My Parents Always Treat Each Other as Substitutes

New story: Becoming a Magical Girl in the Detective Conan World, and upcoming story: After Ascending by Cultivating the Unfeeling Dao, He Was Forced into Marriage. Blurbs below!

(Blurb for this story)

Jiujiu's father bought her mother an official post in Suiyuan County, making her the county magistrate.

Her father said that since the emperor had appointed the eldest princess as crown princess, Feng'an would surely have an empress one day. The emperor was the most honored person under heaven. He was just a country fellow with no great abilities, but he had to give his wife the very best.

His wife was beautiful and talented. What was wrong with her being a county official?

After a year of poverty alleviation and two years of prosperity, the couple worked together to make Suiyuan County a famous happy place in all the surrounding villages.

Everyone envied this heavenly match, so loving and perfectly suited to each other.

But in reality:

One reason her father bought her mother that official post may simply have been that he thought her in official robes resembled his talented first love, who was well versed in poetry and books...

And her mother had it a little rough. She could only gaze at her father's face and think of someone else. She thought her father was too burly to suit the delicate face of her first love.

When Jiujiu learned about the trope of someone being a stand-in for a first love, she thought: I don't get it, but I'm deeply shocked.

Worse still, they had such heavily idealized images of each other's first loves that they didn't realize the stand-in was the first love herself.

Xie Jiujiu hugged her own round little self and began to worry herself sick over her utterly ridiculous parents.

1. The little girl spends the whole story trying to solve her ridiculous parents' love problems. She has no romance of her own.

2. Her parents go from an adult arrangement of mutual convenience, to falling in love, to realizing they were the fools all along.

3. Raising-a-child story, lighthearted alternate setting. Please don't read too much into it.

New story: Becoming a Magical Girl in the Detective Conan World is now underway!

Just shy of thirty, Miyano Genri became a magical young man (adult male).

He had to fight an enemy species called Evil Beasts while carrying a white bear, wearing pumpkin pants with a tailcoat, and wielding a ridiculous lollipop magic wand.

He just had to smack them flat with the lollipop.

*

When a bomb suddenly restarted its countdown, Hagiwara Kenji saw a fluffy bear paw.

While waiting for a clue even with only five seconds left before the explosion, Matsuda Jinpei saw the tail of a tailcoat.

When facing Genri with his giant lollipop, Furuya Rei smelled something sweet.

*

Meanwhile, his colleagues in the organization still thought Amorado, who carried a stuffed toy around all day, was a weirdo.

1. The protagonist is a genuine liquor, but he slacks off.

2. Hagi has a one-sided friendship crush. Unless something unexpected happens, the other party is Zero.

3. Cardcaptor Sakura and Puella Magi Madoka Magica are mentioned a little. After all, the two are classic contrasting examples of magical-girl stories.

4. Any out-of-character behavior belongs to the protagonist, Genri. The deductions are the author's; everything else is for the plot.

Upcoming story: After Ascending by Cultivating the Unfeeling Dao, He Was Forced into Marriage. I'll try to open it once it reaches 150 bookmarks!

Before he began cultivating immortality, Ming Yi considered himself an ordinary man.

As the legitimate son of a prominent clan, he once admired and longed for the most beautiful woman under heaven, Princess Huai Ci, just like most men in Shang Sui. He would have gladly offered her the finest things in the world, just for her to lower her eyes and look at him once.

She was as bright and passionate as fire, and just as dangerous and consuming.

He had been close with her, wrapped in her intoxicating fragrance, yet she made him watch as she died for love alongside another man.

Then his family was destroyed, and he nearly died in that great fire himself.

Unable to find a happy ending, Ming Yi cultivated the Unfeeling Dao.

After completing his path and ascending, he was immediately forced into red wedding robes and sent beyond the Ninth Heaven, to the residence of the Immortal Lord of Yaoshan.

And the Immortal Lord of Yaoshan was none other than the woman who had abandoned him and died for love with someone else: Princess Ning Bai of Huai Ci.

*

Ning Bai had been single for millions of years, and had always opposed arranged marriages.

So when the Star-Seer told her that she had to marry a future star of the Nine Heavens and Four Realms at a certain time on a certain day in a certain month and year, she pretended to undergo a tribulation and went down to the mortal world.

The mortal world's men having three wives and four concubines opened Ning Bai's eyes, so she began to wander among all kinds of men, moving through a field of flowers without a leaf touching her.

...Well, not quite without a leaf touching her. The man with a mole beneath his left pupil did make her fall for him just a little.

Ten thousand years later, she returned to the immortal world severely weakened, only to have a prearranged husband shoved on her while she wasn't looking.

She took a good look at him, then was overjoyed.

What a coincidence!

*

Ming Yi: I cultivated the Unfeeling Dao and ascended so I could become a live-in son-in-law in heaven?!

Ning Bai: You're so cold, so cool. I love you!

Theme: May all lovers who choose each other be spared the wear and tear of life's hardships.