Camellias Bleed for Love [Entertainment Industry]

[Coming soon: A Single Glance Topples a City (modern romance, rekindled love after a breakup). Blurb at the bottom!]

I adore camellias bleeding from their petals, fiercely intense, their beauty a final, vivid flourish.

A brief yet brilliant firework in the idol-singer world, the red camellia missed by countless people: Camellia, Xuan Ming. After seven years away from the spotlight, she has finally returned as a mentor on an idol survival show.

As a senior and a miracle of the survival-show world, all she has to do is show her face to make countless people reminisce about her glorious past.

Countless hit songs, The Sky Falls, which won her Best Supporting Actress, and Hanging by a Thread, her final film, which earned her an award nomination: her achievements are nothing short of remarkable.

Her own take on it:

"It's just nostalgia talking. Seven or eight years ago, people wanted to gnaw my bones to pieces. Now they put up a couple of old photos and howl like they're mourning at my grave. Was my blood not vivid enough back then?"

As she joked, a cigarette rested between her fingers. In the deep February night, with dew thick in the air, she seemed on the verge of ascending to immortality.

The only one who saw this was Li Qiucheng.

He heard about her love life, and he heard her blood and tears.

He silently thought, I'm sorry. I'm truly sorry.

I came too late.

-

Li Qiucheng of Juxing Media: simply put, a mute dance specialist and a handsome student who keeps his head down.

His screen time across several episodes added up to less than three minutes. He was already prepared to gain a little popularity and then pack up and go home. But during the first snow on Red Island in January, someone found him curled up in a corner of the terrace.

Xuan Ming sighed and reached out to him.

"Stand up for yourself, for your own sake."

For the sake of that snow, Li Qiucheng fought his way to first place overall, went viral with tens of thousands of reposts, changed his fate against all odds, and won a sky full of confetti of his own.

He stood in the spotlight, addressing thousands with his acceptance speech.

At the mentors' table, Xuan Ming, dressed and made up to perfection, smiled faintly and applauded him.

They agreed never to speak of it.

Not until Li Qiucheng was worthy of taking her hand under the watchful eyes of the world.

"I have a camellia of my own. I wonder if she'll bloom for me, even for just a moment, today?"

That was Best Supporting Actor Li Qiucheng's final line at the awards ceremony three years later.

The audience erupted. Only Xuan Ming looked helpless.

She'd ended up with a lovesick man who wagged his tail only for her, and she couldn't shake him off.

Might as well keep him. What else could she do?

1. A cool, elegant beauty and dance mentor x a devoted, single-minded younger green-tea puppy.

2. An age gap of eight years or more.

3. Please set reality aside and turn off your brain while reading. Muah~

4. No romance while competing as part of the group. The romance takes shape later, and they only confirm their relationship after the male lead's career transition.

-------------Historical romance coming in September: The Lotus in the Mirror--------------

Reborn, but with a bad memory.

After more than a decade as a consort, she watched her family perish behind three-thousand-foot palace walls and died in despair and illness. When she opened her eyes again, she was back in her youth. Wang Ruofu had sworn to change her fate, but discovered one serious problem:

Why had her family fallen apart? What happened this year again? And who were all these people in front of her?

Unfortunately, with her poor memory, her rebirth was useless.

Having lost her golden finger of "foresight," Wang Ruofu could only start with what mattered most: she must not enter the palace as a consort, and she must not die in Zhaoyang Hall again.

In her previous life, she had been engaged, but the Crown Prince had stolen her away.

This time, looking at the name "Lin Shijing," the top scorer in the palace examination, she thought silently: He was her stepmother's nephew and her former fiance. Perhaps she could escape by entering into another marriage.

At seventeen, the young top scholar was a graceful, dashing figure, a jewel in the crown of the dynasty, and destined for lasting fame. Yet Lin Shijing was only twenty-four when he died in the line of duty.

Wang Ruofu had planned to muddle through life, waiting for her husband to get promoted and rich, and then die.

But Lin Shijing told her, trapped for twelve years behind the palace walls, that the sky was vast and the seas wide, and she could travel freely.

She was always holding a travelogue, looking out at the scenery of distant lands through its pages.

Wang Ruofu suddenly thought: How about not dying, then?

-

Lin Shijing knew Wang Ruofu didn't like him.

She murmured Xiao Zisheng's name in her sleep, hated Xiao Zisheng, and loved Xiao Zisheng too.

She had once had a lover with whom she shared a tempestuous love and hatred. After that, every flutter of her heart seemed insignificant.

He wanted to maintain his graceful poise, but in the end, he couldn't help being jealous and cutting.

"What am I to you?"

"Have you ever loved me?"

Each question sounded so pitiful.

But Wang Ruofu was so good at soothing him. She called him "Brother Shijing," and with just one call, Lin Shijing's heart softened. Even though he knew she must have called someone else "Brother Zisheng," too.

So what?

The names side by side on the gold-embossed marriage certificate were now Lin Shijing and Wang Ruofu's. They were the married couple.

-

Years later, Ruofu, a meritorious official, declined every honor bestowed on her by the new emperor and left the divine capital with carefree ease.

Wang Ruofu and Lin Shijing walked together across the windswept desert, through gentle, flowing Wujun, and into the rugged mountains of Shu.

She wrote a letter to her younger self:

My family is well, and the dynasty is thriving. The sea of suffering is behind us, and all things shine anew.

The characters are hard to sum up, but the main cast is roughly as follows:

Fu (female lead): A people-pleaser at first, but she eventually works through it. Loves travel and gossip, and is an air conditioner for everyone, but her outdoor unit points at her husband. Top liberal arts scholar and a major contributor to the founding of the dynasty.

Jing (male lead): A blend of a man who's officially the husband but feels like the other man. A gentle, older-brother type with a dry sense of humor. Believes loving someone is like tending a flower. His hobby is gossiping with Fu.

Song (second male lead): A political machine with a powerful sense of duty. His wife and daughter matter deeply to him, but the dynasty matters more than anything.

Yanqing (Lingpei): Queen, don't be afraid to take control of this world. But take your time. The air-conditioner Fu will help you grow.

Lou Ling: A legendary general who made history, a queen. The battlefield is yours.

Reader's guide:

1. The male lead is sexually inexperienced. Readers who are attached to the male lead or male supporting characters, please do not read.

2. The female lead behaved violently during a period of mental illness in her previous life. Please do not read if this bothers you. The female lead has a lot of scenes with her former husband early on. Please do not read if this bothers you.

3. Fictional setting, no historical fact-checking required.

Theme: Positive and uplifting.