Carefree Life of a Humble Scholar

Liang Kingdom.

Xinchou City, Chicken Crow Alley.

Xu Mo, who had just arrived from another world, gazed at the millet porridge as thin as water and could not help but shake his head, a look of despondency clouding his face.

“Husband, won’t you drink your porridge? Is it because there’s no meat in it?” came a gentle woman’s voice to his ear.

He jolted to his senses and saw before him a stunning beauty, perhaps eighteen years old, tall and delicately lovely. Though her clothes were plain and worn, and her face bore no trace of cosmetics, to Xu Mo she seemed like a fairy stepped out of a painting. Yet, she was painfully thin, her hair tinged with yellow—a clear sign of malnutrition.

This was Chen Miaoyi, wife to Xu Mo’s predecessor, famed as the great beauty of Xinchou County. She was never meant to marry him, but calamity had struck the Chen family, driving them to hastily marry off their daughter in hopes of sparing her from disaster. At that time, no one in Xinchou dared to take her hand—no one, that is, save for the stubborn man Xu Mo now inhabited.

Not long after the wedding, the crisis threatening the Chen family suddenly resolved itself. Her parents immediately ordered their daughter to divorce and follow them to the capital. But Chen Miaoyi refused, firmly believing that husband and wife should grow old together and share both hardship and joy. She quarreled bitterly with her parents, who, in their anger, left for the capital and declared they had no daughter by her name.

Just yesterday, Xu Mo’s predecessor fell ill and colla