Yaoi with low ratings and questionable tags. Just my cup of tea.

The story is daring with how the characters and story is presented. A cruel “romance” indeed. The MC is a bad guy, as are most of the people who appear around him. And by bad guy, I don’t mean the misunderstood loner bad boy commonly found in other romances. “Plundering neighbouring towns as his main livelihood, and scalping opium as a side job” is no euphemism. I think this makes for an interesting read, if not anything else.

The MC is amazingly cruel and vicious, with just a touch of straight-up crazy. The romance isn't anything soft and fluffy, and is planted pretty firmly in the territory of F**ked up. Truthfully, when it comes to romantic stories I'm not a huge fan of them, and I'm also not a big fan of the messed up sort, but there's something so wholly off kilter about this MC that makes me keep reading. It's like I want to see just how far off the deep end he'll go and how many people he'll end up dragging with him. Although this is a romance, it's the psychological aspects that end up interesting me.

If you are not okay with emotional abuse, physical violence, killing, torture, a crazy MC, yaoi (this is a BL story), or r*pe (this one's right there in the tags), then you will not like reading this story.

For this deliciously screwed up story I'll give it three stars. No more than three because I do feel that it gets a bit extreme on some occasions, and it sometimes reads more like a tragedy or psychological story than a romantic one. No fewer because I felt that these aspects were pretty well done despite that. Besides that, I've yet to read another romance story where the MC is involved in a realistically brutal war, (it makes sense why there aren't any though, haha), which is a unique point.

Read up to Ch 10 and randomly skipped to Ch 28 just to see if it got any better. I couldn't find anything likeable about the MC. It's a constant circle of petty cruelty, r*pe, death, and etc.