The Man Who Married the Mountain God (Matriarchal Society)

Shen Wu'er had no parents. Alone, she brought her younger sister to live with their aunt in Qingling Village.

Living under someone else's roof meant inevitable beatings and scoldings, hardship and exhaustion.

After three or five years of being shoved around and going hungry one day and eating her fill the next, Shen Wu'er finally reached the age to marry.

Shen Wu'er owned nothing but a beautiful face, and had no say in her marriage. Her aunt took the money and married her off as the sixteenth young male attendant to a white-haired woman past sixty, to bring her good fortune.

Shen Wu'er had heard that the old woman was cruel and merciless, and that her legal husband especially enjoyed stripping young male attendants naked, hanging them from the rafters, and whipping them with a riding crop.

Wearing her wedding clothes, Shen Wu'er cried again and again, until the bright red bridal gown had lost its color. At last, she made up her mind to hang herself from the rafters on the day the wedding procession came for her.

Just as he was about to kick away the stool, his aunt burst in from outside with a bag of copper coins. She said the authorities were offering even more money to buy him as the Mountain God's husband.

There was a Mountain God in the mountains, and the god had an enormous white tiger with glaring eyes as an emissary, as big as a house.

When the Mountain God was pleased, the tiger stayed in the mountains and ate jackals, wolves, tigers, and leopards. When the Mountain God was displeased, the tiger came down the mountain to eat people.

The tiger had already eaten four people in three days. The county magistrate was at his wits' end, and the shaman said the Mountain God wanted a husband. They had to offer the god a sixteen-year-old virgin to be his spouse.

Shen Wu'er hadn't even had time to take off his wedding clothes before they blindfolded him, tied him into a wedding sedan, and carried him to the cave where the Mountain God's emissary lived.

Shen Wu'er sank to his knees and began to weep softly.

A cold blade touched his skin and cut through the black cloth covering his eyes. Shen Wu'er fearfully looked up

A valiant-looking woman stood before him. Behind her lay a dead tiger, a tiger even bigger than a house.

The woman was beautiful and sharp-edged. Shen Wu'er couldn't take his eyes off her, until she impatiently strode toward him with her sword. Only then did Shen Wu'er tremble out a question.

“Are you, are you the Mountain God?”

Pei Zhuying raised an army at sixteen, conquering cities and territories and winning every battle. The rulers and ministers of the Ying Dynasty feared her more than they feared tigers. She spent ten years roaming the world, never once tasting the pleasures of love.

Until an ambush left her defeated, and she took refuge deep in the mountains, where she found a man who claimed to have come to serve the Mountain God.

The man was fair-skinned and beautiful, blushing at a touch and seeming as though he might bruise at a poke. He was soft and frail, plagued by illness, as if a breeze could knock him down. And the man... made the most intoxicated expressions and trembled in bed.

She was someone destined for great things. She shouldn't let herself become obsessed with this.

But the man was always kneeling on the ground, clutching the hem of her skirt and sobbing as he pleaded, “Mountain God, don't you want me anymore?”

The founding emperor ruled for forty years. During her reign, taxes were light, labor duties were few, and officials were honest. She was a flawless ruler

Well, she would have been, if her Phoenix Consort hadn't been such a crybaby, and if she hadn't left her ministers standing bewildered in the Golden Throne Hall every time she heard that he was crying.

A fierce, hot-tempered warrior-empress × a gentle, tearful beauty

1. Both leads are virgins.

2. Women are respected and men are subordinate; men can bear children, with some original worldbuilding about childbirth.

Theme: Work hard, and anything is possible.