Chen Jun's Secret

[Next up: “Success and Xiao He”] A carefree, heartless womanizer who turns over a new leaf x a pure-hearted, black-bellied tea-sipping younger man

[Synopsis]: At a reunion with old friends, the first thing one friend said to Li Yihe was, “I ran into Chen Jun a few days ago.”

“Do you remember him? He used to sit behind you, all the way from elementary to middle school.”

“He's a total heartthrob now. He's over six feet tall, studying for a graduate degree at a prestigious university, and his profile looks just like a celebrity's.”

The friend sighed repeatedly. “What a shame. If I'd known he'd turn out like this, I would've chased after him when we were kids.”

Li Yihe racked her brain, but still couldn't remember anyone by that name.

At twenty-three, Li Yihe had graduated from a third-tier college. Her job paid a monthly salary of 3,500 yuan, and she still hadn't been made permanent. With an average build and an unremarkable face she rarely bothered to dress up, her several crushes and relationships had all come to nothing. She was an utterly ordinary person among the masses.

The man her friend described was so far out of her league that she couldn't even bring herself to imagine him.

After the dinner, Li Yihe was still dazed when she suddenly remembered Chen Jun.

It must have been early summer, sometime in their teens. Cicadas buzzed restlessly beneath the faint morning light.

Chen Jun sat behind her. He was quiet, short, and fair-skinned, with little presence. He always had his clingy younger cousin by his side.

Whenever their moral education class ended, he would gently tap her back, interrupting her horseplay with the underachieving desk mate she had a crush on.

“Li Yihe, recite your lesson for me.” That was Chen Jun's catchphrase.

After getting drunk and being in a car accident, Li Yihe woke up back in the year she was twelve.

Content warnings: Both leads are each other's first and only partner in both lifetimes. The heroine has few advantages from being reborn. The story is relatively hard on the hero, who is brooding and awkward.

Coming soon, “Success and Xiao He”:

After years of being a flirt who treated every handsome man like he could be her soulmate, Xu Xiaohe finally got cheated on herself.

One month after breaking up with her, Zhu Jin, the famous hottie from the sports college who had pursued her so desperately, got caught celebrating his three-month anniversary with his new girlfriend. That's right, she'd been cheated on. When he was chasing her, he called her a mature, charming older woman. When he cheated, he called her an unwanted old hag.

She rejected the second part, because she'd dated more handsome men than he'd made three-pointers.

To make Zhu Jin eat his words and win this cheating confrontation in a landslide, she grabbed a passerby who was far more handsome than him and confessed to him in front of everyone. What she never expected was that he would say yes.

Only afterward did she learn that he was Zhong Cheng, the famous heartthrob of Jiang University. Zhu Jin was only famous within his own college, but Zhong Cheng's uniquely fresh, handsome looks had made him a regular on the university's confession board, elevating him to campus-wide fame. As Xu Xiaohe's roommate put it, “He's so handsome you wouldn't even notice if someone died right beside him.”

They became a fake couple. Zhong Cheng used her to fend off admirers, while Xu Xiaohe used him to get back at Zhu Jin. But she couldn't shake her old habits of sweet-talking and flirting, and kept teasing Zhong Cheng out of habit. He was just as stubborn, smiling as he nipped every budding romance in the bud and drove off every man around her who might become her next husband, all in retaliation.

Ever since meeting Xu Xiaohe, Zhong Cheng seemed to be angry all the time. At first he was angry because she teased him. Later he was angry because she only teased him and never made a move. Finally, he was angry because she stopped teasing him and started teasing someone else.

Theme: Secret love and redemption.