“Aren’t you the one who’s most afraid of getting old and loves looking beautiful?” She lifted her chin. “Then I’ll get old. You’ll just have to grow old with me.”
There was an odd man in Xinghua Village named Xie Linyuan.
He looked twenty, but his mind grew younger with every passing year.
The villagers laughed and called him an idiot.
Only Lou Chunjiao knew he hadn’t always been like this.
Seven years ago, he saved her during a mountain flood and was struck by the “Years-Reversing Curse.”
Each time she escaped death, his life turned back by a year.
When she recovered from a high fever, he forgot the art of war.
When she survived a fall from a cliff, he forgot how to write.
And when she tried to curry favor with a wealthy young master by forcing him to sell his ancestral home,
the young lord who had made a name for himself in the capital at just twelve
had been reduced to a child’s mind.
Lou Chunjiao still ran away with the money.
Later, when the wealthy man offered her to a demon priest,
she learned that someone had engineered every one of her brushes with death
to steal Xie Linyuan’s imperial destiny, bit by bit.
The idiot broke into the sacrificial altar to save her. After taking one last calamity in her place,
his body turned into that of a seven-year-old child.
He curled up in her arms, too small to recognize her,
but still put his last piece of candy in her mouth.
Reborn before the mountain flood, Lou Chunjiao vowed never to let him save her again.
But Xie Linyuan had returned with all his memories too.
He avoided her and the fate that would make him lose his wits,
planning to marry a woman with no connection to Lou Chunjiao.
Yet from that day on,
every time Lou Chunjiao took a calamity meant for him, she aged by a year.
In just one short month, white strands had appeared in her dark hair.
Xie Linyuan finally lost control and pulled her into his arms.
“Aren’t you the one who’s most afraid of getting old and loves looking beautiful?”
She lifted her chin. “Then I’ll get old. You’ll just have to grow old with me.”
