a husband.