After all this, the Qixi Festival banquet could not go on. The eunuchs checked the number of people brought into the palace by madams and ladies one by one, and the number of people for the time being. But in the end, they found nothing. When they entered the palace, there was a definite number of people of each family, and only the mandated women brought a few maids close to them.

Those maids had been serving their master all the time, and none of them left.

The ...