After Breaking Off My Engagement to the Gentle Crown Prince

[Fake: Spoiled and Wilful] x [True: Gentle and Warm as Jade]

Sweet romance, 1v1, happy ending

In her previous life, Luo Tangdi was a noble young lady from an illustrious family, famed throughout the capital for her beauty. She was doted on until she lived carefree, spoiled, and pretentious.

By the time she was fifteen, her greatest worry was this:

Her fiancé, the Crown Prince, must have been blind, because he treated her with utter coldness and dislike.

Luo Tangdi did not blame him. After all, he was blind.

But every time she was forced to see him, she would lift her chin and put on airs, then give a haughty snort.

That was to show she certainly was not lowering herself and fawning on him.

Later, the Crown Prince was deposed because of an illness and imprisoned in the palace grounds.

Luo Tangdi did not hesitate for a moment. She resolutely broke off the engagement and married the Grand Marshal, who held power over the entire court.

But she never expected her husband to be a treacherous wolf, plotting rebellion.

The first person he chose to make an example of was Luo Tangdi.

On the day she bared her neck to the executioner's blade,

only the deposed Crown Prince, who had always loathed her, marched north alone, captured thirty-two cities in succession, and killed the Grand Marshal.

In the end, amid the swirling snow, he gave his life for his country.

After being reborn, Luo Tangdi resolved to cling tightly to the deposed Crown Prince's side.

But there was one problem: the moment she opened her eyes, the engagement had already been broken off.

-

Pei Lingyuan was the Crown Prince, yet he had been born with an eye disease and was regarded as an aberration.

Later, when he became completely blind, he was stripped of his title and reduced to a commoner.

The palace grounds where he was confined were overgrown with withered grass, and the night rain was cold.

Only his vain Crown Princess would slip into his arms, complaining that she was so cold, so cold, and insist on pressing her warm lips to his eyes.

She would coo, "Your Highness, hold me."

Pei Lingyuan would think that things could not go on like this forever.

Luo Tangdi liked fine clothes and silk, beautiful maids and capable servants, and lavish delicacies. He ought to give her all of those things.

–

In early spring, in the second month, people went on outings for the Flower Festival.

The deposed Crown Prince, kept under house arrest for a long time, appeared in public for the first time. He was proper and composed, with a distant, aloof nobility that kept everyone at arm's length.

Everyone thought Luo Tangdi was bound to be humiliated.

Instead, they caught sight of two figures beneath a tang tree.

Luo Tangdi held her face in her hands, the tip of her nose almost brushing his cheek. Her tone was as mischievous as ever. "Your Highness, do you really not want to touch Ah Tang's face?"

For the first time, the young man bent down,

and kissed the corner of the girl's lips.

Notes:

1. His disability concerns his eyes. There is something wrong with them.

2. The illness will get better. It is not hereditary.

3. Neither the male nor female lead is perfect, and both will grow.

4. Well, the male lead is not sweet on the outside but sinister within. He is genuinely gentle, a righteous gentleman with a broad sense of duty.

Here's a preview of the next novel I plan to write, "Yao Ji Comes at Night"

One afternoon during the second semester of her junior year in college,

Shen Chi was bent over a book in the library. When she opened her eyes again, she had returned to a thousand years ago.

The realm was in turmoil, and the people were suffering.

She saw a young man sitting in the snow of midwinter before the corpses of his family, his eyes reflecting the light of bloodshed.

Shen Chi lowered her head. The pages of the book in her hands had opened to the seventeenth year of the Chun Cheng era.

That year, the entire family of the Azure Emperor Yin Qi was wiped out. The pages recorded in vivid detail the future in which he would command the six directions, bring the realm under his rule, create an age of peace unlike any before it, and save all the people from suffering.

Shen Chi closed the book and walked toward him.

Even thousands of years later, a huge number of Yin Qi's career-focused fans could still be found on online forums. They all agreed he was "my most swoon-worthy ancestor."

He expanded the borders and brought the realm to peace.

He kept taxes low and prioritized the people's welfare.

The only point anyone could criticize was that during his reign, he spent a fortune building grand platforms and pursuing immortality.

He hoped to climb high enough to approach the heavens and live as long as the immortals.

Apart from that, he was nearly a perfect emperor, the most accomplished career-driven ruler in history.

Until 2025 CE, when the tomb of the Azure Emperor was opened to archaeologists for the first time.

The densely packed inscriptions on the tomb's stone and gold artifacts recorded, word for word, the obsession that had consumed his entire life:

"When will the immortal maiden return?"

"If I do not die, might I yet see her again?"

He had spent his whole life waiting for someone.

Though the official histories have turned to ash, his love shines in every carefully written word of the historical record.

A thousand years, a hundred centuries: it cannot be erased.

#20240326

#ItShouldHaveAHe

"If I do not die, might I yet see her again?" is adapted from the pre-Qin text "Song of White Clouds" in The Biography of King Mu of Zhou: "May you not die, so that you may come again."

[Thanks to my friend, Ka Hou Long Le, for the cover art.]

Inspired by "The eight steeds rode thirty thousand li a day; why did King Mu never return?"

Theme: Flaws do not diminish one's virtues.