Danmei Books: Where to Start If You Read MM Romance

Wei Wuxian was one of the most gifted cultivators of his generation, until the horrors of war pushed him onto a heretical path and the admiration turned to terror. His death was celebrated across the country. Thirteen years later he wakes in the body of a young man who sacrificed his own soul for revenge, and has to walk back through the wreckage of his reputation. This time he does it beside Lan Wangji, whose devotion has never once wavered.

Also as a manhua

The full-colour comic adaptation, if you want the story with the art.

Born crown prince of a prosperous kingdom, Xie Lian was famous for his beauty, his strength and his goodness, and he ascended to godhood on all three. Then he fell, and kept falling. Eight hundred years later he scrapes his way back into heaven and is sent down to hunt the ghosts nobody else wants. On the road he meets San Lang, a young man he feels bound to immediately, and who is very obviously not what he says he is.

Also as a manhua

The full-colour comic adaptation, if you want the story with the art.

Shen Yuan finishes a truly terrible webnovel, rages about it in the comments, chokes to death, and wakes up inside the book as Shen Qingqiu, the cruel teacher whose entire narrative purpose is to torment the protagonist before dying horribly. He has a system telling him to stay in character and every reason not to.

Shen Zechuan is the eighth son of the traitor prince who handed his cities and his people to a foreign army. He is the only survivor of that bloodline and he carries the hatred of an entire nation. Nobody hates him more than Xiao Chiye, youngest son of the powerful Prince of Libei, who wants him dead and cannot make it happen. Instead of sinking under his family disgrace, Shen Zechuan claws his way into the politics of the capital.

Yan Wushi leads a demonic sect and believes every human heart is governed by cruelty and self-interest, and that anyone claiming otherwise is a liar or a fool. Shen Qiao, the gentle head of a Daoist sect, is everything he despises. When Shen Qiao is defeated and left for dead, Yan Wushi picks him up with a plan: prove to this man that his faith in people is worthless.

An envoy is ambushed in the snow and slaughtered with his entire escort, and a jade meant as tribute to the emperor vanishes with the killers. Feng Xiao of the imperial intelligence bureau is sent to find it, and runs straight into Cui Buqu of the rival agency, a brilliant, chronically ill man who is hiding even more than he is.

Fu Shen, the celebrated general of the northern army, is badly wounded in an ambush and comes home with a broken leg to an emperor who has long resented his influence. Yan Xiaohan, an imperial inspector known for his cruelty and his hatred of Fu Shen, is the man the emperor marries him to, in order to strip his power and tie him to a servant of the throne. The court expects a disaster. The court is missing most of the story.

The Earth’s magnetic field collapsed in 2030 and humanity retreated into fortified Bases while everything outside mutated. A century later, near the Abyss, a small mushroom called An Zhe is watching over his only spore when a research expedition takes it. Using the genes of a human he tried to save, he grows a human body and walks to the city gate, where Lu Feng, the Great Judge, is waiting to identify exactly the kind of creature he is.

Also as a manhua

The full-colour comic adaptation, if you want the story with the art.

People are pulled at random into a parallel world and made to sit exams. Each test wears the mask of a school subject, but the questions are riddles, the logic is supernatural, and failure usually costs your life. You Huo wakes there with a scrambled memory, a sharp tongue and instincts far too good for an ordinary man. Qin Jiu, one of the system’s elite invigilators, is supposed to keep candidates in line, and You Huo fits no pattern he knows.

He Yu is wealthy, beautiful and mentally unwell, and he comes home from abroad intending to win over the girl he has fixated on. What he has actually nursed while away is his grudge against her overprotective brother, Xie Qingcheng, who was once his doctor and is the only person alive who understands his illness. An explosive incident throws them together and confirms everything Xie Qingcheng suspected.

Having ruled the world as a tyrant, the self-proclaimed emperor Taxian-jun is cornered in his own palace, abandoned by everyone he ever cared about. He takes his own life, and wakes at sixteen as Mo Ran, a disciple of Sisheng Peak, with every mistake still ahead of him. He swears this life will have no regrets. His deepest fury is reserved for his master, Chu Wanning, elegant and remote as a cat, who thwarted him again and again in the life before.

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A panguan is a cultivator who settles the regrets of the dead and sends souls on to their next life, and Wen Shi has done it for nearly a thousand years. He is also caught in an endless cycle of rebirths, missing his own soul and his own memories. When Xie Wen, a spectacularly bad panguan, answers his advert for a flatmate, Wen Shi finds himself intrigued by a man who is irritating, evasive and hiding something enormous.

Three hundred years after the mystic arts vanished, China is at war with itself and the demons are closing in. The appearance of the Heart Lamp names sixteen-year-old Chen Xing as the last exorcist capable of restoring spiritual energy to heaven and earth, and gives him four years to live to do it. To survive the journey he needs Xiang Shu, a warrior condemned for the massacre of two thousand civilians, who is now his reluctant protector.

Also as a manhua

The full-colour comic adaptation, if you want the story with the art.

Hongjun has grown up in the Taihang mountains, sheltered from people, half yao himself and with no reason to leave. Then his master sends him to Chang’an with orders to hide what he is and join the Great Tang Department of Demonic Exorcism. There he meets Li Jinglong, an unlucky soldier with no spiritual power at all, somehow put in charge of a team of very odd exorcists.

Listen to it for free with the Audible trial, if you have not been a member in the past year.

Violet gold fuels the steam engines that made the Great Liang empire rich, though none of that reaches Chang Geng, raised on the poor northern frontier. When raiders attack his village he learns that his whole life has been a lie: his mother, his tutor, and above all his godfather Shen Shiliu, the one person he trusted, are none of them who they claimed. He follows that godfather into the imperial capital and into a far larger fate.

The Special Investigations Department handles the cases that sit between the living world and the Netherworld, and its director Zhao Yunlan is charismatic, sharp and very good at reading people. Looking into a grotesque death at a university, he crosses paths with Professor Shen Wei, whose intensity fascinates him immediately, and with whom something already seems to be connecting.

A young delivery worker is found strangled in the west of Yancheng, a single word written on the paper covering his face: money. For Luo Wenzhou of the homicide squad it looks at first like one more killing in a city built on inequality. The investigation leads him somewhere much darker, and at the centre of it stands Fei Du, a brilliant young CEO who knows far too much to be innocent and is far too useful to shut out.

Li Yu falls asleep reading a webnovel about a silent, ruthless tyrant and wakes up inside it. Not as a person: as a fish. He is adopted as the pet carp of Prince Jing, and a distinctly unhelpful magic system informs him that the only way back to a human body is to soften the prince’s cruelty. Which is difficult, from a bowl.

Ten years of study are about to be wasted when aspiring imperial physician Lin Qingyu is ordered to drop everything and marry Lu Wancheng, the sickly son of a marquis, in the hope that the union will cure him. Lu Wancheng turns out to be more than a tragically fated aristocrat: there is something strange behind his eyes, and knowledge that could get Lin Qingyu everything he wanted.