A sunny, straightforward general's daughter x a brooding, obsessive, beautiful yet tragic hostage prince. The male lead is reborn.
Wei Jin had a hazy dream. In it, she was the daughter of a military general, happily marrying Xiao Sheng, the hostage prince of the Shan Kingdom, who had offered himself to her and treated her well.
Then, four years later, during a war between their two countries, Xiao Sheng, who had betrayed her, fled Liang, and seized the throne, shot her with several arrows amid the chaos. Her body was left in the wilderness, with no one to bury her.
When Wei Jin woke, she saw the destitute young man beside her, his body still marked with the traces of their night together. His handsome face was cold and sinister, and she turned pale with fright.
Wei Jin scrambled backward. "...Don't come near me!"
To avoid her miserable fate, she decided to stay away from this future ruler, whose hands would be stained with countless deaths. But she soon realized that his gaze had grown more and more obsessive, more and more unsettling.
*
Xiao Sheng had lived for half a lifetime. He had done some good, and plenty of bad.
In the end, he was assassinated by rebels. It was only fitting. He deserved it.
Who could have known that after being reborn, by the banks of Yangzhou, he would see the girl again, riding her horse and snapping a flower from a branch with her whip?
And he was still the lowly hostage sent by his father and brothers to Liang to sue for peace and avert war, still being bullied at will by the young nobles of Great Liang. Every day, he had to worry about his safety, living a wretched life with no guarantee he'd see the next morning.
One day at the hunting grounds, members of the imperial family secretly locked Xiao Sheng in the stables, waiting for the herd to go berserk and trample him half to death.
He watched the onlookers sneering at him with indifference, then looked toward the radiant young woman riding past by chance, a red peony blooming in her hair. He crawled on his knees to her horse and knelt beside it, letting her pull on the reins, lift her whip, and raise his chin.
Beneath the fine horse, the man's deep green eyes held back a madness, but his voice was utterly humble.
"I beg Miss Wei to take pity on me and save my life. I, Xiao, will work like an ox or a horse for you, and never betray you."
Content warnings
* After being reborn, the heroine is 16 and the hero is 18. Gender-bender elements.
* A supporting character is also reborn. The institutions and customs are loosely based on the late Tang and Five Dynasties period, but this is a very loose setting. This is a story of two reborn characters and a fiery revenge arc.
* The hero is a real scoundrel. Before being reborn, he had no empress, and though he had a harem, he never slept with anyone. After being reborn, he initially becomes the heroine's lover. One-on-one romance, both each other's first.
Theme: Break free from fate
