Duan Zhengchun and Kang Min

Duan Zhengchun and Kang Min are former lovers whose reunion turns on a contradiction: he arrives in response to news of her, but cannot offer the equal, secure partnership she wants. In the Ma family house, their affectionate exchange recalls a decade of separation; beneath his promises, however, lies his reluctance to bring her into his life in Dali. Kang Min’s ensuing demand, deception, and threat make the difference between longing and commitment the defining force of their relationship.

A reunion shaped by the past

Kang Min appears in mourning clothes when Xiao Feng sees her with Duan Zhengchun at the Ma family house. Her identity matters to the scene: she is the widow of Ma Dayuan, while Duan Zhengchun is an old lover whose return reopens a relationship that had been interrupted by her marriage. The meeting is not a new courtship but an attempt to reckon with what their separation has left unresolved.

Duan Zhengchun tells Kang Min that he had thought of her while in Dali and that, when he heard she had married Deputy Chief Ma, he went three days and nights without eating. He explains that he did not visit because she had a home and Ma Dayuan was an important Beggar Clan figure; continuing their affair, he says, would have wronged Ma Dayuan. His account casts his absence as restraint, but does not undo its cost for Kang Min.

Kang Min describes the same separation from the other side. Although her body was in Xinyang, she says, her heart had remained with Duan Zhengchun, and she had wanted to know whether he was safe and happy. Her devotion is thus voiced as a lasting attachment, but also as a grievance: she has spent years yearning for a man who, in her view, left her to bear the loneliness alone.

Return without a secure place

Duan Zhengchun says he travelled from Dali as soon as he heard the news, riding day and night because he feared Kang Min might marry again before he arrived. He also describes the separation as ten years of yearning. The haste of his return affirms that their past still has power over him, yet his language focuses on recovering their intimacy, not on making a definite future with her.

Kang Min asks what he will arrange for her from then on, and later asks directly whether he is still unwilling to take her to Dali. His answer is that the heat, humidity, and risk of malaria there would not suit her. Whether offered as concern or as an evasion, the explanation does not meet the question she has asked. She hears it as empty comfort rather than a promise of shared life.

That mismatch marks the relationship’s central tension. Duan Zhengchun speaks tenderly of missing Kang Min and has crossed a great distance to see her, but when she presses for a future, he turns to immediate affection and practical objections. Kang Min wants more than proof that he remembers her: she asks whether he will give her a recognized place beside him.

A promise under pressure

The reunion changes sharply when Duan Zhengchun realizes he has been poisoned with Ten Fragrance Bewitching Powder. Kang Min tells him that the poison fell into his wine while she was pouring it. He understands that she now controls the situation, but reasons that she would not want to kill him; he assumes she means to make him stay with her or take her to Dali so they can become husband and wife.

Kang Min then asks whether he is willing for them to marry. Duan Zhengchun answers that he will return to Dali with her the next day and take her as the South-Subduing King’s side concubine. His answer offers a destination and a formal role, but not the husband-and-wife equality implied by her question. The promise comes while he is under the effects of the poison, and the scene presents it as a way to manage immediate danger rather than a settled resolution of their conflict.

Love turned into destruction

The gap between what Kang Min wants and what Duan Zhengchun offers becomes explicit when she explains why she means to kill him. She denies that killing him would make her a husband-murderer, since he is not her husband. Had he truly been her husband, she says, she would have loved and cherished him; because she cannot have him, she must destroy him. She describes this as her own temperament, making her professed attachment and her intention to harm him parts of the same destructive logic.

Duan Zhengchun connects the present danger to an earlier attempt: Kang Min had deceived a young woman and tried to use Qiao Feng to kill him. Kang Min confirms that this was what she had done and complains that Qiao Feng failed to kill him and allowed him to escape. The earlier plot and the poisoned reunion therefore belong to a continuing effort to eliminate Duan Zhengchun when she cannot secure the relationship she wants.

Their relationship ends here not in reconciliation but in exposed opposition. Duan Zhengchun’s return and his promise to take Kang Min to Dali cannot settle the question of what place he will give her, while Kang Min’s longing has hardened into a willingness to destroy him. The scene’s governing irony is that reunion confirms the force of their attachment without making it a basis for a shared future.