Chasing Jade: Chasing Ning

A fanfic spin-off of Jade's Fateful Love

Main couple: Fan Changning x Yu Bao'er (Qi Yu)

When Yu Bao'er was six, he was locked in a secret room and had never even tasted candy.

Four-year-old Fan Changning came in with a lantern, gave him a piece of tangerine-peel candy, and left him a bamboo whistle. “If you're scared, blow this. I'll come find you when I hear it.”

It was the first sweet thing he'd ever tasted.

Years later, he ascended the throne. His first decree was to make her empress. The court erupted in an uproar. Standing before the imperial throne, he spoke in a calm, clear voice: “The Empress and I have known each other since childhood, and our love is unshakable.”

She was frail and once took a blade for him. He was taciturn and once defied the whole world for her. When his ministers pressured him to take more consorts, he asked only, “Having you is enough for me. Is it enough for you, too?” She handed him the bamboo whistle. He accepted it and said, “An emperor never goes back on his word.”

From the secret room to the imperial palace, from a pawn to the emperor, he spent twenty years keeping his promise: he offered her an empire as his bride price, and took her surname, Fan, alongside his own, Qi.

On their wedding night, he placed the old bamboo whistle in her palm. “Everything I own is yours, including me.”

Many years later, they returned to Lin'an Town and sat beneath the loquat tree they'd planted when they were young. The wind blew, and the bamboo whistle sounded, just as it had when the little girl first blew it all those years ago.

“I heard you.”

“I've always been here.”

He spent a lifetime proving that the candy he tasted when he was six had kept him sweet for the rest of his life.