Her Highness Only Wants to Wreak Havoc on the Nation [Nonhuman]

[Lovecraftian god male lead × savior female lead | Everyone is pure]

[First book in a series. See the announcement for the other books.]

Blurb One (romance-focused):

Xiang Lu returns from the army and realizes something is off about Huan Yan.

Huan Yan is an ordinary commoner with no official post, yet he somehow manages to get her out of the imperial prison with just a few words. When Xiang Lu asks him about it, he pretends he knows nothing.

Whenever Xiang Lu tries to question him, she feels drowsy and unable to speak. In a daze, she discovers tentacles coiling around her ankle.

Before she can ask the question, the dog emperor exiles her to the northern frontier with an imperial edict, ordering her to suppress bandits.

Fine, exile it is. The emperor is far away, and she's free out here.

What Xiang Lu doesn't expect is to find her deceased homeland's surviving relatives and refugees in the northern frontier.

Their fatal wounds seem to have healed, but they are still on the verge of collapse.

After a brief struggle, Xiang Lu decides to lead the refugees and restore the homeland that should no longer exist. She never imagines that every move she makes on this journey is being watched by "Heaven's Mandate."

And she certainly doesn't expect Huan Yan, who kept saying he would set her free, to follow her there!

At first, Xiang Lu only wants them to part on good terms. Restoring the country seems like a pipe dream, and she has no idea what inhuman horrors lie ahead. She doesn't want to drag Huan Yan into it.

But Xiang Lu soon realizes that Huan Yan isn't human either. The man who saved her life and raised her for eight years, the man she loves, isn't human?!

Only after she is dragged into soft tentacles and her senses are stripped away before they resonate does Xiang Lu realize she has unwittingly stepped onto the battlefield of a game between inhuman beings.

-

It turns out all that tenderness was an act. Huan Yan has always been playing the part of a human, and even his chance encounter with Xiang Lu when she was a child refugee was part of his long-laid plan.

The Lovecraftian god must mark his wife, so he can only lead her step by step into an abyss where he alone awaits.

Xiang Lu asks, "You stayed by my side for so long. Was it to possess me, or because you love me?"

Huan Yan: "Can't it be because of you?"

Tentacles wrap around her layer after layer, slowly seeping into her.

Huan Yan chuckles softly. "Don't resist me. Accept my authority, accept all of me."

Blurb Two (plot-focused):

This was never a simple agrarian civilization.

Heaven's Mandate watches over everything, and the framework locks away every civilization's ability to advance.

Xiang Lu feels like her memories have a gap. After her country falls and her family is lost, she wakes from a dream of a prosperous mechanical civilization to find the world outside in ruins and backward.

She disguises herself as an ordinary military officer and makes it through eight years. She never expects her deceased homeland's old companions to miraculously survive and appear in the northern frontier.

She will restore her country.

She will rebuild the mechanical civilization in the sea of sand.

But once those mechanical dreams leave Chenga, they turn into cold, lifeless iron. The rules of this world do not belong to humans.

The inhuman nature of Huan Yan, who took her in, gradually comes to light, while she only belatedly realizes that something is wrong with Chenga.

Human deaths are insignificant. This has never been a world for humans.

Why isn't this a world for humans?

After Xiang Lu steps into the inhuman game, she hopes to find a place of peace.

But the peace she seeks is like a floating weed tossed by the rain, unable to take root as the Old Ones and Heaven's Mandate pull at her from either side.

She never wanted to be a savior, but with all living beings crying out in anguish, she can no longer stand by and watch them die so lightly.

Xiang Lu's unusual fate allows her to interfere with causality. So she chooses to begin with love, devour the authority of the Old Ones, and stand against Heaven's Mandate.

After all is said and done, it comes down to one thing:

Simply a single thought to save all living beings.

Note:

The author likes nonhumans, the female lead, villains, grand worldbuilding, savior storylines, chuunibyou, and unusual kinks. If any content is uncomfortable, it is probably due to the author's kinks, not deliberate mistreatment of the characters.

Theme: People are born free and should not be bound