Married Thrice to Salted Fish (三嫁咸鱼) is a historical and danmei Web Novel by Bikabi.
Set in ancient China, it mainly follows the perspective of Lin Qingyu, an extraordinarily beautiful but cold-hearted young man who's forced to marry Lu Wancheng, a terminally ill nephew of the Empress, due to a superstitious Chinese belief that marrying off an ill person to a healthy, compatible partner will help stave off their illness. His dreams of studying medicine dashed by this, Lin Qingyu starts out seething with bitterness over being thrust into an unwanted marriage to a complete stranger and even considers poisoning Lu Wancheng to hasten the end of his marriage.
What Lin Qingyu doesn't know, however, is that his new husband is actually a young man from the modern day who died and was reborn in the body of Lu Wancheng, a minor character in a book he had read prior to his death... and Lin Qingyu happens to be a villainous character in that same book who ended up dying at the hands of the book's protagonist. The reborn Lu Wancheng, who had to study like hell in his previous life, now just wants to be a "salted fish" in his new life, i.e. a Lazy Bum who does nothing but idle his days away until his inevitable death — and if he can admire and help out the villainous beauty he liked the best out of all the book's characters along the way, all the better.
The more Lin Qingyu gets to know this Lu Wancheng, the more he comes to realize that his husband, for all of his laziness, frivolity, and insouciant humor, is also a secretly intelligent and calculating man who genuinely wants the best for him and even helps him enact vengeance against the people who try to humiliate or control him and he grows to care for him in spite of his initial resentment of their marriage.
What Lin Qingyu also doesn't know, however, is that Lu Wancheng is not going to be his husband's only reincarnation or even the only time they get married to each other in his lifetime...
The novel is complete at 147 chapters long and has a full English fan translation available
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The novel contains examples of the following tropes:
- Belligerent Sexual Tension: Lin Qingyu and Lu Wancheng's initial interactions largely consist of Lu Wancheng teasing Lin Qingyu or acting like he doesn't care about anything other than being a lazy bum and an irritated Lin Qingyu striking back with acerbic insults.
- Brilliant, but Lazy: Lu Wancheng was at the top of his class in his first life and is capable of thinking up elaborate plots against his enemies, but he prefers to laze around and avoid as much work as he can get away with because being pressured to study and work all the time in his past life exhausted him so much.
- Comforting the Widow:
- This is what onlookers think is happening when Lin Qingyu repeatedly remarries after his latest husband dies without waiting a socially acceptable length of time in between the marriages. In reality, Lin Qingyu is marrying the same man each time but since they can't easily explain this to others, it causes Lin Qingyu to gain a reputation as a gold-digging Black Widow who brings misfortune to everyone he marries.
- A much less romantic example occurs when Xiao Cheng makes it nauseatingly clear that he intends to force Lin Qingyu to become his as soon as Lin Qingyu's current husband Lu Wancheng kicks the bucket. Fortunately, Lu Wancheng's next reincarnation Gu Fuzhou makes sure that Xiao Cheng can't follow through with this plan.
- Destructive Romance: Xiao Cheng and Shen Huaishi's relationship was like this in the original Huai's Refusal of the Monarch book with Xiao Cheng being the one responsible for the massacre of Shen Huaishi's entire family and Heavenly Prison Sect and constantly mistreating him on top of that until the latter learned the truth and vowed to kill him in revenge, only to have an inexplicable last-minute change of heart and forgive Xiao Cheng for everything he did to him. It's averted in the current timeline by Lin Qingyu convincing Shen Huaishi to fully turn against Xiao Cheng.
- Dull Surprise: Lin Qingyu's reaction to learning that his second husband Gu Fuzhou has died being an unemotional "I see" comes across as this to other characters who are taken aback that he doesn't seem to care about the husband he was deeply in love with dying. In reality, Lin Qingyu had already learned about this a few days ago and did have the expected emotional breakdown over it but couldn't be bothered to fake another emotional reaction to the official news later on especially when he now knows that his husband got reincarnated again in another man's body.
- Empty Shell: According to Xu Junyuan, the reason Xiao Li seems so dull and slow-witted is that his soul isn't properly inside his body. This turns out to be true, with Jiang Xing's final transmigration/reincarnation into Xiao Li reuniting his soul with his true original body.
- Have I Mentioned I Am Heterosexual Today?: Lin Qingyu and Lu Wancheng both claim at the beginning that they're straight and would never become interested in each other in that way and Lu Wancheng even talks Lin Qingyu into doing a "sworn brothers" ceremony with him to affirm their status as Heterosexual Life-Partners. However, it doesn't take Lu Wancheng all that long after that ceremony to realize that his admiration of Lin Qingyu's beauty isn't that of a straight man and he laments doing such a dumb ceremony whenever Lin Qingyu brings it up as a way to deflect his flirting attempts.
- I Will Wait for You: Lu Wancheng tells Lin Qingyu to wait for a hundred days after he dies in case he gets reincarnated as another person in his world and can find Lin Qingyu again.
- Lascivious Beauty Mark: Lin Qingyu has a mole near the corner of one of his eyes, which is stated to be one of the most striking features of his beauty.
- A Lighter Shade of Grey: Lin Qingyu and his husband will both ruthlessly manipulate, poison, and even outright murder people, but almost all of the people they target are even more scheming and have far worse ambitions than them, and they largely act against them only after they prove to be a threat to them.
- Marriage Before Romance: Lin Qingyu starts out loathing having to be married to Lu Wancheng instead of getting to fulfill his dream of becoming a physician and Lu Wancheng, while not as opposed to their marriage, is content to treat it as an in-name-only one, until they start developing feelings for each other.
- Master Poisoner: Poison is Lin Qingyu's primary method for dealing with people who get in his way, and he's very good at utilizing it.
- Moment Killer: Huan Tong kills several tender moments between Lu Wancheng and Lin Qingyu, the biggest one being Lu Wancheng about to tell Lin Qingyu his full name from his first life but only getting his surname out before Huan Tong interrupts.
- Morality Chain: Played with in that Lu Wancheng doesn't want to become this to Lin Qingyu because he actually likes Lin Qingyu's less moral qualities and he even encourages him to embrace them. However, it's still shown that Lin Qingyu really would stop poisoning and killing if Lu Wancheng wanted him to or he thought his actions were putting Lu Wancheng in danger.
- Next Life as a Fictional Character: This is the fate of the modern-day man who gets transmigrated into one of the characters of the fictional book he read, not just once but thrice. However, it's revealed near the end that Jiang Xing actually started as one of these 'fictional' characters before his soul was somehow transported from his original body to a body in another world where his original world existed as only a fictional story.
- "Not So Different" Remark: Xi Rong, after being imprisoned for his betrayal of Lin Qingyu and his husband, tells Lin Qingyu that he had no reason to trust that Lin Qingyu would not turn against him one day and that Lin Qingyu is no better a person than him and is just as guilty as him of doing ruthless things to achieve his goals. This remark does succeed in getting into Lin Qingyu's head a bit and he wonders if his wicked deeds will lead to him or his husband getting punished like Xi Rong in the future.
- Obfuscating Stupidity: Lu Wancheng passes himself off as a hapless fool who can't do anything because of his terminal illness and only Lin Qingyu is aware of how shrewd and cunning he really is.
- Pet the Dog: Lin Qingyu, for all his ruthlessness against people who annoy or threaten him, has moments of showing compassion or mercy to people he's more sympathetic to, like ensuring that the maid who was kind to him gets enough money to live comfortably or slipping Xiao Jie medicine to ease his suffering.
- Please, Don't Leave Me: The normally cool and composed Lin Qingyu breaks down in tears and begs his husband to not leave him when Jiang Xing's spirit visits him in his dreams to say goodbye for seemingly good after his third death as Gu Fuzhou.
- The Promise: Lu Wancheng, believing that he has a chance to get reincarnated a second time, makes a promise to Lin Qingyu that he'll find him again and give him their Trust Password before one hundred days pass after his death. He doesn't quite manage to meet Lin Qingyu before the one hundred days are up, but he does manage to get him to hear their Trust Password from another source as proof that he really did get reincarnated again.
- Pronoun Trouble: The Chinese language has male and female pronouns that are pronounced identically but are written out differently, which the novel's original text took advantage of to reveal a character's true gender to the readers while another character who only heard the pronouns didn't learn of it until later on. Since the English language doesn't have pronouns like that, the fan translator decided to have Shen Huaishi use specifically female pronouns while talking about Princess Jingchun to Lin Qingyu so that Lin Qingyu's utter shock at learning later on that Jingchun was actually a crossdressing man would make sense, which meant that the readers of the fan translation, unlike the readers of the original Chinese text, did not know about Jingchun's true gender until Lin Qingyu did.
- Puppet King: Lin Qingyu and his husband pull strings to get the nice but simple-minded Xiao Jie crowned as the new Emperor with his eunuch companion Xi Rong as the one who actually does the political work behind the scenes. Unfortunately, Xi Rong proves to not be as easy to control as Xiao Jie, forcing them to usurp Xiao Jie in favor of another figurehead Emperor, Xiao Li. Who ends up becoming more than a puppet king when Jiang Xing's soul transmigrates into his body, but they didn't expect that at the time.
- Reincarnation Romance: An unusual one-sided variation where one half of the couple dies and immediately gets reincarnated in a different body three separate times over the span of just a handful of years, while everyone outside of them believes that the other half of the couple is marrying completely different people.
- Secret-Keeper: Lin Qingyu eventually figures out that his husband is a transmigrator from a different world and keeps this, and also his subsequent transmigrations into different people, a secret from everyone else. Later on, Shen Huaishi becomes privy to this secret too.
- Separated by a Common Language: Lu Wancheng says at one point that he wants Lin Qingyu to call him lao gong, the Chinese term for husband. However, this usage of lao gong is actually a relatively modern one and lao gong in ancient China times meant "old man" or "eunuch" instead, which causes Lin Qingyu to get confused as to why Lu Wancheng wants him to call him by such an unflattering term.
- Sexless Marriage: Lin Qingyu's marriage to Lu Wancheng is this by default, as Lu Wancheng's illness makes his body too weak to perform sex with. His marriage to Lu Wancheng's next reincarnation Gu Fuzhou also starts out as this, with them claiming to want to marry each other only to fend off unwanted advances by other people, until they finally confess their feelings to each other.
- Single-Target Sexuality:
- Lu Wancheng wasn't romantically or sexually interested in anyone in his first life and even considered masturbation to be too much work for him to enjoy, until he met and fell in love with Lin Qingyu.
- Lin Qingyu also doesn't seem to have loved anyone before meeting Lu Wancheng and he makes it clear that his husband being reborn in a different body makes no difference to him.
- Snow Means Death: Lu Wancheng dies outside during the first snow of winter.
- Spoiler Title: The title and summary both establish from the very beginning that Lin Qingyu's love interest will die and get married to him three times.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: This is Lu Wancheng's In-Universe opinion of the original Huai's Refusal of the Monarch book relegating a beautiful, clever, and fascinating character like Lin Qingyu to a doomed minor villain role while a far less interesting jerkass like Xiao Cheng got a main character role and a happy ending.
- Trust Password: Lu Wancheng comes up with "if odd, change; if even, remain the same," a trigonometry-related mnemonic that no one in an ancient China setting other than a transmigrator from the modern day like him would know or think of, as a phrase he can give to Lin Qingyu to prove his identity if he gets reborn again.
- Tsundere: Lin Qingyu, for a long while, refuses to admit to himself that he's grown quite fond of the husband he constantly bickers with, even when he's actively making medicine that will prolong his life.
- Unholy Matrimony: While Lin Qingyu and his husband are both A Lighter Shade of Grey compared to the more villainous people they take down, they're still very much a Manipulative Bastard couple who enjoy working together to get people they don't like incapacitated or killed off.
- World's Most Beautiful Woman: Lin Qingyu was explicitly stated in the original Huai's Refusal of the Monarch book to be the most beautiful person in the world and hardly an introduction of him to others goes by without them commenting on his looks.
- Your Days Are Numbered: Lin Qingyu and Lu Wancheng are both aware that the latter's terminal illness is incurable and that even the best medicine can only give him another year to live at most. Lu Wancheng tries to make light of this for the most part, but his impending death begins emotionally affecting both him and Lin Qingyu the sicker he gets.
