A Game Within a Game, No One Is a Substitute

“Your playing style has a lot of her in it.”

That remark from world champion Chen Xu lodged like a thorn in Lin Mo’s marriage. She had once thought herself lucky: an ordinary girl who had somehow married a legend of the Go world. Then, by chance, she opened a drawer her husband kept locked and found a stack of old photos of him with Su Qing, the nation’s sweetheart. On the back of one, in unmistakable handwriting, were the words: “The night before the Tokyo final.”

At the same time, a wave of online abuse crashed over her, with everyone mocking her as Su Qing’s replacement. To restore her reputation, Chen Xu took her onto a couples’ reality show, where they played the loving couple in front of the cameras. His acting was flawless; every embrace and lingering kiss seemed real.

But when the production team played “Nothing to Do with Being a Substitute,” the love song Lin Mo had written for someone else in college, Chen Xu smiled before the nation and told a colossal lie: “She wrote this song when she proposed to me.”

Lin Mo felt as if she had fallen into an icy abyss. At last, she understood that she was not only a stand-in in his love life, but also a pawn in his carefully laid plans.

What she still did not know was that behind this game of stand-ins lay a cruel truth spanning twenty years. When the hideous scars on Chen Xu’s wrist, the secret medical records from a psychiatric clinic, and his rival Zhou Ran’s words, “He married you just to beat my cousin”, were all brought to light, how would this marriage that began as a substitution make its next move...