DIDKNWGEWAFEM

Chapter 10: Birthday Of A Lightweight

The Mid-Autumn Festival passed, and in the blink of an eye, Zhongli Luo’s fifteenth birthday was fast approaching. Rong Jiahui’s parents thought of how to do it properly; it was her first birthday since she came to Marquis Zhenguo’s residence.

Zhongli Luo wants to turn it down, as her status – in both sentiment and logic – should not be valued like this, but Rong Chen and Mrs. Yu’s overbearing attitudes leave others no room to talk, so that door was closed to her.

The helpless Zhongli Luo thinks to go find Rong Jiahui to save the day in a roundabout way, only to find that her seldomly-shut door was also not accepting visitors.

Apparently, she has no choice but to suffer this grace. She just comforts herself that she’s the only who who’d know that it’d be the year of the hairpin initiation [1], which would be a big, lively, and noisy scene to handle.

Rong Jiahui didn’t miss Zhongli Luo on purpose, though; she’s actually preparing a gift. This person is likely to not be present to have a birthday here the next year, so it’s only natural for her to prepare for this one nice and proper-like, but she didn’t have many things she could do. After going back and forth about it, she came up with a good idea: embroidery!

Though her needlework isn’t bad, she isn’t too fond of the repetitiveness. In her past life, she added in a few of her own stitches to her embroidered wedding dress only after embroideresses had embroidered almost all of it, and her eyes are quickly boiling blind over this now. Ugh, who let her have only this relatively-competent skill? Her painting is something only her dearly-loved papa can subconsciously give her a few words of praise about, as even her teacher gets a headache looking at it, and everything else could just be bought. It really wasn’t intentional, but now she can only suffer the bitterness and strain.

On the night of the twelfth day of the ninth month, after their family had a day of festive birthday-partying, they each presented their own gifts.

Their family has few members, and they aren’t very close to the other blood relations from the paternal side, so apart from the addition of the parents, only Rong Jiahui had something ready.

When her gift was displayed, those few people present all jumped high in severe fright.

Mrs. Yu stared for a long time, and said disbelievingly, “Jiahui, this table screen… you embroidered it?”

Rong Jiahui nodded with her pair of swollen eyelids. “It took me half a month to rush it out. There was too little time, so it’s kind of crude. Please don’t blame me, Brother Zhongli.”

Zhongli Luo saw that it really was a not-very-refined, but still pretty good-looking table screen, and felt moved. “This… is for me?” She said, incredulous.

Jiahui smiled. “I’m stupid and can’t do anything. Only needleworking is something I’ve learned pretty well. In the future, maybe I could make you… a double-sided embroidered piece.”

Dangerous! Very dangerous! She almost let slip the phrase ‘make you a set of clothes’. She didn’t mean anything unusual by it, but those words can’t be said arbitrarily. Her embroidering a screen or a little bauble is harmless. If she embroiders some kind of sachet or makes whatever clothes, it wouldn’t be socially appropriate. In her past life, she also made clothes for her husband and her in-laws. She was just really lazy with the difficult embroidery of the wedding dress; all the clothes and shoes sent to her husband’s family were made by her hands, though she’d never seen them wearing any.

Rong Chen looked at what his own precious daughter had made, and his heart actually ached a bit. “You have such good craftsmanship, yet I’ve never seen you give Mom and Dad anything embroidered.”