Chapter 979 Stirring into Evil (4)
By the time he had finished the wedding ceremony and received the news to pursue her, Fangcao had already been raped by a villain on her way back home from the city and, unable to bear the humiliation, she threw herself into the moat. When her body was fished out, it was unrecognizable, becoming the nightmare of his lifetime.
Back then, he wished he could have died alongside Fangcao. It was only his grandmother’s threat of death that kept him from throwing himself into the moat, but his heart had already died there with Fangcao.
Cui Pingan, like a walking corpse, clung to Fangcao’s body without rest or sleep until her corpse decayed beyond recognition. He, too, from starvation, had fainted, and it was only then that the Cui family’s servants buried Fangcao and brought him back to the Cui family.
When Cui Pingan awoke, he seemed to have lost his soul, spending every day by Fangcao’s grave, never returning home. He forgot about the Cui family, his grandmother, and even his cousin, who was his newlywed wife.
His new wife couldn’t bear having her husband’s heart occupied by another, and knowing too well that the living cannot compete with the dead, she left behind a divorce paper and returned to her maternal home, never to set foot in the Cui family again.
However, since she had been married, although she had not consummated the marriage, she was still subject to unbearable gossip and could no longer find a family of equal social standing. In the end, she had no choice but to marry a widower.
The widower was a third-rank Military Counselor who appeared decent on the outside but was unbearably brutal. He would beat people at the slightest disagreement. His first wife, pregnant for six months, died from his beatings over a trivial matter. Because the incident was well concealed, it did not become public knowledge, and others simply believed, as he claimed, that his wife had died from complications during an early childbirth.
Cui Pingan’s cousin’s ruined reputation became the reason the Military Counselor abused her; she was mistreated to death within half a year of her marriage. Although Cui Pingan’s maternal grandfather discovered the truth behind his granddaughter’s death and had the Military Counselor executed, the dead could not be brought back to life.
Because of this incident, Old Lady Cui’s maternal family severed all ties with her, and even when Old Lady Cui died of depression, her family did not visit to see her off on her final journey.
Not many years after Old Lady Cui’s death, Cui Pingan died in melancholy. When he died, not yet thirty, he had the white hair and withered face of a sixty-year-old, leaving behind countless sighs from the world.