My Dead Husband Keeps Changing His Face to Find Me

[An unconventional blurb] [A little widower and his nonhuman husband]

Chen Xiangyu's body is unusual. He was born in the mountains and grew up there.

He never went to school.

Then a university student came from out of town, tall and handsome.

He said he had come to the mountains to write a research paper.

Then he spent a year working at Chen Xiangyu's home.

From far away, the villagers could see the "university student" rolling up his sleeves to draw water.

They teased that he was trying to win Xiangyu over.

The villagers knew about the Chen family's circumstances.

Chen Xiangyu had never been outside the mountains, but he knew about the movement to send educated youth to the countryside many years ago. He hadn't known it still happened nowadays.

The university student was very capable.

"..."

"Aren't you going back?"

"There's no rush."

The two hastily held a wedding ceremony and consummated their marriage.

There was no way to register their marriage here, so they bowed three times to the well in the courtyard, and that was that.

*

But less than three days after the ceremony, a flash flood hit the mountains.

Most of the villagers were elderly, and almost all of them were gone. Chen Xiangyu thought he wouldn't escape either.

He only felt sorry for his university student husband.

He liked educated people.

The muddy water flooded into the house. Chen Xiangyu felt the water rising higher and higher, until a sudden clap of thunder swept him away.

The university student had gone to plow the fields on the hillside that morning, so he was probably already gone.

But just as Chen Xiangyu's consciousness was about to fade, he felt something sticky wrap around his lower face.

The feeling of drowning still hadn't gone away, but it seemed he was being dragged somewhere.

When the rescue workers arrived, Chen Xiangyu was sitting dazed in the courtyard, soaked through.

The well from his home stood beside him.

"Hello, did you rescue a university student? He was in the northeast. Did you see him?" Chen Xiangyu asked, gesturing anxiously.

A rescue worker said sympathetically, "That whole area has mostly collapsed. I'm afraid..."

The rest went unsaid.

After the disaster, Chen Xiangyu tidied up the little courtyard and dug a grave on the mountain behind the house. He put a few of the university student's clothes in it.

It was a symbolic burial.

His husband was dead.

Three years later,

he decided to find another husband.

In the middle of the night, the well suddenly began to boil.

Reader's note:

I changed the setting from the original double-sided anatomy to the shou having female genitalia. My OCD means I don't want multiple categories in my profile. If this bothers you, feel free to remove it from your reading list. I'll write an alternate-universe version with both characters being male in the bonus stories; that's the short piece I mentioned. A bow.

1. Pregnancy and egg-laying

3. Pure sweetness! I absolutely will not write angst for this! That's a promise.

4. It probably won't be long.

Not enough people have added it to their reading lists, so I'll let it sit for a while.

[After finishing Linlin, I'll fill the hole with the story of beautiful Xiaoyu and his husband.]

[Actually, this shares a world with the Linlin story, hahaha, but ours is set in a semi-rural area.]

Theme: Worshipping academic credentials is misguided; self-improvement is what matters