似愛而非 by 橙子雨

Chapters: 24 (MC’s POV) + 16 (ML’s POV) + 13 (Extras)

Summary from JJWXC (please support the author!):

“This is a story about a shou who commits suicide because of an incurable illness but whose spirit refuses to leave, and so he stays beside the gong and watches the gong’s regrets.”

Celebrity gong x President shou, HE in the end.

Landmine warning: This is an abusive story written over ten years ago, so please don’t use today’s standards to discuss this old work! (Ten years ago the environment was vicious, not like today [lies down])

Many danmei and romance authors have borrowed from this idea, so if you’re feeling a sense of “deja vu”, it’s 100% someone else copying me, just look at the time it was written.

This is an extremely old work, and the VIP is just for the sake of filling in the extras that have never made it online before.

If you bought the book, please ignore this; the contents are all the same. The specifics are said in the chapter before the first VIP chapter, xoxo.

A general content warning for the entire series for suicide, suicide ideation, and the works. Please take care of yourself and do not read this if you know this kind of content will negatively affect you! And do remember that crisis hotlines are available in most countries, many of which 24/7, if you are struggling with such thoughts yourself.

Special thanks to the folks over at Snowy Codex for translating the free version, which was how I originally found out about this story in the first place. Go check them out if you’re interested in that version — it’s completely translated now! (I also already spoke with them about doing this ages ago lmao so thanks for giving me permission for this too!)

Note: The first 10 chapters of the free edition roughly corresponds to the first 24 chapters of this edition, with some very minor additional scenes. So if you’ve already read it over at Snowy Codex, there’s no need to read the first 24 chapters, though I think it’s worth it, if only for the author’s notes which are A++.

You can also check out the carrd for this story here, which also includes a list of works related to this one.

Downloads: EPUB ver2.2 / PDF ver2.2

I’ll sometimes sneakily edit/fix the epub/pdf if I notice errors. You can tell if I’ve done so if there’s a version number behind it that doesn’t match the one you currently have.