The Stand-Ins Eloped

The new novel, Marrying a Rough County Magistrate, is complete. Welcome to read it!

My next novel, The Emperor and His Widowed Sister-in-Law, will be opening soon. The blurb is below. Feel free to add it to your list!

Everyone knew that His Highness Prince Zhao, renowned for his military achievements, kept a peerless beauty hidden in his inner residence. He treasured her like a precious jewel, cherishing her so dearly that he would not even let outsiders catch a glimpse of her.

The beauty herself thought so, too.

Until one day, during the royal autumn hunt, she saw with her own eyes the man who had always doted on and protected her risk his own flesh and blood to fend off a tiger for the princess's sweet call of "Uncle," yet abandon her to the tiger's jaws. Only then did she realize she was nothing more than a substitute he had found.

After narrowly escaping danger, Guan Qingqiu had a dream. In it, she saw Gong Zhe eventually disregard public opinion and marry Princess Deyang, whom he had raised since childhood. As for her, because her face looked nine-tenths like Deyang's, she was hated by the princess and ultimately persecuted to death. Her corpse was carelessly discarded in a mass grave, where wild dogs gnawed at it.

When she awoke, Guan Qingqiu decided to pack her things and run as soon as possible.

On the run, she met a man who looked seven-tenths like Prince Zhao. After questioning him, she learned he was a substitute for Prince Zhao, found by Deyang. He, too, had learned in a dream that he would meet a miserable end, so he had hurriedly escaped. And whenever she touched his skin, she could foresee scenes of Prince Zhao and Deyang's actions in her dreams.

So the two substitutes joined forces and fled for their lives.

Meanwhile, in the capital, Prince Zhao and Deyang went frantic upon learning that the substitutes they had found had eloped.

[Prince Zhao chases his wife to the crematorium]

[The substitutes are taking over!]

[So someone is a good person just because they aren't too bad to their substitute?]

[Yeah, right! What good person would find a substitute?]

The complete manuscript of The Emperor and His Widowed Sister-in-Law is in progress

Cui Fuwei was once the most envied noblewoman in Great Yue, and is now the woman the emperor hates most.

She had once been his fiancée, but after he was wounded in battle, she abandoned him and shamelessly climbed into his elder brother's bed.

When he managed to cling to life and returned to the capital, all he saw was her radiant wedding procession stretching ten li, as she entered the Eastern Palace with a smile as beautiful as a flower.

From then on, she became his sister-in-law, the empress.

*

On the way to her wedding, a breeze lifted the curtain of the bridal sedan. Cui Fuwei glanced outside without thinking and immediately saw the man she thought she would never see again: her former fiancé, the second prince, Fu Junhui.

Blood soaked through the cloth covering his wound, as bright as the wedding dress she wore. Yet the look he gave her was cold and despairing, as if steeped in poison.

He stopped Cui Fuwei's sedan. After a long while, he said coldly:

"Congratulations, Your Highness, Sister-in-Law."

*

But that very night, he pinned her before the Crown Prince's memorial tablet and took her without restraint.

What sister-in-law?

She had always been his woman.

The complete sweet romance, Marrying a Rough County Magistrate, is available to read

Marriage first, love later | Rough-hewn man and noblewoman

In a single night, the world turned upside down. Shen Jingmo, the capital's most beautiful woman, was about to go from being the daughter of a fourth-rank official to a prisoner.

The only way out before her was to marry immediately.

Before the whole family was thrown into prison, Shen's mother begged everyone she could think of on her behalf. But after the Shen family fell into disgrace, the young nobleman who had grown up with Shen Jingmo and shared her affection never showed his face even once.

The peerless beauty was about to be ruined.

At her wit's end, Shen's mother suddenly remembered that seventeen years ago, in a poor and remote village a thousand li away, one family had made a verbal marriage pact with the Shen family.

So on the day the Shen family was imprisoned, Shen Jingmo was bundled into a carriage by her mother and sent to seek the fiancé she had never met.

*

Shen Jingmo had never imagined that her husband would be a rough county magistrate who could not recognize a single character, was slovenly, and had no ambition in life beyond a warm bed, a wife, and children.

On their wedding night, Shen Jingmo made a gentleman's agreement with him. She could not yet let go of her childhood sweetheart, and he loved someone else. They would only have to pretend to be a loving couple for three years; after that, they could part amicably and each find happiness.

But she never expected that this man, who had never in his life left the mountains, would for her rise step by step from a poor county magistrate to the throne. He would clear her family's name and place the whole realm at her feet.

*

Chen Junqian, magistrate of Yongning County, never imagined that his childhood betrothed would be the woman he had dreamed of day and night.

To marry the woman he loved, he renovated the courtyard, caught fish in the river for her, stole fruit and caught birds, and tried every trick he could think of to make her happy.

Unfortunately, though he loved her, she did not feel the same. No matter how hard he tried, she still preferred that fair, clean, refined young gentleman.

But it was all right. He would wait.

He would wait until he led her out of the mountains, until her childhood sweetheart bowed before him in submission, until he personally brought her family back to the capital from their exile in the north, until he placed the phoenix seal of the empress in her hands...

He would wait until she fell in love with him.

[Little scene:

There were rumors in the palace that after ascending the throne, His Majesty spent every night in the empress's chambers. A month later, the Empress finally kicked him out.

His Majesty flew into a rage and slammed the door of the imperial study, his face dark. The palace attendants were all so terrified they held their tongues, and no one dared go in and disturb him.

In the middle of the night, after staying up in the imperial study and diligently reviewing eighty memorials, Chen Junqian finally tossed aside his brush and happily sneaked into the empress's chambers, then quietly climbed into her bed.

"You told me to review sixty memorials. I reviewed eighty. Ten memorials per time, no credit." ]

Theme: Even in adversity, keep striving and fighting back