Childhood Friends

When the apocalypse came, I struggled to stay alive.

Then the zombie king ate a hopeless romantic’s brain—and fell hopelessly in love with me.

Every day, I opened my door to find him offering me fresh food, eager to please.

Until he read a book called The Rules of a Shady Merchant.

Then the food came with a price.

“One sausage for a hug.

One bag of bread for a kiss.”

“What about hot pot?”

I asked nervously.

The zombie king chuckled and beckoned me closer.

“That costs a little more.

Come here, and I’ll explain it to you.

Slowly.”

I had fallen for a shadow guard.

Times were hard.

I was sold to a wealthy household to be a playmate for its young master, who had a lame leg.

He had a delicate, handsome face, but his health was very poor.

His right leg was disabled, he was always coughing, and sometimes he was too weak even to sit up.

Everyone in the household said he would not live long.

Afraid I would be sent away, I slipped into his room and leaned over the edge of his bed.

“Could you please not die?

If you die, I won’t have a home again.”

He paused, then smiled gently and stroked my head.

“All right.

I’ll see if I can stay alive.”

My best friend was a top-tier Alpha, but he had a medical condition.

Pheromone overload.

If he didn’t get the excess out of his system, it could kill him.

So I, a Beta, volunteered to be his pheromone storage tank.

I was a Beta, after all.

The scent wouldn’t stay on me for more than a couple of days anyway.

Except that, before long, my best friend was sinking his teeth into my neck every few days.

Wait.

Had his condition really gotten that bad?

Dude!

Keep biting me and people are going to start wondering what we are to each other!

To break his betrothal to my elder sister and marry me, Lu Jin agreed to three conditions.

First, on her birthday every year, he must personally bring a bouquet of pomegranate blossoms to her residence.

Second, if we ever had a daughter, the child must bear her name.

He agreed to both.

As for the third, my sister said she would name it another day.

After we married, it did bother me that he went to her with flowers year after year.

But he was gentle with me, and we were so deeply in love that I could hardly bring myself to complain.

Besides, whenever I showed the least displeasure, he would say, “Once a promise is given, not ten thousand mountains can stand in its way,” and tell me not to ask again.

What truly stuck in my throat was the way he mentioned my sister every time he called our daughter’s name.

She did not live in our house, yet she was everywhere in it.

At last I could bear no more.

I wept and insisted on changing the child’s name.

Lu Jin merely watched me coldly.

“Have you finished making a scene in front of the child?”

He resented my suspicions and grew steadily more distant.

Then my sister sent word of her third condition: he was to help her divorce her husband and bring her home.

I promptly wrote a divorce agreement of my own.

Lu Jin took it with a weary sigh.

“She’s already given up so much.

What more do you want?”

“If she hadn’t stepped aside, I would never have married you.

Had I known it would come to this, she might as well have refused.”

I was reborn on the day Lu Jin came to ask for my hand.

He handed the betrothal token straight to my sister.

“The eldest Miss Xie alone holds my heart.

I wish to take her as my wife and remain true to her all my life.”

I breathed a sigh of relief.

Everyone in my family had sickly bones.

My eldest sister coughed three times for every three steps, spat blood every third day, and fainted every fifth.

My brother’s bones broke at a touch—one a month, seven or eight times a year.

I alone had a head of iron and a body of bronze.

I could ram a peach tree with my forehead to bring down the fruit.

The tree shook, the peaches fell, and I was perfectly fine.

When I was seven, an eminent monk passed by.

One look at me, and he blurted out: “Bronze skin over bone.

A demon born.”

I couldn’t be bothered to listen.

I charged him headfirst and knocked him flat on his back.

It took him ages to wake up.

When he did, he laughed instead of getting angry and asked my parents: “Would you have your children live long lives, sound in body and bone?”

“Take one bone each from your eldest daughter and your son.

Nurture them beside your youngest daughter’s heart, then cut them out when she turns eighteen.”

“Your eldest daughter will then rise like the sovereign moon, and your son will be the richest man in the realm.”

My parents trembled.

“And this girl?”

The monk held my wrist, half closed his eyes, and chuckled out a little song: “No future as a human.

As a beast, she’ll have plenty of room to roam.”

Yang Bufan never took anything seriously.

Not even marrying me.

An auspicious date for the betrothal?

Too much trouble to choose.

How much to offer in betrothal gifts?

Too much trouble to think about.

He left every last detail to his cousin.

He would sooner spend an entire afternoon beneath the flowering trees, stringing jasmine for our dear Miss Meng, than spare a second glance at the marriage contract I had sent him.

He was getting annoyed.

“She’s changed it twice already.

Last time, I left two strokes out of her name.

What is it now?

Did I leave something out of mine too?”

The servant who had brought it faltered.

“The names have been corrected, sir.

It’s just that Miss Lu would still like to know what you think…”

Yang Bufan propped his chin on his hand, already losing interest.

“As long as it’s fixed.

Tell her to stop hurrying me.”

“The sixth day of the sixth month, isn’t it?

I’ll be back.”

After her family goes bankrupt, spoiled heiress Su Mo marries Tan Xu, the brilliant former scholarship student her father once sponsored.

Their marriage is all sparks, demands, and hate sex—until Su Mo begins seeing live comments that insist she is a doomed villainess and Tan Xu will leave her for his childhood sweetheart.

Determined to save herself and her father, Su Mo hires a divorce lawyer and stops depending on her husband.

But every considerate step only makes Tan Xu more jealous and desperate, while the supposed heroine seems far more interested in befriending Su Mo than stealing him.

As misunderstandings unravel, Su Mo must decide whether the love she thought was one-sided has been mutual all along.

Everyone in Shengjing knows that Young Marquis Shen despises his wife, Meng Suichao.

He spends his days in brothels while she tends to him with unfailing devotion—until a scar destroys the one resemblance that kept her at his side.

When Suichao finally asks for a divorce, an old love believed dead returns through the snow, forcing every buried truth into the light.

As a child, Li Sujun saved an immortal lord who promised to answer whenever she lit the Heaven-Seeking Incense.

She called for him three times.

He never came.

Years later, Sujun has become a healer—and the same immortal lord lies powerless at her door after failing his tribulation.

He insists she is the trial of love he must overcome.

She thinks he should look closer at his own mistakes.

But the dog, cat, and little snake in her home are not what they seem, and the path Sujun abandoned is already winding back toward her.

To understand what Zhao Yunzhi truly lost for her, she must face the family that discarded her, the sect that used him, and the difference between love as possession and love as freedom.