The blurb has been heavily revised, and will probably get a few more tweaks later. If it's not your thing, feel free to remove it from your favorites. Much love!
[Childhood Sweethearts, The Male Lead's Longtime Secret Crush, The Second Male Lead's Whole Family Gets Their Comeuppance]
Lu Xiaotang, the eldest daughter of the prestigious Lu family, spent nineteen years as a gentle, well-mannered young lady. Even when Gu Jinnan, the man betrothed to her, kept putting off their wedding, she waited four years without jealousy or resentment.
Then disaster struck the Lu family, and she was about to be demoted to slave status. The girl who had never once bowed her head to beg anyone went to seek help from her fiancé, a powerful minister in the Imperial Secretariat, only to be coaxed into drinking a cup of poison. She nearly died.
Lu Xiaotang had barely escaped death. Dragging her frail, broken body along, she saw the ruthless officials confiscating her family’s property trying to drag away her sobbing younger siblings.
At a time like this, why bother acting like a proper lady?
She tore off the soft, demure clothes Gu Jinnan had given her, changed into a wedding dress, and rushed into the mourning hall of Prince Xie Siche, who had supposedly died on the battlefield. Claiming the two of them had loved each other deeply, she said she would marry his spirit tablet.
The emperor, pitying his son who had died defending the frontier, finally agreed to this absurd marriage and showed mercy to the Lu family as well.
On the wedding day, as Lu Xiaotang clutched the spirit tablet and put on a show of devotion, the young general known as the Bloodthirsty God of Death suddenly galloped in. He was alive.
Lu Xiaotang: "..."
Xie Siche: "..."
The entire city craned their necks, eager to watch the spectacle. Gu Jinnan, the man who had been cuckolded, sneered as he waited to see how she would get out of this one.
But Xie Siche strode forward, suddenly knelt on one knee, and retied the laces of her wedding shoes, which had come undone. Then he rose and gently wiped the tears from her face. "Don't cry, Atang. I'm here."
Later, as she made her way through life, shouldering the Lu family’s burdens and carving out a place for herself, he stayed by her side, always saying, "Atang, I'm here."
The young prince Xie Siche once harbored a secret longing for someone.
One spring day, because he was the son of the Demon Empress, he was bullied and had his mother's jade pendant stolen. He was left covered in dirt and grime.
Beneath a flowering crabapple tree, a bright and lovely girl ignored the scorn of the noble young ladies around them, smiled warmly, cleaned the pendant, and returned it to him.
From then on, her flowerlike smile haunted his dreams.
But she was of noble birth, and the fiancée of a powerful minister serving his rival elder brother. She was utterly beyond his reach.
After three years on the frontier, crawling out of mountains of corpses and seas of blood and surviving one plot after another, he earned the title "Bloodthirsty God of Death." No one dared provoke him anymore, and he thought he had long since grown cold and forgotten her completely.
Until he returned from the dead, heard that he had somehow been married off, and angrily stormed into the wedding hall, only to see her clutching his spirit tablet and weeping bitterly, no longer smiling as brightly as she had in the past.
So be it. Whether she was pretending or using him, he accepted it all.
In this life, he was hers to command.
He would claim the throne and share its supreme glory with her, just as he had once wished in his heart, and give her a whole capital city of crabapple blossoms, blooming for a lifetime.
Both leads are each other's first and only, 1v1, happy ending
Theme: Love's beginning is unknown, yet once it takes hold, it runs deep
