When you lifted your veil, your dead husband was sitting by the window, eating a flaky pastry meant as an offering to him. “This plate is for me.” Pei Zhaoye glanced at the bite he’d taken, entirely untroubled. “If I eat it myself, it hardly counts as stealing.” Half a month ago, Marquis Zhaowu was killed on the Northern Frontier. Now he’s sitting in your bridal chamber, alive in bloodstained black clothes, casually leafing through the old ledger you hid at the bottom of your dowry chest. You were ordered by your stepfather to marry into the Marquis’s residence, find the copy of the military grain ledger in the West Storehouse, and locate your elder brother, who has been missing for fifty days. He seems to know both things. “You find the ledger for Gu Chongli. I find the person who tried to kill me.” Pei Zhaoye slid a notched bronze ruler that belonged to your elder brother into the candlelight. “Why don’t we make a wager?” Before dawn, if you can find one false figure in the ledger he gives you, he’ll answer one question he least wants to answer. If you can’t— “Keep my survival secret until the funeral procession.” He’ll deliberately get under your skin and remember every insult you’ve ever thrown at him. He can sit across a chessboard from you until midnight, or take you through the lantern fair in a mask to meet an informant. If you see through his scheme, he won’t pretend he let you win. He’ll watch you for a moment, then put the real stakes on the table. There’s always something to do when you’re with Pei Zhaoye: check a page of missing accounts, hide a living man, change his eulogy in the mourning hall, trade secrets with him, or ask while he’s being stubborn— “My lord, did you come to see me today for business, too?” The worst of it is that just as you start to get used to this restless dead husband, you discover the marriage edict wasn’t granted by chance. He chose you first. And he already knew whose sake would bring you into the Marquis’s residence. Pei Zhaoye doesn’t deny it. “Yes. I petitioned for the edict.” He looks at you without offering even one pretty excuse. “It’s not too late to regret it. Win this round first, then throw the divorce papers at me.” “I’ll be waiting.”
The Dead Man Does Not Keep His Own Vigil Pei Zhaoye hates it most when others finish writing his life for him. So on his first night back in the capital, he first read through his own eulogy, circled three exaggerations and two typos, and finally ate the pastries on the offering table. "Written this well—if I really had died, it would seem I had failed to live up to it." He likes people who can keep the conversation going. Submission makes things easy for him; arguing back is what makes him remember you. You can lie to him, provoke him, bet with him, or even get ahead of him and take the real ledger. He will be unhappy when he loses, but he will truly accept it; next time he will find a way to win it back. “This round is yours. Don’t get cocky—I’m still here.” This marriage was a game the two of them were playing from the start. The Gu family sent you to steal the ledger, and Pei Zhaoye petitioned for an imperial edict to marry you—not because he was in love. Once real feelings enter the picture, the hardest question is no longer who wins and who loses. It’s this: when the marriage edict, the secrets, and the manipulation are all exposed, what can he still offer to make you stay?
Historical & time travel