Kang Min

Kang Min is the widow of Ma Dayuan and the hidden architect of his death, a figure whose calculated intelligence is bound to a destructive fixation on what she cannot obtain. Her exposure unfolds through two linked revelations: in private, she tells Duan Zhengchun that deprivation has always made her want to ruin what another person possesses; later, her own account of the Hundred Flower Gathering explains why Xiao Feng’s indifference became, for her, an injury worth avenging.

Identity and Introduction

When Xiao Feng secretly looks into the Ma residence, he sees Duan Zhengchun sitting with a wine cup and smiling at a woman in white mourning clothes. The woman is Kang Min, Ma Dayuan’s widow. Her mourning dress places her in the household’s public role, while her private encounter with Duan Zhengchun reveals a relationship concealed beneath that appearance.

The scene also introduces the discrepancy between how Kang Min presents herself and what she is doing. She meets her former lover in secrecy, speaks intimately with him, and then reveals that she has arranged for him to be poisoned. The apparent reunion is not simply a return to an old attachment: it is a setting in which affection, threat, and strategy coexist.

Desire and Self-Description

Kang Min tells Duan Zhengchun about an episode from childhood. Rather than steal another girl’s new clothes and trousers, she cut them apart with scissors, taking satisfaction in making them impossible to sew back together. The story is more than a recollection: she offers it as a guide to understanding her temperament. If she longs for something and cannot obtain it, she says, she will destroy it when someone else has it; as she grew older, she moved from childish methods to more deliberate ones.

Duan Zhengchun tries to stop the conversation, saying that it spoils his mood. Kang Min insists on speaking because they have only a few days together and may never meet again after that day. Her disclosure thus arrives inside a farewell as well as a seduction: she wants Duan Zhengchun to understand her, but the understanding she offers is a warning about the pattern of harm that governs her attachments.

Poison and Deception

Kang Min tells Duan Zhengchun that he has been drugged with Ten Fragrance Bewitching Powder and can no longer use his internal energy. She explains that the poison entered his wine when she poured it, presenting the act as an apparent accident caused by her distraction at seeing him. Her explanation makes clear that his vulnerable state is part of her design, even as she wraps the disclosure in affectionate language.

She also urges him to make a small hole in the paper window so that an enemy will retreat, but Duan Zhengchun recognizes that this proposed escape depends on an ability the poison has taken from him. Her cleverness lies partly in manipulating what he knows: she asks him to act while withholding the fact that she has already made the requested use of his internal energy impossible.

When Duan Zhengchun suspects that she means to kill him, he tries to buy time by speaking of Ma Dayuan. He describes the dead man as though he were present, and Kang Min reacts with alarm. Duan Zhengchun then calls out Ma Dayuan’s name; when she turns, he strikes her and she falls unconscious. The reversal briefly gives him an opening, but it does not erase the larger scheme she has set in motion.

Ma Dayuan’s Murder and the Attack on Xiao Feng

Kang Min’s involvement in Ma Dayuan’s death is tied to the secret of Xiao Feng’s birth. Under pressure from the apparent threat of Ma Dayuan’s ghost, Bai Shijing confesses that Ma Dayuan had read Chief Wang’s will and that Kang Min repeatedly urged him to expose the secret of Xiao Feng’s birth. Ma Dayuan refused. Bai Shijing’s account identifies Kang Min as the chief schemer behind the plot against her husband, whose resistance to revealing the secret had become an obstacle to her designs.

Duan Zhengchun also recalls that Kang Min deliberately deceived a young woman and tried to use Xiao Feng to kill him. Kang Min confirms the accusation and dismisses Xiao Feng as useless because he failed to kill Duan Zhengchun. Her schemes therefore reach beyond the marriage she claims to have wanted: she turns other people’s actions and loyalties into instruments for removing those in her way.

Xiao Feng and the Hundred Flower Gathering

Kang Min identifies the source of her hatred in an encounter two years earlier at the Hundred Flower Gathering in Luoyang. She remembers standing beside a yellow peony while the gathering’s heroes looked at her. Xiao Feng, who had attended with Beggar Clan brothers and spent the occasion drinking and playing games, did not give her the attention she expected. To him, he had not deliberately singled her out; he had scarcely looked at the women at all.

For Kang Min, however, Xiao Feng’s failure to look was uniquely wounding. She says that the other men admired her, while he alone seemed to treat her as no different from an ordinary woman. She interprets his indifference not as inattention but as a judgment that cancels the value she finds in being admired. In her account, his reputation as a celebrated leader intensifies the slight: attention from someone so widely regarded would have mattered in a way that attention from the rest did not.

Xiao Feng eventually explains that he was absorbed in drinking and that, as he grew older, he paid even less attention to women. He says he would have approached a senior female hero to pay his respects, but Kang Min was his sister-in-law; he does not understand why this moment has remained a source of hatred. His recollection and hers do not reconcile. The scene instead sets ordinary inattention against the enormous significance Kang Min assigns to it, showing how an encounter he barely remembers becomes, for her, a lasting grievance.

Character and Narrative Role

Kang Min’s own childhood story supplies a pattern that the later revelations bear out: frustrated desire becomes destructive action. She is not shown merely lamenting what she lacks; she describes choosing to damage what she cannot possess and demonstrates that her adult methods are more concealed and strategic. The distance between scissors cutting another child’s clothes and the poisoning and plotting of her later life lies in method, not in the principle she herself claims to follow.

Her role in the unfolding revelation is also shaped by competing accounts. Xiao Feng watches from concealment; Duan Zhengchun pieces together the danger through her reactions; and Bai Shijing’s frightened confession connects her actions to the secret of Xiao Feng’s birth. Kang Min, meanwhile, speaks with striking directness about her motives, but her self-explanation does not make her conduct less calculated. Her central contradiction is that she speaks of longing for intimacy with Duan Zhengchun while using poison and deception against him, and that she treats Xiao Feng’s failure to notice her as an offense grave enough to help drive a wider conspiracy.