Reborn with My Aloof Ex-Husband

Five years into their marriage, Shen Weizhi happened to spot a letter on her husband's desk.

The words on it were unmistakable: My heart remains unchanged. Has yours?

The sender was no stranger. It was her older sister, who had returned to her family after her marriage fell apart not long ago.

Thinking of her husband's recent change in behavior, Shen Weizhi sighed inwardly. So much time had passed that she had nearly forgotten how disgraceful her marriage to him had been from the very start.

Five years ago, after drinking a cup of wine laced with something, she had spent one wild night with Zhong Shuheng, who was then her sister's fiancé.

Afterward, everyone thought Shen Weizhi had schemed to steal her sister's husband. From then on, she was shunned, while Zhong Shuheng was forced to marry her, leaving her sister heartbroken and pushing her into another marriage.

For the past five years, Zhong Shuheng had been aloof and indifferent to everyone and everything, including her, the wife he had been married to for five years. Even when they shared a bed twice a month, he held himself back as much as possible. It was little more than a perfunctory act to placate their elders.

Shen Weizhi was immensely relieved that Zhong Shuheng had no desire to share a bed with her, and that they had no children. It would be easy to part ways.

When she asked for a divorce, no one understood why.

But Shen Weizhi had seen how warm and gentle Zhong Shuheng had been as a young man, his smile as soft as a breeze. She could no longer force herself to swallow this half-cooked marriage.

Yet on the very night she sent Zhong Shuheng the divorce papers, Shen Weizhi was reborn.

The moment she opened her eyes, she was back on the night everything had gone wrong.

At her grandmother's birthday banquet, someone had secretly drugged the wine in front of her.

By now, Zhong Shuheng, thoroughly drunk, had been deliberately led to his lodgings.

Hiding her mouth behind a handkerchief, Shen Weizhi quietly spat out the wine and made a decision that would change the course of the story. This time, she kindly had a maid lead her sister to Zhong Shuheng's lodgings.

The next day, Shen Weizhi went to the flower-viewing banquet arranged by the Grand Princess, which was really a matchmaking banquet, if you know what I mean.

But in this life, Shen Weizhi's marriage prospects were especially unlucky. Every time she met a young gentleman who seemed right for her, something unexpected would happen.

At last, she settled on a suitable husband, a strapping young general. But just before their engagement was finalized, rumors spread that the child of the general's mistress was about to be born.

Then, at a palace banquet, a noble young man who had admired her for a long time got drunk and finally worked up the courage to confess his feelings. At the crucial moment, someone punched him and knocked out two of his front teeth.

To everyone's surprise, the one who threw the punch was the newly appointed top scholar, Zhong Shuheng.

Gazing into Zhong Shuheng's deep, unreadable eyes,

Shen Weizhi gritted her teeth. What on earth was her unlucky ex-husband trying to do?

[A Reader's Guide]

1. Both leads are reborn, one-on-one romance, both are each other's first and only partners in both lives.

2. The male lead loves only the female lead in both lives. There are misunderstandings along the way, but they will be cleared up.

3. A bittersweet, sweet romance. The author doesn't consider it angsty.

4. Updates are not daily. Feel free to let chapters pile up.

Please add my next book, After I Tempted My Adoptive Brother, to your reading list!

On the day Pei Qingfu married Mu Zheng, the young general who guarded the northern frontier, she received a wedding gift from her elder brother, Pei Shuyue.

She accepted it with a smile and thanked him, finally feeling a weight lift from her heart.

She believed that she had neatly put an end to the secret chapter of her past, when she had deliberately drawn close to her elder brother just to survive.

What she didn't see was the dark, complicated look in the eyes of the man who turned and walked away.

Later, the general's household was caught up in a struggle over the succession, and everything collapsed overnight.

To save her husband, Pei Qingfu went to beg Pei Shuyue for help.

Her adoptive elder brother was now the chief minister, a close confidant of the emperor, and the most powerful man in the court.

Within the high walls of the manor, the man stood with his hands behind his back as he listened to Pei Qingfu explain why she had come. He said nothing for a long while, only reaching up to pluck a hibiscus and rolling its stem between his fingers, his feelings impossible to read.

At last, he slowly came closer and tucked the hibiscus into her hair.

He leaned down, his breath brushing her ear. His voice was as faint as mist. “The tricks you used to coax me back then, little sister... have you really forgotten them all?”

He still looked as composed and lofty as the moon, but Pei Qingfu felt a chill run down her spine. She looked up sharply and met his deep gaze, only then realizing:

The story she thought had ended long ago was something he had never let go of.

-

Everyone in the capital knew that Chief Minister Pei Shuyue was proper and self-restrained, and valued rules above all else.

No one knew that he kept a hibiscus in his heart, hidden from the light.

When he was seventeen, the quiet hibiscus growing in a corner of the rear courtyard flushed red, tempting someone to pluck it. So he indulged his timid, illegitimate younger sister as she deliberately drew close to him.

He waited for her coming-of-age ceremony, planning and dreaming of how to keep her by his side forever.

Instead, he watched her joyfully marry another man.

While he defied his elders and knelt in punishment at the ancestral hall, while he burned scar after scar into his own skin, she was plotting her escape. She slipped away so easily and left him behind, alone in his obsession.

Later, the hibiscus fell into his hands once more.

He stroked the nape of her trembling neck, his laughter steeped in a possessive tenderness. He coaxed her into divorcing her husband, and when her eyes blurred with tears, he kissed the blood from the corner of her lips.

“Back then, you left me for him. Now... it's time you came back to me.”

-

In Mu Zheng's eyes, his friend Pei Shuyue might have been quiet and reserved, but he had always been open and straightforward. Somehow, though, his friend had become dark and inscrutable.

Later, the two fell out over a conflict and cut ties. But since Pei Shuyue was his wife's elder brother, Mu Zheng swallowed his resentment and kept up a show of respect for the man who was, in name, his elder brother-in-law.

After divorcing his wife, he bitterly regretted it. With nowhere else to turn, he barged into Pei Shuyue's courtyard. But just as he was about to ask for help, he caught sight of the wife he longed for every day, curled in the arms of her refined, moonlike elder brother and letting him have his way with her.

Furious, he raised a hand to punch Pei Shuyue in the face, only to see his wife's panicked expression. Her eyes held nothing but concern for her elder brother and resentment toward him.

Theme: Cherish the person before you, rather than settling for what has passed.