Delicate as a Round Fan

(Marriage first, love later + chasing his wife + regret and redemption + amnesia, a bittersweet romance)

(Clever, long-suffering concubine-born daughter vs. cold marquis who comes to regret his actions)

She remembers everyone but him. That is the cruelest revenge of all.

Gu Yunyao, the concubine-born daughter of the Prince of Zhennan’s household, hides her myriad thoughts behind a flowing-cloud silk fan. She gets her wish and marries into the marquis’s household as the second wife of Marquis Pingyang, Yuwen Chexuan. Everyone knows the marquis’s heart belongs to a dead woman, the princess sent to marry him who died taking an arrow meant for him.

Gu Yunyao doesn’t care. She only wants to fulfill her duties as mistress of the household and find some peace in this marriage arranged by imperial decree. She prepares his meals every day and keeps a lamp burning for him each night. When he falls ill, she tends to him without changing out of her clothes. Gradually, the marquis, once cold as ice, begins to smile at her, place hairpins in her hair, and tell her, “Wait for me to come back,” before leaving for battle.

She thinks this is what it means to fall in love over time.

Then the enemy invades, and he insists on going to war to avenge his lost love. On the battlefield, she takes a fatal arrow meant for him. When she wakes from her grave injuries, she remembers her father, her sisters, and the young general she grew up with, but she has completely forgotten the husband she once loved enough to give her life for.

“Brother Xuanzhou,” she asks timidly, holding her childhood friend’s hand, “who is that man? Why is he looking at me like that?”

Yuwen Chexuan finally understands: she remembers the whole world, but not him.