Blood ran over her red lips, making them all the more vivid. No matter how much pain followed, Bian Qiang never uttered a sound.
In truth, she had been exceedingly stubborn as a child, never willing to curry favor with anyone.
Her stepfather slapped her across the face again and again, yet she still refused to give him so much as a better expression. It was not that she did not fear pain; she simply did not know how to smile.
Her mother, cursed as "a woman any man could have," kept remarrying and being cast aside. With her little face stiff and blank, Bian Qiang followed her from one short-lived "home" to the next.
Until her mother died, felled by a filthy disease in the flower-and-willow lanes. Before dying, she prepared a packet of arsenic and said she would take Bian Qiang with her—that wherever they went, she would never abandon her.
She did not drink that bowl of medicine. She walked out of that little room alone. She walked for a long time—until her stomach rumbled like thunder, until she could no longer find a home—and then, all at once, she learned how to smile.
"Big brother, you're such a good person. I'm so hungry..."
"Big sister, your eyes are so beautiful. Are you still going to eat these things?"
"Granny, you look so much like my grandmother. I miss her so much. She always bought me tasty things..."
That was how she grew up.
Beautiful flowers adorned beautiful trees; beautiful words adorned this beautiful world. And she, too, became an ever more beautiful woman.
She understood far too well how to please others. She could always tell what people wanted, and then seize what she herself wanted.
And so she saw clearly Zhongshan Weisun's sorrow... and hatred.