It Has to Be Me

The new story, In a Dream No One Ever Wakes From [Infinite], launches on March 6. Synopsis below. Please add it to your collection.

The Ninth Prince, Song Yi, has three great qualities: he is handsome, charming, and utterly useless.

He spends his days either in a brothel or on his way to one.

At court, the princes clash in a storm of intrigue, while he alone looks utterly indifferent and lazy.

No one knows that beneath his frivolous facade lies a mind that can calculate every human heart.

Until he sets his sights on the Third Prince’s trusted aide, the great general Lin Xiang’an.

Born into a humble family, the young general is as cold as iron.

Song Yi finds him fascinating, and decides to tease him.

“General, you have quite a talent. Why not stay in my bed and put those skills to the test?”

Lin Xiang’an: “Get lost.”

To uncover information, Song Yi decides to put on an act and seduce the great general, Lin Xiang’an.

“I’ll pretend to care for him and fool him into falling for me. It’s only a performance.”

Song Yi is confident and a brilliant actor, but he never expects that as the performance goes on, he’ll get caught up in it himself.

The act hasn’t ended, but his heart has already been moved.

He thought it was only manipulation and testing the waters. He never expected to be the first one to fall in love.

Within the palace walls, deadly schemes lurk at every turn.

Falling for someone he should never love is both the beginning and the end.

They draw closer as they plot against each other, then retreat once feelings take hold.

In Tai’an City, the hand he cannot bear to let go of becomes a fatal liability.

It is a weakness others can exploit, a soft spot laid bare to the blade.

So Song Yi chooses to let go first.

Behind Lin Xiang’an’s back, he cuts off every path of retreat with his own hands and removes himself from the game, giving Lin Xiang’an a chance to survive.

When Lin Xiang’an returns to Tai’an, the place is empty and Song Yi is gone.

He loathes Song Yi’s heartlessness. For three years he hates him, and for three years he searches for him.

Until they meet again at a temple gate amid a blizzard. Song Yi wears blue robes, his head shaved as he becomes a monk.

“The Ninth Prince is truly impossible to figure out. Becoming a monk? Even a storybook wouldn’t dare come up with that.”

Three years later, Song Yi watches Lin Xiang’an’s mouth, not knowing when it turned so sharp, and finds himself missing the old days.

Though he misses them, Song Yi is just as sharp-tongued. “That’s right. I ran all the way to this temple, and General Lin still managed to track me down. We must be fated to meet.”

A scheming, unhinged Ninth Prince × a cold-faced, devoted great general

“I’ll trade my future for a smooth career and a steady rise through the ranks for you.”

Comments are open!

A few quick notes

1. Both leads are sexually inexperienced.

2. The political schemes are a little simplistic.

3. The ending is happy.

Coming soon: In a Dream No One Ever Wakes From [Infinite]. Launching March 6. Please add it to your collection.

Launching March 6. Previously titled Dreamweaver Island.

As an agent of the Dream Management Bureau, Yi Chu’s job is to enter dreams, mend collapsing minds, eliminate the nightmare beasts that take root there, restore emotions that have spiraled out of control, and stabilize the dreams once more.

As far as he knows,

nightmare beasts should be unconscious, without personality or feelings,

and they certainly shouldn’t look human.

But on his very first mission, he encounters an exception.

Yi Chu’s dagger is already at the nightmare beast’s throat.

He lowers his eyes to the hand holding the blade.

Then he suddenly smiles and shrugs nonchalantly. “You can’t kill me.”

The dagger plunges into his throat in an instant.

But the blade passes through nothing but a mass of dissipating black mist. Suyuan’s figure vanishes before Yi Chu’s eyes, then appears behind him the next moment.

“I told you.”

His voice is so close, tinged with amusement.

“You can’t kill me. I don’t belong to this dream.”

The handbook’s records are completely overturned.

Nightmare beasts can actually leave the dreams in which they were born and exist across the borders between dreams.

To kill him, Yi Chu must find the dream that belongs to him.

But until then, in this high-risk dream, the only nightmare beast that exists by day

is him.

And so the dreamweaver and the monster are forced to stand side by side.

-

Across the vast sea of dreams, this being who should have been destroyed draws closer to Yi Chu again and again;

they grow familiar, become entangled, and slip into something both intoxicating and dangerous.

Their boundaries are tested, then crossed, again and again.

“You enter dreams to save them.”

“What about me?” Suyuan asks softly. “Who will save me?”

Yi Chu has never given him anything but silence.

From a downpour on the day a loved one leaves, to a castle drowned in rumors;

from a gentle trap bound up in love, to an immortal reflection of the self;

in countless dreams that collapse and are rebuilt, Yi Chu witnesses each heart break and begin again.

As they take on dream after dream, they walk side by side, and the boundaries between them gradually blur.

The dreams are mended, and people are saved.

But feelings take root in the unreal, then grow wild and out of control.

Their boundaries are tested, then crossed.

Dependence grows in silence.

Nightmare beasts are meant to die by a dreamweaver’s blade.

“You hesitated.”

Suyuan chuckles softly. His fingertips brush the hand holding the blade, then clasp it tightly.

“Yi Chu, are you afraid to kill me, or afraid that without me, you won’t be able to save yourself?”

Deep within the dream, the blade does not fall.

And the monster keeps drawing closer to his heart.

Standing in the dream that belongs to Suyuan, he spreads his arms, his gaze obsessive and burning.

“Come, Yi Chu. Embrace me, or kill me.”

A monster who has learned to love, and a hunter who falters over his prey: from the moment their eyes first met, they had both fallen into a dream they could never wake from.

Dream Management Bureau agent bottom × human-shaped nightmare beast top

“So, does that mean a monster isn’t worth saving?”

Theme: Learn to love yourself.