Chapter 177 Past Events
The word "Miss" startled Xie San Niang.
Her eyes were bloodshot as she looked at Xie Shan with a mocking smile.
"Father, why did you do this? Don't you know that this fire has destroyed most of the Xie family's fortune?"
Xie Boyu was heartbroken and didn't know whether he should comfort Xie San Niang first or console his father.
"Of course he knows."
Xie Sanniang gasped for breath, her voice shrill: "You've been in the Xie family for so many years, just waiting for this day. If I had known, I shouldn't have been soft-hearted back then."
"You're not being soft-hearted, you're just unwilling to accept it."
Xie Shan walked to the chair, lifted the hem, and sat down.
He raised his hand and touched the rosewood chair beneath him, his expression calm as if lost in thought.
Xie Boyu asked, "Why is that?"
Xie Shan looked up: "Why, don't you know?"
"But so many years have passed, why can't we let go?"
Xie Boyu didn't understand. His gaze swept back and forth between the two of them, and he felt an unbearable heartache.
Upon hearing this, Xie San Niang's eyes flashed with a hint of sadness.
Yes, she doesn't understand either. So many years have passed, why can't she let go?
"lay down?"
Xie Shan lowered his eyes: "How easy is that?"
After saying this, Xie Sanniang couldn't help but sneer: "Don't act like you're so innocent. You want me to die with my eyes open, not because I, Xie Sanniang, have committed so many evils."
"But it's you... you Xie Shan, a cowardly, shameless, cowardly coward who dares to do but not to act."
Upon hearing this, Xie Shan, who had been fiddling with his prayer beads, snapped the string, scattering the beads all over the ground.
He looked at Xie Sanniang with a sinister gaze, as if trying to see right through her.
"Bring me a soft chair. I'm going to have a serious talk with him today. All these years, who owes me, you or me?"
The people in the room looked at each other in bewilderment. It was Granny Li who instructed her maid to bring over a soft chair.
Xie San Niang sat down and looked at Xie Shan, but her eyes flickered for a moment.
In truth, her relationship with Xie Shan was a tragic one.
In earlier years, the Xie family did not have its current status. In Suzhou Prefecture, it was just a cloth shop that could barely be called a name.
Fortunately, the Xie family was hardworking, and her parents and siblings were all very capable, which gradually improved the Xie family's cloth shop business.
But man proposes, God disposes; a sudden epidemic struck Guangyuan County and claimed many lives.
Her parents, brother and sister-in-law, and even her sister all died in that plague.
The entire burden of the Xie family fell on her shoulders.
That year, yellow paper was everywhere on the streets, and white banners hung in front of every house.
She cried as she wove hemp and cut mourning clothes at night, and sold them at the shop during the day. Several times she wished she could go with her family, but when she saw the stacks of mourning clothes on the table, she climbed down from the hemp rope and continued weaving and cutting clothes.
Day after day, the hemp rope hanging from the roof beam remained untied and remained there for a long time.
The low chair beneath her feet was covered in a thick layer of shoe prints, but ultimately...
She pulled through.
At that time, she was just an innocent young girl in her late teens.
Later, the government found imperial physicians, and they finally survived the ordeal.
She survived that period, but for a woman like her to make a name for herself in Suzhou, a city teeming with merchants, was as difficult as plucking the moon with her bare hands.
She had no parents and no one to rely on. The hardship of supporting herself on her own still makes her feel powerless when she thinks about it now.
In those years, any rogue or scoundrel on the street dared to come to your door with two pounds of cakes to propose marriage, speaking as if it were a stroke of good fortune, and she should immediately prostrate herself on the ground and kowtow to express her gratitude.
Thinking of all this, Xie San Niang's hand trembled.
For a full decade, the threshold of the Xie family's gate was lowered by half an inch due to the constant visits of matchmakers.
Such harassment wasn't a big deal, but it really bothered her.
Later, she hired a well-known local bodyguard to protect her for six months, which finally drove away the annoying mosquitoes and flies that wanted to suck her blood.
What bothered her even more was the exclusion she faced from other cloth and dye workshops in Suzhou.
Those ridiculous men, fearing that such a large market would be taken over by this weak woman, kept trying to trip her up.
Her experience of going out to purchase raw materials and dealing with customers was significantly more difficult than that of others.
When she went to Songjiang to buy cotton, she talked with the cotton supplier for half a month. When the delivery date finally arrived, the supplier came empty-handed and left her with only one sentence: "Miss Xie, doing business is a man's business. How can a woman like you understand it?"
"It's not that I look down on you, but take my advice: you should sell the shop as soon as possible and get married in peace."
"This business deal is best handled by your husband; that's the only way it can be successfully negotiated."
"Otherwise, if word gets out that I'm doing business with you, people will laugh at me for bullying a woman."
Half a month's time, plus the round trip, wasted the entire amount.
She was not discouraged. If she couldn't buy the goods in nearby places, she would send people to distant places.
With such a vast territory, she refused to believe she couldn't buy the raw materials.
Finally, she found a supplier and expanded the Xie family's business.
One year, she received a large order from Sichuan. She won it by standing out from many merchants with the Xie family's exquisite weaving skills.
She was very happy.
That evening, she got very drunk. Looking up, she saw the hemp rope hanging from the beam, covered with a thick layer of ash.
She cried and laughed, sitting on the ground and rolling around while hugging the wine jar.
Finally, fueled by her drunkenness and joy, she climbed to a high place and took the hemp rope down.
At that time, she thought that the road ahead would be smooth sailing.
Three months later, however, the merchants from Sichuan said that she had failed to deliver the goods on time. Not only did she not earn a single copper coin from this order, but she also lost several thousand taels of silver.
She was indignant. She had personally watched people load the goods into the ship piece by piece, so how could the goods not be delivered on time?
She went to the canal transport office to find the person in charge of transporting the goods, only to discover that it was the Suzhou Chamber of Commerce, who had colluded with the canal guild to intercept her goods halfway, preventing her from delivering them to the merchants in time...
She accepted the loss.
For the goods that followed, she never used the canal transport again until now.
Later, she took on a job in Dongshan, Yuzhou. She led the caravan alone, hired bodyguards, and carried a piece of plain cloth as she went.
The suffering she endured was known only to Heaven, Earth, and herself.
In those years, she was neither Xie San Niang nor the female owner of the Xie family's cloth shop.
She was a piece of fat meat in everyone's eyes, a fat sheep that anyone could come and take a bite out of.
They bullied her because she had no father or brothers to support her, and no clan to protect her.
Yet Xie San Niang still managed to keep the Xie family afloat, step by step, wading through thorns and knives.
Even now, thinking about those hardships still makes her heart ache.
One day, during a severe drought in the north, she met Xie Shan, who had been begging all the way there.
Oh, back then, Xieshan wasn't called Xieshan; people just randomly called it Shuzi (黍子).
He had come all the way from the north, eating grass roots, and fainted from hunger in front of the Xie family's cloth shop.
When Xie San Niang saw this, she asked the shop assistant to cook him a bowl of rice porridge and fed it to him.
She wasn't particularly kind; it just so happened that it was the anniversary of her mother's death...
She thought that she should do a good deed every day to accumulate good karma for her mother.
Later, when Xie Shan woke up, he saw her and knelt down on the ground with a thud.
He said, "Miss Xie, I am grateful for your life-saving grace. I wonder if your shop is short of staff? I can do anything, rough work, heavy work, anything hard, tiring, or dirty."
"I have plenty of strength, and I don't need any wages from you, Miss. Just give me something to eat so I can support my wife at home..."
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