I Play the Fool in an Old-School Angst Novel

[My next books, The Sweet Fool Gets a Villainess Script and I Became the Favorite of a Bunch of Treacherous Officials, will be updated simultaneously. Thank you all for your support! Bows!]

[Truly a female-led power fantasy!]

Lou Wangshu is incapable of feeling emotions. Sent to endure trials in three thousand melodramatic novel worlds, she finds that these angsty romance stories are always full of male and female leads and supporting characters who can't think straight...

Lou Wangshu: Let me teach you how to behave.

1. The enemy pins the female lead and the supporting female character against a city wall, forcing the male lead to choose whom to save.

The male lead chooses the supporting female character.

Lou Wangshu snatches an arrow from a soldier and shoots the supporting female character, then turns to the male lead. "Now you know who to choose, right?"

2. The male lead's unattainable first love goes abroad, so he uses the female lead as her replacement and warns her, "Remember your place. Don't think you can marry me."

Lou Wangshu scoffs. Who doesn't know how to find a replacement these days? She pins him down and gives him a new hairstyle.

She says tenderly, "You look most like him when you're bald."

3. In a story about a domineering man claiming a woman against her will, the female lead falls unconscious while giving birth. The male lead holds up the swaddled baby and threatens, "If you dare to die, I'll bury him with you!"

Lou Wangshu opens her eyes. "Hold him higher. I'm afraid you won't drop him hard enough."

4. In a tragic romance, the female lead's brother supposedly abandons the male lead's sister. So the male lead deliberately runs into the female lead, waits for her to fall in love with him, and then plans to dump her.

Lou Wangshu adjusts the glasses on her nose. "You didn't see that coming, did you? I never leave the house."

When Lou Wangshu finally leaves the novel worlds, everyone realizes her condition has gotten worse.

Blurb for The Sweet Fool Gets a Villainess Script:

Wen Shushu loses her memory after falling into the sea and transmigrates into a book.

She can't remember her past. All she knows is that this world is an old-fashioned, melodramatic tragedy. The heroine is found by her family, only so they can make her enter the palace in place of her sister and win the empress's throne by a stroke of luck. Then, on her wedding day, her entire family is wiped out.

Because she's too kind, the heroine becomes a pawn in the schemes of various factions. She's thrown into a mass grave to be eaten by wild dogs, dying without even a complete corpse.

And now she's that heroine!

Wen Shushu: I hug my chubby self, heartbroken.

As a frail young woman who can't even truss a chicken, how can she escape her predetermined fate and stay alive?

Wen Shushu: Being the kind and righteous person she is, she has no choice but to fight evil with evil to save her own life, reform the villains with all her might, and fill the world with love (?).

But being a bad person seems so hard. She just can't do it, so she has to find a few experienced villains to learn from.

"How do I become a big bad?"

After a long silence, the other person pulls his face out from under her shoe and slowly spits out two bloody teeth.

"You just need to tone it down a little," he says.

Later, Wen Shushu, holding a villainess script, meets the book's elegant and noble third male lead. With deep affection in her eyes, she says, "You're the one I cherish most."

She meets the dashing, philandering sixth prince, the male lead, and assures him, "You're the only one in my heart. The other men are all in the past."

She meets the self-disciplined, proper scholar from a poor family, the second male lead, who says one thing and means another. She fusses over him: "My eyes are on you, my hands are holding you, and my heart loves you, sweetie!"

Then one day, the truth comes out, and all three men show up at the same time to ask for her hand in marriage...

Wen Shushu: To be honest, my heart is a durian, and there's a person standing on every spike. (Blows a smoke ring.)

Just as the whole thing is about to go off the rails, Wen Shushu dives into the imperial harem, waves goodbye, and goes off to compete in the selection.

One day, she sits on the dragon throne, looking down at the assembled court officials. She turns to the child in her arms and asks, "My child, do you know how many stepfathers I've found for you?"

Blurb for I Became the Favorite of a Bunch of Treacherous Officials:

Yan Yu transmigrates into a book with her old, busted phone and becomes a pitiful girl loved by neither her father nor her mother. Her stepsister sees her as a thorn in her side.

Though they're one of the great families of the capital, they live worse than ordinary commoners.

What has Yan Yu most worried right now is that the whole family plans to have her pretend to be her missing twin brother and take an official post.

In the original story, her brother eventually becomes a chancellor, but he's also the book's greatest treacherous official. He's sentenced to be torn apart by five horses and dies a horrible death.

Yan Yu has a sound moral compass. Though she's envious of the grand life the great villain enjoys before his death, she doesn't want to die. Besides, she's just an innocent commoner. How is she supposed to become a treacherous official?

Her broken phone suddenly lights up.

[Dong Zhuo, Wei Zhongxian, Qin Hui, He Shen... have requested to be friends]

The great treacherous officials: We've always wanted to take on a disciple.

Yan Yu: ...You really don't have to.

Later, Yan Yu never does become a treacherous official, but she does learn all her masters' basic tricks and gets rich by fleecing the aristocracy.

The capricious tyrant is patting the dragon bed and calling out to her. "My dear subject, what wonderful surprise are you bringing me today?"

The masters: Go for it!

Yan Yu clutches her money pouch tightly. "I really don't have any left. I'm completely broke."

Reader's guide:

1. One-on-one romance, both leads' first relationship. The miserly, money-grubbing tyrant male lead versus the flexible, money-hoarding female lead.

2. The male lead only knows how to ask the female lead for money. When he spends money on her, it's to get even more money from her next time. That's right, as emperor he's dirt poor, but he isn't living off a woman. (Important!)

3. Daily updates, no matter what!

Theme: No one should have to pay for someone else's love.