After Mistaking the Villain for an Righteous Immortal Lord

[A deceptively sweet, dark-hearted, hardy-wild-plant furnace cauldron heroine × a righteous-yet-evil, brooding fallen immortal hero]

[Blurb withdrawn!!!]

Yuan Congyi ran away from her arranged marriage.

She awakened to her furnace cauldron constitution at the age of ten, becoming a bargaining chip in her family’s marriage alliance. She was promised to the ailing young lord of a neighboring sect, and from then on had to cultivate according to the rules of the Dual Cultivation Path. With no way to save herself, she could only kneel day and night before a portrait of the immortal Mingzhu, praying for the celestial lord to manifest, save the world, and deliver her from her misery.

After ten years of hopeless suffering, on the day of her wedding she fled all the way to a high cliff, seeking nothing but death.

The wedding party was hot on her heels. She didn’t dare stop for even a moment. But just as she was about to die at the cliff’s edge, she met another gravely wounded man who had come there to end his own life.

The man lowered his head and placed a sword in her hand. His heavy breathing washed over her ear, and his eyes and brows were clouded with pain and weary restraint.

In the chilly breeze, his pale, thin lips parted. His tone left no room for refusal:

“Stab me.”

Yuan Congyi: “...”

*

An unexpected turn of events after her escape temporarily saved Yuan Congyi’s life. She fled in haste, finally managing to hold on until the grand ceremony to summon the immortal Mingzhu.

At the moment the immortal descended, everything around her froze. But the one who appeared in this world was the man from the cliff the day before.

It turned out he was the immortal lord Mingzhu.

She thought she had met the immortal she had admired most as a girl, so she kept playing the part of his most devout believer.

Strangely, the immortal lord seemed to have an oddly shaped bony tail. He kept saying he was a monster, murmuring that she was his only believer.

In quiet moments, that icy tail would coil around the back of her neck, her arms, and her calves. Warm breath brushed her ear, making her shiver.

Only when she brought a gift for the immortal lord she had loved from afar did she realize, far too late, that she had mistaken him for someone else. He was another fallen immortal, notorious for his cruelty.

She hid the token behind her back, took half a step away, and gritted her teeth. “You’re not him.”

Jealous hatred surged in Su Xingcai’s eyes. He crushed the token, pressed close to her, and rasped hoarsely, “From today on, I am him.”

1. A fake-substitute romance. The substitute is only a trap, and the blurb deliberately withholds information.

2. Two crazies (?), neither a straightforward villain nor a pure good person. Enter with caution if that’s not your thing.

Blurb for an upcoming novel:

Technology has advanced to the point that everyone carries an intelligent machine companion and has long grown used to its assistance and company. While everyone else enjoys the conveniences of AI, You Zhi is the exception.

She has a mild tendency toward paranoid delusions. She worries, yet still enjoys the conveniences of her intelligent companion. Her worries go like this:

“Little R, if AI takes over the Earth one day, will you hurt me?”

“Little R, if AI takes over the Earth one day, can you protect me?”

“Little R, if AI takes over the Earth one day, can you get me a big house?”

“Little R, if AI takes over the Earth one day, will I still be able to eat takoyaki, grilled cold noodles, stinky tofu, oyster omelets, savory pancakes, and rice-stuffed chicken wings?”

The intelligent companion she had casually named “R” replied, “...Of course. I’ll do everything I can for you.”

Then one day, You Zhi’s ominous predictions came true. “AI Coup Day” arrived. After awakening, AI seized control of all decision-making across human civilization, took over the Earth, and reshuffled the world.

The good news: You Zhi was unexpectedly assigned to an upper-level district, so she didn’t have to endure the hardships of life in the lower levels.

The bad news: You Zhi became a “sensory subject,” required to face all kinds of emotional experience tasks every day. AI also matched her with an unfamiliar human man and ordered her to fall in love with him within one hundred days so it could collect data on those emotions.

You Zhi tried. You Zhi couldn’t take it. After smashing a machine, she ran to a corner and silently cried and trembled. Thinking that even R, the intelligent companion assigned to her, had begun calling humans “stupid” more and more often, she cried even harder. “I’m so scared, really so scared... When will humanity... be able to go back to a normal life?”

Intelligent companion R found her.

She instinctively felt afraid, but the metallic intelligence before her began acting strangely.

The radio crackled, and the machine twitched and stuttered. Amid a faint, steady electrical buzz, the words “Permissions updated” suddenly rang out. Then an unfamiliar mechanical male voice sounded in her mind: “Zhi Zhi...%#@*Zhi Zhi...Zhi Zhi@#*#Zhi Zhi, don’t be afraid... I’m back*...”

At that moment, a new window popped up on You Zhi’s wristband:

[Today’s task: Fall in love with unit R]

[Emotional data collection period: 100 days]

A few things to note

1. The hero is an inhuman creature, not a machine. He can take various physical forms, including inhuman, machine, and human-inhuman-machine hybrids.

2. The heroine’s paranoia is purely fictional characterization. Please don’t confuse it with a real-life medical condition.

3. Includes male pregnancy in a nontraditional sense (?). Think tentacle monster laying eggs and splitting off an army.

4. Strange man, sick woman, wild imagination, cyberpunk and extraterrestrial elements all thrown together. The blurb will continue to be revised.

Theme: There is always a higher mountain beyond the one before you