[Both devoted to each other ✖ sweet romance ✖ 21-year-old bitter little melon (designer) ✖ 26-year-old mature, fatherly older man ✖ growing together ✖ guiding lover]
Nian Zhao spent the first decade and a half of her life in a world where no light ever reached her. Even her name had been chosen by her parents to bring prosperity to the family. She thought her life would always be that way, until she happened to add someone as a contact and, by chance, found the light. Battered from head to toe, she clung to that faint glimmer in the mire, using it to get through one day after another. At first, she saw the other person as nothing more than a lifeline. But before long, her feelings changed for the “light” on the other side of the screen, whether that person was human or a ghost.
When they first met, the girl looked just as she did in her photos. There wasn’t a trace of the vitality one would expect at her age in her eyes. Gu Chen took one look at her and thought of two words: lifeless.
After years spent among the wealthy and powerful, Gu Chen had met all kinds of people. Still, he had never seen anyone let themselves fall into such a state...
Another winter arrived. The cold wind battered the windows as snowflakes drifted down. In the study, where a fire burned in the fireplace, Gu Chen gently stroked the head of the girl lying limp in his arms, while his hand kept kneading her lower back...
In Niannian’s heart, Gu Chen had always been the very definition of kindness. She never knew that such absolute tenderness was something he showed only to her. She would never know that on that stormy night, after he had gently coaxed his pregnant wife to sleep, the man beside her pillow stepped onto the body of the person who had tried to hurt her, their hands severed. He was nothing like the gentle man who had just soothed her to sleep...
