After Marrying a Sharp-Tongued Invalid for a Wedding Blessing

Sunny girl x sickly young man (older man, raising her as they depend on each other)

The leads are seven years apart. There is no romance between them before the heroine comes of age.

When Zhou Shaoai was seven, her family fell on hard times, and her father sold her to a wealthy local family as a child bride, to bring good fortune to their sick son.

On her first day at the Li family estate, she cried all the way there. The old woman leading her along comforted her earnestly: "Actually, our eldest young master is the kind of man you couldn't find with a lantern. He's tall and slender, with a pale, foxlike face. He's kindhearted, too, and a good person, though he's a little frail, and his mouth is also..."

A bright red cherry fell from above and landed right on Zhou Shaoai's head.

She looked up and saw a young man lounging in the cherry tree to escape the heat.

He wore a snow-white silk robe, and his face was pale and slender. Against the blazing red cherries, he was as pure as the moon, so handsome and delicate he seemed otherworldly, and so cold and remote he seemed otherworldly, too.

Zhou Shaoai stared at him and forgot to cry.

Then the other person opened his mouth and said:

"Whose little radish stump is this?"

*

Li Fengyu had been a gloomy, sickly child from the start, never saying a kind word to anyone and never much liked by his family.

When he turned fourteen, it was obvious he wouldn't last much longer. His parents made a show of arranging a child bride whose birth chart was an excellent match, hoping she would bring him good fortune.

The child bride was spoiled, liked to cry, and was terribly naïve. She believed anything anyone told her, and could be lured away on the street with a single candied hawthorn skewer. Li Fengyu couldn't stand the sight of her.

Later, his family was destroyed, and the once-noble young master became a disgraced outcast, hated by all. All he had left was his little child bride, and the two of them depended on each other.

Old enemies and new foes alike waited for him to breathe his last so they could swallow up his increasingly beautiful little wife.

To protect the very naïveté he had once despised, he clung to his final breath, studied for the imperial examinations, learned to curry favor with the powerful, and schemed his way forward at every turn...

He somehow managed to turn a miserable life into one of success and glory.

Theme: May we have no years to regret, and share a lifetime of devotion until our hair turns white.