It has been serialized in Kodansha's seinen manga magazine Monthly Afternoon since January 2018 and its chapters have been collected in 11 tankōbon volumes as of October 2024.

The series was inspired by a manga Ishiguro read in university; he intended to make Heavenly Delusion different from his previous work, And Yet the Town Moves, portraying a proper dynamic between the two leads and the evil they face.

Fifteen years after an unprecedented disaster destroyed modern civilization, a group of children live in a facility isolated from the outside world.

While Kiruko is a skilled fighter when dealing with enemies, she also mentors Maru who has an unknown power that allows him to instantly destroy the man-eaters.

[3] Ishiguro was inspired by the early Kojiki era of Japan, and relationships between humans and artificial intelligence when planning to write Heavenly Delusion.

Ishiguro aimed to properly write "evil" in contrast to And Yet the Town Moves, so the post-apocalyptic world of Heavenly Delusion is far darker than his previous works'.

[5] After drawing sketches of young characters suitable for the shōnen manga demographic, editorial members from Afternoon asked Ishiguro to write for their seinen magazine again.

One of the child charecters, Tokio, lives in a mysterious facility, and enjoys and collects fantasy paintings her friend Kona creates.

He had been drawing science fiction themes since his childhood and continues exploring them in Heavenly Delusion; they were influenced by the late manga duo Fujiko Fujio.

Because he enjoyed walking, he often fantasized about a world that had been destroyed by a catastrophe and found himself inspired by an anime in which the main character wandered alone, like Chirico from Armored Trooper Votoms.

Ishiguro decided to change the plot and returned to an urban setting, though it was difficult to draw backgrounds with a large number of buildings.

Maru's design is based on Kon from And Yet the Town Moves, and is inspired by the way JoJo's Bizarre Adventure's eighth story arc JoJolion reuses previous characters.

Ishiguro called this premise "transsexual sci-fi", alluding to the possibility of Maru still loving Kiruko despite knowing the truth.

Ishiguro personally experienced a case of déjà vu because of the scandal with the empty New Year's food and wanted the handling of meals to be properly shown in his work.

He rejected coincidences related to magic and wanted to create a more-realistic world to show what might happen after a brain transplant.

Ishiguro often writes metaphorical situations; Kiruko's menstrual cycle is caused by a clash with Maru's lips when awakening from an hallucination from a Hiruko's attack.

[4] In the book Critical Posthumanities, Maru and Kiruko are called posthuman characters based on the commentaries from Francesca Fernando; Maru possesses an outstanding physical shape that allows to fight older people all alone and easily recover from wounds that do not work on common people like regrowing a tooth he loses when being attacked.

This comes across as a visual resistance throughout the series against the non-consensual corruption of the children who suffer traumas while dealing with their supernatural abilities given by the doctors from Takahara Academy.

Maru and Kiruko also show morals about the possible evolution of man-eaters in the first episodes of the anime but such scene ends with failure when one of them kills a woman claiming to be its mother.

[11] Heavenly Delusion is written and illustrated by Masakazu Ishiguro, and it has been serialized in Kodansha's seinen manga magazine Monthly Afternoon since January 25, 2018.

[20] Reviewing the first volume of Heavenly Delusion, Anime News Network praised the narrative for its focus on Kiruko's and Maru's appealing relationship, and Ishiguro's character designs.