Wen Bingjie has always lived in her older sister's shadow, until her sister's stepson becomes her dog.
1,
The words Wen Bingjie heard most often as a child were: "Why can't you be more like your sister?"
Her sister is the very definition of perfection, yet she marries a professor fifteen years her senior. It's her second marriage, and she has a son.
Wen Bingjie can't understand it until she transfers to a high school in Jingbei and moves into her brother-in-law's detached mansion in the west of the Second Ring Road, tagging along like unwanted baggage.
The man is quietly dazzling.
His son, Cui Ze, is even more impossibly handsome. Though he is still young, his eyes are like a pool hidden beneath flowering trees, staring at her from the depths, dark and brooding.
Wen Bingjie realizes that her sister has already climbed the social ladder, while her own future can only get bleaker.
Until that day.
The boy suddenly goes berserk, drives away the private doctor, knocks down his father, and frightens her sister into tears.
His vacant gaze sweeps over the room before he finally points at her. "I won't take my medicine unless that older sister feeds it to me."
2,
The Cui family has a very expensive curly-haired dog. Wen Bingjie calls the dog, but it won't come. She calls Cui Ze, and Cui Ze goes, "Woof!"
She thinks Cui Ze is noisy. Cui Ze falls silent and lies on the floor beside the curly-haired dog, staring motionlessly at her until she feels better.
When her period starts unexpectedly, Cui Ze rushes from his Olympiad class to the sports field, trades his uniform pants for her, then insists on wearing her bloodstained uniform skirt through the rest of class.
Her sister notices and scolds her, but her brother-in-law smiles and smooths things over. "They're both still young."
No matter how late he gets off work, her brother-in-law also brings her a late-night snack of her favorite foods.
As she savors those midnight snacks, a twisted sense of victory makes her teeth itch and chatter.
3,
Wen Bingjie is eighteen. After the college entrance exams, she has her first erotic dream, and it's her brother-in-law's face that appears in it.
She wakes up drenched in cold sweat.
Then she fills out an application for a university thousands of miles from Jingbei.
She looks at the boy whose hand was bitten by the curly-haired dog and gives him one last "dog-training" lesson.
"It likes you, so it makes you hurt."
"Love is the most useless thing there is. If you want it, lock it up next time."
She changes all her contact information and leaves without a word.
4,
Four years later, Wen Bingjie returns to Jingbei for work and, for various reasons, ends up staying in that mansion again.
"Big sister, I've been waiting for you."
Cui Ze holds the curly-haired dog, now visibly old but still obedient. The boy from before is now a head taller than Wen Bingjie, and more outstanding than his father ever was.
Wen Bingjie finds him unfamiliar and no longer easy to bully, so she answers perfunctorily. "Mm... where's your father? I haven't seen him."
She doesn't know that the mansion has a new owner.
That night, she hears the bedroom door lock from the inside in the dark.
The young man, so composed and proper by day, looks at her now with feverish, pathological desire in his eyes.
"Big sister, do I look like my father?"
To Wen Bingjie's horror, the young man is wearing the gold-rimmed glasses his father wore back then. The identical shirt and trousers look a little tight on him.
Wen Bingjie's palms grow damp, and her scalp prickles.
The young man leaning over her holds her wrists and chuckles.
"Love makes you hurt. If you want someone, just lock them up."
"You taught me that, big sister. Did I learn well?"
She grew up trapped in a stagnant, murky current, and casually dragged the boy down into its damp depths with her.
Those late-night snacks back then were all bought by Cui Ze's father at Cui Ze's request.
From beginning to end, Cui Ze was the one who loved Wen Bingjie.
Morbid, brooding woman × possessive younger man, sickly beauty
Mutual salvation between two "bad seeds."
*Neither character is perfect.
*Both are sexually inexperienced.
*The romance and intimate scenes do not involve minors. No non-consensual sex, no blood relation, and no legal family relationship.
Blurb revised and screenshotted on September 21, 2026
Theme: Be a good person.