The Third Year After Our Forced Marriage

My next story will be Stepmother. Add it to your collection in my column →

Coming soon: Seducing the Emperor, Stepmother, The Chief Councilor’s Second Wife Is Reborn, and The Legitimate Older Brother. Please save them!

Pei Yi comes from a distinguished family. His mother is a princess and his father a great general who guards the nation. Handsome, talented, and accomplished, he receives an imperial decree arranging his marriage when he comes of age. He marries Shen Ruomi, the empress’s niece.

Unfortunately, the Shen clan comes from humble rural beginnings. Thanks to Empress Shen, the whole family has risen to prominence, becoming a bunch of uncouth political upstarts.

On their wedding night, the bride beneath the veil is beautiful, radiant, gentle, and demure, quite unlike the foolish, dull girl of the rumors. Pei Yi is momentarily taken aback.

But that is all.

After their marriage, although Shen Ruomi comes from a modest background, she is beautiful and virtuous. She manages the household for him and is dutiful to his parents. Even though he has no interest in romance, she treats him with warmth and consideration, putting him first in everything.

She is simply too proper and dull. Pei Yi respects her and fulfills his duties, but he is not in love with her. Aside from sharing a bed and other necessary matters, they have little to talk about.

After a year of marriage, they are a model couple, and their union has become a celebrated love story in Chang'an.

Pei Yi thinks his political marriage to Shen Ruomi will be like his parents’: they will spend their whole lives making do together.

Until, by chance, he finds several letters his wife has kept hidden. The handwriting is graceful, but the words are passionate, playful, and affectionate. She calls someone “Brother A Jian.”

And the name at the end of the letters is Nian Nian, his wife’s childhood nickname.

The letters were written by his own good wife, the one who is always so gentle and virtuous at home.

The most intimate thing she calls him as her husband is a tender, trembling “dear husband.”

Pei Yi expressionlessly crushes the letter in his hand.

-

Pei Yi is cold-hearted and unfeeling. He cares only about making a name for himself and never allows anyone or anything to escape his control.

He has married Shen Ruomi and has a clever, well-behaved son and daughter. He is quite satisfied, and believes his marriage is nearly perfect. But then he learns, quite by accident, that his wife not only doesn’t love him, but once had a childhood sweetheart she was almost engaged to before they married. She was forced to marry him and has merely been making do ever since. The knowledge sticks in his throat and stays with him for the rest of his life.

* Domestic drama and household infighting

* The plot serves the romance; this is not a wish-fulfillment story

* When the male lead calls the heroine proper and dull and says he isn’t in love with her, he’s just being tsundere. In reality, he’s extremely satisfied with her

* Both leads are physically pure. The heroine’s feelings waver between the male lead and the second male lead, and she wants them both. Even later, she never fully trusts the male lead because she doesn’t love him that much. Readers who mind the couple not being entirely devoted to each other should take note!

(The warning about the heroine is for readers who mind her being emotionally unfaithful. Readers criticized the heroine of the author’s book Bewitching the Lord for being flirtatious and promiscuous because she had once been involved with a supporting male character.)

* A heaven’s favorite gets his comeuppance and falls hard

* The author will delete comments that attack or insult the author or heroine. Let’s keep things civil and enjoy the story without abusing anyone.

2024.9.14

Coming soon: Seducing the Emperor

Zhaozhao is the daughter of the richest man in Qingzhou. She is beautiful beyond compare, spoiled, and carefree.

One day, she finds an unconscious man in the snow.

Though seriously injured, the man is strikingly handsome and refined, as immaculate as snow on a mountain peak. Zhaozhao falls for him at first sight and brings him home to nurse him back to health. She fawns over him and humbles herself in every way, but he remains disdainful of her.

Unable to have him, Zhaozhao lashes him until his skin is torn, hoping to break his proud spirit. He would rather pass out from the pain than beg her to stop.

Furious, Zhaozhao makes him drink a cup of love-worm liquor.

Anyone who drinks this liquor has no cure. For the rest of their life, they can only share a bed with the person who gave it to them.

Seeing the once aloof and taciturn man lose himself in passion beneath her and let her do as she pleases, Zhaozhao feels more satisfied than ever before.

That night, she has a ridiculous dream.

In the dream, the man turns out to be of noble birth. Once he regains his identity, he takes revenge on Zhaozhao for humiliating him, and poor Zhaozhao ends up losing her entire family.

Zhaozhao wakes up drenched in cold sweat. Trembling, she fusses over the man as he gets dressed beside her bed. “You... worked hard last night. Are you tired?”

The man is silent for a moment. Then, to her shock, he takes off his clothes again.

Just as Zhaozhao is wondering what to do with him, the man unexpectedly falls off a cliff, leaving no body behind.

-

After the new emperor ascends the throne, Xu Yan is named General Zhaoyong for his service in helping the emperor claim the throne.

He is of noble birth, a gentleman of impeccable character, as bright and pure as the moon.

But during a business trip, he inexplicably loses a year of his memories.

What’s more, he can’t bring himself to feel the slightest interest in any of the suitable women his mother carefully picks out for him.

Until one day, his nephew brings a mother and child before him to ask for help. The moment the woman sees him, terror appears on her face.

Xu Yan looks at her soft, delicate features, and fragments of ambiguous memories begin to surface.

He is pressing a woman beneath him and taking her with abandon.

At first, Xu Yan saves Shen Zhao’s lover and family because he pities her and feels guilty about secretly desiring her.

Her lover betrays her, and she cries as she leans against Xu Yan, speaking softly through her tears. “Xu Lang, we were in love with each other. Sob...”

Xu Yan’s gaze gradually darkens.

If we loved each other, Zhaozhao, why did you have another lover?

Later, between the sheets, Xu Yan recovers his memories and traps Zhaozhao as she tries to escape, handing her the whip himself.

He sighs softly. “Zhaozhao, weren’t we in love with each other?”

* Aloof, upright gentleman × spoiled, selfish beauty

* The heroine only uses her whip on the male lead and villains. The male lead likes being whipped by her.

2026.5.7 note

Stepmother

Father, who is almost forty, recently married a stepmother three years younger than he is.

The stepmother is just sixteen, and beautiful.

But she’s timid, weak-willed, and vain, with none of the bearing of a marquis’s wife. She even stammers when she speaks to him.

Xiao Yan watches his father, who has always kept his distance from women, suddenly fall head over heels in his old age, and feels contempt for him.

After his father dies in battle, his stepmother becomes a widow.

Since she is so young to have lost her husband, Xiao Yan decides that if she behaves herself in the marquis’s household and observes widowhood for his father for the rest of her life, he will provide for her until she dies.

-

Jingxian is the daughter of a low-ranking official. Her parents marry her off to the forty-year-old Marquis Yongchang as his second wife.

The marquis may be older, but he is handsome and gentle, treating Jingxian like a precious treasure.

Then an accident claims her husband’s life.

Jingxian cries herself dry and vows to remain faithful to her late husband for the rest of her life.

Her stepson has always been cold as ice toward her and has never treated her like a mother.

Jingxian trembles whenever she sees him.

Until one night, her stepson enters her room and asks casually, “Would you like a child to raise?”

Jingxian is moved to tears, thinking her devotion has finally paid off, and agrees.

She has no children of her own from her marriage and has no one to rely on. Perhaps adopting a stepson to raise will keep her from living such a dull life in the future.

Later, on countless spring nights, Jingxian pushes at the man on top of her and begs through her tears, trembling. “Eldest Young Master, I... I only wanted to adopt a child...”

Again and again, the man traces her alluring features, his voice hoarse but firm. “How could an adopted child be as reliable as one of your own?”

Father’s version

As Xiao Yu lies on the verge of death, there are only two people he can’t stop worrying about: his eldest son, with whom he has always had a distant relationship, and the young wife he married by any means necessary.

Fortunately, fate has other plans. He survives against all odds and returns victorious at the head of his army.

After returning home, he treats his wife and son with ever more tenderness and consideration.

Yet though his wife is delighted, she often seems to have something to say but holds back.

Sometimes she hurries out of her room to greet him, her clothes disheveled and her face flushed.

His eldest son, too, has inexplicably become hostile and defiant toward him.

With a son born in his later years and his beloved wife in his arms, Xiao Yu believes his life is nearly perfect.

He no longer wants to dwell on many things.

Xiao Yu stops his son at the door, where he waits impatiently, eyeing the room. Smiling, he says,

“Eldest, Xian Niang has happy news.”

He adds calmly, “You’re going to be an older brother.”

Xiao Yan’s cold gaze slips past his father to Jingxian, pale-faced inside the room with a hand on her pregnant belly. Then he lets out a low laugh.

An older brother?

* A father and son competing for the same woman: an elegant father who still has plenty of fight in him × a kind, gentle stepmother × a hypocritical young stepson

* The male lead’s father and the ancestors of his family were nomadic people from the grasslands, and the family accepts the idea that a son can inherit his father’s wife.

Theme: Marriage is not everything in life.