A Fake Marriage in the Sixties: I Really Just Want to Build a Career

|Alternate 1960s|Time Travel|Everyday Family Life|Marriage First, Love Later|

[Not going premium. I'm getting back into writing after many years away and rediscovering the joy of it. Grateful our paths crossed.]

Dad didn't care, Mom didn't love her. Lin Wanshuang had been single since birth and dragged around a useless leg that had grown crooked because her family hadn't wanted to spend money on treatment. Years in the workplace had taught her how to talk to people in whatever way suited them.

Just as she was about to get a promotion, a raise, and reach the peak of her life, working overtime got her sent by a freight truck to the 1960s.

The moment she opened her eyes, someone was strangling her. And the person doing it was her husband, at least on paper?

Never mind. Men are obstacles on the road to success. She'd better figure out how to kick him aside and get back to work.

What? After a divorce, her household registration would have to return to her parents' home, or she'd become a vagrant?

But her family back home was made up entirely of the people who'd killed her parents?!

No choice. She'd have to use her silver tongue to keep her in-laws calm for now. After all, the original owner had forced this marriage, and it was a sham in all but name. She could get a job first and divorce him later.

But how had this promised divorce suddenly become impossible?

And what happened to the cold and heartless man? Can someone please get this master of self-delusion out of here?

*

When Lu Chenzhou returned to his hometown to visit family, the village bully drugged him and forced him into marriage.

That bully cheated and swindled people, picked on the old and young, and did every kind of evil. Then she put a hand on her belly and claimed she was carrying his child.

After he was forced to marry her, trouble soon came to his family.

First, they were told their class status had been reclassified. Then he was forced to leave the army. After that, his mother died, too.

He moved out, only for the bully to tie him up in the middle of the night, sharpening her knife as she prepared to kill his whole family.

But just as she came through the door with a knife, she tripped and fell. When she woke up, everything had changed.

She tore into her own family and found medicine for his father.

She could identify medicinal herbs and stop a swindler from killing people for profit with poisonous ganoderma.

She could even tell at a glance that a dirty, battered stick was priceless golden nanmu wood.

Until she told him, "I might have been brought back to life in someone else's body."

He didn't believe in superstition. Whether she'd become someone else was something he'd have to observe for himself.

But observing her was the beginning of his downfall.

She could make jerky.

A few words from her were enough to deal with the Educated Youth Committee's harassment.

She could write poetry.

She even knew how to improve saline-alkali soil.

Most importantly, while everyone else only saw a young man with a successful career, she understood how hard it had been for him to get where he was.

She was like a flame, warm and full of life. She made him want to draw close, to claim her as his own.

So when she told him, "I'm not pregnant," his first thought was to help her keep it secret. There was absolutely no way he was letting them divorce.

When she caught a chill and the doctor said it might affect her fertility, he immediately announced to everyone that he was the one who couldn't have children.

But...

Just when everything was getting better and he'd climbed back to the top, she wanted a divorce?!

Was it because she'd found out he'd lied about being infertile?

Wait! If that's the reason, he can keep lying.

One-on-one romance, both leads have only been with each other.

Everyday family life, marriage first, love later.

Theme: Take your career seriously