My Ex-Husband Is Dead

Sweet, spoiled, and scheming villainess witch × cool-headed, obsessive righteous-path prodigy

1. Jiang Wan, a star whose acting skills were laughably bad, hit rock bottom.

She had spent her whole life playing the pure, unattainable heroine and relying on that character image to make a living. Then one divorce brought her terrible luck, and she found herself in the role of the vicious supporting villainess from a script. The poisonous witch of the Demon Palace, Jiang Wan, met a fate too gruesome to look at. She was so terrified she nearly went mad.

In her panic, she made two more blunders while trying to save herself.

First, she took a sword strike meant for the original male lead's sworn enemy.

Second, she used the wrong love poison and slept with the wrong man. She married him, then handed him a divorce letter, adding another ex-husband to her tally.

But as fate would have it, both mistakes involved the same man.

The original demon lord male lead Xuan Fengsi's sworn enemy, the script's third male lead:

Lu Huanlin, a sword cultivator of genius.

2. Lu Huanlin reached the pinnacle of the sword path and broke through the limits of the mortal world. At a young age, he became a grandmaster. By the end of the script, he was the Supreme Boundless Sword Ancestor, unquestionably the author's favorite, born with the sort of destiny usually reserved for royalty.

As a future leader of the righteous path, and the man destined to kill her with his own hands, marrying Lu Huanlin was no different from walking alongside her executioner.

Every day felt like walking on thin ice.

Even though she used every ounce of her acting talent to play a sweet, gentle girl and told him day and night that she loved him, all she got in return was his cool, distant reserve.

A brief joy is like a fleeting cloud: once it fades, even the mist is gone.

When her true identity was exposed, she left him a divorce letter and faked her death without hesitation.

She thought that would be the end of it. She planned to ask the System for a new appearance and identity and start a new life.

But in the middle of the night, she awoke in terror to discover that someone had locked her soul inside a sword tomb!

The man before her was still as cool and extraordinary as ever, but his expression had turned sick with obsession, as if he had gone mad from practicing his cultivation. A bony hand clamped around her chin.

"If you didn't love me," he said, on the verge of collapse, his voice calm yet hiding a surging undercurrent, "why did you take that sword for me?"

3. Everyone said Lu Huanlin was the last hope of an age when cultivation was in decline.

Only he knew the truth: if the notorious poison witch Jiang Wan could not live, then he was already dead too.

A dead hope was no longer hope. He was simply her dog.

* Romance-focused. The male lead has a full-blown case of lovesickness. His mental state becomes unstable later on, but the story's values are sound, and there are no scenes of him attacking ordinary people. For a scheming green-tea type male lead, see Volume Three.

* The heroine had an ex-husband before her ex-husband in the modern world. Theirs was a loveless marriage. That first ex-husband lived a debauched life in the modern world and is the second male lead. Her ex-husband in the ancient world is a Taoist priest who came down from the mountain, and he is the male lead.

* Every mystery introduced in the story will be resolved, though some won't be answered until the finale.

* The Qian, Dui, and Guai hexagrams in Volume Two are three of the I Ching's hexagrams. If you don't understand them, just treat the hexagram names and line positions as stand-ins. They won't affect your enjoyment. They're mainly used to drive the plot through the line positions. This isn't how the I Ching is properly used, though. I'm only borrowing the form.

* All the poems in this story are quoted from Taoist works.

* This is my first practice novel, so feel free to critique it. Recent updates are just minor edits and typo fixes.

Theme: The Great Way may seem emotionless, yet it is full of feeling.