Prologue: The Notice of Broken Engagement
I transmigrated into the male lead of a romance fantasy novel.
And not just any male lead — I woke up as Kaelus Hartelion, heir to the famous Northern Grand Duchy.
I wasn't some villain or wastrel who had to twist the original plot just to survive. I wasn't some nameless extra clinging to meta-knowledge just to scrape by from the bottom. I had possessed the body of the male protagonist himself.
The perfect answer key to a happy ending was already in my hands. I had even taken the original heroine as my fiancée. By every measure, my future should have been a golden road stretching endlessly ahead. All I had to do was follow the original story's current, and I would spend the rest of my life enjoying the Grand Duchy's overwhelming power and wealth — plus a beautiful wife to go with it.
That, however, was precisely the problem.
A romance fantasy's happy ending is written from the heroine's point of view. It does not guarantee the male lead's happiness. And that goes double for a reverse harem.
Of all the rotten luck — after dodging every last one of the countless pure-love romance fantasies out there — the novel I had fallen into just had to be a reverse harem. Worse still, it was set in a world so unhinged that anyone, man or woman, could take multiple spouses.
Isn't the usual formula that you gorge yourself on the vicarious thrill of a heroine adored by a parade of handsome, wealthy men, only for the author to dump every last secondary male lead the moment the story wraps? That was the unwritten law, wasn't it?
By that standard, the novel I had landed in was a far nastier piece of work. Because the heroine I was about to be engaged to was scheduled to take three more men as her "husbands" in the very near future.
If she had been the head of a house and I were some lesser noble or commoner taken in to preserve a superior bloodline, I might have at least understood this absurd reality. Monster Waves erupted so frequently that the mortality rate was staggering, and large families were considered a virtue. House heads — regardless of gender — taking as many spouses as possible to produce as many heirs as possible was simply common sense in this world.
But I was the next Grand Duke. And the woman who would be Grand Duchess was going to take other husbands?
Then what about the succession? How was I supposed to be certain any child was even mine? And I was just supposed to sit quietly and watch my wife's husbands poke around the North?
I don't care how thoroughly this romance-fantasy world had thrown logic out the window. How the fuck was any of this supposed to make sense?
Still, I supposed I should count my blessings where I could find them. The original author must have felt obligated to maintain at least a shred of plausibility, because the Kaelus of the early chapters was portrayed as a reasonably sound and rational man. He had kept his distance from his fiancée — she was, after all, a Southern noble, and a hundred and fifty years of bad blood stood between their regions. He had even fiercely opposed the engagement itself, wary of Southern influence creeping into the North.
Yes. In the beginning, he had been a perfectly normal human being.
But whether the crime was simply being trapped in a romance fantasy, or whether he had finally buckled under the North's chronic food shortages — or whether the heroine had slipped him some kind of brainwashing drug behind his back — Kaelus's intelligence began a catastrophic freefall as the story progressed.
Gone was the man who had coldly rebuffed the heroine and fought tooth and nail to break the engagement. In his place stood a doormat who tossed aside his family's interests for her sake, and then a complete idiot who looked the other way while she funneled the Grand Duchy's resources to his rivals — the secondary male leads.
The Magic Tower Master needed high-grade magic stones for an experiment? Handed over immediately, no compensation required. The Imperial Knight Commander caused a disaster? Covered up at once with the Grand Duchy's authority. The merchant guildmaster demanded exclusive trading rights? Signed on the spot, no questions asked.
And every last one of these spineless acts was dressed up as Kaelus's "noble and profound love" for the heroine.
Love? Please. The man was simply insane.
But the pièce de résistance came near the ending. When the family's elders finally raised their voices, demanding the heroine be stripped of her title as Grand Duchess for carrying on with other men, Kaelus shut them all down. Weren't you the ones who forced the engagement in the first place? he said. The position of Grand Duchess belonged to her and her alone.
And by the finale, when the heroine's natal family — a mere count's house — was openly siphoning the North dry, he pretended not to see it. At that point, I had to wonder whether the heroine had used black magic to mind-control him, the way villainesses did in other romance fantasies.
Whatever the case, the current me has not the slightest intention of playing that kind of brain-dead fool.
So I did it.
A single stiff sheet of paper slid across the desk and came to rest before Elysia, shattering the cool silence of the study. Stamped in vivid crimson was the seal of the Grand Duchy. And beneath it, the words:
The instant Elysia's eyes touched those letters, they flew wide. Her entire body locked up like a statue. The dreamy, innocent expression that had captivated so many men shattered on the spot, and the rosy flush drained from her cheeks, leaving them deathly pale. Her green eyes, fixed on the paper as though she were staring at a reality she simply could not accept, began to tremble like the ground in an earthquake.
"...K-Kaelus...? W-what is this...?"
This was the same woman who, in the original novel, had used her natal family as a backer to sink her teeth into Kaelus's wealth and power. The same brazen woman who had taken three extra husbands and carved up the North's interests like slices of cake. And now she was stammering, her whole body convulsing like a leaf in a storm.
Even through that crushing shock, though, she was still turning the little gears in her head. Thick tears began to roll down her cheeks, one after another — a last-ditch attempt to change my mind.
"K-Kaelus... this is a joke, right? You would never do something like this..."
The original Kaelus would have gone soft in an instant and torn the Notice of Broken Engagement to shreds right then and there. Unfortunately for her, the modern soul occupying this body had no such intention whatsoever.
I leaned back into the chair, propped my chin on my hand, and regarded her with a cold, mocking smile.
In her trembling green eyes, a perfect, ink-black despair and terror she had never once experienced in her life began to spread.