Also known as: After Transmigrating, I Became the Mad Prince's Shadow Guard
A seemingly fragile but clear-headed and resilient woman x a seemingly useless wastrel who is actually a dark, clingy, obsessive man
Both are each other's first and only love, an older woman-younger man romance, with a younger male lead, one-on-one.
Bai Muzhi never dreamed that one day she would be walking down the street and suddenly transmigrate into an ancient brothel, just after waking up. She has no System, and her whole body has transmigrated into this dangerous world. It is a fictional, war-torn era where people prey on one another, and famine and disaster are everywhere.
To find a chance to escape, she decides to hide her true abilities. Relying on her looks alone, she pretends to be a gentle, obedient beauty who is greedy for money, and feigns cooperation as she tests the brothel madam. During her escape, she accidentally stumbles into the Crown Prince's private quarters.
Everyone says the Crown Prince is a lecherous playboy, forever haunting the pleasure quarters and unable to take his eyes off a beauty. Even Bai Muzhi thinks at first that sex is all he can think about, so she uses her looks to get him to take her away.
Only when he forcibly poisons her and treats her as his pawn, weapon, and tool, using her and training her, then sending her into the palace as a beauty to seduce the emperor, does Muzhi realize that this seemingly useless Crown Prince may not be as simple as he appears. To stay alive, she pretends to play along and tests him, making him utterly infatuated and letting his guard down as she looks for a chance to find her way home.
Wait, why is this taking such a strange turn? How did this suddenly become a story of coercive love?
After she successfully escapes and is captured again, he keeps her under even tighter control. She thinks that by hitting and scolding him, she has completely shattered his pride and crossed every line, and that he will come to despise her. Instead, her behavior stokes his pleasure. Only then does Muzhi realize that he is a complete madman with no sense of morality.
Chu Yanwen once believed that revenge was all his life had to offer. Then, in the endless darkness, he met the bright moon that lit his way. Everyone says the moon belongs high in the sky, but he insists on dragging it down to earth.
"...Zhizhi... Please don't run away again, all right?"
"...Isn't it nice by my side? Why do you keep trying to leave me...?"
"I love you, Zhi. I love you with all my heart, with every last breath in me. I wish you could have been born to me." He gave her his whole self as if in sacrifice, offering up even his breath.
"Zhi, when my revenge is finally over, drain my blood, strip the flesh from my bones, crush them to dust, and eat me. Then we'll become one, and you'll never be able to escape me."
Theme: People grow through hardship without having to lose themselves
