[Two Male Leads] [Steampunk] [Western Fantasy] [Anti-Mary Sue] [Subverting Tropes] [Power Couple] [Medieval] [One-on-One Romance]
A clichéd plot, a broken man. A brother who bangs his head against a wall for the Mary Sue heroine's true love, a father sharpening his knives for his unfilial son: what a joyfully dysfunctional family of villains-in-training. Song Chao couldn't take any more of the thunderous melodrama that hit him from the start, and fainted. The only consolation was that, as a background character destined to die young, the Bourbon Empire's second prince had only a small part to play in this romance, appearing in the memories of a few of the main characters.
But once he truly became part of this world, he discovered the undercurrents stirring beneath the absurd drama.
The chains on their heads were called fate, bestowed by the gods. They had clamped around the throats of generation after generation of the Bourbon family, and strangled this world's hope of emerging from ignorance into civilization.
After his father, brothers, and friends fell one after another on the road to human liberation, Song Chao, who had been pushed down this path by his teacher, had no choice left. He could either bow his head and become a servant of the gods, or raise it and die on a road with no possible end.
"I promise you power, wealth, freedom, and love. I grant you youth, wisdom, beauty, and immortality. You will have my favor and rule the mortal world in my stead."
"My dear child, where is the lamb for the burnt offering?"
The answer was a fire lit by Corland, one that swept across the mortal world.
"What I give you is the fury of mortals and the answer of ants."
"I will lead this world out from under your shadow, so that gods will be gods no longer, and humans can become human."
A one-line theme: Every speck of dust in history has a place of its own.
