Chapter 235: Wang Chunmei Returns
“If you don’t care to act like a member of this family, you can pack your bags and get a divorce the moment that child is born.”
Gu Tinghao’s final words struck Wang Chunmei like a physical blow. Her face drained of color, and she felt so dizzy she almost fainted on the spot.
The Gu family was a prominent clan that everyone in their circle despaired to marry into. Back then, countless envious eyes had followed her when she secured Gu Tinghao.
“Tinghao, I was wrong,” she sobbed, panic overtaking her. “I don’t want a divorce. I swear, I will never sneak another cent back to my parents’ house as long as I live!”
Desperate to prove her sincerity, she lunged forward and tightly clutched his hands, her voice trembling. “I’ll go home with you right now. I don’t want to stay with the Wang family for another second!”
“No need. I didn’t come here to take you back.” Gu Tinghao smoothly pulled his hands from her grasp, his tone freezing cold. “Since you were so eager to retreat to your maiden home, you might as well stay here. I’m sure my parents-in-law won’t mind harboring their own daughter, will they?”
Gu Tinghao shifted his gaze to Father and Mother Wang. Mother Wang opened her mouth to snap a retort, but Father Wang immediately shut her down with a lethal glare.
Plastering on a thoroughly awkward, ingratiating smile, Father Wang nodded rapidly to signal his compliance. “Of course, of course! How could we ever think of our own daughter as a burden?”
He was banking on the long game. No matter how fierce the current storm, his daughter was still legally a daughter-in-law of the Gu line. The high command would inevitably forgive her sooner or later.
Wang Chunmei stood frozen. She genuinely hadn’t anticipated that Gu Tinghao would abandon her here, and she was entirely at a loss. Without casting a single backward glance, Gu Tinghao turned and strode out of the courtyard. No matter how hard she tried to waddle after him, she couldn’t match his pace.
The exact second the gate clicked shut behind him, Mother Wang’s pleasant facade vanished. She whirled around and began shrieking at her daughter.
“You let him retrieve every single cent of that capital without leaving us a penny! You can spit out every single scrap of food you’ve consumed under my roof this past month!”
Only at this moment did the cold reality shatter Wang Chunmei’s illusions, reminding her exactly how brutal and transactional her mother had been before her marriage.
Mother Wang fiercely favored her sons over her daughters. Before Wang Chunmei secured Gu Tinghao, her childhood had been a relentless cycle of verbal abuse and physical discipline. It was only after she successfully married into the prominent Gu clan that her mother began showering her with artificial concern, completely intoxicating her vanity.
But she had been so thoroughly blinded by the flattery that she forgot a fundamental truth: without the backing of the Gu family, she was absolutely nothing.
Petrified of being thrown out onto the streets, Wang Chunmei didn’t dare flee the Wang estate, leaving her trapped under her parents’ roof.
But life in the Wang household quickly transformed into a living hell. The premium fine grains were immediately locked away, and despite her heavily protruding belly, she was forced to bend over the stoves to cook and clean for the entire extended family.
When Wang Chunmei tried to rebel, her mother launched into a violent rage, striking her so harshly she was nearly thrown into a premature labor.
She bitterly regretted ever swallowing her mother’s poisonous advice. Now, trapped in a domestic nightmare, she was entirely paralyzed, completely unsure of how to salvage her life.
Before long, the eighth day of the Lunar New Year arrived—the designated date for Sheng Wanyan’s scheduled prenatal check-up.
Mother Gu and Grandma Gu were so intensely eager to witness the milestone that they insisted on tagging along. Gu Tingxiao took the wheel, his vehicle smoothly chauffeuring the three most cherished women of the household toward the military hospital.
When the ultrasound technician initiated the scan, Grandma Gu and Mother Gu crowded around the monitor, staring at the tiny gray-and-black pixel smudge that had grown slightly since their last assessment. They couldn’t tear their eyes away.
“Oh, look at that precious angel,” Grandma Gu cooed, her face melting into pure adoration as she praised the formless smudge.
Mother Gu nodded in rapturous agreement, loudly declaring that her darling future grandchild was undeniably the most breathtaking, magnificent baby in the entire universe.
Sheng Wanyan: “…”
She finally understood exactly where Gu Tingxiao had inherited his genetic code. Their shared talent for looking at a tiny, indistinct dot on a screen and launching into selective blindness was structurally identical.
The moment they rumbled back into the driveway, Old Master Gu and Father Gu abandoned their usual stern, military decorum, crowding around the printed scan to obsess over the little smudge.
Two days after the medical excursion, a massive commotion erupted just outside the Gu family’s front gates.
It turned out Wang Chunmei had finally broken. The physical labor and emotional torment inflicted by her maiden family had pushed her body to the brink of a miscarriage, forcing an emergency hospitalization.
Father Wang had grown completely terrified. He knew that while the Gu family was punishing his branch, Wang Chunmei was still carrying a direct descendant of their bloodline. If that baby was lost under the Wang family’s watch, the old general would ruthlessly crush them.
The moment she was stabilized in the ward, Father Wang dispatched an urgent notification to Gu Tinghao, begging him to retrieve his wife. Faced with a medical emergency regarding his future child, Gu Tinghao had no choice but to drive out and bring Wang Chunmei back to the compound.
When Wang Chunmei stepped across the threshold of the main villa, Mother Gu maintained a thoroughly grim, silent expression, refusing to offer her a single word of welcome. But this time, Wang Chunmei had finally tasted the alternative; she recognized the immense luxury and security of the Gu household. She no longer dared to exhibit a single shred of her old, willful arrogance, keeping her head lowered as she tried to appear as compliant as possible.
“Look how skeletal you’ve become,” Mother Gu noted, her eyes narrowing as she evaluated her. “Did your precious Wang family refuse to grant you a single bowl of rice?”
Wang Chunmei looked unrecognizable compared to the smug woman who had proudly traveled to her parents’ home weeks ago. Back then, her face had been flush with joy; now, her skin was a deathly, translucent pale, and her cheeks were entirely hollow. It was blindingly obvious she had been subjected to severe domestic abuse.
Hearing her mother-in-law’s piercing words, Wang Chunmei didn’t dare mount a defense. She merely sat on the edge of the sofa, her eyes welling with thick tears. “Mom… I know I was wrong. I truly know my mistake now.”
“Do not address me as your mother,” Mother Gu countered ruthlessly, cutting her off. “I have absolutely zero desire to claim a daughter-in-law like you.”
She rejected her outright. In her entire life navigating elite political circles, she had never encountered a woman so fundamentally stupid. To claim such a short-sighted creature as her son’s wife was an embarrassment to her status.
Wang Chunmei bit her lower lip until it lost all color, not daring to utter a single syllable. She understood the family’s fury was total.
“If it weren’t for the fact that you are currently sheltering a child of our line in your womb, I would have thrown you out of this compound long ago,” Mother Gu stated flatly.
Mother Gu was far from a cruel or vindictive mother-in-law. While she naturally treasured the expansion of their family line, she had always been highly protective of her daughter-in-laws’ emotional well-being. But her current execution left no room for ambiguity. She had initially written Wang Chunmei off as merely uneducated and foolish. But the exact second the woman attempted to discard Gu Jingjing and manipulate Gu Tingxiao into absorbing her, Mother Gu realized she wasn’t just foolish—she was fundamentally, dangerously selfish.
Desperate for an ally, Wang Chunmei cast a pleading, tearful look toward the eldest sister-in-law and Sheng Wanyan, praying one of them would intervene and speak up on her behalf.
But Liang Zhenna was entirely occupied, gently massaging Grandma Gu’s legs to soothe her chronic rheumatic winter pain, keeping her eyes firmly lowered, refusing to grant her a single glance.
Meanwhile, Wanyan sat comfortably on the adjacent sofa surrounded by the grandchildren, contentedly munching on fresh fruit Gu Tingxiao had meticulously sliced for her. She watched the domestic theater unfold with detached amusement, her lips sealed.
Finding no salvation among the women, Wang Chunmei turned a thoroughly aggrieved, desperate look onto her husband. But Gu Tinghao didn’t move to shield her as he had in the past. He stood rigidly against the wall, his expression blank as he permitted his mother to execute the family discipline without interruption.
“Tinghao, take your wife back to your quarters,” Mother Gu commanded, waving her hand in exhaustion. “Do not permit her to linger here and poison everyone’s holiday mood.”
She paused, her voice hardening. “From this milestone forward, unless a formal national holiday demands your presence, you are to report to this villa alone with the children. She is barred from crossing my threshold.”
Mother Gu refused to endure the sight of her. Since the pregnancy legally restricted them from casting her out entirely, she would simply exile the woman from their daily lives.
Wang Chunmei’s lips trembled with suppressed indignation, but she possessed enough remaining clarity to know that opening her mouth right now would only accelerate her destruction. Furthermore, Old Master Gu’s lethal decree had already stripped the Wang family of countless political privileges, a reality her father had been frantically screaming into her ears during her hospitalization.
She subtly cut her eyes toward the head of the room, only to instantly recoil in terror upon encountering the ferocious, hardened gaze of the old general. How could she possibly muster the audacity to beg Old Master Gu to rescind his order?
As Gu Tinghao stepped forward to steer her out, Wang Chunmei reached down, intending to gather Gu Jingjing to bring her back to their apartment.
Predictably, the little girl flinched, swiftly scrambling to hide her small frame behind Sheng Wanyan’s legs. She intensely disliked the prospect of returning to her mother’s care; she desperately wanted to remain within the sanctuary of her grandparents’ house.
“Leave Jingjing exactly where she is,” Mother Gu interjected coldly. “I will be assuming absolute custody of her upbringing from now on. Every month, you are to transfer ten yuan of child support and twenty kilograms of premium fine grains to this household.”
Hearing the financial demand, Wang Chunmei looked at her mother-in-law with immediate, instinctive greed. Ten yuan for a useless little girl? How could they expect her to squander such a massive fortune on a daughter?!
Furthermore, diverting twenty kilograms of fine grains to Jingjing meant stripping resources away from the precious son currently growing in her womb!
“Mom, this… this arrangement surely isn’t appropriate,” she stammered. If Gu Jingjing remained at the main villa, who on earth was going to clean their apartment and manage the domestic chores? She was heavily pregnant; it was physically impossible for her to handle the labor alone.
“I am not initiating a negotiation; I am informing you of a directive,” Mother Gu stated with absolute finality. “I have already executed the formal parameters of this arrangement with your husband.”
Mother Gu had zero intention of permitting her to reclaim custody of the girl. Under her careful guidance over the past few weeks, little Jingjing’s personality had finally begun to stabilize. If the child was thrown back into that toxic apartment, her spirit would be permanently broken.
In the past, Wang Chunmei had systematically brainwashed the toddler, drilling it into her head that she was a worthless liability, forcing the girl to become hyper-compliant in a desperate, tragic bid to earn her biological mother’s affection. Mother Gu refused to let that cycle resume.
