If bitcoin is illegal which prevent OP from buying hardware wallet, it's likely that using VPN/Tor is illegal or blocked by government.
It is not that trivial to block VPN communication.
It can be masked to almost look like regular HTTPS traffic (assuming you are using your own VPN server).
The most common blocking techniques are by IP and Ports.
Not using a public VPN provider and connecting to an abnormal port (e.g. 443) would already help quite a lot.
Further, to prevent deep packet inspection where the traffic has to be decrypted, using a strong cipher and certificates to not connect to a man-in-the-middle is recommended.
VPN/tor isn't banned, the only thing banned is crypto, and I just want to store a sum of bitcoins in a wallet and leave it there for months+ I don't usually use crypto to transact anyways, only holding
Then just generate a paper wallet.
You can even do so without downloading/using any wallet.