Title: Love-Lock Curse​​ In the shadowed halls of Willowbrook University, where ivy-clad dorms whisper secrets and campus lights flicker like dying stars, a young man’s desperate longing for love will unravel a darkness older than time itself. Tyler Zhao never meant to become a monster. Once a quiet pre-med student with a penchant for late-night study sessions and stolen glances at the girl across the library—Tara Fang, his first love, his everything—he thought he’d found salvation in an ancient text buried in the campus archives. A spell, it promised: “Lock her heart to yours, unbreakable, forever.” But the Love-Lock Curse was no fairytale. To bind Tara’s love, Tyler must draw occult symbols daily, drain his body’s vitality with each stroke, and endure 360 days of hell. The cost? A soul-crushing hunger—for power, for control, for the illusion of safety. And if he faltered? The curse would turn its venom inward, consuming him. At first, it seems to work. Tara, once distant, leans into his touch, her laughter soft and warm. But the spell’s true nature unravels fast. It doesn’t bind love—it steals it, twisting hearts into puppets. When Tyler’s ex-best friend, Belle Yu, accidentally drinks a cursed potion meant for Tara, she becomes his next obsession. Her once-bright eyes grow hollow, her smiles forced, until she spirals into madness, leaving a trail of broken glass and whispered curses in her wake. Then comes the past. Cecilia Su, a sharp-eyed sophomore with a resemblance to Tara that’s impossible to ignore, stumbles onto a cold case: Tara’s death twenty years ago. Was it suicide… or something darker? As Cecilia digs, she uncovers a pattern: girls linked to Tyler, all dead or broken, their stories echoing Tara’s. The Love-Lock Curse, she realizes, isn’t new—it’s a plague, passed down through generations, feeding on possession. But Tyler is already lost. By day, he’s a hollow shell of a student; by night, he’s a priest of pain, carving symbols into his skin to keep the curse alive. He tells himself he’s protecting Tara, that she’d choose him if she knew the truth. But the truth is, Tara jumped from the clock tower long before he ever cast the spell—her final note, found crumpled in an old textbook, reads: “I never wanted this. I never wanted him.” The curse demands a price beyond blood. To end it, Tyler must die. But as Cecilia closes in, as the walls of his mind crumble, he makes a final, horrific choice: to bind her instead. To make her love him, even in death. Love-Lock Curse is a dark, pulsing tale of desire and decay, where love is a weapon and obsession a living thing. It asks: What would you sacrifice for a love that can never be yours? And when the line between lover and monster blurs, who survives the fallout? Beware the curse that locks hearts. Beware the boy who thinks he can control love. Beware the silence after the spell breaks.

When July, a sharp-witted Chinese-Egyptian archaeology student with a lifelong obsession with ancient Egyptian history, stumbles upon a cryptic artifact during a dig in Cairo, she never imagines it will hurl her 3,500 years into the past—to the court of Ramses II, where power, intrigue, and divine right collide. But when she awakens as Nefertiti, a minor princess of the rival Mitanni kingdom, July must quickly trade her textbooks for survival instincts in a world where one misstep could mean exile… or death. Egypt, under the golden rule of Ramses the Great, is a land of opulence and treachery. The royal harem simmers with jealousy, and the pharaoh’s favor is as fleeting as the Nile’s annual flood. Nefertiti, once a quiet scholar, now finds herself thrust into the center of a lethal game: the current queen, a ruthless noblewoman with ties to the Hittites, sees her as a threat to her son’s claim to the throne. Worse, Nefertiti’s half-brother, Prince Kadesh, plots to use her as a pawn in his own bid for power—all while her childhood friend, Prince Amenhotep, the pharaoh’s sharp-witted second son, watches silently, torn between duty and growing admiration. But July’s modern mind is her greatest weapon. Trained in diplomacy, languages, and the history of Egypt’s dynasties, she deciphers the court’s unspoken rules—how to flatter a priest without sounding desperate, how to turn a rival’s gossip into an ally’s secret, and how to use her knowledge of astronomy (a “divine art” to the Egyptians) to predict a celestial event that could legitimize her place in the palace. When Amenhotep, bored with court politics but intrigued by her cunning, notices her sharp wit, Nefertiti seizes the chance to form an uneasy alliance. Together, they navigate poison plots, religious conspiracies, and the pharaoh’s volatile temper, all while July secretly works to rewrite her destiny—not just as a pawn, but as a queen. What begins as a fight for survival becomes a revolution of ideas. July introduces primitive sanitation practices to curb palace plagues, uses basic chemistry to create vibrant cosmetics that win the pharaoh’s admiration, and even subtly challenges the priests’ monopoly on “divine knowledge” by aligning her predictions with the stars. As Amenhotep grows to respect (and eventually desire) her, their partnership evolves from convenience to something deeper—a bond forged not by duty, but by shared ambition to reshape Egypt’s future. Yet the past is never far behind. A cryptic dream of Akhenaten, the heretic pharaoh with whom July shares an uncanny connection, a missing artifact from her modern dig, and the shadowy figure of Kiya—her maid in both past and present—begin to blur the lines between past and present, threatening to unravel her hard-won power. When the queen’s plot to frame Nefertiti for treason is exposed, July must confront not only her enemies but also her own fears: Can a modern woman truly rewrite history? Or will the weight of an ancient empire crush her before she can claim her crown? The First Favorite Queen of Egypt is a tale of wit, courage, and the enduring power of a woman who refuses to be a footnote in history. Blending heart-pounding palace drama with the allure of ancient Egypt, it asks: What if the past wasn’t fixed—and one woman’s courage could change it all?