My Husband Doesn't Know He's a Substitute

Sang Miao was born into the Duke of Guo’s household and was cherished for seventeen years before learning that she was a fake heiress, an impostor.

To find a powerful backer, secure her place, and avoid trouble, she schemed and plotted. She had hoped to marry the Third Prince, Yan Zeren, whom she had admired for years.

But in the dark, she accidentally ruined the Fourth Prince Yan Yuesheng’s “innocence.”

Everyone knew that the Fourth Prince had grown up living among commoners before the royal family found him and brought him back in his youth. He was devastatingly handsome and had won great victories on the northern frontier, yet he was cold-hearted, ruthless, and bloodthirsty.

The noblewomen of the capital all admired him, but kept their distance.

Having accidentally “schemed” her way into the life of a man like him, then been granted an imperial marriage decree, Sang Miao felt as if the sky were falling.

Fortunately, though Yan Yuesheng and Yan Zeren were not full brothers, they looked about seventy or eighty percent alike.

Either way, she had a powerful backer. Hoping to make married life easier, Sang Miao decided to go along with the mistake and came up with another clever plan: she would pretend she had been deeply in love with Yan Yuesheng all along.

*

After a childhood spent in hardship and a youth spent enduring humiliation, Yan Yuesheng had two lifelong grudges:

First, he hated his imperial father for abandoning him after a brief affair, leaving him born with “no known father” and his mother burdened with a shameful reputation. Second, he hated that as a child, he had spent several years as a servant boy at the Prince of Shu’s mountain villa, waiting on a group of pampered young ladies, one of whom had indirectly caused his mother’s death.

The year he returned victorious from the northern frontier, he planned to marry into the Shen clan, a powerful family with control of the military, to strengthen his position before vying for the throne. But Sang Miao had appeared out of nowhere and wrecked his plans.

In his memory, she was the Prince of Shu’s granddaughter, a girl from the prosperous imperial capital who had always looked down on him. She had once lifted her chin proudly and pressed a foot against his knee: “Servants should know their place. Get down on your knees and beg me. This young lady might just show you mercy.”

Now she had grown up, becoming even more charming and beautiful than he had imagined.

Not only did she have no memory of him, she didn’t even recognize him.

And she declared, the moment she opened her mouth, that she was madly in love with him.

Yan Yuesheng laughed in disbelief.

But when he imagined that after they married, the young lady who had once trampled on him would tuck away her claws, sob and beg for mercy, and call him “husband,” well, wasn’t that another kind of deeply satisfying revenge?

[A drama-loving sweetheart who wants a comfortable life and only has eyes for his body × A chaste, aloof façade who wants her heart and eventually loses his composure]

[The heroine mistakes him for someone else, surviving by the skin of her teeth with a goofy streak vs. the hero’s one-sided, tormented love]

#MyDarkMoonlightGrewUp, SchemedAgainstMe, ConfessedToMe, But Didn’t Recognize Me#

#Oh, So I’m My Brother’s Substitute#

[Reader’s Guide]

❶ Alternate-universe setting, both leads’ first time|Unconventional substitute trope|Mutual information gap|Marriage before love|A melodramatic mix of tropes|A battlefield of romantic rivals

❷ The hero looks very different as an adult than he did as a child, so the heroine doesn’t recognize him at the beginning. She will discover the truth later.

❸ The heroine pursues the hero early on; later, he pursues her. The heroine will run away later, and there will be a romantic rivalry involving the second male lead. All the story elements serve the romance and the characters’ preferences.

❹ The claim in the blurb that she “caused his mother’s death” reflects one character’s perspective. The novel will explain this, but the heroine may still have played an indirect role, so proceed with caution if this bothers you. Readers with exceptionally high moral standards for the protagonists should also proceed with caution.

Theme: As a human being, my own position comes first.