Duan Zhengchun and A'Zi

Duan Zhengchun and A'Zi are father and daughter whose reunion turns a concealed family history into an immediate, unsettled relationship. Duan Zhengchun recognizes A'Zi as his child, but their first meeting is not a simple restoration: she challenges his long absence even as she seeks his attention, and their connection becomes part of the larger revelation that A'Zi and A'Zhu were both born to him and Ruan Xingzhu, then raised apart from their parents.

Parentage and Separation

Duan Zhengchun is a prince of Dali whose travels and romantic relationships leave him with children beyond his marriage. A'Zi is the daughter he had with Ruan Xingzhu. The sisters were born a year apart, but after Duan Zhengchun wished to return to Dali and Ruan Xingzhu opposed his departure, the couple separated. Ruan Xingzhu feared the consequences of taking the children home: her own father maintained strict family discipline, and she believed he might kill her if he learned of the affair. She therefore sent both girls to be raised by other people while leaving them identifying marks so they might one day be recognized.

The marks give the separation a material trace. Each daughter had a red Duan character tattooed on her shoulder, and each received one of a matching pair of gold locks that Duan Zhengchun had given Ruan Xingzhu. The inscriptions on the locks together preserve a clue to their mother’s name. A'Zhu later pieces these signs together: her lock and A'Zi’s match, and the shoulder mark identifies them as Duan Zhengchun’s daughters. What the sisters had carried from infancy as separate tokens becomes evidence of the family from which both were removed.

Reunion at Little Mirror Lake

The reunion takes place at Little Mirror Lake, where Duan Zhengchun is visiting Ruan Xingzhu. A'Zi has already encountered him without a full understanding of their relationship. When she pretends to be dead after being thrown into the lake, Duan Zhengchun asks why she accepted Ding Chunqiu as her master. His concern and the question of her master reveal that he knows her name and regards her as a daughter, while she responds with cheeky familiarity rather than deference.

A'Zi’s behavior is playful and confrontational at once. She has trapped Chu Wanli in her Flexible Silk Net, and when Duan Zhengchun tells her to release him, she asks what reward she will receive. He tells her to obey and threatens to have Ruan Xingzhu punish her for offending Chu Wanli. A'Zi answers that he has no claim to reprimand her when he abandoned her for more than ten years. Her complaint interrupts his authority: the title of father may be acknowledged, but it does not erase the years in which he was absent.

Duan Zhengchun cannot answer that accusation. He falls silent and sighs, while Ruan Xingzhu tries to persuade A'Zi to release Chu Wanli by offering her something. The exchange shows a family reunion unfolding amid an active confrontation, not in a private or orderly setting. A'Zi presses her grievance in front of Duan Zhengchun’s companions, who are wary of challenging the prince’s newly discovered daughter despite her insolence.

A'Zhu’s Discovery

A'Zhu learns the truth while concealed near the bamboo house and listening to Duan Zhengchun, Ruan Xingzhu, and A'Zi. She hears her parents embrace A'Zi, grieve over having given both daughters away, and explain their history. Duan Zhengchun says he had intended to find A'Zhu and bring her back. The conversation reaches the daughter they do not know is listening, making the delayed recognition painful as well as informative: his stated wish to recover her comes after years in which she had grown up without knowing either parent’s face.

The same evidence clarifies A'Zi’s place in the family. A'Zhu understands that the two of them are sisters and that their matching marks and locks point to Ruan Xingzhu and Duan Zhengchun. She tells Xiao Feng that her birth parents had separated and sent the children away, and that she herself had been only a little over a year old when she was adopted. Her adoptive family knew her mother’s surname was Ruan, but A'Zhu realizes that her own birth surname is Duan. Thus the reunion at the lake does not concern A'Zi alone: it discloses a shared parentage that reconnects two sisters whose childhoods had been divided.

Kinship, Grievance, and Obligation

A'Zi’s relationship with Duan Zhengchun brings blood descent into conflict with lived experience. She is willing to call him Dad and to bargain with him, but she also names his abandonment directly. Her demand for a reward before freeing Chu Wanli and her refusal to accept his admonition as unquestioned authority show how she tests the relationship through immediate, defiant exchanges. Duan Zhengchun’s sadness acknowledges the force of her complaint, but the evidence does not show the past being repaired simply by recognition.

The revelation also creates a family obligation for Xiao Feng. As A'Zhu lies gravely weakened after the encounter at the bluestone bridge, she asks him to look after her younger sister, fearing that A'Zi may go down the wrong path. Xiao Feng promises that A'Zhu will recover and that they will find A'Zi together; he imagines the sisters joining him and A'Zhu beyond Yanmen Pass. A'Zi emerges from beneath the bridge and rejects the proposed role of younger sister accompanying her elder sister and brother-in-law. Her interruption confirms that she has heard them, but also that kinship cannot be imposed as a ready-made intimacy: she asserts her own response to the family future being imagined for her.

Significance and Limits of the Reunion

Duan Zhengchun and A'Zi’s reunion is one strand in a wider pattern of concealed descent and interrupted upbringing. Recognition depends on physical signs preserved from infancy, on the matching gold locks, and on A'Zhu’s discovery of her parents’ conversation. Yet identification does not undo the separation. A'Zi’s pointed reference to the more than ten years of neglect keeps the cost of that history present at the moment her father is found.

The relationship also sits within Duan Zhengchun’s broader history as a prince whose romantic life has produced children in different households. His status does not make him an uncomplicated patriarch: at Little Mirror Lake, his authority is challenged by the daughter he has only just acknowledged, and his response is silence rather than a denial of her grievance. The reunion therefore establishes both a biological bond and an unresolved one. A'Zi is his daughter, but the emotional terms of their connection remain shaped by the years during which that fact was hidden from her.