How Do I Deal with My Sentinel Ex-Husband Turning into an Android?

I've drafted 100,000 words and am continuing to polish and revise it... (A long novel, taking my time to build up a backlog.)

[Hallucinogenic Dodder Guide x Gray Wolf Mechanical Sentinel]

Black-Bellied Bad Woman x Beautiful, Strong, and Miserable Abstinent Type

Blurb:

After her S-rank Sentinel husband died unexpectedly, Guide Jing Xianye began living the life she'd always dreamed of.

Now she was no longer subject to forced matching and marriage, and she no longer had to go to great lengths to conceal her secret ability to control machines. She was finally free to live as she pleased.

But her good fortune didn't last. Without her late husband's formidable strength to protect and intimidate others, trouble after trouble came her way, and various factions began eyeing her from the shadows.

In a fit of anger, Jing Xianye used "going to the frontline garrison to mourn her late husband" as an excuse to flee the capital in the middle of the night, happily making her way to the border fortress.

-

Thanks to her one-of-a-kind ability to control machines, Jing Xianye shone in battles against mechanical lifeforms. Before she knew it, she'd made herself the hottest Control-type Guide on the border.

But one day, while on a mission in a disaster zone, she unexpectedly encountered a combat bioroid who looked exactly like her late husband.

They had the same handsome appearance and were equally powerful, gentle, and polite.

Compared with her husband's distant, brooding, and inscrutable nature, the bioroid was obedient as a program, treating every instruction she gave him as absolute law.

To get rid of the factions secretly coveting her, Jing Xianye immediately used her control ability to rewrite the bioroid's code.

While setting [Protect her life] as his highest priority, she continually expressed how much she missed her late husband, ensuring that this replacement would trust her emotionally.

The bioroid believed her and took on the duty of protecting her.

Strangely, from time to time, emotions beyond his programming flickered in his icy blue eyes.

*

Before long, the factions that had been lying in wait to take her down were dealt with one after another.

After she'd had her fill of adventure, Jing Xianye returned from the border covered in honors, becoming a major figure in the capital.

At a celebratory banquet, guests surrounded Jing Xianye with praise, all lauding her immense contributions to humanity.

But the figure who should have been hiding in the shadows, protecting her as usual, unexpectedly appeared before her. Once dressed up, his handsome, upright figure stood out even more.

"I want to thank you." The man she'd always regarded as a program raised his glass. "After I endured inhuman torture and was turned into a half-mechanical monster, you were the only one who told me I was needed."

"When I lost my sense of temperature, touch, and pain, and began to doubt whether I even existed, only your mental link could restore those senses and reassure me that I was still alive."

Looking at his stern yet sincere face, Jing Xianye uneasily realized that something was very wrong.

Oh no, she'd...

Accidentally tricked the real thing.

-Premise written on April 9, 2025

Serious title: "A Body of Scrap Iron"

Content warnings:

1. The heroine has villainess potential! She's no fragile little flower! Don't be fooled by her act at the beginning! Her true self is strong-willed and black-bellied.

2. The pairing is firmly female Guide x male Sentinel. The heroine tends to take the lead romantically! The hero is an abstinent, emotionally insecure, beautiful and miserable powerhouse.

4. Post-apocalyptic wasteland, with a fictional future setting unrelated to reality. Pseudo-science, with plenty of hand-waving.

5. The plot and career storyline take priority. The hero appears early, but the leads don't team up to tackle missions until later. This novel's worldbuilding is unrelated to the female Guide x male Sentinel novel below, though both premises feature a late husband who becomes a bioroid.

Theme: Love transcends forms of life.