After Being Saved, He Said He'd Mistaken Me for Someone Else

Before she met Ming Quanyue, Zhu Xu was just an ugly little black snake who liked rolling around in the mud.

One day, he fell from the sky, badly injured the great demon who had been bullying her, and gave her precious medicine to heal her wounds.

He told her she was his betrothed, lost to him in childhood, and that she was meant to be a golden dragon with gleaming scales, soaring through the skies.

She simply wasn't powerful enough yet to shed her coarse skin and return to her true form.

He comforted her, telling her she never had to be afraid again. He would care for and protect her, and do everything he could to help her regain her original form as soon as possible.

From then on, he supplied her with cultivation resources without end. They stayed by each other's sides for hundreds of years, and Zhu Xu really did cultivate a dragon's form. Every day, she coiled by the pond, poking her head out to wait for Ming Quanyue to brush her horns.

Ming Quanyue strung together the dragon horns and scales she had shed over the years and wore them on his wrist. Wherever he went, he told people they were a gift from his betrothed.

Zhu Xu thought the two of them would always be this happy.

But the day before their wedding, Ming Quanyue suddenly told her he had mistaken her for someone else. She wasn't his betrothed, and now he had finally found the real Xiao Xu.

Zhu Xu was stunned for a long time. She wanted to ask: even if he had mistaken her identity, hadn't the feelings they had shared through six hundred years together, day and night, been real?

From his tactful and polite explanation, Zhu Xu understood. He only had feelings for the title of betrothed. If she was his betrothed, they could be deeply in love. If she wasn't, then they had to cut ties completely.

Zhu Xu slunk back to her old home by the Yishui River. Over the next two hundred years, she gathered every rare treasure he had spent on her and returned them all at once.

She heard that Ming Quanyue and the real Xiao Xu were deeply in love and had traveled to many places together, becoming a couple everyone admired.

She plunged her head into the water and sighed quietly. Her tears melted into the river, and the bubbles she blew popped one by one.

Later, when chaos swept the mortal world, she was burned by heavenly fire while saving the people and creatures living along the Yishui River. Her golden scales fell away one by one, and she reverted to her ugly little black snake form.

With only a little time left to live, she found a random pool of water and waited quietly to die.

After she had gathered a little strength, she wanted to say one last goodbye to an old friend. But when she swam back to the banks of the Yishui River, she saw that even her gravestone had been set upright.

She also heard that the real Xiao Xu had died in the upheaval. Ming Quanyue had used forbidden magic to search for her soul, leaving him half-blind, but he had found nothing.

His body had barely recovered halfway when he took Xiao Xu's memorial tablet in his arms and held a wedding ceremony with it. From then on, he was a widower, searching everywhere for his dead wife's soul.

Zhu Xu encountered him by the Yishui River. White silk was wrapped around his eyes, and his expression was bleak.

She had meant to greet him, but decided against it. Whether his eyes were well or not, ever since he learned she wasn't the real Xiao Xu, he had never looked at her again.

Zhu Xu was about to leave when Ming Quanyue seemed to suddenly sense her presence. Calling out Xiao Xu's name, he ran toward her.

She was still quite heartbroken. She said softly, "You've mistaken me for someone else again."

Then she gently swished her battered tail and sank quietly beneath the water, no longer responding to his repeated calls from the shore.

Reader's guide:

The male lead marries the heroine's memorial tablet, not the second female lead. The person he calls out to by the river is the heroine.

Theme: Cherish the beautiful moments