The Sleepless Marquis

[A troubled insomniac villainess x a gloomy, masochistic wolf cub]

In Pei Yinning’s eyes, when Yu Xiang was brought home, he looked like a beautiful, sickly beast.

She was overjoyed, tapping on his golden cage and laying out brocade bedding, planning to raise him well. But all she got in return was betrayal.

On the day her mother lay dying, A Yin knelt outside the door of her father, the Marquis, who was bewitched by another woman, begging him to bring out the Snow Pill and save her mother.

At last, the door opened. She saw the servants hurrying out with the Snow Pill.

The life-saving medicine she had begged for all night had been given by her father to his illegitimate son, who was no blood relation to him.

Behind the door, music and dancing went on without pause. Blood from A Yin’s forehead ran into her eyes and carved itself into her heart.

Three years later, a great fire consumed the Marquis’s residence. Blood relatives turned on each other, and all the splendor went up in ashes.

A Yin donned her father’s crown, usurped his power, and rose to the highest ranks of the court.

By day, she was a noblewoman who treated her half-brother kindly. By night, she was a blood-drinking demon who slit her own wrist.

“A Yin…”

Smack! A familiar slap landed on the wild, alluring face that had first caught A Yin’s attention and kept her gazing at it for so long.

A Yin knew Yu Xiang was innocent, but only good people forgive. She chose to take out her anger on him.

“…I mean, Elder Sister, could you please not leave marks on my neck tonight? I don’t want anyone to see them.”

“The medicinal properties of the Snow Pill left in your body are almost gone. Soon, you won’t have to worry about anyone seeing them.”

The women of A Yin’s maternal family inherited a hereditary insomnia. They could not sleep without medication, and generation after generation died from the accumulated drug toxicity.

Only the Snow Pill could cure this condition. Its powerful medicinal properties could also turn the person who took it into a living medicine.

On the day she usurped the throne, A Yin showed no mercy at all to this half-brother who shared no blood with her.

She drank from Yu Xiang to survive, and they slept together in a bed of hatred. She had assumed he hated her to the bone.

That is, until the political situation changed and she became a prisoner. Pei Yinning was locked away by Yu Xiang in the very cell that had once been his.

She had imagined a thousand ways he might take revenge. What she never expected was that when he appeared again, he would eat the last Snow Pill right in front of her, expose his vulnerable neck to her, and swallow, laying bare every secret desire he had harbored all these years.

“Keep going, A Yin. You can’t live without me after all.”

Pairing: Pei Yinning x Yu Xiang

1. The heroine usurps the title and raises the hero as her caged pet, drinking his blood every night to treat her insomnia. The hero is faced with her bright and upright childhood friend, whom she cannot be with. He is like a secret lover she keeps hidden away, forever resenting the moon for shining high above and never on him.

2. Slightly woman-focused fiction. Set in an alternate history, with some reference to a historical framework.

3. The heroine is a poisonous, arrogant woman. If that bothers you, please give it a try anyway.

4. Comments are open, so say whatever you like. Even if there are negative reviews, surely they can’t be more vicious than the author.

Keywords: BG, lots of everything except communication, a tangled romance between people on the same boat, love and hatred as deep as the sea.

Theme: Being loved gives you flesh and blood