For four hundred years, she ruled the dead. She watched twenty-three mortal men live, love, and die in her arms. And through all those centuries, one ghost stood beside her—silent, patient, waiting. He painted her portraits. He helped her crush rebellions. He climbed the ranks of Gui Xu (归墟) to become her right hand. Yet she never once looked at him the way she looked at a dying soldier named Duan Xu (段胥). Why would a woman who could love two dozen strangers refuse the one who stayed four hundred years? The answer isn’t just a murdered father. It runs deeper than revenge. It lives in what each of them truly wanted from the world—and from her.
The Throne or the Order?
Yan Ke (宴柯) had been a prince in his mortal life. He fought for a crown, lost, and was torn apart by horses in the public square. Death did not cleanse his hunger. It only sharpened it. He rose as a vicious ghost, and his obsession never changed: absolute power. He killed He Simu’s (贺思慕) father to clear a path to the throne of Gui Xu. But he wasn’t strong enough to take it for himself. So he hid the murder, bowed his head, and served her for three centuries. She saw through every single day of it.
She kept him close not out of trust but out of use. He was competent. He kept the realm of the dead in line. She gave him the title of Right Deputy—so close to the top he could almost touch it. That was her quiet punishment. Let him stare at the seat he would never sit on. Let him rot in the space between ambition and reality. A man who killed her father could never earn her love. But that wasn’t the whole wall between them. It was only the first brick.
He Simu once said, “I don’t like evil ghosts.” She wasn’t being cruel. She was being precise. Evil ghosts are born from obsession—a hunger for something missing. Guan Huai clung to life. Jiang Ai (姜艾) hoarded gold. Fang Chang (方昌) chased fame. And Yan Ke? He craved the crown. A throne no one could ever give him because he wanted it for the wrong reason. He wanted to rule. She wanted order.
Possession, Not Love
What Yan Ke called love was really a leash. He didn’t want He Simu. He wanted to own her. That’s why Duan Xu’s arrival burned him so badly. It wasn’t jealousy of the heart. It was rage at losing control. She smiled at a mortal. She handed that mortal the Wanling Lamp (万灵灯)—the very symbol of her authority. Yan Ke couldn’t stand it. Four hundred years of standing beside her, and she gave her trust to a stranger in months. His response wasn’t heartbreak. It was an urge to take by force.
Compare that to Duan Xu. The first time he met He Simu, he didn’t bow. He bargained. He offered to trade his sense of touch for the right to call her by her first name—“Simu.” No titles. No posturing. Just two people making a strange, honest deal. And when she got that sense of touch, she went wild. She squeezed everything—rocks, fabrics, a guard’s shoulder. She caused chaos everywhere. Duan Xu just followed behind her, cleaning up the mess, laughing at her wonder.
That’s the difference. Yan Ke gave her silent company and patient waiting. He called it devotion. But devotion without respect is just a longer way of saying “possession.” He Simu had spent four hundred years surrounded by ghosts who obeyed her. She didn’t need another servant. She needed someone who would run after her in the rain, complain that medicine was bitter, and fight a losing war just to feel the sun on his face. Duan Xu was covered in blood from battles he couldn’t win. But he was alive in every way that mattered.
What He Could Never Give
He Simu was not born from grief or rage. She was born from love—her parents’ genuine affection given form. That’s why she had no obsessive hunger. She grew up in the mortal world learning to paint, to play the zither, to write one careful stroke after another. When she took the throne of Gui Xu, she didn’t dream of power. She dreamed of boundaries. The Jinbi Law (金壁法) was her creation: rules for evil ghosts, a clear line between the living and the dead. She wanted the world to run smoothly. She wanted monsters to stay in their cages.
Yan Ke could never understand that. He saw the throne as a prize. She saw it as a job. He wanted to climb. She wanted to build. Two people walking in opposite directions cannot fall in love no matter how many centuries they share the same room. That’s why the twenty-three mortal men before Duan Xu all got something Yan Ke never did: her genuine curiosity. They were different from her. They wanted food, warmth, a tomorrow. She found that fascinating.
But Duan Xu was the first to give her something she had never experienced in four hundred years of immortality. Pain. Color. Wind on her skin. Sunlight making her laugh until her stomach hurt. He bet his remaining life on a single goal: that she would remember him. Not obey him. Not need him. Just remember. And she did. She loved him because he made her feel like a person again—not a ruler, not a ghost queen, just someone who could hurt and heal and laugh in the rain. Yan Ke waited four hundred years and never once asked what she actually wanted. Duan Xu walked in and gave it to her without being asked. That’s why she chose him. That’s why she never could have chosen the other.
