The Cannon Fodder Prince's Path to the Throne

Two male leads, ancient setting, doomed prince x personal bodyguard In his fourteenth year after transmigrating, Yan Cheng finally realizes he's a doomed prince in the sequel to a transmigration novel. Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but without the fate to enjoy it. As the younger of a pair of twins, he was abandoned at birth by his mother, who was consumed by her ambition to seize the throne. He was lucky to survive, but years of poisoning left him frail and sickly. When he was seventeen, his adoptive father plotted a rebellion, and the entire family was executed. The doomed prince appears just once in the whole novel: when the sequel's protagonist brings down his greatest rival for the throne. The protagonist reveals a list of crimes committed by the rival and his mother, including proof that she had switched the babies at birth. Only then does the world learn that the royal family has another prince who was never entered in the imperial register. And that this prince met an especially ignoble end. The emperor, who personally ordered his own son's execution, issues an awkward decree posthumously naming the doomed prince Prince Yong and burying him in the imperial mausoleum. By the time Yan Cheng awakens to the original story's plot, he has already been recognized as a member of the royal family and become the eighth prince of Great Xia. There's no escaping now. Fine! If he can't escape, he'll do his best to help himself and the people he cares about avoid their scripted deaths! Better to live badly than not at all! * At first, Yan Cheng only wants to survive. Later, he discovers that some things won't go the way he wants, no matter how hard he tries. As Yan Cheng is swept along by a group of loyal ministers who keep pushing him forward, they force him onto the throne everyone covets. Hearing one “Your Majesty” after another and looking at the endless stack of memorials to review, he cries out to the heavens: This is not the life I wanted at all!