The Tenth Year of Widowhood

(The premise has changed. The synopsis needs rewriting, but this is roughly what it's about.)

Childhood sweethearts / cool beauty x sunny, cheerful guy who's secretly a gloomy obsessive. Handsome pursuer, beautiful pursued.

In the tenth year of his widowhood, Imperial General Shen Qingyan developed an estrus-related pheromone disorder. During his heat, he needed an S-rank alpha to help regulate his pheromones.

But for the sake of his late husband, Shen Qingyan refused the marriage candidates the Empire sent him.

With Shen Qingyan on the brink of death, the Empire's Grand Princess personally selected an alpha and sent him to Shen Qingyan's room.

This S-rank alpha was named Gu Xunjian. Both his parents were dead, he had just turned eighteen, and he bore an eight-tenths resemblance to Shen Qingyan's late husband.

As expected, Shen Qingyan used Gu Xunjian to get through his heat. He even brought him along to meetings now and then.

Everyone was happy with the arrangement.

But whenever Shen Qingyan was intimate with Gu Xunjian, he couldn't stop thinking of his late husband's face. He felt he was betraying his late husband, yet also felt he was betraying Gu Xunjian. In the middle of the night, he'd hold his late husband's portrait and repent for what he'd done.

Until Shen Qingyan discovered that Gu Xunjian was his late husband, Shen Yuan, the previous Imperial General.

Shen Qingyan's gaze turned cold. He slapped him. "Shen Yuan, was it fun deceiving me?"

.

After fighting the Zerg, Shen Yuan died on the battlefield. When he opened his eyes again, he had become Gu Xunjian, an alpha from the slums.

Gu Xunjian worked hard to get into the Imperial Military Academy, hoping to rekindle his romance with his wife. The moment he entered the academy, he saw the Imperial General Shen Qingyan holding a party to select a husband.

He wasn't even dead yet, and his wife was already about to marry someone else.

Furious, Gu Xunjian submitted his own application too. Thanks to his excellent physical attributes, he became one of the candidates to be the general's husband.

But once he was actually selected, Gu Xunjian had no idea how to tell his wife he had been reborn.

It took only a few months for his wife to find out, and then he got slapped.

Theme: Keep moving toward your goal