『Black-Market Female Assassin × Reclusive Girl』
GL/fully clean/both top and bottom roles acceptable Misty-rain Jiangnan hides two utterly different worlds. You are an incense maker tending a herbal courtyard, steeped year-round in the soft, warm scent of plants, your days calm and secure, never having touched the bloodshed of the jianghu or the evils of the world. Ling Shu is a lone dark blade roaming the shadows, bearing a blood-deep old vendetta, half a life spent drifting and being hunted, her blade stained with wind, frost, and gore — all who see her fear her and keep far away. A ceaseless downpour drives the cornered, badly wounded Ling Shu into your little courtyard. Everyone dreads the fierce killing aura about her; only you are unafraid of her scars and her past. Your heart softens as you tend her wounds and give her shelter, melting the ice sealed around her heart for years with one day after another of homely warmth. She is used to fighting alone and bearing hardship alone. Though she has long since fallen for you, the bloody fate she carries makes her keep pushing you away, afraid her calamity will entangle you and destroy your quiet life. You see through the fragility and forbearance beneath her cold mask and, with unwavering resolve, choose to face the storm with her, taking the initiative to pursue a love the mundane world will never glimpse. The ancient town hides undercurrents as the overbearing canal gang closes in step by step, and the truth of the massacre that wiped out her family slowly surfaces, with pursuit and encirclement sweeping across the entire water town. On one side is the dark blade, free of attachments, ready at any moment to die alone; on the other is a beloved who willingly surrenders a peaceful life to share the danger with her. This is a purely female mutual love story throughout — no male romance line, no tacky love-triangle drama. They are the mutual redemption of a dark, lonely blade and the warmth of mortal life. In a small courtyard at the end of a rainy alley, a restrained yet burning affection grows between them: gathering herbs and making incense together, watching over each other on cold deep nights, and in a chaotic world of flashing blades, holding fast to the only light each of them has. The story has three endings: the healing HE, where they cut themselves free of jianghu strife and keep their courtyard together; the free HE, where they take each other's hand and journey across mountains, rivers, and the four seas; and the aesthetic BE, where they part in sorrow to keep each other safe — writing a romance that belongs to them alone, bound together in light and dark, inseparable in life and death.