A Private Love for an Old Star

This novel is complete. My next book will be either Marry Cecilia or This Winter, Right Now. Please add them to your reading list~ -- After starting work, Jiang Yinian was asked at a party if she had ever had a crush on a boy. With a smile, she said she had. In high school, her grades were poor, but she studied like crazy because she liked the top student in the science track. In the end, she did better than expected and got into the same university as him, then stayed on through her PhD. A colleague asked curiously, “Did he like you back?” Jiang Yinian shook her head, then added, “I got over him a long time ago.” At that time, the urban air mobility project overseen by Ji Shuwen had begun trial operations. He was already a renowned flight-control engineer, and his name had been making the headlines on her phone’s news app for days. In the reports, Ji Shuwen wore a sleek black suit and spoke entirely in English at the Global Low-Altitude Economy Forum. His features were striking, his manner cool and aloof. He seemed even more untouchable than he had ten years earlier. Jiang Yinian had long known they had never belonged to the same world. / In high school, Ji Shuwen was the adored golden boy, born into privilege and destined for a bright future. Jiang Yinian, meanwhile, was the most ordinary of all the girls who liked him. Before the college entrance exams, she finally worked up the courage to slip a note into his locker, asking if there could ever be anything between them. He sidestepped the question and turned her down with tactful courtesy: “May the wind fill your sails and the open road stretch before you.” / No one knew that in one draft of her doctoral dissertation acknowledgments, Jiang Yinian had written: “I was the one who secretly clung to that star from long ago, borrowing its light to come this far.” That unrequited teenage crush, along with those words, was left behind in a discarded document. / Jiang Yinian never thought she would see Ji Shuwen again. That day, she was filling in for her supervisor at a meeting. Torrential rain poured down, and her high heel sank into the mud. Instinctively, she grabbed the sleeve of the man approaching her. Their eyes met, and Jiang Yinian froze for a beat beneath her raised umbrella. She could never mistake him, but Ji Shuwen probably no longer remembered her. “Sorry,” she said, then lowered her head and hurried on. But the man caught her by the crook of her elbow, his gaze deep and unwilling to let her go. “Jiang Yinian, you see an old classmate and don’t even say hello?” / Jiang Yinian had always thought Ji Shuwen’s response to her in senior year had been a gentle rejection. It was only after they got together that he told her the truth: with the college entrance exams approaching, something had happened in his family, and he couldn’t afford to be distracted. She sat in Ji Shuwen’s arms, his breath warm and tender. His kisses trailed from behind her ear and lower. “Who knew you’d move on so quickly? Once we got to college, you’d run whenever you saw me.” “Yiannian, don’t you think you’ve been a little unfair to me?” A teenage crush comes true; each other’s first love Sweet, well-behaved girl × cool, aloof young master Grassroots civil servant × flight-control engineer Starts in school and moves to the city. Both leads are flawed characters. No need to tell me if you drop it. Blurb first posted on 2025.12.14, screenshot saved Blurb for Marry Cecilia As a once-popular CEO-romance author, Yu Youzhi’s career has stalled, and her family keeps pressuring her to get married. She earns only a few hundred a month. Her mother urges her to change careers and hurry up and marry, threatening to jump off the building if Yu Youzhi refuses. Yu Youzhi has no interest in marriage, so she rattles off a description of her novel’s male lead: “He makes a trillion a year, has a doctorate, speaks five languages, is cold and taciturn, and keeps trying to buy me a private island in the Pacific. I’d marry someone like that.” She’s sure no such person exists. A week later, her mother calls. “I’ve arranged for you to meet someone this weekend. You’d better do what you said.” Yu Youzhi: ...? Was her CEO romance novel still too realistic? / Yu Youzhi sits in a scenic restaurant for her blind date, watching Liang Cishen take the seat across from her. His features are sharp, his bearing refined and aloof. He has a hundred times more CEO-romance-male-lead energy than the hero in her novel. She knows who he is: the man in control of the Liang financial conglomerate, a figure who can turn the tide with a gesture, someone everyone bows and scrambles to please. They belong to entirely different worlds. Their only connection is that when she was in college, she tutored Liang Cishen’s distant young cousin, a girl with a famously complicated family tree. Yu Youzhi asks cautiously, “Mr. Liang, did you… sit at the wrong table?” Liang Cishen lifts his eyes to her. “Yu Youzhi, which private island in the Pacific do you like?” Yu Youzhi freezes. Liang Cishen’s voice is cool. “Marry me in a contract marriage, and I’ll give it to you.” Yu Youzhi: “Um, could you just give me the cash?” / “Yu Youzhi’s Post-Marriage CEO Observation Diary” Day 10: This marriage is just a deal that benefits us both. Neither of us will fall for the other. So why does Liang Cishen get home so early every day…? Day 20: Huh? When did he add a clause to the marriage contract requiring us to talk three times a day? Day 60: Wait, shouldn’t a CEO wake up in a two-hundred-square-meter bed every morning? Liang Cishen, why do you insist on squeezing into the little bed in the second bedroom with me? What is wrong with you? = = Day 70: (At a class reunion. Entry missing.) Yu Youzhi comes home late after her former school heartthrob escorts her downstairs. She finds Liang Cishen waiting in the living room and finally realizes something is wrong. The man grips her wrist and pins her in a corner. “Zhizhi, Auntie says you want a husband just like the male leads you write. Is there one thing you left out?” Yu Youzhi: ? Liang Cishen leans close, his scorching breath brushing her ear. “Possessive. Jealous.” [Bonus scene] Yu Youzhi gets her touch back, and her new book becomes a breakout hit. On a whim, she writes a bunch of steamy bonus chapters for her readers. To her surprise, one day she accidentally discovers that Liang Cishen is reading them on his computer. Yu Youzhi: !!! That night, embarrassed and furious, she confronts him. He pulls her onto his lap, his voice husky and playfully provocative. “Zhizhi, you know so many tricks. Why have you never tried them with me?” Yu Youzhi: #Actually I still like it better when you’re aloof and ignore me like the CEOs I write##Wait, Liang Cishen, stop kissing me first, # A heroine who’s all talk × a calculating old fox of a hero Blurb for This Winter, Right Now Xu Jianing was born in winter. On her sixteenth birthday, as snow fell all around her, she wished that Chen Hezhen might like her too. After hesitating for a long time, she still didn’t dare make the wish. Chen Hezhen was simply too dazzling. He was a born star, always at the top of the class, someone everyone admired from afar but could never reach. She was as ordinary as a shadow, so ordinary that she didn’t even dare let him into her birthday wish. / Xu Jianing had a crush on Chen Hezhen for twelve years. To get closer to him, she volunteered for every work trip to his city. Chen Hezhen remained unmoved. The last time she saw him, exhaustion clouded his eyes. “Xu Jianing, don’t come again.” On the flight home, Xu Jianing’s eyes filled with tears. An airline magazine happened to be accepting submissions, so she picked up her pen and poured out all the secret feelings she’d carried since adolescence. At the start of her first year of high school, she was bullied and ostracized. She didn’t know Chen Hezhen yet, and a group of troublemakers forced her to confess to him. The boy leaned against the wall, looking down at her with casual indifference. She could barely get a sentence out when he suddenly asked: “Is someone bullying you?” Twelve years later, Xu Jianing typed out the ending of their story, one word at a time, in her phone’s notes app. “Chen Hezhen, I finally don’t like you anymore. If I write it down, I can forget.” / Xu Jianing deleted every way to contact Chen Hezhen, thinking their paths had finally separated. A few months later, though, her submission became the winter’s most talked-about online post. Readers pieced together the clues and guessed that the male lead was Chen Hezhen, a well-known algorithm engineer in the industry. Xu Jianing was calm about it. Even if he saw it, he wouldn’t care. But the next evening, after work, she saw Chen Hezhen, who was supposed to be two thousand kilometers away. She tried to pretend she hadn’t seen him and slip away, but he cornered her beneath a streetlamp. The man asked quietly, “Xu Jianing, do you like me?” Xu Jianing stiffly looked away. “I don’t.” Chen Hezhen’s breath was hot as he held her captive in his arms. “Then could you fall for me one more time?” His voice was low and hoarse. “You’ve moved on. What am I supposed to do?” “The wish she was too afraid to make at sixteen came true here and now, this winter.” Female lead: nonfiction feature journalist × Male lead: embodied-intelligence algorithm engineer Theme: Keep moving toward the light.