Growing Wild

Roguish, carefree young heir to a wealthy family × pure, resilient top student

Fake siblings / heroine taken in by a foster family / bittersweet push and pull / mutual salvation / realistic coming-of-age / high school and city life

Next book: Snowy Night Recklessness [Pregnancy Before Love]. Please add it to your favorites!

During the summer after Sang Yi graduated from middle school, her mother took her by the hand and dragged their battered luggage behind her as they followed her stepfather to the Chen family’s imposing estate, a sprawling luxury villa.

She saw two people leaning over the railing, watching her from a distance. When she looked up, she froze for a moment, almost unable to look away.

One was a tall, slender girl with cool, striking eyes and delicate features. Her small, fair face made her look like a beautiful doll as she gazed down at Sang Yi.

Standing beside her was a tall, striking young man with an irresistible, roguish good looks. His face was flawless and unforgettable, his expression languid and aristocratic.

Her mother told her that the girl’s companion was her stepfather’s son, the young master of the Chen family. His name was Chen Zi, and he was her “older brother” in name only. From now on, she would live at the Chen house, eat with him, and go to school with him...

Chen Zi leaned lazily against the railing. He exhaled a cloud of smoke at the pale, timid girl before him, whose skin was almost translucent and whose body looked frail, yet whose back was straight beneath her blunt bangs. His eyes turned up at the corners as he gave her a cocky, roguish smile, utterly unconcerned.

A damn stepmother, a damn little sister. Women orbiting his father were as common as flies. He’d bet this stepmother wouldn’t last three months in the house.

The girl standing beside Chen Zi was Sang Yu, who had come to visit the Chen family. Sang Yi’s mother told her that Sang Yu was her distant cousin, a true rich heiress and, supposedly, a dazzling beauty at No. 9 High School.

Sang Yi nodded. The two girls standing together seemed radiant, like princesses. Compared to them, she felt she belonged to a world she could never touch.

Three months later, her mother secretly left, abandoning Sang Yi, that stumbling block, at the Chen house to fend for herself and scrape together a living in the cracks.

Sang Yi wasn’t particularly surprised. Ever since her father, the only person who had ever been good to her and cherished her, died, her unreliable mother had dragged her from place to place, living under other people’s roofs.

Over the years, she had trained herself to be like a reed growing through a crack in a stone. Wherever she ended up, she could grit her teeth, swallow down her pain, and keep living with unyielding strength.

Ever since he started school, Chen Zi had been a complete delinquent. He had an almost perfect face, and the girls at school worshipped him as their heartthrob. He was a bona fide campus idol.

In private, though, he smoked, drank, and fought. All he had left was the huge pile of cash his father threw at him.

If he said he wanted a villa worth hundreds of millions, his father bought it for him. If he wanted to ride in a luxury car worth tens of millions, his father bought one and hired a driver just for him.

As a result, from the day he was born, he had learned to solve every problem with money and to treat the world, including so-called love, with contempt.

Everyone at school knew that Sang Yu, the much-admired school belle, had a crush on Chen Zi, the campus heartthrob. She made no secret of her ardent, passionate feelings and was willing to do anything for him.

Everyone also knew that the school belle and the heartthrob were the perfect golden couple, made for each other.

Unlike her dazzling cousin Sang Yu, Sang Yi was a cousin from a completely different world: a transfer student whose father had died, whose mother had vanished, who lived under someone else’s roof, and who had suddenly fallen into poverty.

In class, she was quiet and forgettable. She loved studying and seemed like a tireless machine, endlessly memorizing and devouring books. A pair of thick black-framed glasses was always perched on her nose.

Then, one day after school, a nosy classmate noticed that Chen Zi, the school heartthrob, would sit in his chauffeur-driven luxury car and wait for a few extra minutes at the school gate before leaving.

Then someone saw Sang Yi, carrying a heavy backpack, run out of the school gate and hurry into that very car. Could the two of them really be going home to the same place?

On the day of their senior-year graduation, Sang Yu had already prepared a several-page confession letter and a carefully chosen bouquet. She planned to finally tell Chen Zi how she felt, but after searching all over campus, she couldn’t find him anywhere.

At that very moment, in a secluded corner of a rooftop where no one could see them, Chen Zi was relentlessly closing in on his pale, frail “little sister.” She had turned eighteen that very day, received financial support from Chen’s father, and resolved to study abroad.

He stretched out an arm against the wall, trapping the girl, whose long lashes trembled with unease, in the crook of his elbow. With long, elegant fingers, he snatched the thick glasses from her nose.

Then he gripped her wrist, his eyes red at the corners, and bent down to bite her pale pink lips. In a hoarse voice, he warned her fiercely by her ear:

“Sang Yi, do you know how long I’ve waited for this day? If you dare go abroad, I’ll kill myself!”

Tips:

1. Having grown up wild without anyone to guide him, the male lead has a rather warped sense of right and wrong at first, but changes a lot later on. The story follows them from high school into their careers, spanning many years, with a breakup and reunion and all kinds of entanglements.

2. The male lead is one month older than the female lead. They are not related by blood and are not registered in the same household. Their sibling relationship is as fake as it gets. (Their parents never married, the prospective stepfather never officially became her stepfather, and the female lead’s mother eventually left. They are not even step-siblings.)

3. No intimate scenes before they become adults.

4. The leads grow and change, and they are not perfect. Please skip this if that bothers you.

(Synopsis screenshotted on July 7, 2024. Plagiarism will be pursued!)

Pregnancy Before Love / Love After Divorce / sweet romance / height and build difference / intense chemistry

Ruthless audit tycoon × sunny art-school returnee

Jiang Rong and Lu Chenyuan were supposed to get divorced, but she never imagined she would end up pregnant with his child.

At twenty-four, for the sake of their families’ business interests, Jiang Rong had just returned to China after graduating from the Central Saint Martins art and design program in London when she entered into a brief, hurried marriage with Lu Chenyuan, the son of the Lu family, an old family friend. They went through the motions and got a marriage certificate.

They only needed to wait a year, until both families had weathered their business troubles, then get divorced.

Besides, she had disliked her marriage partner, Lu Chenyuan, ever since they were students.

As the eldest son of the huge Lu Group, CEO of Lu Financial Group, and founder of a world-class auditing firm, he had taken over the family business in college and quickly made his mark in the business world, achieving outstanding success on par with the previous generation. In Jingzhou, countless wealthy heiresses hoping to marry into a powerful family were eager to win him over.

But in Jiang Rong’s eyes, only his height of 188 centimeters and his cool, strikingly handsome face, which had no obvious flaws, were passable.

Everything else about Lu Chenyuan was exactly what she hated in a man: from his head to his toes, inside and out. He had been trained since childhood to see the world through numbers, and his emotional awareness was almost mechanical. He was dull and boring, impossible to read, rigid in his ways, and led a regimented, stifling life.

Jiang Rong was the youngest daughter of a wealthy family. Although she had been blessed with flawless, luminous skin and a pure, charming beauty from childhood, and was famous for her looks,

her personality was the complete opposite of her appearance: bright and outgoing, fiery, bold in love and hate, and decisive.

What’s more, her family had doted on her so much that they sent her overseas to study in her senior year of high school. She had always admired freedom, passion, and a bold, adventurous spirit.

Jiang Rong suspected that, since they went to the same schools in middle and high school, the famously well-behaved Lu Chenyuan had heard all about her carefree ways and her “glorious” reputation as the school belle.

There was no way he could like someone like her: a spoiled, willful, difficult heiress, raised in luxury, whose social standing was similar to his but whose personality was nothing like his own.

After they got their marriage certificate at the Civil Affairs Bureau, he had been cold as ice. He barely said a word to her, and once they walked outside, he casually said goodbye, claimed he had work to do, and drove off at once. After that, they lost touch and went about their separate lives.

At last, their one-year term was almost up.

Jiang Rong had planned it all out. The next day, she would immediately contact her long-unheard-from “husband” and make an appointment to get their divorce certificates, restoring her freedom for good.

But people make plans and fate laughs. The day before they were due to get divorced, her art gallery was finally completed, and she was so delighted that she had a few extra drinks with her business partners.

She drank too much at the table and got completely drunk, nearly blacking out.

The result was that on a snowy night, a friend who wasn’t close to her and didn’t know the situation took her straight to the luxury “marital home” the Lu family had prepared for her and Lu Chenyuan, a place she herself had never once set foot in.

And, as luck would have it, her “husband” happened to be there.

Lu Chenyuan had just finished showering and hadn’t even dried his hair. His tall, broad-shouldered frame appeared in the doorway, wet black hair hanging over his forehead. He held the doorframe with his long, elegant fingers and stared down in utter confusion at her flushed face, drunk and red as a tomato.

And Jiang Rong, who tended to go wild when she drank, had no idea what had gotten into her that night.

She looked up and not only failed to recognize the “husband” she had met only once since they got married, but suddenly found him attractive.

When she moved closer, she even realized something else: she felt an intense, unprecedented physical attraction to him that she couldn’t control.

So, for no reason she could explain, she put her arms around his long neck and kissed him, then threw herself on top of him...

The two of them turned out to be surprisingly compatible in bed. They spent one reckless night together.

The next morning, once Jiang Rong had sobered up and opened her eyes, she saw who was lying beside her and could hardly believe it. She was mortified.

She had slept with the man she hated most, the man she was supposed to divorce that very day!

Fortunately, Jiang Rong quickly pulled herself together and fled the “marital home” in a panic.

That afternoon, once she had collected herself, she calmly called him and told him the new time she had booked to get their divorce certificates.

Lu Chenyuan readily agreed. Clearly, he understood that the previous night had been nothing more than an accidental mistake.

A month later, they arrived at the Civil Affairs Bureau on time.

They successfully got their divorce certificates, and Jiang Rong felt a huge weight lift from her shoulders. As she walked out of the Civil Affairs Bureau, she even felt lighter on her feet.

But as she went down the steps, her stomach suddenly churned with discomfort. She couldn’t hold it back and crouched down, retching.

A terrible suspicion surfaced in Jiang Rong’s mind, one she hardly dared to entertain.

Lu Chenyuan noticed something was wrong, too. He strode over and immediately drove her to the hospital for a checkup.

“Congratulations! You’re expecting. You’re four weeks along!” the doctor said with a smile, handing Jiang Rong the test results.

But neither of the soon-to-be parents could smile.

Jiang Rong wished she could transmigrate back in time and beat the drunk version of herself senseless.

She realized, near tears, that she had gotten pregnant by the man she hated most, a man she barely knew and had just divorced: her “ex-husband”!

But as soon as the elders of both families got the news, their attitudes did a complete 360-degree turn.

The two people who had just gotten divorced were not only ordered to put remarriage on the agenda immediately,

but also commanded to move into their “marital home” and live together at once, until the baby was born and while raising the child!

Jiang Rong thought her life was over and that she was now tied to a sinking ship for good. But after moving in with her “ex-husband,” she gradually discovered that she was falling for him after all!

Theme: For the first time, he saw the word “alive” embodied in someone with such powerful force.