The Substitute Paradox

[The full manuscript is complete and the currently locked chapters will be replaced] (The main story is not told in the first person) I've lived for tens of thousands of years and caused plenty of trouble. That's why I deeply understand the need for a secret identity, and support having one. Really, it's great to have a secret identity, especially when you're dating. After stirring up trouble, you can just drop it and leave without a trace. Besides, I'm not only capable, I'm also very responsible. I eat whichever meal goes with whichever secret identity I use, and I've had only a few rotten romances. They all believed I truly loved them. The funny thing is, after I leave, they always look for someone who resembles me to keep by their side. Have you heard of Zhan Shen Yue Zheng? He was my ex-husband, too, and the match was arranged by the Jade Emperor. I was only a secondary consort, but until he took a principal wife, he kept fooling me into thinking we were husband and wife. That guy treated me like a stand-in, yet acted so deeply in love. I didn't call him out. I just waited until he married his new wife, when the celestial soldiers and generals would be busy at the banquet and the guards would be lax. It was the perfect chance. To evade him, I couldn't use the underworld's rebirth passage, where you have to register, so I took a reckless leap from the Descent Platform and went down to the human world to be reborn in a fresh corpse. Later, I discovered my new secret identity was in a cold palace, where the food was so awful that it was no wonder the young girl had given up on life. Gradually, my new secret identity fused with my soul and came to look more and more like me. The emperor's gaze grew increasingly strange, and he kept visiting the cold palace every few days. The downside of frequently changing secret identities became clear: I couldn't remember much about what had happened while I was using some of them, and I couldn't exactly ask people whether they'd had a thing with one of my secret identities. Worse still, the emperor's newly appointed national preceptor, who could summon wind and rain, looked exactly like my ex-husband, Yue Zheng. Theme: Love yourself before loving someone else.