The master had asked Shopkeeper Yan to come and persuade Miss Zhao not to take her own life, but looking at the way Shopkeeper Yan was trying to persuade, it was as if he feared Miss Zhao wasn’t dying quickly enough.
Just as the little maid was at a loss about what to do, Shopkeeper Yan turned back with a silent smile and glanced at her, saying, "Leave this to me, go and make a new batch of medicine for Miss Zhao."
The little maid respectfully curtsied and withdrew, her heart chilling with dread, fearing that by the time the medicine was ready, the person would be gone. Heaven and Earth as her witnesses, the sun and the moon her proof, she was not to blame.
The little maid ran from the Asura Field as if on wings, hoping to escape blame when the master or the steward sought accountability.
At that moment, Zhao Xiaomiao, lying on the bed, seemed to have caught her breath, "I won’t drink it, so give up hope."
"Let me guess why you’re seeking death?" Shopkeeper Yan continued to speak his own mind regardless.
"If I’m not mistaken, it’s because of chastity?"
"For a woman, if chastity is lost, she should prove her innocence with death or atone with death, right?"
Zhao Xiaomiao clenched her fists and said nothing.
"But who decided that?" Shopkeeper Yan asked in return.
"There’s no need to speak, I understand all that, but I can’t get over it myself," Zhao Xiaomiao howled in despair.
"Then why didn’t you take your own life immediately at the beginning? To my knowledge, the bandits occupied Zhao Family Village for over half a month. If you had died then, you could have been reborn by now, right?"
"That’s because I wanted revenge!" Tears fell from Zhao Xiaomiao like a torrential downpour.
"I wanted to avenge my father, to get revenge for the people of Zhao Family Village who died wronged! So I humbled myself, I pretended, I complied! But later, everything went into chaos, they killed the bandits but refused to take me with them, letting me once again encounter Black Spider! As a frail woman, enduring humiliation already once was enough. The second time, my heart turned to ash, is that not allowed?"
Shopkeeper Yan raised an eyebrow at her, "Just because someone saved you, should they have to take you along? What kind of reasoning is this? There are too many pitiable people in the world, how many can they take with each one they save? As far as I’m aware, they killed the bandits in the first half of the night, and you had half a night before Black Spider came—what were you doing during that time instead of running away?"
Zhao Xiaomiao, with a gloomy face, retorted word for word, "Where could a frail woman like me run to? Isn’t it dangerous outside too?"
For once, there was a serious glint in Shopkeeper Yan’s eyes, "In this chaotic world, who will pity you for being a frail woman? If you want to survive, you must not see yourself as a woman. Look at how many are separated from their spouses and children outside, look at those refugees. To survive, they’ll even scramble for human flesh, let alone excrement.
Aren’t they frail women too?
This saying itself is a lament of the weak."
"I’m not afraid to tell you, even if Fox and his lot hadn’t come to kill the bandits, Black Spider would have still come to kill the traitors.
You would have been found all the same, and what was destined to happen would happen. You might even have been treated as a traitor’s woman and suffered even worse.
You originally had a chance to escape, but you missed your chance for salvation because as a ’frail woman’ you thought it would be more dangerous to run out into the darkness."
Shopkeeper Yan did not sugarcoat his words, placing before Zhao Xiaomiao the very thing she least wanted to face, without any mercy.
Indeed, Zhao Xiaomiao was dragged back to the memories of that day, resisting and screaming at the top of her lungs.
In the kitchen, the maid could hear the piercing screams as she fried the medicine, causing her scalp to tingle.
It’s over, it’s over. To be screaming like that, she’s not far from her last breath.