After Faking My Death, My Ex-Husband, the Dragon-Proud Protagonist, Went Mad

Aloof Immortal Lord gong x airheaded beauty shou. A grab bag of melodramatic tropes. The outline is set: equal angst for gong and shou, no going easy on either of them, and the crematorium is guaranteed to be blazing!

Ning Jin was renowned as a beauty for miles around. Though born in the countryside, he had a face so stunning it could take anyone's breath away. Unfortunately, a fever in childhood damaged his mind, leaving him slow and simple, always a step behind everyone else.

Until he was sixteen, his master protected him and taught him medicine and the ways of medicinal herbs. After his master died, he lived with only a big yellow dog for company. The dog looked fierce and kept local ruffians from harassing him.

The day the big yellow dog left him, Ning Jin was drugged and sent to the bed of an Immortal Lord.

Only later did Ning Jin learn that this Immortal Lord was Xie Shuyun, Immortal Lord Zhuoyun, the foremost figure in the cultivation sects of the age. They said he cultivated the Way of Slaughter, had renounced love, and made it his mission to wipe out the demon race. His Pagoda Sword was stained with blood, striking terror into the hearts of demons.

And yet Ning Jin became pregnant with his child.

The Immortal Lord took him back to his sect and promised to marry him properly as his lawful wife. But the wedding was delayed again and again, until in the end it was hastily thrown together.

Ning Jin understood that the demons were stirring, and his husband was busy fighting for the people of the world. He wasn't deliberately brushing him off. Besides, Xie Shuyun gave him everything he asked for. He even gave Ning Jin an entire mountainside to use as a medicinal herb garden, and no matter how precious something was, if Ning Jin asked for it, it would be brought to him at once.

That was nothing like the cold and heartless Immortal Lord Zhuoyun of the rumors.

Ning Jin was already very content, even though the other cultivators in the sect looked down on him for being a mere mortal and bullied him both openly and behind his back.

"Immortal Lord Zhuoyun is the foremost figure in the cultivation sects. How could a crude country bumpkin like him be worthy of the man?"

"I hear the Immortal Lord has loved someone since childhood, but that person has been missing for a long time. They were once the foremost figure in the cultivation sects, peerless in cultivation and bearing. I saw them from afar once, and they looked at least eight tenths like that mortal!"

"Then if the Immortal Lord married that mortal... does that mean...?"

"A substitute, that's all!"

No wonder. No wonder. No wonder Xie Shuyun always seemed to look at him through a veil, as if he were seeing someone else. Ning Jin finally understood.

He packed his things, planning to leave once the medicinal herbs had matured. But then the rumored "white moonlight" appeared before him, carrying a message from Xie Shuyun, who was thousands of miles away.

"If you don't want this to end badly, leave of your own accord."

That night, his medicinal herb garden was inexplicably burned to the ground. He was gravely injured in the sea of flames, and in utter despair, dragged his broken body step by step out of the mountain gate.

No one knew how a pregnant, foolish boy with no cultivation like Ning Jin managed to escape the protective formation around Fengxuan Sect that day. They only knew that when Immortal Lord Zhuoyun returned to the sect, he carried a cold corpse back from beneath a cliff.

*

Three years after his wife died, Xie Shuyun had not descended the mountain once. He kept watch over a lonely grave, even colder and less talkative than before.

The sect elders couldn't bear to see him like that. They handed him an invitation and forced him to represent Fengxuan Sect at a banquet.

With no choice, Xie Shuyun went down the mountain with his sword. He saw a richly adorned landscape stretching for miles below. The Lord of Furong Prefecture was getting married, and guests from all over the four seas and nine continents had been invited. The occasion was a hundred, a thousand times grander than his own shabby wedding ceremony years ago.

The beaming Lord of the Prefecture rode past him in brilliant red wedding clothes. The wind lifted the inky hair of the young man in his arms, revealing a familiar face.

Xie Shuyun's eyes nearly burst from their sockets. It was unmistakably his wife, dead for three years!

[Important!!! Maximum melodrama!!!]

1. 1v1, happy ending, no changing the gong.

2. There is pregnancy, but no childbirth.

3. This is genuinely melodramatic and illogical, but so deliciously angsty. The author loves this kind of thing.

4. The shou suffers first, then the gong. There is revenge in kind, and the crematorium is guaranteed to be intense. Not recommended for readers with extreme character preferences.

5. The old blurb, 2024.1.29, and new blurb, 2025.6.6, have both been archived.

Theme: Temper yourself through adversity