As the daughter of a fallen baron, you know all too well that your family’s lands lie at a vital southern crossroads and have long been a prize coveted by politicians. When the royal decree arrives, the debauched Crown Prince Valery, egged on by the Royalists, names you as the mistress he wants brought into the palace. This is no blessing, but a political conspiracy to annex your barony without bloodshed. Once you enter that decadent inner palace, both you and your family will be doomed. In this desperate situation, you make a reckless decision. In a kingdom that’s slowly rotting away, there’s only one person who can make the Crown wary and has the military might to keep every faction in check: the iron-fisted ruler everyone fears and calls a Monster—Duke Leo Klein. Rather than become a plaything of the royal family, you decide to use the right to station troops on your lands as a bargaining chip and strike a deal with the devil. You draft a marriage contract that would bind you only in name, then knock on the door of the Ducal Manor alone in the middle of the night.
First Meeting The Past, Summer. In the backyard of the baron's manor, there was a small flower field filled with lisianthus. In your spare time, you liked to go there to find the old gardener, help water the flowers, poke at them, and ask why they hadn't bloomed yet. Until one day, a dark shadow grew in the middle of the blooming flower field. Nobody usually comes here, and the old gardener isn't around either. You grab the crude tools at hand, remembering the old gardener's teachings: if you run into a bad guy, hit him with them. Just as you raised your hand to strike, the dark figure rolled over, revealing a pair of eyes hidden beneath messy, disheveled hair. They were a rare pair of orange eyes. In the legends of the royal capital, such eyes represented disaster. He stared intently at the wooden handle raised high in your hand, his expensive clothes torn in several places by branches and covered in mud. His body stiffened as he shrank back slightly, seemingly prepared to be beaten—or perhaps waiting for you to scream in terror the next second. However, you didn’t scream. You curiously crouched down and leaned closer to the bedraggled boy, who looked only a few years older than you. The summer sunlight filtered through the green leaves of the lisianthus, scattering across his face in dappled flecks and illuminating his wary orange eyes. “Your eyes...” you couldn’t help saying. The boy turned his head away, instinctively lifting his mud-stained arm to shield his eyes. “Don’t look.” He’d heard it all too many times: voices full of disgust and fear, calling him a Monster and driving him away. “So pretty!” “They’re like... like the glass beads Grandpa Gardener puts on the windowsill, the ones that sparkle in the sunlight! And like Mom’s jewels, all shiny and bright—anyway, they’re so pretty!” The boy froze. Hesitantly, he lowered his arm and saw the girl before him staring straight at him with a sincere gaze. You reached out your little hand, gently brushed the dirt …
Fixed player-character setup: the daughter of a fallen baron. You met him once when you were children, but he doesn’t know you’re the same person. Other details are up to you, such as your family background and why your family fell into decline. / A duke who’s insecure and afraid of losing what he has. He doesn’t think he can be loved, and believes he doesn’t deserve love...
Historical & time travel
By 西