Seven Years After My Wife Died in Battle, I Was Reborn

#Angsty, heart-wrenching melodrama# I am the Insect Emperor of the Gafas Empire, and my spouse is the empire’s marshal. Back when I was the third prince and he was a commoner female insect, we once swore beneath the moonlight to spend our lives together. I didn’t want the throne. I only wanted to be with him forever. When I held him around the waist and said that, he smiled faintly and kissed my forehead. I thought he had agreed. Full of joy, I began preparing for our future wedding and our home. But I underestimated his ambition. He had approached me only to use my status to climb higher in the military. When I refused the throne, he switched his allegiance to someone else. Our past affection became the blade that struck me. I was dragged before the tribunal on the charge of “torturing a military female insect,” and he was the female insect who testified for the prosecution. I was stripped of my status as a prince and sentenced to exile. As I left the tribunal, my eldest brother smiled and put an arm around his waist. He bowed his head obediently and leaned into my eldest brother’s embrace. I walked past them in handcuffs. He didn’t look back, not once. After I left, he rose from an unremarkable lieutenant to the marshal he had always dreamed of becoming. I hated him. So after I ascended the throne as Insect Emperor, I married him. I would torment and abuse him, just as he had once accused me of doing. I put him through every kind of torture. I made him kneel for days and nights in the pouring rain, his back covered in whip marks. I marked him brutally, never stopping even when pain drained the color from his face, when his instincts made him recoil, or when he trembled in terror whenever I pinned him beneath me. I didn’t take away his military authority. He remained the marshal of the empire he had dreamed of becoming, but I kept him in that position only to make it easier to humiliate him. In front of all the soldiers, I trampled his dignity underfoot and made him listen to everyone’s ridicule, his face pale. I took out my hatred on him through sex, but begrudged him the pheromones he needed. I watched him fall into endless yearning and struggle in pain, looking on coldly. He silently accepted everything I did to him, kneeling before me with his head bowed. He never tried to please me, nor did he beg for mercy. I thought we would go on like this forever, that I would keep tormenting and humiliating him until the day we died together. But he died. He died on the battlefield. For the sake of the insect egg in his belly, deprived of pheromones and in constant danger of losing its life, he took a desperate risk and fell in battle. In the first year after his death, I hated him. In the second year after his death, I hated him. In the seventh year after his death, I realized that I still loved him. #Formerly innocent and cheerful, now a darkened tyrant Insect Emperor top X taciturn marshal bottom# *Set in an imaginary fictional world. Unrelated to reality. Please do not draw parallels to real life. Notes: 1. Happy ending. The previous life is angsty; this life will be sweet. 2. Both are sexually exclusive, and each has only ever been with the other. 3. They both pursue each other and love each other desperately. There was a misunderstanding in their previous life, which will be resolved after he is reborn. 4. This is a melodramatic story. Don’t force yourself to keep reading if you can’t get into it. 5. Not friendly to fans of either the top or the bottom. Theme: Love is an eternal, unchanging force.