Lin Daiyu Refuses to Marry Baoyu and Weds the New Emperor

[1v1, devoted to each other · sweet romance, no angst · thorough revenge · emperor and empress rule together]

When Lin Daiyu was nine, she met a frail young man in a plum grove. Coughing up blood, he asked her, “Before your father died, did he ever say anything?”

That question uncovered the cause of Lin Ruhai's death, as well as the shocking secret of the empress dowager's faction. She didn't know the man before her was an emperor reborn. He didn't know this orphan girl would become the only weakness he had in this lifetime.

Everyone in the Jia household was waiting to see her make a fool of herself. Grandmother Jia plotted to marry her off to Baoyu and swallow the Lin family's inheritance. Baoyu pestered her every day, while Xue Baochai watched coldly after entering the household with her golden lock. None of them knew that the man she met in the plum grove would become her future.

The day the Jia household tried to force her to marry Baoyu, she refused in front of everyone. Lady Wang slammed the table. “If you won't marry Baoyu, who else could you marry?” A cold laugh came from outside the door. “She'll marry me.” The new emperor, Xiao Heng, stood in the doorway. His gaze swept over the crowd and settled on her.

Later, Lady Wang knelt outside the palace gates and begged her to save her life, while she watched from atop the palace wall. When the Xue family tried to arrange a marriage between their families, he issued an imperial decree that bankrupted them. When the entire court opposed her ruling from behind the curtain, she sat there and exposed corrupt official after corrupt official. When the empress dowager had her father killed, he made the empress dowager kneel before his birth mother's spirit tablet on the night of the coup.

He fought his way back from a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood, yet gave all his tenderness to her. She went from an orphan dependent on others to an empress who ruled the realm alongside him.

As she lay dying, she held his hand. “In the next life, I'll marry you again.”

This is the story of an emperor reborn and an orphan raised in another's household. From their first meeting in the plum grove to ruling together as emperor and empress, they walked side by side for half their lives.