“What else can I mean if not that Sun Guihua?” Zhou Xiaocao was also angry when she had to remember about that person.
As soon as Madam Yang heard what her daughter said, she directly rolled up her sleeves and growled, “That Chen Xiuxiu is still so shameless and dares to bully the daughter of I, Yang Xiaomei?! See if I won’t tear her to pieces myself! Husband, let’s go over to the Sun’s place at once, or else won’t they think that the daughters of the Zhou family are easy to bully?”
Zhou Dazhu also had a heavy expression when he heard his daughter’s words, and it only got heavier when he saw his wife’s reaction. Eventually, he pulled his wife back and said, “What’s your hurry? It’s not like they will run away.”
Because of their daughter’s words, the couple were instantly ready to go to the other person’s door and start to fight. But, for her part, Su Tang didn’t care too much about other people’s affairs, that was until she heard a familiar name from Madam Yang’s mouth.
‘Chen Xiuxiu?’ Su Tang recognized the name, but she couldn’t remember where from, so she asked the orange cat who was off to the side.
Zhou Xiaocao saw that her parents were already agitatedly leaving, so she hurriedly thanked Su Tang one last time and gave a hasty farewell before following along behind them. Of course, Su Tang was planning to go to town as usual, so she slowly walked out behind them with Su Nuo.
When the orange cat heard Su Tang’s question, he explained, ‘Well, about Chen Xiuxiu…’
Su Tang never expected that a person she had randomly helped yesterday actually turned out to be involved with Madam Wu’s ‘good sister’ Chen Xiuxiu. It seemed that Sujia Village was really a small place.
But Su Tang didn’t think about it any further. Anyway, it all had nothing to do with her, so she just took her brother and headed off to Qinghe Town together to continue their studies.
At the same time while Zhou Dazhu and his wife were taking their daughter over to get even with Chen Xiuxiu, Chen Xiuxiu herself had actually just wandered outside to go looking for Madam Wu again.
Because she had failed to properly frame Su Tang last time, Madam Wu had ended up being beaten until she felt she had no face left to speak of. Because of that she had been carefully holding herself back at home ever since then, and it was only during the autumn festival that she finally started to go out and cautiously start greeting people again.
Since Madam Wu and Madam Zhao had both been beaten in such a high profile way that time, Su Yonggui also felt that he had lost a lot of face, so he had especially warned the whole family that if such a humiliating thing happened again, he would definitely send a letter of divorce to the culprit.
Madam Wu knew that, although Su Yonggui acted very afraid of Madam Zhao while they were at home, he was a person who loved saving face the most and he might really do just as he threatened if things got too out of hand. Because of that, Madam Wu had been behaving herself properly and not daring to make any sort of moves.
However, Su Sanshou’s wife, Madam Zhang, who had previously accepted benefits from Madam Wu to help her get rid of those two brats back then, had recently been greedily pestering her for even more benefits and, because of that, Madam Wu had been busy every day recently and didn’t have any time to care about Su Tang or her brother. In short, there were many factors that had contributed to this recent period of relative quiet.
However, Chen Xiuxiu had come over several times to talk to Madam Wu about how Su Tang would go into town every day to try to stir things up, but Madam Wu had never paid much attention to it. After all, Qinghe Town was the closest town to Sujia Village and many of the villagers had to go there every day to make their living. The fact that Su Tang was going there too wasn’t actually strange at all.
But then Chen Xiuxiu came over today, she finally told Madam Wu something different. “Guess who I saw when I went into town yesterday?”
Madam Wu was busy making clothes for her youngest son, so when she heard Chen Xiuxiu’s gossipy tone, she rolled her eyes and said, “Who did you see outside, your lover? Or some handsome prince?”
“Bah, you think everyone is as shameless as you are!” When Chen Xiuxiu heard her friend teasing her, she scolded her briefly before continuing in a serious voice, “You can’t talk nonsense, alright?”
When she saw the guilty look on the other woman’s face, Madam Wu just snorted. No one else knew, but she was actually very clear about this matter. Chen Xiuxiu had been running to town a lot recently, and she had probably even found herself a lover if all the good things that had been appearing on her body* were anything to judge by. It seemed that poor Sun Tiezhu still didn’t know that he had a green prairie growing on his head even until now.
Actually, Madam Wu looked down on Chen Xiuxiu quite a bit. She and Chen Xiuxiu were originally girls from the same village, just Chen Xiuxiu was two years older than her. Back then, Sun Tiezhu had always delivered goods to their village and Chen Xiuxiu took a fancy to him one day and then schemed a way to marry him. Eight months later, she gave birth to Sun Tiezhu’s eldest daughter, Sun Guihua.
And that Sun Guihua was only 11 years old this year, but she already knew how to chase men, so many people looked down on her.
*‘good things appearing on her body’ as in like jewelry and stuff I assume
tl note: I’m not 100% sure but I think the author is implying that Chen Xiuxiu was pregnant before marriage with that last paragraph? Most times in Chinese novels pregnancy is said to last ten months, so that ‘eight months later’ really sticks out to me. I dunno, just speculation.
Note about my recent hiatus:
Long story short, Centinni stopped paying me as agreed. I told them I would stop posting until the paid me, they never did, so I left, and now here we are. The long delay was, first of all, because I was hoping for the best and just waiting for the Centinni admins to get back to me and then when it became apparent that wasn’t happening I had to work up the motivation to come back here and whip this old site of mine back into usable shape. I’m still only part of the way there unfortunately, but I’ll keep working on it. Anyway, I’ll probably so a mass release sometime in the next couple days to clear up some of this backlog I’ve accumulated and then go back to the usual Tues-Fri schedule.
Thank you for the chapter!