(Will begin writing once it reaches 250 favorites or I have 150,000 words in reserve.)
Ning Yao has lost his memory. He doesn't remember who the woman standing before him with a bowl of medicine, claiming to be his wife, is, but he remembers everything else perfectly.
In other words, because he married this frail mortal woman, he, the mighty Heavenly Demon Constitution and reincarnated demon lord, gave up conquering the immortal sects and spent three whole years growing vegetables and chopping firewood in a tiny mountain village?!
How foolish. How shallow.
He sees this so-called wife as a stain on his life and a stumbling block on his road to supremacy. The gentler she is, the more disgusted he feels. He sees it all as an attempt to seduce him.
On the first day of his amnesia, he knocked the medicine bowl from her hands and verbally abused her.
On the third day, he ran a sword through her shoulder to protect his junior fellow disciple.
After a month, when her old illness flared up, he deliberately hid her medicine, cornered her while she burned with fever, and humiliated her with his words.
Three months after losing his memory, his wife said with red-rimmed eyes, "A-Yao, maybe we're not right for each other."
She left him a letter and went away. The gentle morning light shone into the wooden house as usual, but she was gone from their tidy home.
When her husband lost his memory, Xia Ning once thought that if she were patient enough, they could start over, even if he couldn't remember their past.
But her amnesiac husband always looked at her with disgust. Because she knew him so well, she understood what that look meant.
He hurt her with his sword, hid her medicine, and called her a slut, yet she didn't want to blame him.
That day, he roared at her with utter contempt: "Do you know how much I've given up for you? Your life wouldn't be enough to repay me!"
For the first time, she felt despair.
But, husband, do you know? I gave up everything, too, so I could marry you.
That year, the founding master asked her, "Are you certain? Once the Spirit-Locking Curse is placed on you, you'll lose all your cultivation. Unless you willingly renounce the mortal world from the bottom of your heart, it can never be undone."
Xia Ning thought: We love each other deeply. She was willing to leave the curse unbroken forever, so she and her husband could spend their lives together.
But she never imagined that when the seal of the curse began to loosen, she wouldn't feel all that much pain.
A year after losing his memory, Ning Yao saw his wife again at the grand gathering of the immortal sects. She was clad in flowing white, cool and pure as the moon, with the bearing of an immortal. Countless prodigies admired and surrounded her. She and the disheveled Ning Yao seemed to belong to two different worlds.
A crack appeared in the depths of his memory. He looked up in a daze. The distant woman's every smile and frown seemed as if they had happened only yesterday, yet time could never turn back.
He heard someone say, "Sect Master Xia has finally come to her senses."
"That's right. She once sealed away her cultivation and left the sect for some scoundrel. How foolish and shallow."
"At least that man was a useless good-for-nothing. Sect Master Xia loved him so much back then, but now she can finally let him go."
"I hear her senior brother has also returned alive from the Ancient Immortal Abyss. Those two were a perfect match. Their romance was once a legend in the cultivation world..."
*
The romance is one-on-one in stages; all male characters are sexually inexperienced, with multiple male suitors and a love rivalry.
A freewheeling, old-school, melodramatic mash-up, under 300,000 words.
Theme: Those who love others are loved in return.
