Married to a Gu

Wen Hongguang was born with a sword bone. He was the youngest sect leader in Xuanqing Mountain's history, a man as clear and bright as the moon, with extraordinary talent. Everyone said he would cleave open the Gate of the Ninth Heaven, ascend the Great Path, and become a god. Shi Huaizhen liked men like him.

That was in her previous life.

Spoiled by nature and determined to get whatever she wanted, the little princess Shi Huaizhen died in the previous life from the bitter fruit of her own making.

In the years her spirit drifted without a home, she thought that if she could live again, she would never rely on imperial power to force Wen Hongguang to become her cultivation partner, nor would she drag him into planting a Love-Sleeping Gu with her.

After all, the person Wen Hongguang had always loved, from beginning to end, was another woman who had passed away.

By some stroke of luck, she was reborn, but fate seemed determined to thwart her. When Shi Huaizhen awoke, the love gu had already been planted.

As the poison took hold and cold sweat poured down her face, she briefly wondered if she could ask Wen Hongguang for help. In the end, however, she refused to yield and threw herself into another path.

And she really did find a glimmer of hope.

It turned out that although the love gu could not be cured, it could be transferred. The primary gu inside Shi Huaizhen could not be moved, but the secondary gu in Wen Hongguang's body could be extracted and placed in someone else, with the help of a particular item.

That item was called the Gu-Transferring Jade. Plain in appearance, it became useless after a single use.

There was only one in the world.

Using it would sever all ties between her and Wen Hongguang.

Shi Huaizhen eventually got her hands on the jade. Now only one question remained: she was the Human Emperor's only daughter, a princess of noble birth, dazzlingly beautiful and peerless. Even with her horrid, spoiled, and willful nature, plenty of people would be willing to take on the secondary gu.

So, the one-use jade in her hand...

Who should she use it on?

*

Wen Hongguang was a rare, naturally gifted sword cultivator with unfathomable cultivation. Few worldly things could catch his eye.

Yet one day, he suddenly began searching frantically for a piece of jade.

Everyone was baffled. Why would the usually detached and otherworldly leader of the Xuanqing Sect want a piece of jade?

Only Wen Hongguang knew the answer. He didn't want it for anything. He just wanted to find it and destroy it with his own hands.

But he didn't know that a boy dragging one crippled leg had found it before him.

*

Qiu Xiaosheng hated one person more than anyone.

When he was seventeen, he saved her, but she repaid his kindness by breaking one of his legs.

The boy was poor, but proud. He thought that sooner or later, he would make her pay.

So he took up the sword, overcame the Burning Tribulation, and used his mortal flesh and blood to forcefully temper himself into a sword bone. Later, he wielded the Blood-Binding Sword with such uncanny skill that even the entire Xuanqing Sect could do nothing to stop him. Then he thought it was time to find her and take his revenge.

But she was dead.

She had died in a raging fire, leaving not a single bone behind for him.

That day, Qiu Xiaosheng lay for a long, long time at her grave, a blade of grass in his mouth as he gazed up at the ashen sky.

But revenge still had to be taken, he thought. So he would just have to go find her.

*

Reading Guide:

‖Slow-burn angst and melodrama, happy ending.

‖The male lead comes in later and takes the heroine's heart. The second male lead pursues her after losing her, but never wins her back.

‖My own take on the cultivation world, with a fair amount of plot. This is not a purely romance-focused story (##but the plot is just an excuse for the author to indulge in piling on ever more outrageous melodrama. At its core, this is a self-indulgent fantasy romance.

Theme: The simple joys of ordinary life are treasures, too.