缚春情 (Bound by Spring Love) by 任欢游
Historical romance webnovel completed on January 21, 2025

The Jiang and Song families had been on good terms for generations, and Song Wan was betrothed to Jiang Xingjian before she was even born. The two were childhood sweethearts, but she was confined to the inner quarters of the house, and all her learning in her life was merely preparation for becoming a wife in the Jiang family.
The young man, dressed in fine clothes and riding a spirited horse, had lofty ambitions. Before he even reached adulthood, he went to the border to make his mark.
Before his departure, Jiang Xingjian personally put a white jade hairpin in her hair. With just one sentence, “wait for me,” Song Wan’s heart was touched. Even though he died on the battlefield, she insisted on marrying into the Chengyang Marquis’s mansion while hugging his memorial tablet.
She kept the boy hidden in her heart and remained a widow for six years, only to wait for Jiang Xingjian to return to the capital with his beloved.
The young man’s beloved was eccentric in her words and unpredictable with her actions. She made ice and firearms in the summer, helping the Marquis’s mansion rise to prominence.
Song Wan watched as he embraced the girl, showering her with boundless affection. She also watched as he personally snatched the power to manage the household from her hands, all for the sake of winning a smile from his beauty.
No noble family would divorce a woman, so Song Wan abandoned everything and left the Marquis’s mansion, only to be entangled by a rebellious and unruly man.
But Jiang Xingjian suddenly realized his mistake. Jiang Xingjian: Song shi was mine in life and will be mine in death. Even her ghost will be mine.
Shen Qianyu: You go find your dead ghost, I want my A’Wan…

​The prompt for this month was “Vintage” and honestly I (other than going by publication date) don’t know what in cnovel world would be “vintage.” Everything I read is “old school” in that it’s a historical setting. (Look, the escapism is real.) But I felt the book I read just before this last one fits perfectly, because it has a transmigrator as one of the major characters, and she definitely starts out as the antagonist. (I actually felt she was more the actual protagonist of the book, but the author had a premise in mind and insisted on following it despite not really wanting to … I’m also annoyed because I just finished another book by her but this one was … not good.) Anyway, what I felt specifically “vintage” about it, was the setting of the book is an ancient very conservative society. What was interesting also was generally in novels the transmigrator is the protagonist, and their innovations lead to success and winning. But here the transmigrator couldn’t fit in, didn’t understand things, and caused endless trouble. Continue reading →