Ripples in the Evening Breeze

The print edition is now available for purchase on multiple platforms~

My other ongoing novel, Wild Star Lamp, is just next door. Visit my profile to check it out; the blurb is below~ Depressed writer x lost girl, saving each other~

Beautiful, rich, and willful princess x gloomy, aloof boy with a criminal record

1.+

Five years ago, Beijing. A rainy night. A huge black umbrella blocked out half the sky.

"Jiang Zeyu, I have people lining up to date me all the way to Fragrant Hills. You're poor and you've been to prison. What makes you think I'd stay with you forever?"

After breaking up with him, she walked away beneath her umbrella without looking back. Her fingers gripping the handle were pale, and she never once looked at the boy's dark, reddened eyes.

As they passed each other, she heard his hoarse voice, but thunder rolled overhead, and all she could make out was the first word: "You..."

It was probably a curse from a heart consumed by love and hate.

A few days later, she went abroad and didn't return for five years.

Years passed. The poor boy of the past made a sudden comeback, becoming a hot new name in the business world and the biggest boss at the company she signed with.

She kept giving ground, but he repeatedly made things difficult for her. His cold expression concealed a deep-seated resentment. She thought he hated her for dumping him, until she heard the truth after he got drunk.

His voice was hoarse, his eyes as red as they had been that year, but now there was even more despair in them. "I can't help hating you, Xie Yi. Back then, I couldn't even afford a plane ticket. How was I supposed to... find you?"

Only then did she understand what he had said when they broke up:

"Don't go too far away. Wait for me to come find you."

2.

Years later, old friends reunited. Slightly tipsy, Xie Yi said, "I've lived freely and have few regrets. If I had to name one, it would be that parting all those years ago. If I could start over, I'd rather live in poverty, with only coarse clothes and barely enough to eat, than part from him against my heart's wishes."

When she finished, she realized that beneath the table, someone was gently prying her fingers apart one by one, then lacing them with his.

How unlucky, and how lucky.

3.

"I like you, like the evening breeze passing over a lake and stirring up ripples."

"Just ripples?"

"That's because I'd already melted a whole lake of ice for you before then."

[Reading Guide]

1. They save each other; both leads are beautiful, strong, and tragic.

2. The heroine had her reasons for breaking up with him. The hero's criminal record was the result of a frame-up, and his name has since been cleared.

3. Happy ending.

Ongoing novel: Wild Star Lamp

At seventeen, she ran away. Light-years away, wild stars became her lamp.

1.

At the tail end of her seventeenth year, Gu Jianian failed the college entrance exam. With her future looking bleak, she was sent to spend the summer at her grandmother's home in the countryside.

One day, she accidentally wandered into the village villa covered in ivy. It was home to a strange man, as the neighbors called him:

The doors and windows were always shut. He didn't work or go out, and his only contact with the outside world was through people who came twice a week to deliver supplies and clean.

On the last day of summer vacation, Gu Jianian did two things: called her parents to discuss retaking the exam, and went to the ivy-covered villa to confess her feelings.

One succeeded. The other failed.

2.

Two years later, Gu Jianian was studying by lamplight in the Chinese department at Yun University, surrounded by outstanding students. For one literature appreciation class, the professor assigned a reading list that was nearly half made up of works by a rising young writer, who had won major literary awards for a full-length novel and a series of novellas.

At two in the morning, Gu Jianian sat in the library and opened the preface to his novel.

He had written:

"The opening was hard-won. I stopped writing more than ten times, each time because the harshness of reality wore down my romantic dreams. Then one day, she knocked on my door, pushed aside the dogwoods cluttering the entrance, and handed me a box of pastries. From then on, light poured in."

Depressed writer + X + lost girl

Saving each other, finding their way to each other

Theme: Love and giving