Island of Joy

Island Dating Show | Childhood Sweethearts to Lovers + A Girl Who Makes the First Move | Flashbacks to Their School Days |

Coming soon: The Rich Ladies' Afternoon Tea Mystery Hour [Republican Era], blurb at the end

When Zhou Yu learned that the girl he had cherished and raised since childhood was going on a live-streamed island dating show, he flew back from Egypt overnight to catch her.

Fresh out of college, Chi Rou knew that livestreaming and audiobook narration were not reliable careers for the long term, so she was still looking for a job. Breaking a promise she'd made to someone, she showed up in the recording studio wearing a maid outfit. The furious man cornered her in the stairwell and kissed her until the corners of her eyes turned red.

“Didn't you say you'd only wear that for me?”

The young woman looked more confused than anything else. “Brother?”

He had always been nothing more than her brother.

*

At a first-birthday zhua zhou ceremony twenty-two years ago, one-year-old Chi Rou reached out amid everyone's eager attention and grabbed the hand of her three-year-old neighbor, Zhou Yu.

Chi Rou's mother pondered: The neighbors are both professors. Does this mean she'll become a teacher?

Zhou Yu's mother stood up and applauded: Oh my gosh, she's going to be my daughter-in-law!

Years later.

On the night of their high school graduation ceremony, Jiangzhou's top science-track student pulled Chi Rou into a secluded corner, resting his forehead against hers, his eyes hazy with drunkenness.

“Did you selectively set me free?”

Chi Rou, who had never kept anyone on the hook, looked at Zhou Yu, who thought he was one of her fish. “?”

Bonus scene:

On their wedding night, Mrs. Zhou felt the man in front of her tracing words on her thigh through the steam. He removed the lace ribbon covering her eyes, and she saw that he had written “I love you” in lipstick. Zhou Yu leaned over her, his gaze as tender as it had been the first time she grabbed his hand.

“Want to grab something else this time?”

A bright, bubbly prodigy voice actress x a scheming, dangerously obsessive university professor

Reader's Guide:

1. Both leads are virgins. This is a short, tooth-achingly sweet story, and they don't become a couple until they're both adults.

2. One-on-one romance, with nothing but the love story. Screenshots taken on June 22, 2024.

3. I drew all the covers and character cards myself.

---Coming Soon: The Rich Ladies' Afternoon Tea Mystery Hour---

| All-women detective team | Each has a love interest | The husbands are all just accessories

# Tailor-fitted velvet qipaos embroidered with gold thread fill the wardrobe, and the cream scones at the Dongshuiwei Road Grand Hotel have become sickeningly familiar.

Song Fangsheng, the cherished daughter of a diplomat, is praised by her father's friends as “the most beautiful pearl in the Far East.” To preserve her lavish, high-society lifestyle, she follows her father's arrangements and marries Gu Junsheng, the police chief, a man she has never met. Her husband, who has no feelings for her, is rarely home, so Fangsheng often invites people over for afternoon tea in their sprawling mansion.

Ye Qiurong is a gold digger in every sense of the word. She fought tooth and nail, beating countless actresses and socialites in Shanghai's high society, until she finally married into the Duan family, headed by the chairman of China's foremost merchants' association. Her husband, Duan Cheng'en, is thirty-two, and he indulges his thirteen-years-younger beauty without limit. She need do nothing but sleep.

Shen Liman has just lost her husband. Her three-year-old son is in the care of her mother-in-law, while she spends her days riding around Shanghai in a car, listening to “Ye Lai Xiang” at the city's theaters, drinking Maxwell House coffee, and wandering among the music and dancing beneath the neon lights.

But this is Shanghai: even when sunlight pours over the city and illuminates every corner, it cannot light up the resentful ghosts that have died in the shadows.

One day, three wealthy wives come together after finding a greeting letter written by someone who died ten years ago. On its envelope, the vivid wax seal of a Chinese glory bower still glimmers with a silvery light.

“Since we have nothing else to do, why don't we open it and have a look?”

Reader's Guide:

1. The three heroines receive equal focus, though the story is told mostly from Song Fangsheng's perspective.

2. The husbands have limited page time, and each romance follows a different path: marriage before love, a long-planned courtship, and a variety of ways to train a dog.

Theme: Growing up means continually surpassing your past self.