Recalling past events, old Aunt Xing’s tears flowed uncontrollably. In her recounting, Su Qingyue and Xiao Yuchuan learned that back then, the farmer Lu Erdan married a woman named Huang and had two daughters, the elder one Lu Xingcui, and the younger Lu Xingu. Huang died during childbirth when Lu Xingu was born, and Lu Erdan immediately remarried a woman named Lady Mo. Lady Mo bore three sons and naturally disliked the sisters Xingu and Xingcui, considering them loss-making goods. The Lv Family had several acres of fields, and when Lady Mo entered the house, Xingcui was ten years old. Despite her young age, she was good at work and very diligent. Thɪs chapter is updatᴇd by 𝘯𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘭·𝔣𝔦𝔯𝔢·𝗇𝗲𝘵 As Lady Mo’s three sons grew, Lady Mo had long harbored the idea of selling Xingu and Xingcui, yet she was reluctant to part with Xingcui’s ability to work. This delay dragged on until Xingcui was twenty years old, when she was sold as a concubine to a sixty-year-old man. Once Xingcui was sold, Lady Mo then sold ten-year-old Xingu into the Shen Family as a maid. From then on, the sisters Xingcui and Xingu were separated. Xingu was fortunate to become the personal maid of the Shen Family’s young lady Shen Yun, staying by her side, and had the opportunity to learn words and recognize characters. As she grew older, she discovered that young Lady Shen Yun was a woman with a heart of a serpent and scorpion, competing for favor within the Shen Family among sisters unscrupulously. To survive, Xingu also helped the young lady commit many evil deeds. When Xingu reached the age of innocence, she met a craftsman named Xiao Changfu who was working as an assistant at a furniture shop. According to Xiao Changfu, his father was an unnamed and unfamed wandering beggar who later discovered an abandoned earthen house in Hetun Village, a hundred miles away in the suburbs of the capital, and settled there. At that time, his father was over forty and had never taken a wife, without any name or surname, others just called him beggar, beggar. The widow living next door, Mei Zi, pitied him, saying how could a person be without a name or surname. Everyone knew that the Xiao Family in the capital was a hundred-year-old prominent family with immense power and influence. Mei Zi then said to bask in the glory of the prominent family, you can take the surname Xiao. Thus, Xiao Changfu’s father, an unnamed beggar, took the surname Xiao, never having studied nor come up with any culturally rich name, and simply being called Xiao Youliang, meaning just wanting food to eat, just wanting a full meal. Widow Mei Zi was unattractive and had returned to her maternal home after her husband’s death, being disliked at her maternal home, Xiao Youliang showed her much care, and with their two families living next door, gradually the two became husband and wife. After getting married, they had two sons, the eldest named Xiao Changfu, and the second named Xiao Changshou. Xiao Youliang and Mei Zi, as husband and wife, worked very hard raising pigs and chickens and saved money to buy a few acres of fields, later sending Xiao Changfu to a school for a few years of study. Later, Xiao Changfu felt the tuition was too expensive and stopped studying on his own, going to the capital to work as an assistant at a carpenter shop. One time, Xingu followed young Lady Shen Yun to the shop to pick out furniture, and it was then that Changfu met Xingu. The two of them took a liking to each other at first sight, and in secret, after some encounters, they started a relationship. Changfu was very clever, and learned anything extremely quickly; he learned the craftsmanship of several masters at the carpenter shop regardless of whether the others taught him or not, observing in secret, mastering it all over the years. Not only that, Changfu was very good at carving on wooden products, and he had a sudden idea that if he could carve designs on the human body, wouldn’t it be even more beautiful? Changfu didn’t pursue carpentry; he spent money to learn painting from a non-prominent painter. Renowned painters were too expensive to hire, non-prominent masters were cheaper to learn from. Changfu was highly talented and still learned very quickly, soon painting even better than his master. He figured out a way to make money, obtaining pigments, first painting on the human body, and then using needles dipped in the pigment to tattoo onto the person’s skin.