AnastasiaWun:
Oh, so was she a virgin before her marriage to ML Cui Jiu? Or was she really already a married female as tagged in MDL?
Also, did she marry ML after finding out his real identity?
Did ML really marry her? I mean, doesn't he already have a wife in waiting already?
Yes, she's a virgin before she met the ML.
Before he met Miantang, Cui Xingzhou has already engaged with Lian Binglan, his cousin from his mother's side. It's an arrangement out of convenience, so there's no love between them. Lian family was manipulative and very calculative, really wants to benefit form Xingzhou's position. And he knows this, but he was kinda indifferent about it. At some point, he has to go to war in the border and he finds out that Lian family was trying to cut all their loses cause they though he might not make it back. Xingzhou was furious, so he passive-aggressively wrote a letter to dissolve their engagement.
He also wrote a similar letter to Miantang, but in a totaly different note. He intended to set Miantang free and stop their act as a married couple. However, Miantang did not accept this, and she chose to follow him to the battlefront. This is the point where Xingzhou realize that Miantang is what a really good wife should be (in comparison to his situation with Lian Binglan). So he actually start considering Miantang sincerely as a love interests from this point on.
During this war, Miantang finds out about his real identity as King Huaiyang and she immediately tried to cut all strings. This created a period of separation in which both of them evaluates their relationship and eventually realize they can not live without each other lol. At first, considering her situation as an orphan with not so great family background, he tried to take her as a concubine. But of course Miantang was like, either you marry me as your one and only legal wife, or nothing at all. Eventually he caves and proposed to her and then they offially got married, no concubines involved.
*edit: sorry if my tenses were all over the place, I'm not a native english speaker so all these tenses and grammar rules don't come naturally for me haha