This Official Is No Ordinary Man: GB

Proud, aloof female official 🌳 x gloomy, insecure eunuch 🦥️

Su Yingchun knows she's not easy to like.

She's the iron-faced judge of the Palace Justice Bureau. Everyone says she shows no mercy to anyone when investigating a case, and that her words are so blunt people would rather keep their distance. Even when she cares about someone, it sounds like an order. When she tries to praise someone, it comes out as, "Don't get carried away."

People go out of their way to avoid her, and she can't be bothered to care. She simply doesn't know how to speak gently, and has no intention of learning.

Someone like her is supposed to spend her whole life alone.

At first, she genuinely paid no attention to the young eunuch Li Puci of the Directorate of Ceremonial Affairs.

He came to deliver files, hunched over, with a faint smell of medicine about him. Others thought his presence was bad luck, saying he was a defective who hadn't even been properly cleaned out.

She didn't think he was bad luck.

She just couldn't understand how he could endure so much. His colleagues bullied him and he said nothing. His old injuries flared up until he was sweating with pain, yet he still gritted his teeth and knelt there, sorting her case files without a word.

Unable to watch any longer, she tossed him a hand warmer. What she said was, "Don't die in my office."

When he was framed, she testified on his behalf, saying, "No outsider gets to meddle with the people of the Palace Justice Bureau."

Every time she helped him, she took eighteen detours, doing the kindest things in the harshest words.

He remembered every one of them. Su Yingchun helped him once, so he spent his day off organizing old files for her at the Palace Justice Bureau. He even made a point of passing by her office fifteen minutes before the doors were locked for the night.

She noticed it all but never called him out. Instead, the next time she requested files, she extended the deadline on the official paperwork by three days. She said, "I can wait," but in truth, she'd heard his old injuries were keeping him from sleeping and wanted him to get some proper rest.

She also had her maid deliver some calming soup. Before sending it, she gave three strict instructions: "Tell him the Imperial Pharmacy made extra. If you so much as mention my name, you'll answer for it."

She thought he would never find out about any of it.

Until that rainy night, when she was suspended from duty and he knelt outside her office, holding a stack of account books, drenched from head to toe. He told her the accounts from the Noble Consort's palace didn't match the documents used to impeach her.

She froze and asked him, "Why have you done all this for me? What do you want?"

He said, "This servant only wants to shield you from the wind."

At that moment, she suddenly understood. Everyone feared her, respected her, and avoided her. Only this person, in the most humble of postures, treated her as if she were the heavens.

But she didn't want him to look up to her. She didn't want him to shield her from the wind, and she certainly didn't want him to risk his life at every turn. She wanted him to live, to keep her company and talk with her, to help her organize files and understand what lay behind every harsh word she said, to keep her from being bored.

Su Yingchun wanted to say all this, but couldn't. She'd never learn to be gentle in this lifetime.

But that didn't matter. She could spend her whole life showing him through her actions that she, Su Yingchun, was the one who wanted him first.

That rainy night, she stood before him beneath an umbrella, her voice steadier than when she was interrogating a suspect. "Li Puci, I have no shortage of people to shield me from the wind."

"What I lack is a partner."

He knelt there, trembling all over. She didn't wait for his answer. She simply tilted the umbrella toward him, covering every part of him that was soaked.

If this world insisted on making life difficult for them, then Su Yingchun was willing to shelter him from every storm for the rest of her life.

She was a tree, and he was the only shadow beneath it. No one else could lay a hand on him.

[Reader's Guide]

1. Both leads are each other's only partners. The male lead is a real eunuch who transmigrated from the modern era, while the female lead is from ancient times.

2. Happy ending.

Theme: Stay true to yourself in both good times and bad.