Parasol Tree's Choice: A Boy Grew Up Overnight!

The funeral was hurried and painfully simple. Your mother had no relatives, and no one came from Xie Manor. You alone knelt in the mourning hall.

In the end, your mother's name was never engraved in the Xie Ancestral Temple. She was buried on Mang Mountain outside Bianjing.

Then everything returned to normal.

Outside the small courtyard, the guards who had once followed you like shadows had vanished.

When a parent died, a legitimate son was required to mourn for three years.

Great Qi governed through Confucian teachings and filial piety. Ministers of the highest rank and common folk alike had to observe the custom.

During mourning, one could wear no bright clothing or hold any kind of banquet. One had to maintain an air of grief to express sorrow for the dead.

The mourning period was not quite three full years, however. Ritual law required only twenty-five months.

By the time the funeral ended, flowers were blooming the following spring. You were still young, so your mourning duties required only that you keep a spirit tablet in the small courtyard.

For three months after your mother's death, you did not go out. You remained in the courtyard.

Parasol Tree was eleven that year, a girl beginning to grow up. Once a little girl with dark, sun-scorched skin, she had become graceful and strikingly beautiful.

Even among Xie Manor's carefully chosen maids, few could match Parasol Tree's looks.

You recalled the autumn before your mother died, when Steward Wu had, for some reason, delayed handing out the autumn clothes.

The weather had already turned bitterly cold. Glittering frost covered the courtyard in the mornings.

The maids in every other courtyard had changed into warm autumn clothes. Only Parasol Tree still walked around in a thin garment.

Several maids in the