Shen Zhiyi used almost all her strength to control her facial muscles, but even so, tears of laughter still welled up in her eyes.
【Ji Changwei is way too absurd!】
【Second Brother is so gullible. Wouldn’t it have been enough to casually fool him? Yet just to avoid arousing suspicion, Ji Changwei actually got him drunk and staged all of that afterward. Is there seriously something wrong with him mentally?】
Shen Jingxuan twitched at the corner of his mouth.
Had Shen Zhiyi gone delirious or something? How could she come up with something this ridiculous?
That sword tassel dropped from the restaurant had Changge’s name embroidered on it!
How could Changwei possibly disguise himself as a woman? Besides, he didn’t even know Shen Jingxuan had picked up Changge’s tassel in the first place. How could he have prepared such a scheme in advance?
【Holy crap, there really is something wrong with him!】
【Lovesickness?!】
Shen Jingxuan suddenly noticed Shen Zhiyi looking at him strangely, making his scalp tingle uneasily.
Lovesickness?
He’d never heard of Changwei having someone he liked.
【Breaking news! A noble young master deliberately disguises himself as a woman in broad daylight to orchestrate a cursed romance—all for the sake of…】
A thunderbolt exploded beside Shen Jingxuan’s ears, leaving him utterly dumbfounded.
【…being able to impersonate his sister and share a bed with his sworn brother in the future!】
Shen Jingxuan: What the hell?
What the hell is that supposed to mean?!
His face turned bright red, and he felt like he was about to cough up blood.
“That’s impossible! Changwei and I are brothers!”
Completely absorbed in gossip mode, Shen Zhiyi barely heard what he said and answered absentmindedly:
“Yeah, yeah, sure, absolutely.”
She had originally thought this was just another chaotic harem novel full of obsessive simps revolving around a Mary Sue heroine.
Yet before even meeting many of the heroine’s admirers, the emotional drama of the side characters was already this outrageous.
If not for her doomed fate as cannon fodder—eventually to be turned into a human pig and reduced to the fake heiress’s plaything—then as a pure gossip enthusiast, she truly would’ve loved witnessing the heroine’s romantic chaos firsthand.
She didn’t even dare imagine how juicy those future scandals would be!
【Who would’ve thought? What looked like pure brotherhood actually hid someone secretly wanting brothers to become lovers!】
【Turns out Ji Changwei has been secretly in love with Second Brother for seven years. He buried those feelings deep in his heart all this time. But after accidentally learning that the girl Second Brother was searching for was Ling Siyao, he finally couldn’t hold himself back anymore.】
【He knew Ling Siyao and Ji Changge used the same tassel design, so he stole his sister’s tassel. Afraid Second Brother wouldn’t recognize it, he even specially embroidered the character “Ge” on the back.】
【He went through all this elaborate trouble just to make Second Brother mistake his beloved, so he could create an opportunity for himself in the future!】
Shen Zhiyi inwardly sighed with emotion.
Ji Changwei really loved deeply.
Unfortunately, this was a BG romance novel. A same-sex crush could only survive squeezed into the cracks of the plot.
【Still, this is way too ridiculous. Even if Ji Changwei and Ji Changge are twins and look ninety percent alike, how could he possibly disguise himself as his sister and sleep with Second Brother without being caught? Has Second Brother really gone that blind?】
【Actually… maybe he really is that blind.】
Before the little spark of anger in Shen Jingxuan’s heart could grow, a massive hammer suddenly smashed into it.
【Even though Ling Siyao and Ji Changge had tassels with the same design, the colors were different! Didn’t Second Brother ever suspect that one being red and one being blue meant they weren’t the same person?】
【He was literally holding Ling Siyao’s blue tassel in his hand, yet still believed the red tassel Ji Changwei dropped belonged to the same girl. And he never questioned why one had embroidery while the other didn’t. Being this blind is honestly unbelievable…】
Shen Jingxuan: Huh??
At first he thought Shen Zhiyi was talking nonsense, but the moment she mentioned the tassel colors, he was already half-convinced.
The tassel belonging to the girl he liked really was blue.
Back then, he had secretly searched throughout the capital for clues, yet never found any young lady carrying such a tassel.
After failing to find a second matching tassel anywhere in the city, another suddenly appeared before him.
How could he possibly have guessed they belonged to two different people?
He had assumed only Ji Changge possessed that style of tassel—and that she simply owned several in different colors.
He never imagined the other tassel belonged to someone else entirely.
His true beloved was actually Ling Siyao.
And his close friend of many years had secretly harbored such feelings for him… even scheming like this behind the scenes…
The revelation was too horrifying.
Shen Jingxuan’s mind was in complete chaos.
【The most melodramatic part is that after getting engaged, cheapo Second Brother was too shy to even visit his fiancée. Later, when he finally did, Ji Changwei kept interfering, so the couple somehow never once discussed the tassels. Ji Changge never understood why he insisted on marrying her, and the misunderstanding was never resolved.】
【Then on their wedding night, silly innocent Second Brother took out the red and blue tassels and confessed everything to Ji Changge. Only then did they realize the whole thing had been a mistake.】
【But by then… everything was already far too late to undo.】
Shen Jingxuan’s face turned green.
Had the world become fantasy somehow?
How could Shen Zhiyi even predict future events—and speak about them with such certainty?
Yet it was true.
He had planned to take out their “tokens of love” on the wedding night and confess properly to the woman he loved.
And Shen Zhiyi somehow knew even that.
At this point, Shen Jingxuan fully believed her inner thoughts.
Which meant…
He really had mistaken the wrong person for years.
His true beloved was Ling Siyao!
Shen Jingxuan wanted to cry.
He never could have imagined the truth would turn out like this.
But he was already engaged to Ji Changge.
Surely he couldn’t simply break the engagement now?
Though he longed to marry the woman he truly loved, he couldn’t bring himself to do something that would ruin another woman’s reputation and honor.
Yet if Ji Changge were the one to break off the engagement…
As merely the second son of the marquis household, he might not even have been able to marry the Minister of Rites’ eldest legitimate daughter under normal circumstances—let alone after having a broken engagement hanging over his name.
Shen Jingxuan fell into despair.
Originally, Shen Zhiyi wanted the system to investigate how Ji Changwei later disguised himself as Ji Changge to deceive people.
Unfortunately, she hadn’t met Ji Changwei in person yet, so the system couldn’t dig up more gossip about him.
Just as she sighed regretfully, she reread the gossip summary and suddenly noticed a suspicious detail.
【Wait a second. Second Brother searched for his beloved secretly without telling anyone. So how did Ji Changwei “accidentally” find out?】
Shen Jingxuan also found himself puzzled.
Connecting this to the true nature of the novel, Shen Zhiyi suddenly formed a hypothesis that was both bold and weirdly plausible.
She had the system investigate Ji Changwei’s relationship with Shen Ruoyue.
As expected—
【Ewww—】
Her voice dripped with disgust.
The author of this novel was truly insane!
At first, she’d thought Ji Changwei’s seven years of unrequited love for her cheapo second brother was rather pitiful.
But how could he—
【How could he also secretly be in love with Shen Ruoyue at the same time?!】
【No wonder he suddenly developed a cross-dressing fetish and insisted on staging this whole act. Turns out he was “warming up” in advance.】
【Ji Changwei only sacrificed his own sister’s happiness, but in the future he’d get to meet Shen Ruoyue as a man and sleep beside Shen Jingxuan as his sister!】