A Pear Branch Brings Spring

A possessive, unhinged regent × a cool, broken orphan girl

She was snow resting on a branch, until he plucked her into his palm and bruised her all over. Only later did he learn that melted snow becomes spring water, enough to drown a dynasty.

Coercive possession | Angst before romance | Confinement | Love and hate

Ruan Liyu, the daughter of a disgraced official, is the most dazzling pear-white flower in the Music Bureau. With bones as pure as snow, she can wield a brush to portray the world, but cannot control her own fate.

Ye Xunzhi, regent of the Great Yao, commands a million soldiers but can never ascend the throne. The world calls him the “Living King of Hell.”

In a bloody bargain, he imprisons her in the depths of the Bronze Sparrow Tower and forces her to copy the founding emperor’s final decree:

“Write one character wrong, and I’ll break off a pear blossom and drive it into your palm.”

She escapes three times. Three times, he destroys something precious to her.

Her maid, her music, the tendons in her right hand.

So she drinks poison and drives a hairpin into her throat, desperate to die.

But he blocks arrows and stops her like a madman, all to keep her alive.

Until the day he gives her freedom with his own hands.

He thinks it is the end, but he is wrong.

On the night she turns and walks away, he realizes that from then on, the Bronze Sparrow Tower will be an emptiness that gnaws at his bones.

The whetstone of old is finally drowned by spring waters.

The man who once snapped the branch at last bows in submission to that pear blossom.

Someone asks him, “Your Highness, do you regret it?”

“I do. I regret not kneeling sooner and begging her to love me.”

Amid a mire of hatred and desire, they torment each other, only to glimpse the one light in their shattered souls.

"Content warning: confinement, coercion, the heroine suffers in the early story, and the hero suffers later. Do not read if this is not for you."