Two Lives as My Enemy’s Deceased Wife

*Please don’t read if any of this bothers you: 1. This is a long novel, with the main focus on the plot and romance as a secondary thread. It leans toward an ensemble cast. The first ten chapters have a warm, everyday feel to them, and spend some time laying out the world and its setting. This is all to tell a complete story. The male lead loves the female lead dearly, but that never makes him stupid. He’s jealous, but not over petty things. 2. The leads aren’t each other’s first love; their connection is more like fate. If you insist on defining it, in her previous life the heroine was the amnesiac hero’s first love. 3. Before losing his memories, the male lead was one of the two strongest fighters in the story’s setting. In his previous life, he was a moody, unpredictable man who hunted the heroine down like the Grim Reaper. She was a resilient, clever, life-loving woman being hunted by him. Their relationship wasn’t sweet at all, and he only started acting like a decent person very late in the previous-life storyline. The amnesiac male lead has lost all his magic. His body is still as strong as it was before, so he’s hard to kill, but not impossible to kill. He’s at his most fragile after attaining enlightenment. His “older brother” has only lost his memories and doesn’t know how to use his magic; this one has no magic at all. So after losing his memories, he’s really just a paper tiger with nothing but his looks, a nobody who can’t act as recklessly as he used to. He has to think things through and is working on getting stronger, gradually making his way back to the top over the course of the story. The person with the least merit in the Four Realms once accrued countless bloody debts as karmic sin. Losing his memories is the consequence of clearing that karma. The heroine in her previous life was one of the unlucky people he wronged on a whim, and helping her is part of how he makes amends. As for why the male lead doesn’t retreat to his happy home and start cultivating again, even though he knows his good “older brother” will protect him, it isn’t because enemies are everywhere. There’s another, deeper reason that will be revealed later.* [Greedy, clever little cat demon x duplicitous “Daoist” with hidden motives (previous life: resilient, clear-eyed heroine who grows into herself x volatile yet composed hero full of contradictions)] *To her, he is an enemy and half a fool in love. When “Daoist Xue” studies the notes his late wife left behind by lamplight, he finds that his former “self” filled them with dense annotations. He suddenly realizes that his former self and his late wife must have been a pair of ill-fated lovers caught in a love-hate tragedy. Du Ruo: You’ve only understood half of it. That young lord and I had our share of hatred, and I was certainly ill-fated. Xue Tuan’er: That stinking Daoist is clingy and insincere. * She was a storyteller who made a living from her craft. Those who knew her name called her Du Ruo; those who didn’t called her Master Changping. When Du Ruo was sixteen, she met someone who almost became her ideal husband, but fate cruelly tore them apart. Two hundred years later, she came across another man, who became the death god on her heels. Before she died, she compiled the strange tales of her life into a manuscript. Since she had spent her life telling stories, she named it The Changping Chronicles. * As it happened, Du Ruo was also a match he had stolen from his “older brother.” He came up with the name “Xue Wang” in the space of two blinks. The reason was simple: the graceful little cat demon with the lovely face before him was being called “Madam Xue.” It wasn’t a case of love at first sight or falling for her beauty. He had simply recognized at a glance that this “Madam Xue” was his late wife reincarnated. As for his supposed identity as a direct disciple of the immortal sect at Xuanqing Temple, that was entirely made up. Spiritual energy had surged through the Woxi Shrine for years. He had willingly been imprisoned there, and after many years the shrine was damaged and collapsed, breaking the seal and freeing him. By the time he saw daylight again, the world had changed. He had forgotten his past and lost all his magic, becoming no different from an ordinary man. But he had at his side a set of notes his late wife had left behind before she died. He figured he was probably the villain in those notes, the one who had caused his late wife’s death. He also learned that in the end, she had hated him. *Before you read: (The novel is planned to be about six volumes. Each volume follows the past-life and present-life storylines in parallel, so this is a long novel.) 1. Both leads are each other’s only ones. It’s mostly a sweet story, though parts will be quite angsty. There’s no leveling up or monster-fighting. The xianxia cultivation elements mostly appear in the male lead’s memories, while the main plot leans toward Eastern fantasy. 2. The first ten chapters follow the dreamy, poetic romance of a human girl, so the pacing and writing style will have the warm, dreamlike feel of an everyday romance. The style will change to match the plot and shifts in perspective as the story progresses. 3. Please consider adding it to your favorites. After signing, it will update every other day, with no fixed update time. Updates may come at five or six in the morning. If I can manage daily updates, I’ll let you know in the author’s notes. When an update is under 3,000 characters, no flower icon will appear. 4. To maintain the quality of the novel, I can only manage long chapters every other day for now. I may revise a chapter several times just after posting it. If I become able to update daily in the future, I will. Thank you for enjoying my work. Divider There’s also a wuxia romance novel on my author page. If you like that kind of story, you can add it to your favorites ahead of time, though I’m still working out the framework. Theme: Love is not only a promise between two people; it also takes the right time, place, and people