[Male-Male Romance|Miaojiang Bottom|Coercive Love|A Lover’s Groveling Quest to Win Him Back|1v1, Both Pure|Happy Ending]
A calculating, possessive Han Chinese top × a guileless, sincere Miaojiang bottom who takes time to warm up. Top’s point of view.
The best bargain Yan Sui ever made was deep in the mountains of southeastern Guizhou.
All he did was teach the Miao man some Chinese, offer him a few illusions of tenderness, and show him a little of the outside world’s wonders. In return, he got a sincere heart, a rare medicinal herb, and a gu recipe.
Back then, Yan Sui thought the latter two were what mattered most. Only later did he realize that the hardest thing to find, and the most precious, was the sincere heart he had crushed with his own hands.
A Wu had once begged him to stay and had even used a gu on him. Yet someone who loved him so deeply had given him up without a backward glance.
“Go,” A Wu said. His Chinese was far more fluent than before, but his tone and gaze were colder than Yan Sui had ever known. “The blood orchid is gone. There’s nothing left for you to take.”
The gu master from the mountains sat in the apartment Yan Sui had so carefully prepared, growing thinner by the day, as if the breath of life were gradually leaving him.
Only then did Yan Sui realize what he had stolen was never a medicinal herb or a gu recipe.
He had stolen a soul cut off from the world, then cast it into a world where it did not belong.
And if he wanted to win back the soul he had destroyed with his own hands, the first thing he had to do was stop “giving” and instead…
Return, one by one, everything he had taken from the mountains back then.
Including himself.
Note: The gu practices, medicinal herbs, and other details are fictional and do not involve authentic Miao culture.
Very pretty.