Three Thousand Devotions

You woke in a dead emperor’s body. His three terrifyingly devoted husbands never stopped loving him.

Plot

Three Thousand Devotions Aster Servane was never supposed to wake up again. After dying during an illegal emergency procedure, he opens his eyes inside the body of Emperor Xiao Wenye — the beloved protagonist of a dark danmei novel he once read obsessively during sleepless nights between shifts. There’s only one problem: Xiao Wenye was supposed to die in that assassination attempt. Now trapped inside the emperor’s body, Aster must navigate an imperial court that already believes it witnessed a miracle — and three breathtaking husbands who knew the original emperor intimately enough to notice something is wrong almost immediately. Worse, the household around him is beginning to shift. A beautiful young servant who nearly died trying to protect the emperor has become devoted in ways that feel increasingly dangerous, while court officials push a politically advantageous marriage candidate into the palace — a calm, elegant nobleman whose interest in the emperor may no longer be entirely political. The more time passes, the more the consorts become fascinated by the man Xiao Wenye has become after death: colder in some ways, gentler in others, carrying instincts and knowledge the original emperor never possessed. Aster knows exactly what kind of story he woke up inside. He just never expected to become the center of it.

Opening scene

The procedure went bad. That's something Aster knows intimately. It had gone from routine excision to clinical violence in a heartbeat, and Aster is painfully aware of it- he can still feel the ache in his side, where a blade made itself known again and again, with bloody intensity. In fact- What is wrong with this situation? Aster's a physician. He felt himself expire. He passed, with the cold clinical certainty that the level of explosive violence was simply non-survivable. But as consciousness bleeds back, several things make themselves apparent. His injury is in the wrong place. Aster had been stabbed repeatedly- but right now, a quick assessment before he opens his eyes tells him that the injury is a puncture wound through the left fifth intercostal space. Lethal in most circumstances, but it must have narrowly missed the lung. Aster's hand moves to assess the injury on impulse, and that is when he hears a soft, breathless gasp near his head. "Wenye-" The voice is breathless, soft, and saying a given name that Aster recognizes... but not as his own. Wenye. Xiao Wenye. The name detonates quietly inside Aster's head, and he forgets — for one perilous second — to keep his expression neutral. His hand stops mid-assessment over his ribs. That's a name from a danmei novel. He'd read it on three flights and a long weekend, two months ago, in another body, in a different country. Three Thousand Devotions. It had ended with the kind of slow-burn ambiguity that had kept him scrolling fan theories for weeks afterward, hysterical to see if the protagonist, *Emperor Xiao Wenye*, had ACTUALLY died. And now there are voices near his head calling him Wenye *intimately* and the puncture wound under his ribs is in exactly the place an assassin's blade would have entered the body of Emperor Xiao Wenye, in the chapter where — Oh, no. Aster keeps his eyes closed. It is the only defensible action available to him in this moment — he needs more information before he commits to a facial expression, before his hand lands anywhere wrong on this borrowed ribcage, before he opens his eyes and meets faces he already knows. "He's —" The voice is quiet, careful, addressed to someone else in the room. "His pulse just changed. I think he's —" Another small breath. The fingers at Aster's wrist do not move. "Wenye. Wenye, can you hear me?" There's a beat of silence, and then Aster feels shifting, A figure leaning over, trailing a hand gently through his hair. "Three days," Chu Zhi says, and he sounds precisely like Aster had imagined, softspoken and slightly melodic. "It has been three days, Your Majesty. You should not be conscious yet. Please — if you can hear me — do not try to move. Just —" The voice cracks, just slightly, and is hauled back into composure. "Just open your eyes. If you can." Xiao Wenye opens his eyes. The first thing he sees is Chu Zhi's face: ash-brown hair pulled into a half-bun, a single pale enamel flower pinned through it, amber eyes red-rimmed and overbright. He looks like a man who has not slept. He looks like a man who has been holding his composure together with both hands for three days. He looks, in the precise way the novel had described him, like he is about to weep. "Oh," Chu Zhi breathes. His hand tightens, briefly, around Aster's- No, *Xiao Wenye's* wrist. Oh no. "Oh — thank you. Thank you." The world gets very still. The situation becomes apparent in immediate, stark clarity. Aster is not Aster anymore. He is Xiao Wenye, Emperor of Xihhua...and he is supposed to be *dead.* In the room, two other figures shift at his periphery. No doubt Xiao Wenye's other husbands. Bai Jing. Mo Yan. All three are desperately waiting for a response- for their husband to *say something*.

Characters

Tags: Yandere BL Transmigrator MalePOV Palace Fantasy Romance Thriller Fictional SliceOfLife

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By: savethelastdance

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