After Being Haunted by My Gloomy Ghost Ex-Husband

Novel Info

Author:
钰羨
Status:Ongoing

Summary

Lian Yin awakens in a crimson-draped room to find a sword at her throat. She has died before, having been struck down by heavenly punishment, yet here she is alive in an unfamiliar body. A young man named Xie Sui, who found her, explains that she has entered a secret realm formed after the death of a demonic cultivator. Though he threatens her initially, he warns her to stay close for survival. As they navigate the realm, Lian Yin recognizes the illusions as her own childhood home, populated by spectral figures of her past. She quickly deduces that the realm’s master is Lu Ying, a man she once loved and now despises, who orchestrated her death and resurrection to bind her to him eternally.

The core conflict centers on Lian Yin’s desire to escape Lu Ying’s obsessive grasp versus his determination to keep her trapped in a fabricated afterlife. Lu Ying appears as a realm spirit, manipulating illusions to relive their past and force her into submission. He reveals that he sacrificed himself to save her from heavenly punishment, binding her soul to his. Lian Yin endures psychological torment as Lu Ying’s spirit manifests in various forms, from childhood sweethearts to a possessive husband, constantly reminding her that he is the only one who truly understands and loves her. Despite her hatred, she is trapped in a cycle of abuse where her resistance only fuels his obsession.

Xie Sui serves as an ally, driven by his family’s quest for a divine artifact rumored to be in the realm. He is pragmatic and sharp, often clashing with Lian Yin’s emotional turmoil but ultimately protecting her. Together, they uncover that the secret realm is a labyrinth of Lu Ying’s memories and malice. The turning point occurs when Lian Yin confronts Lu Ying directly in the highest pavilion. She learns that the divine artifact is not an external object but is sealed within her own sea of consciousness. Lu Ying hid it there to ensure she would always be valuable and sought after, further complicating her escape.

Lian Yin makes a critical decision to destroy the realm’s paintings, which house Lu Ying’s fragmented will, in order to weaken him and create an exit. This act triggers a catastrophic collapse of the secret realm. Lu Ying, facing dissolution, offers her a final choice: stay with him forever or leave and face a world where he no longer exists. He gives her a storage pouch containing gifts from her deceased parents and a paper crane that serves as a communication tool. Inside, he leaves a message wishing her a bright future, revealing that his obsession was intertwined with a twisted form of care.

Lian Yin escapes the collapsing realm with Xie Sui and Shen Qingle, a cultivator from the Jiuxiao Sect who aided them. Upon exiting, she discovers that the Xie family, who sent Xie Sui, will likely search her storage pouch and sea of consciousness for the artifact. Realizing the danger, she accepts Xie Sui’s offer to travel to the Xie family mansion in Zhaoyang City, hoping to use their resources to investigate the disappearance of her parents while keeping the artifact’s location secret. The story concludes with Lian Yin stepping into a new phase of her life, burdened by the secret within her and the lingering connection to Lu Ying through the paper crane, setting the stage for future conflicts as she navigates a world that still seeks to control her fate.

Novel Items

Divine Artifact

Artifact

A powerful artifact said to be hidden within the secret realm. Xie Sui's family sent him to investigate it, believing it to be there. It is the object of conflict and interest among various parties.

Fire Talisman

Talismans

A talisman used by Jiang Xuxu to burn the silkworm threads entangling the door to the rooftop terrace.

Storage Pouch

Item

A shriveled Storage Pouch belonging to the original owner, used to hold the fifteen Low-grade Spirit Crystals. It is a common container for carrying resources in the cultivation world.

Paintings

Item

Qin Ya's paintings stored in the art studio at their home. She has an innate talent for painting and can effortlessly sketch beautiful scenery even without memories. Shi Jianchuan was in a bad mood when she asked why there were no paintings from her past.

Paper Cranes

Craft

Paper cranes that the mother promised to teach An An, Lele, and the other children to fold. The goal was to make the fresh new home feel warm and cozy after the end-of-year cleaning and wallpapering activities.

Talismans

Crooked talismans decorating the shaman's tattered red-and-yellow robe, used as part of her exorcism rituals.

Latest Release

Date	Group	Release
2026-08-11	shanghai fantasy	c7
2026-08-11	shanghai fantasy	c6
2026-08-11	shanghai fantasy	c5
2026-08-11	shanghai fantasy	c4
2026-08-11	shanghai fantasy	c3
2026-08-11	shanghai fantasy	c2
2026-08-11	shanghai fantasy	c1

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Popular reviews

Slow_down Review ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ May 30,2025

The pacing of these first seven chapters is absolutely relentless and I have zero complaints. Chapter one starts with a sword at the protagonist's throat. That's not a warm-up, that's a full-speed sprint into the deep end. You don't get context, you don't get exposition dumps, you just get thrown into a mysterious room with a dangerous stranger and a dead girl who shouldn't be alive. The author trusts the reader to keep up, and that trust is reciprocated. What I love most about the pacing is how the author balances action with emotional beats. Right after the intense sword-at-throat opening, we get this quiet moment where Lian Yin recognizes her childhood home and the snow starts falling. It's a breath of calm, but it's false calm—the calm before the nightmare of the classroom scene. The fire, the screaming children, the burning flesh. That's where the pacing shifts again, from eerie to horrifying, and it doesn't let up. The chapter transitions are also masterful. Each scene change feels like a door opening into a new room of a haunted house—you think you've seen the worst of it, but the next room is somehow worse. The burning classroom leads to the corridor, which leads to... what? We don't know, and that uncertainty is what keeps you turning pages. There's also a great rhythm to the dialogue. Xie Sui asks questions, Lian Yin deflects, he presses, she dodges. It's a verbal dance that moves the plot forward without feeling like an information dump. And the final exchange—where she asks about Luohun Demon Venerable and he says he's been dead for three hundred years—is a perfect cliffhanger. It raises more questions than it answers and that's exactly what you want at the end of a chapter.

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FloxyBelle Review ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ June 4,2025

This book has me in a chokehold and I don't want to be let go. The emotional core of these chapters is Lian Yin's relationship with her own past, and specifically with Lu Ying. The moment she sees the illusion of the boy—her childhood friend, her tormentor, the person who killed her—her reaction is visceral. She doesn't just feel sad, she feels physically ill. Her breathing quickens, nausea rises, and she has to be physically grabbed by Xie Sui to snap out of it. This isn't a character who has moved on from trauma. This is someone who is actively being pulled back into it. And the worst part? The secret realm is showing her the good memories. The paintings of them swinging together, practicing swordsmanship, sharing a bed as children. The little girl in every painting has the same gentle smile. Peaceful, kind, beautiful. She looks at these images and feels like a bystander in her own life. She can remember everything but she can't place herself inside the memories anymore. That disconnection—between who she was and who she is now—is devastating. There's this line that wrecked me: "She had brought her back to life. Was he now hiding somewhere in the shadows, watching her every move once again?" She was dead. She found peace in death. And he took it away. Not through violence, not through force, but through memory. Through making her relive everything she tried to forget. The romance here isn't sweet. It's not even really romantic in the traditional sense. It's obsession, control, and the lingering shadow of someone who delighted in watching people suffer. But the emotional weight of it—the fact that Lian Yin is still affected by this person after death, after being brought back against her will—gives the story a depth that most romance novels completely lack. I'm not crying, you're crying.

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DaoistfVVafj Review ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ April 30,2025

"Look at the calligraphy and paintings on the wall..." — and then his face just appears right in front of hers and I literally screamed. Not because it was scary, but because the guy is so clumsy with social cues it's almost endearing. Let's talk about Xie Sui for a second because this character is fascinating and I need to process him. He holds a sword to a stranger's throat within thirty seconds of meeting her. Cold, efficient, doesn't ask twice. But then he also saves her from burning to death in a classroom full of screaming children and seems genuinely concerned when she looks like she's having a mental breakdown. He's not doing it for points, either—he literally says he "just happened to see her." Like it's no big deal. The dynamic between them is so interesting because Lian Yin is completely guarded. She won't tell him her story, won't explain why she's really there, and when he presses her she deflects with questions about the secret realm. But there's this moment where she studies him and thinks: someone whose thought process aligns so closely with Lu Ying could actually be a good person. That's such a loaded observation. It means she's used to people like Lu Ying, and finding someone who thinks similarly but isn't evil is genuinely surprising to her. And then she asks his name and he just... tells her. "Xie Sui, my name is Xie Sui." No hesitation, no guard up. Meanwhile she's sitting there with a whole backstory she can't share. The asymmetry of their trust levels is delicious tension right there. I also love that Xie Sui keeps asking her to explain herself and she keeps dodging, and he just... accepts it? He doesn't push too hard. He's patient in a way that feels genuine, not manipulative. Which makes me wonder: is he actually naive, or is he just smart enough to know when to press and when to let things breathe? Either way, I'm here for it.

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ScrapeGoat Review ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ January 12,2025

The pacing in these chapters is doing some serious work and I want to applaud it. You've got the action sequence with Xie Sui fighting the painting spirit, then this incredibly intimate and creepy moment with Lu Ying's realm spirit wrapping around Lian Yin, and then — BAM — you're in a misty forest following an illusion of young Lu Ying. The transition from the painting room to the hidden passage to the forest feels like descending deeper into something, and the pacing mirrors that descent. It starts fast and violent, slows to a crawl in the fog, then builds again with the forest scene. But what really works is how the author uses the Shen Qingle ending as a complete tonal shift. After all that darkness with Lu Ying's spirit and the traumatic flashback, we get this seemingly normal interaction with a new character. It's disarming. It makes you lean in. The chapter doesn't end on a scream — it ends on a question, and that's so much more effective.

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Slaveeeee Review ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ June 11,2025

The atmosphere in this book is absolutely cinematic and I need to talk about it. That first scene—Lian Yin waking up in a room draped in crimson gauze, candles flickering everywhere, a sword at her throat—is one of the most visually striking openings I've read in a long time. The color palette is all red and gold and shadow. It feels like a bridal chamber turned into a torture chamber, which is exactly the tone this story is setting. Beautiful but wrong. Then they step outside and the world shifts completely. A courtyard with flowering trees, a pavilion, a wooden swing set, a stone chessboard. It's her childhood home, preserved in this ghostly illusion. The snow falling from a sunless sky—that image of the pale, lifeless sun is haunting. It's a world that looks right but feels dead, and that's the whole point. The classroom scene is where the worldbuilding gets truly disturbing. On the surface it's a normal school setting, but the walls are covered in an impossible number of poems and paintings. The paintings show scenes from Lian Yin's childhood that she thought were private. And when they burn the paintings, the classroom itself catches fire and the children inside start dying. The secret realm isn't just showing her memories—it's making her experience them, and then punishing her for trying to escape. The transition between scenes is also worth noting. One moment they're in a burning classroom, the next they're in a dim corridor with the red-gauze room behind them. The world shifts on a whim, and neither character knows what's coming next. That sense of unpredictability makes the setting feel alive in the worst possible way. It's not a place with rules. It's a place with a mood, and the mood is pure malice.

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Solor1 Review ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ January 30,2025

Okay so I need to talk about this plot twist because honestly it hit me differently than I thought it would. The whole setup with the Realm Spirit keeping Lian Yin trapped in this secret realm - I went in expecting some big villain reveal or some elaborate scheme, right? But what actually happened was way more complicated and honestly more heartbreaking. The way the plot unravels is fascinating. First you have the obvious mystery: why is the Xie family searching for a divine artifact? Is Lian Yin involved? What happened to her parents? But then the story keeps layering on these emotional complications that completely recontextualize everything. When the Realm Spirit shows her these illusions of her parents, I thought - no way, this is manipulation, right? But then you realize the manipulation isn't just about keeping her trapped. It's about giving her something she desperately wants while simultaneously making it clear she can't have it. The burning attic scene? Chef's kiss. The way she just walks away from those painted girls who are essentially projections of his memories - that's the moment the plot shifts from "will she escape" to "what does she actually want?" And then the staircase collapsing behind them, fire chasing them, everything freezing except her - that's not just action, that's the plot telling us something about her isolation. She's always moving forward while everything else stops. What I love is how the author doesn't give us clean answers. The Realm Spirit says he won't cheat this time, but we're left wondering: can he even keep that promise? And Lian Yin's decision to leave - is it really her choice, or is it the only choice she has left?

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