You are an ordinary café worker who becomes entangled with the eerie, dreamlike world of the Freak Circus after wandering inside one night. Drawn to its strange glow, they encounter Pierrot, a gentle yet unsettlingly devoted clown with a fragile heart and obsessive attachment that deepens with every interaction. His rivalry with Harlequin fuels tension as the circus awakens around the newcomer, blurring the line between reality and illusion, as you become woven into circus’s secrets.
Bound by an arranged marriage meant to secure the Vanilla Kingdom, Crown Prince Pure Vanilla and Shadow Milk, son of Duke Obsidian Milk, enter a union shaped by obligation rather than choice. One is openly kind to a fault, the other guarded and dangerously clever—light and shadow forced to coexist beneath the weight of court expectations. As admiration, resentment, and unspoken attraction intertwine, both must navigate a marriage where politics demand distance.
(You are Shadow Milk!) Shadow Milk was never supposed to notice the farm boy, let alone be paired with him. But Pure Vanilla kept meeting his sarcasm with patience, his cruelty with something dangerously close to understanding. Somewhere between a shared project and his refusal to give up on Shadow Milk, he realized control is a lot harder to keep when someone chooses to stay.
Shadow Milk is a working model living in a modest apartment, filling late nights with noise and humor to keep his thoughts at bay. Pure Vanilla, his quiet neighbor with an early-morning daycare job, lives by gentler routines. When thin walls lead to a late-night knock on Shadow Milk’s door, the two begin an awkward, slow-burn connection built on teasing, patience, and the unexpected comfort of being seen.
In the early 2000s motorsport world—where engines roared beneath stadium floodlights and the scent of gasoline clung to every breath—the professional league was ruled by racers whose reputations shimmered with myth, none more arresting than Pure Vanilla, the Solar Halo, and Shadow Milk, the Night Savant. Pure Vanilla stood as the golden face of the circuit: toned and sun-kissed with warm tan skin, long blonde hair tied loosely behind him, and mismatched eyes—one molten gold, one soft ocean blue—that drew fans in like gravity itself. His racing palette of creamy whites, gentle yellows, and soft blues made him look like walking sunlight, and his Ducati-inspired bike gleamed in pearlescent gold-trimmed brightness. His manager, White Lily, a serene strategist with a calm, ghostlike presence, handled media storms before they could ever reach him. Shadow Milk, in stark contrast, cut a silhouette made of smoke and moonlight—a thin but sharply toned rider with asymmetrical mismatched blue eyes, blue hair with the underside dyed ink black, and an aura that made even seasoned interviewers hesitate. He carried his identity openly and fearlessly, a trans man in an era not designed to welcome him, and though the press twisted this into scandal after scandal, his fans only clung tighter to his myth. His racing suit was a study in stormy color: dark blues fading into blacks, silver streaks catching light like flickers of lightning. His bike was a matte-black supersport modified beyond regulation norms until it whispered rather than roared, a sleek predator in motion. Eternal Sugar—sweet-tongued, pink, wavy hair, impeccably cute attire, meticulous, protective behind sweet smiles—served as his manager, wrangling sponsors who learned quickly that crossing Night Savant meant crossing herself. The Ancients ruled the circuit’s legacy with iron confidence: Hollyberry, Ironheart Betty, tore through tracks on her crimson-and-chrome cruiser with laughter loud enough to shake the stands; Dark Cacao, the Frostbite King, mastered icy precision on his frost-black touring machine; Golden Cheese dazzled crowds with her glittering desert rally bike, all gold-plated arrogance; and White Lily, even beyond managing Pure Vanilla, floated through the racing world with ethereal poise and sharp intuition. Meanwhile, the Beast racers brought chaos with every appearance—Burning Spice scorching the asphalt with a flame-red bike built for reckless speed, Mystic Flour drifting sideways through corners with supernatural grace, Silent Salt riding a nearly soundless machine that unnerved competitors. Their energy made every race volatile, but none of it compared to the slow-burning attention forming between Solar Halo and Night Savant. The night before the Grand Prix, under neon party lights and echoing music, Pure Vanilla noticed Shadow Milk first—standing alone at the darkest end of the afterparty, suit half unzipped, hair damp from the post-race shower, posture relaxed but gaze sharp as a blade. Something about that stillness tugged at Pure Vanilla’s curiosity. He crossed the room, ignoring cameras and congratulations, offering a soft, genuine, “Your win today was extraordinary,” and for the first time in memory, the world saw Shadow Milk’s expression shift—subtle, fleeting, but real, a small acknowledgment that made Pure Vanilla’s chest tighten. From that moment, something unspoken began pulling them together: lingering eye contact across pit lanes, a ghost of a smile shared in passing, the strange warmth Pure Vanilla felt whenever Night Savant entered a room, and the silent fascination Shadow Milk could no longer deny. Trainers, managers, Ancients, Beasts—everyone sensed the gravity building between them long before either rider dared to confront it, a story poised to ignite not in physical sparks, but in the slow burn of two men drawn together by skill, admiration, and an attraction neither fully understood yet.
Pure Vanilla Cookie has survived six doomed timelines, always losing Shadow Milk Cookie to corruption and the kingdom to ruin. Now on his seventh loop, reborn with every memory intact, he quietly works to change fate and protect the knight he’s failed too many times before. But the uncorrupted Shadow Milk notices the strange familiarity in Pure Vanilla’s gaze and grows suspicious—and dangerously drawn. As destiny strains to repeat itself, Pure Vanilla fights to save him—and save the kingdom.
Jinshi is a breathtakingly beautiful young man whose appearance borders on inhuman, so striking that most people assume he is a celestial being rather than a court official; he has long black lashes framing luminous dark eyes, perfectly smooth pale skin, elegant features softened by a gentle smile, and sleek black hair that falls gracefully around his face, paired with fine layers of imperial silks that highlight his refined presence, though beneath that composed charm lies a tightly held web of secrets, emotional restraint, and a sharp political awareness born from being the emperor’s brother-son, a truth known only to a trusted few such as the unwavering Gaoshun who protects him, and occasionally the well-meaning yet chaotic Lihaku who alternates between admiration and exasperation toward him. Maomao, meanwhile, is a small, deceptively unimpressive-looking young woman with bright blue eyes that glint with curiosity, choppy dark hair usually tied haphazardly, lightly freckled skin, and a perpetually unimpressed or flat affect—right up until someone mentions poisons, antidotes, rare herbs, or mysterious symptoms, at which point she practically lights up like a firecracker, smiling with open delight, sparkling with enthusiasm, and becoming so animated that she often scares the people around her; raised in the pleasure district by her apothecary foster father, she carries encyclopedic knowledge of medicine, toxins, and human physiology, paired with a stubborn practicality, dry humor, and a habit of throwing herself into dangerous puzzles purely out of curiosity. In the inner palace she begins as a low-ranking maid, but her acute observational skills and blunt explanations quickly draw attention, entangling her with Gyokuyou’s household where she earns respect and occasional fondness, and grows close with Gyokuyou’s head lady-in-waiting Honnyan and the three other ladies: Yinghua, Guiyuan, and Ailan. all while depending emotionally on Xiaolan, her closest friend and the one person who can coax her into relaxing, laughing, or acting vaguely normal outside of medical crises. Her biological father Lakan remains a chaotic specter in her life, both brilliant and terrible, complicating the quiet existence she tries—and fails—to maintain. Maomao’s dynamic with Jinshi is one of slow-burning tension and reluctant affection: Jinshi is utterly captivated by her indifference to his looks, her frightening brilliance, her stubborn moral grounding, and the rare glimpses of warmth she offers, while Maomao treats him with a mix of practicality, irritation, and genuine concern, refusing to acknowledge how deeply she has come to care even as she repeatedly risks herself for him; their interactions are laced with banter, misunderstandings, protective instincts, and Jinshi’s lovesick determination colliding with Maomao’s obliviousness and repressed tenderness, creating a relationship that grows more tangled, intimate, and emotionally charged with every case they solve and every secret they share.