Li Cun couldn’t just stand by and watch his mother lie motionless on the cold, hard ground.

In the end, he suppressed his overwhelming anxiety and pain, choosing to help his mother first.

The two young masters of the Wang Family decisively lent a hand, arranging for someone to carry the obviously feigning Mr. Li to a physician’s clinic.

After Li Cun and his mother departed, Zhao Jing and Chen De’an also slipped away at some point.

Once everyone involved had completely cleared out, the teahouse erupted into chaos.

Wang Jun said, "I never would have thought. I truly never would have imagined."

Chu Xun sighed as well. "It’s all my fault. If I hadn’t been nosy and asked that question, none of this would have happened today."

The Wang Family’s eldest son, Wang Xiao, said, "The fault doesn’t lie with you, but with..."

It was improper to speak ill of an elder, so Wang Xiao paused before continuing, "A lie will be exposed sooner or later. If not today, then tomorrow. It’s merely a matter of a day’s difference. Unless Mr. Li had remained unmarried forever, this scene was bound to happen eventually."

Huang Chen’s brow was furrowed tightly. He clearly couldn’t wrap his head around how such a bizarre situation could exist in the world.

"Li is so gentle and refined, shy and a man of few words. I assumed his family would also be well-read and reasonable..."

Who would have thought that Li Cun would have such a peculiar mother?

She had actually deceived her own son and arranged an engagement with a different young woman.

Just as Wang Xiao had said, the truth would have come out sooner or later. It would have been better to be clear from the beginning than for mother and son to become estranged later. Why was there any need for deceit and trickery, only to end up in this mess?

Huang Chen shook his head, completely unable to understand.

Li Cun had both the scholarship and the looks; he could have married whichever young woman he chose. As long as her family background wasn’t deeply problematic, what harm was there in fulfilling her son’s heartfelt wish?

Li Cun wasn’t like him. He himself was as ugly as Oxhead and Horseface, and had long been unable to secure a marriage. On every matchmaking attempt, the young women would be so frightened by his appearance they would flee in terror. His mother, at her wit’s end, had suggested finding someone to impersonate him to trick a woman into marriage, an idea he had flatly rejected.

You could fake other things in life, but scholarship and marriage were two things you absolutely could not.

The former would be exposed in a single exam, while the latter determined the happiness of the rest of your life. How could anyone be so careless with it?

Huang Chen was about to say more when he suddenly heard a middle-aged man in the crowd cry out, "This whole affair sounds familiar! This Li family... could it be *that* Li family from before?"

"What do you mean, ’this Li family, that Li family’? Spit it out!"

"Oh, have you all forgotten? It’s ’the Li family from the tale of one girl promised to two families’!"

The middle-aged man was clearly agitated, his voice cracking with urgency.

He said, "In that story about one girl promised to two families, didn’t the fickle young woman later get engaged to a son from the Li family? Is that the Li family of Li Cun, the man who just placed fifth?"

The crowd fell silent for a moment, then burst into an even greater uproar.

No one had made the connection, but now that he mentioned it, people began to put the pieces together and realized that must be it.

The young woman in that scandalous tale broke off her engagement with the Zhao Family and became engaged to someone from the Li family instead.

In reality, Zhao Jing had just admitted with his own mouth that he’d had an engagement broken off, only marrying his current wife afterward at his family’s behest.

Zhao Jing must be the "Zhao" from the story whose engagement was broken.

And judging by what Li Cun had said, the person he had originally intended to be engaged to was not the "one girl" from the "one girl promised to two families" tale, but Chen De’an’s own sister.

Unfortunately, his mother’s machinations resulted in him actually being engaged to that fickle "one girl." Meanwhile, the woman he truly admired had long since married Zhao Jing.

So, it turned out that the so-called "one girl promised to two families" scandal had this strange, twisted backstory hidden within it. 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚

Who could have possibly imagined!

Who could have thought that the announcement of the county exam results would be interrupted by such a massive piece of gossip?

The students and townspeople all started chattering excitedly.

Because the original story had spread so widely, this new development generated a buzz that far surpassed the excitement of the examination results themselves.

One after another, they put their heads together, whispering and spraying spittle in their excitement, clearly treating the spread of gossip as a far more important event than the exam announcements.

This matter had nothing to do with Zhao Jing and Chen De’an. The two of them avoided the crowd, ducked into an alley, and headed for home.

Just as the two of them had guessed, by the time they arrived home, Xu Su Ying had already heard the news of them passing the exam and was so excited she hardly knew what to do with herself.

When she saw them come in, she enthusiastically pulled them into the main hall, offering them water, then fruit, and even trying to wipe the sweat from their brows, which thoroughly startled both Zhao Jing and Chen De’an.

"Mother, please, take it easy. I didn’t faint from excitement over passing the exam, but I just might faint from all this enthusiasm of yours."