Mu Qiangwei was the youngest princess of the Kingdom of Tianzhu, though her status as a princess was practically equivalent to that of a palace maid. She had five older sisters and four older brothers. Her mother was merely a concubine, and she herself was the product of her father's drunken escapades.
After giving birth to her, her mother was sentenced to death, supposedly because her mother seduced her father, causing him to stay at Jianjia Palace instead of visiting other concubines.
But I, who had just been born, was spared. If I had known I would suffer so much later, I would have preferred to be executed along with my mother.
After my mother was given death, my father only left me a maid and a nanny. The nanny was an old woman in the palace who knew best how to be opportunistic and curry favor with the powerful while stepping on the weak.
Although the palace provides monthly stipends for the princes and princesses, she has never seen them. In fact, she has to work with the nanny and Xiao Xiu to get enough to eat. Moreover, she and Xiao Xiu have to wash many of the palace clothes themselves; otherwise, they still wouldn't have enough to eat.
It's alright on weekdays, but it's more unbearable in winter. They don't wear much clothing, and they have to wash their winter clothes in the yard. The water in winter is bone-chillingly cold.
She and Xiaoxiu had been working since they could remember, even in winter. So every winter, their hands would get frostbite and sometimes even bleed. If the blood from their hands got on their clothes while washing them, they would be beaten. Therefore, they were extremely careful when washing clothes, sometimes even wrapping their hands in multiple layers of gauze. This way, even if their hands bled, the blood wouldn't seep in too quickly.
This situation continued until I was about ten years old. One day, I was hanging clothes to dry in Jianjia Palace when the Crown Prince saw me. After asking me, he learned that I was his sister. So he ordered the eunuchs around him to replace all the servants in Jianjia Palace.
The Crown Prince's actions allowed Xiao Xiu and me to enjoy a year of good life. However, after a year, the people of Jianjia Palace, seeing that the Crown Prince didn't care about me as his younger sister at all, stopped serving me as diligently as before.
Moreover, other people in the palace, knowing that the Crown Prince had been taking good care of me, would often come to cause trouble, so my life seemed to have returned to what it was before, or even worse.
His Highness the Crown Prince, perhaps because he was busy with affairs, forgot about me, his younger sister, after that act of kindness.
From childhood to adulthood, I don't know how many times I've fainted. Each time, it was Xiao Xiu who took care of me, begging people to see a doctor and get medicine for me. My dear father, the Emperor, probably never even knew I existed. The other people in the palace basically just watched and laughed.
And so, I lived in constant fear and trepidation in the palace until I turned sixteen, until I heard that I was to be sent to the Youlan Kingdom for a political marriage. Mu Xinyan went to the Qinglong Kingdom for a political marriage, and Mu Xuewei was sentenced to death by the Crown Prince. She had also inquired about the situation of her other sisters, and none of them wanted to go for a political marriage. So her opportunity had come.
She must try her best to secure the opportunity for a political marriage; perhaps that would give her a glimmer of hope. Otherwise, she feared she wouldn't live long in the Azure Kingdom.
However, when she went to see His Highness the Crown Prince, he readily agreed, which made Mu Qiangwei overjoyed. She was finally going to leave this ruthless palace.
Ever since the Crown Prince agreed to her marriage, she had been treated to a life of luxury in the palace, and she could hardly believe it until she got into the bridal sedan chair.
She knew what a marriage alliance meant: it meant bearing the burden of peace between two nations, and having her every move monitored. But so what? As long as she could survive, what did the surveillance matter?
After arriving in the Azure Kingdom, she was glad that she had finally taken the courage to take this step. Although she had never met the Seventh Prince, judging from the small courtyard arranged for her, the Seventh Prince should not be the kind of person to mistreat others. Even for the sake of diplomatic relations between the two countries, he would not treat her too badly.
After Mu Qiangwei settled in, she felt uneasy for the first few days because although she had come here for a political marriage, she was still someone else's daughter-in-law, and an ugly daughter-in-law eventually had to meet her in-laws.
She didn't know what kind of person the Seventh Prince's mother was, whether she would make things difficult for her, a foreign princess, or simply not acknowledge her existence.
But after waiting and waiting for ten days, no one came to see her or ask her to go to the palace to pay her respects. Only then did Mu Qiangwei feel relieved, thinking that the Youlan Kingdom probably only regarded her as a hostage.
But this is good too. She and Xiaoxiu can live peacefully in the courtyard, undisturbed and self-sufficient.
Although the Seventh Prince arranged for him to live in a small courtyard, he did not skimp on his food and clothing, and tried his best to satisfy his every desire.
So, Mu Qiangwei began to till the soil, remove pests, plant vegetables and flowers, and raise chickens and ducks in her small courtyard.
The two even asked the guards in the mansion to help them find some wood and build a pergola, so that they could sit in the pergola to cool off and take a nap on summer afternoons.
But peaceful days always pass quickly, and this kind of life ended a year after Mu Qiangwei came to Youlan Kingdom.
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