Lin Wanwan, a modern-day office drone, finds herself inside an old-fashioned romance novel as Lin Wan, a cannon-fodder student at the Imperial College who disguises herself as a man. In the original story, Lin Wan accidentally discovers the secret of the main villain, Prince Xiao Jue, and is silenced from the start. To stay alive, Lin Wanwan decides to keep her head down and stay as far away as possible from everyone involved in the plot.
But on the very first day of school, she runs straight into Xiao Jue. Faced with a threat on her life, she thinks fast and spouts a jumble of modern internet slang and empty corporate jargon. The suspicious Xiao Jue somehow interprets it all as the words of a peerless sage who sees the whole game and pretends to be a fool.
From then on, Lin Wanwan’s “slacker” ways are read as “great wisdom hidden beneath a foolish exterior,” her “wisecracks” are taken for “cryptic hints,” and her “avoiding the male lead” is seen as “playing hard to get.” Xiao Jue, the original story’s ruthless villain, starts keeping her “at his side” as an “adviser” and grows intensely interested in her.
Lin Wanwan is forced to teeter between “dying” and “social death.” She fobs off the villain with absurd antics, but her desperate will to survive keeps leading her, by sheer coincidence, to help him overcome one crisis after another, sending the original plot completely off the rails. When the original hero and heroine appear, they find a “demonic” strategist at the villain’s side, and the whole story has taken a bizarre turn. As she shares one ridiculous encounter after another with Xiao Jue, Lin Wanwan gradually discovers the loneliness and wounds hidden beneath his obsessive, ruthless exterior, and even her own lazy heart begins to waver. In the end, she gives up on staying out of it and chooses to face their overturned fate alongside the villain she has “led astray.”
