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“I’ll let you see one person first.” Lin Fei said.

The woman who was brought in had been washed up, and the scratches on her body had been treated. Her long braids were combed behind her head, and her facial features were gentle and calm. From a casual look, she was just an ordinary, gentle, and quiet woman. Just a woman.

But the premise of all this was not to look at her obviously wandering and dull eyes.

Gripping the ribbon on the twisted braid in her hand, she softly hummed the song “Ruan Shiniang” The melody remained the same, and the singer was still the same, but perhaps because the listeners of the haunted temple had been transferred to the Dali Temple’s dungeon, the song seemed to lose its melancholy and instead gained a somewhat cheerful tone.

Looking at the woman humming “Ruan Shiniang” in a low voice, Jinghui and Zhuang Meiniang were startled at first. They didn’t think anything of it at first, they just felt that the woman in front of them was inexplicably kind.

When the woman was playing with the braid in her hand and humming softly, the two of them once again turned their attention to the woman in front of them. The more they looked at her, the more they felt that the kind-faced woman in front of them had an indescribable sense of familiarity, as if she was someone they had seen before.

“Cover her eyes.” Lin Fei said.

Wen Mingtang said “hmm” and raised her hand to cover the eyes of the woman who lowered her eyes and hummed so that only the lower half of the woman’s face was exposed.

The familiar feeling of deja vu suddenly came over her. Zhuang Meiniang opened her mouth and blurted out: “Sister?”

Jinghui’s face suddenly changed.

Seeing this, Wen Mingtang covered the lower half of the woman’s face without waiting for Lin Fei to speak. Her delicate eyebrows were slightly drooped. After looking at it for a moment, Jinghui turned pale and said, “She looks like… She is really like that heartless man. She looks so similar!”

With the image of a face combining the features of Madam Yanzhi and the fickle scholar suddenly appearing before her, along with Lin Fei’s earlier statement, “What if this child was swapped from a young age?” an unbelievable speculation formed in her mind.

“She…Miss…” Jinghui opened her mouth but suddenly realized that she couldn’t say anything for a moment. She just looked at the woman in front of her and shook her head instinctively, “How…how could…”

“After Madam Yanzhi married the fickle scholar, it wasn’t long before the fickle scholar became involved with a courtesan, right?” Lin Fei held the dossier detailing the Lady Rouge murders and said, “Women in the courtesan world aren’t easily moved, but once they are, they are often more obsessed than ordinary women. While the fickle scholar’s affair was just a passing fancy, that courtesan developed feelings. She repeatedly sought out his wife, wanting her to separate from the scholar.”

“Madam Yanzhi was deeply ashamed and outraged, so she demanded a divorce from the fickle scholar. But why would the scholar agree?” Lin Fei analyzed, “For the scholar, a wife like her who was skilled, engaged in a respectable profession, and wealthy, made her the ideal wife. He could have affairs with courtesans, but he would never marry one. Besides, that courtesan was stubborn, and how could she be easily placated like Madam Rouge? If he ended up with that courtesan, where would he find peace?”

“In such a situation, he simply brought up Madam Yanzhi’s pregnancy, making it impossible for them to divorce, in order to reject the courtesan,” Lin Fei continued. “Such cowardly behavior is contemptible to ordinary people, but to that courtesan, whether out of excessive stubbornness or genuine infatuation with the scholar, she actually began to resent Madam Yanzhi. I heard she even came to the door causing trouble while heavily pregnant…”

Jinghui and Zhuang Meiniang knew this.

“That’s what happened!” Jinghui murmured, “That courtesan named Qingyue came to cause trouble, but then we heard that she was ill and stopped coming.”

In fact, it could be seen from this incident that the scholar was not a good person, but Madam Yanzhi was already pregnant at that time. She probably thought that the scholar would become better after having a child, so she forgave the scholar.

“My sister was pregnant for ten months and gave birth to a girl.” When Zhuang Meiniang said this, she couldn’t help but frown, “We watched this child grow up…”

“Was the midwife who delivered your sister someone unfamiliar, brought in hastily from the streets?” Lin Fei asked Zhuang Meiniang.

At these words, the two’s faces slightly changed. After a pause, Jinghui trembled and said, “Miss was experiencing difficult labor at the time, and with the heavy snow of the New Year, we couldn’t find anyone. Coincidentally, a midwife from out of town knocked on the door seeking shelter from the snow. Upon hearing about Miss’s difficult labor, she claimed to be a midwife and stepped forward to help…”

With the heavy snow and many tasks at hand, coupled with affluent women urgently coming to collect rouge, Jinghui and Zhuang Meiniang were absent from the house for quite some time.

When she got back from her busy work, Madam Yanzhi had already gone to bed after giving birth, and the baby was a girl. Later, Madam Yanzhi didn’t say anything when she woke up. They had never thought about the child being exchanged.

“Could it be that my sister’s child had been exchanged?” Zhuang Meiniang looked at the woman humming a tune in front of her, feeling inexplicably sour in her heart.

The way this woman’s eyes were wandering, she didn’t look like a normal person at first glance.

“It has been too long, and the midwife is nowhere to be found. Madam Yanzhi and the scholar are also dead.” Lin Fei said, “But Master Jingxin, you two should know about it!”

When the two heard this, their expressions were slightly startled, and they paused. After a moment, Jinghui said: “Master Jingxin… I just… thought of him as a good person!”

Lin Fei thought for a while and said, “Generally, he was a good person!”

“After all, he saved her,” glancing at the woman humming a tune on the side, Lin Fei said, “I don’t think that the courtesan’s hatred for Madam Yanzhi would allow Madam Yanzhi’s child to live, so he should be the one who stopped the courtesan and took this child away and raise her well.”

“Not only that, when Master Jingxin was alive, did he often call Jing’an to talk about Buddhism?” Lin Fei said, “He was the first to notice the face that Jing’an was hiding. So he hoped to awaken Jing’an’s conscience through Buddhism.”

Unfortunately, this pure heart master still failed. When he was alive, he was able to suppress Jing’an for a while, but when he died, Jing’an started killing people.

Fortunately, Master Jingxin still saved a trick and didn’t teach Jing’an to become an expert. He only gave her the power to protect herself.

As for why Jingxin wanted to take care of these two children like this…

“The courtesan named Qingyue had an elder brother who, in his early years, had devoted himself to the study of Buddhism and become a monk. However, as there were no male relatives to support the family, and she lacked the skills to make a living like Madam Yanzhi, she fell into the world of courtesans. After wandering aimlessly for half his life and returning to Chang’an, he felt guilty seeing his sister fall into such circumstances. He felt he had let down his family despite being faithful to the Buddha. From then on, he began to take care of Qingyue and these two children,” Lin Fei explained.

(End of chapter)

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T/N It is in this chapter that I understood that the name of the lady was Madam Yanzhi and not Lady Rouge. I seriously thought that it was a moniker given to her since she made rouge and killed people using it. Should I go and make the changes in other chapters or leave it???