No One Told Me My Trial Partner Would Be a Monk

A restrained, obsessive monk gong x a flirtatious, two-faced Matchmaker shou

Have you ever heard of getting drunk and sleeping with someone? How about getting drunk and tying your own red thread of fate?

After a drunken binge, Matchmaker Chai Shu turned his own tree of fated relationships into a tangled mess. When he woke up, he was in the mortal realm, reborn as a swaddled baby.

The smiling Fate Official relayed the message: "The Heavenly Emperor says you may return to your post once you've completed your tribulation."

No problem. Don't panic. Untangling threads is a piece of cake. But when he reached the very last one, he was stunned.

Engraved at one end of the thread were the words: Buddhist Child Baichuan. At the other end: Matchmaker Chai Shu.

Wonderful. He'd better prepare a grave with his clothes and belongings in it ahead of time, so his immortal friends would have somewhere to mourn him after his body was destroyed and his soul scattered. But soon he recovered from the shock, his eyes shifting as an idea struck him: Why not make the first move?

"Master~" Chai Shu followed the thread to the meditation room and leaned toward Baichuan, who was chanting with his eyes closed. His voice was bright and cheerful. "I've just read your fortune, and it seems your mortal life is about to face a tribulation."

Baichuan's expression didn't change. His fingers paused briefly on his prayer beads. "Do not speak nonsense."

Chai Shu's smile deepened. He wound the red thread around his finger again and again. "It's true. Monks aren't supposed to lie, Master. You owe me a love affair."

Later, Baichuan broke his vows for him, left the monastic life for him, and shed the Buddha's radiance that had surrounded him. But on the very night his tribulation was due, Chai Shu fled back to his immortal cave and never came out again, calling it, with great dignity, a period of secluded cultivation.

At a banquet in the Heavenly Palace,

His close friend Bai Ling whispered, "I heard the living King of Hell in the Ninth Heaven has flipped through the Underworld's Book of Reincarnation eighty-one times lately. I wonder which unlucky soul offended him. He's not even sparing the dead."

Chai Shu was playing with a red cord, smiling, when his expression suddenly froze. His wrist grew hot. The phantom thread he'd severed a hundred years ago was unexpectedly reconnecting from some unknown end, as if coming to claim his soul...

It's over!

Chai Shu made a run for it.

Later, a saying spread among mortals: If you hear a bell ring on your wedding night, it means the Matchmaker has blessed you with a good marriage. But no one knew that the bell was originally tied to one person's wrist. Whether it rang or not depended entirely on that person's whim.

Theme: Love in all its forms, great and small