The onlooking commoners were in an uproar.
Was this for real?
Of course it was.
The bailiffs dragged Yu Zi away with one on either side of her, and gave her ten strokes of the rod. When they brought her back, she could barely stand and fell to her knees. Her face was as white as snow, her lips trembled with pain, and her breathing had gone uneven. Beads of sweat glistened on her nostrils.
Trembling, she pulled the petition she had prepared from her robes, staring fixedly as the bamboo scroll was handed to Lord Shen.
Then it was slowly unfurled—
And read through carefully, word by word.
In just a few short breaths, he had read through an entire woman's life.
The woman who had given birth to her, raised her, and taught her.
She was also a "cautionary tale" whose fate matched Yu Zi's, a fellow sufferer. If her mother hadn't protected and taught her with all her might, Yu Zi's future would have followed the same course. She could almost picture that future, one whose end was visible from the start.
Being looked down upon, humiliated, beaten, and cursed.
Every day, she would wake to endless farmwork and housework, and a "husband" who would beat her at the drop of a hat. Perhaps she would have more than one "husband"; perhaps her "husbands" would be brothers, fathers and sons, or grandfathers and grandsons. She would bear children endlessly, only for them to keep dying young.
Poverty, violence, despair, and helplessness would fill every corner of those long years, staining her unknown life in the foulest colors. These festering sores would squeeze out every last scrap of room she had to breathe.
Only complete numbness or death could free her.
It was a future that made her