Step Into the Story With You

[Please add my ongoing novel, Her Golden Bough Shattered, to your favorites! Blurb at the bottom.]

Dong Limao fell in love with an older colleague at the opera house, a living fossil of the Peking Opera world and an inheritor of an intangible cultural heritage. She pursued him for years, but never once received a kind word from that unattainable beauty.

On the night she decided to give up, she was tipsy and slumped over a cute younger guy's back. She lifted her head, and the starry sky hung low overhead.

In a narrow, empty alley, dust swirled in the air.

The broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted younger man pinned her against the wall. "Stop liking him. Sis, turn around and look at me, okay?"

Dong Limao nodded, her expression unreadable.

A late-night drink can't beat morning porridge. Whoever wants that unattainable beauty can have him.

Later, the cute younger guy became a movie star and expanded his business empire. "Do you need a boss's wife? You can be the boss, and I'll be the boss's wife."

But why did this younger guy seem stranger and stranger? He was clearly a wolf, one that could devour her whole.

Dong Limao hissed. "You said you wouldn't cling to me!"

Jiang Wenming: Even the wildest wolf will become a loyal dog for his big sister.

Blurb for the ongoing novel, Her Golden Bough Shattered:

Qifu Ye had only ever knelt to one person in his life.

Back when he was in an iron cage in the menagerie, the little girl in her peacock-blue riding outfit pointed her riding crop at him, and he knew his life was over.

If she told him to be her horse, he was her horse.

If she told him to steal persimmons, he went and stole them.

When she got drunk and curled up in his arms, saying she was cold, he didn't dare move all night.

Later, he escaped back to the grasslands and became a khan, then an emperor, ruling over the four seas.

Until he saw her in a prison cart.

She had grown thin, her chin sharp, and her wrists bore bloody marks from her shackles.

He sneered. "Good. Princess, it's my turn now."

But the tent he had prepared for her was filled with porcelain and brocade from Jiangnan.

He guarded her there for three years, never even daring to leave her a cup of cold tea.

He thought she had married and had children.

She thought he had married her older sister and taken a second wife.

Each thought the other had long since fallen out of love.

Until she stabbed him in the chest with a dagger. He grabbed her hand and pushed it farther in. "It doesn't hurt."

His subordinate asked why he hadn't dodged.

He said, "She stabbed me because she loves me. Otherwise, why didn't she stab someone else?"

Theme: A couple of the opera world, preserving its legacy hand in hand