Otherworldly Merchant

I was pensive while listening to them. All their babbling was nonsense to me as it wasn’t related to the things that I wanted to know. Who had cast this golden bowl? Since when was it handed down in their family? Who was the first owner of this bowl?

When I asked them these questions, they shook their heads. They didn’t know anything about this, either. However, there was a book in their house that had been passed through generations along with the bowl and the chopsticks. Perhaps that book could help us out.

Since they were illiterate, the old couple didn’t know what was written in it. I was immediately interested in the book, so I asked them to show it to me. They agreed that the book could help somehow, so they handed it over.

The book looked very ancient and was badly damaged. There were burn marks, and the water had blurred some of the words. However, we could still see the title, which was ‘Ming Dynasty Unofficial History.’

The book was rough to the touch. I flipped the cover page and saw that there was an introduction. I skimmed through it and found that this ‘Ming Dynasty Unofficial History’ mainly recorded the legendary stories from the late Yuan dynasty and the early Ming dynasty. Most of the stories were about real people and places, which gave the book high credibility. Soon, I got to the story of the golden bowl!

In the late Yuan dynasty, there was a Princess called Agai who enjoyed the favor of the Emperor.

After Zhu Yuanzhang’s attack on the Yuan’s capital city, his soldiers captured Princess Agai.

When Zhu Yuanzhang—the future Emperor Hongwu—saw her godlike beauty, he decided to make her his concubine.

However, Princess Agai refused, preferring to die than accept living with the hateful man who had destroyed her country.

Zhu Yuanzhang was enraged by her refusal, but he didn’t want to kill her. He sent her to a remote area where she was forced to marry a local ruffian.

Since she didn’t want to live with that barbaric man, either, the ruffian locked her in a dark, damp cellar and left her there to starve.

As Princess Agai only had the Yuan dynasty in her heart, and she was ready to die for her country. As the ruffian didn’t give her anything to eat, she could only silently sit in the darkness.

Snakes and mice would come and go in the dark cellar. Princess Agai became weaker and weaker and eventually contracted a strange disease, moldy spots grew all over her body.

Since Princess Agai’s condition was worsening, that ruffian couldn’t wait anymore and decided to rape her while she was still beautiful. Having been humiliated to this degree, Princess Agai just wanted to die. However, the man kept pestering her, giving her no chance to kill herself.

After a while, Princess Agai became pregnant. The local ruffian finally changed his attitude toward her. However, the food he fed her was still terrible.

The beautiful Princess Again had become less than a shadow of her former self after all that she had endured. After nine months, Princess Agai gave birth to a chubby and cute son. The local ruffian also really liked this son of his and took care of him every day. However, he ignored Princess Agai and didn’t prepare any food for her.

Princess Agai had just given birth and didn’t have the strength to cook. She got weaker and weaker as time passed by and was on the verge of death.

When she watched her baby boy, she felt more and more insulted. She was from the royal blood of the Yuan dynasty, how had she sunk this low? To have ended with such a base and despicable common ruffian...

With a heart full of hatred, Princess Agai came up with a retaliating plan.

She dragged her exhausted body out to buy wine and rice. She cooked some dishes and told the ruffian that she wanted to celebrate the birth of the baby.

When the ruffian saw the wine, he started drinking with Agai.

As she was from Inner Mongolia, Princess Agai could hold her liquor very well. Eventually, she got the barbarian drunk. After that, she minced the newborn baby, cooked him, and ate him.

When the ruffian woke up the next morning, the first thing he did was to check on his newborn son.

However, he only found Princess Agai with a glowing face on the bed. The baby was nowhere to be seen. He only spotted some dabs of blood on the bed sheet.

He bellowed, “Where’s my son?!”

Princess Agai snorted and patted her stomach. “Here.”

The ruffian was scared and shocked. He collapsed on the ground, and it took him quite a long time to recover.

Before he could get a hold of himself, the ax in Princess Agai’s hands had hacked his head into two halves, with his brain fluids splashing onto the ground.

In that era, murdering one’s husband was a very serious crime. Officials sent some soldiers to capture Princess Agai and prepared to put her to death. Princess Agai didn’t want to bear more insults. She bit her tongue off and killed herself before the executioner could take her clothes off.

Princess Agai had never forgotten the resentment of losing her country, and she considered her virginity her most prized treasure. Her story had affected many people, and eventually, it made its way to Zhu Yuanzhang’s ears. Pitying the poor woman, he built a chastity arch for her.

I felt the hair on my nape rise after I finished reading the story. An old proverb said that, although cruel, a tiger would not eat its cubs…

So, how could Princess Agai do that to her own son? I found it unbelievable.

Still, I admired her for how hard she’d tried to protect her chastity.

Chastity was seen as something useless in modern society. As our living standards got better, we started to forget about the concept of chastity.

Nowadays, some women got themselves a new boyfriend every day, and they would just need someone to buy them a handbag to sleep with them.

Young girls would become pseudo-models for a little pocket money and later turn into toys for the rich, eventually getting discarded.

Still, they would abuse honest men and ask them for a house and a car before they got married. Some women would even pretend to be virgins while they were not...

Anyway, I eventually returned the golden bowl and the chopsticks to the old couple, and they couldn't thank us enough for that. The story had come to an end.

Unfortunately, several days later, I heard that Lei Long had committed suicide by jumping off a building. I couldn't discover why he’d killed himself, but Princess Agai’s words resurfaced in my mind. “I’d offered to marry him to help him overcome his deadly fate...”