Chapter 31: Seeking Revenge Part 1

Wang Ya wiped away the tears blurring her vision. There were several pages of letter paper, and her grandma had thoughtfully numbered the corners to avoid mixing them up—nine pages in total.

“Yaya, when you read this letter, it will be time to tell you the whole truth!”

Wang Ya’s heart skipped a beat as she continued reading, her hands trembling.

“‘Yu Qin’ is my alias. My real name is ‘Feng Yuqin.’”

Wang Ya gasped in shock upon seeing that line, stunned on the spot. Although she had long suspected that her grandma was the Legitimate Eldest Daughter of the Zhongyin Feng Family, she had been unwilling to believe it. Now, seeing her grandma’s handwriting, there was no room for doubt.

Wang Ya kept reading. Knowing her grandma’s true identity—and having heard of the Zhongyin Feng Family before—the later contents didn’t surprise her as much.

The letter stated that her grandma, Feng Yuqin, was the seventy-fourth generation inheritor of the Zhongyin Feng Family and its Legitimate Eldest Daughter. A traitor had emerged from the Feng Family, allying with the Righteous and Evil Paths. On August 15, 1960—the day of the Zhongyin Feng Family’s ancestral worship—they stormed the family’s residence. It was a brutal slaughter. The invaders from the Righteous and Evil Paths were nearly wiped out, with fewer than one in ten surviving, but the Zhongyin Feng Family was massacred entirely—except for Feng Yuqin, who broke open the Yellow Springs and escaped through the Underworld Courts.

When Feng Yuqin returned to the mortal world from the Underworld Courts using a Feng Family treasure, she was no longer in Yunnan but in Sichuan, and half a year had already passed. Dragging her severely injured body, she traveled by night for half a month. In a place called Zhouzi Town, she found a family where everyone had died, leaving only a girl in her twenties, emaciated to skin and bones, lying on the bed. That night, the girl died. Feng Yuqin buried her in secret at midnight, then used the girl’s identity to stay with the family and recover for half a month. With no food left in the house, she had to leave. The family was surnamed Yu, which sounded the same as the “Yu” in her name, so she adopted the alias Yu Qin.

The story of how her grandma married Wang Ya’s second grandfather matched what Wang Ya already knew. While fleeing, her grandma had collapsed by the roadside from her injuries and starvation. Captain Wang—her own grandfather—had saved her, and she married the second son of the Wang Family. In the letter, her grandma explained that her grandfather’s mental disability stemmed from having his soul scattered in fright years earlier, leaving it incomplete.

After Feng Yuqin married the second son of the Wang Family, Captain Wang specially built them three adobe brick rooms and let the couple live separately. Old Madam Wang felt that such a flower-like beauty was wasted on her second son, so she never let her do chores, always caring for her and treating her illnesses. Her only hope was that her grandma would recover soon and bear a child for the second son.

Her grandma wrote that marrying her grandfather wasn’t so bad. In that chaotic era, dragging a severely wounded body, only by marrying him could she survive. If she had died then, the Feng Family Inheritance would have ended. Her grandfather, being simple-minded, was easy to manage. Even when he occasionally lost control, locking the door and giving him a beating with a stick would settle him down. Life with him was straightforward and worry-free, allowing her to focus on healing. Otherwise, with her nearly half-crippled body, she couldn’t have recovered enough to bear a child, regain her abilities, and even have the energy to teach a disciple. But she hadn’t anticipated that traversing the Underworld Courts with heavy injuries would cause dense Yin Qi to accumulate in her body, resulting in her father being innately drawn to yin and mentally impaired—a fool unfit to inherit the Feng Family mantle.

The Feng Family had an ancestral precept: the Inheritance passed only to legitimate descendants, not concubines’ children or outsiders. Seeing the family at its end, her grandma had hesitated to break the precept by taking a disciple or adopting someone. Then, events took a turn. At 3 a.m. on the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month in 19□□, a Family Heirloom of the Feng Family shattered. At that exact moment, the eldest granddaughter of the Wang Family’s main branch was born.

Her grandma rushed to the room of the Wang Family’s eldest daughter-in-law, only to see Wang Chengzhi holding the newborn upside down, about to drown her in a chamber pot. Her grandma persuaded him for a long time, finally offering two fattened pigs and agreeing to have the child adopted under the name of nineteen-year-old Wang Cheng’an, the second household’s son.

Her grandma told her that the Feng Family’s orthodox Inheritance consisted of three parts. Her birth at the perfect time fulfilled the first, binding her fate to her grandma and the Feng Family. The second was the book, of which Wang Ya had learned only half. The third was the scroll—the Yin Spirit Scroll, containing the treasures of the Feng Family’s thousand-year Inheritance. She repeatedly warned Wang Ya not to use the scroll lightly. The final three pages detailed its functions and usage.