“I should inject a little poison into romance fantasy.”
Until not so long ago, I’d thought that with ridiculous confidence. But to state the conclusion first, the current me didn’t even have the luxury to act that bold. I was simply chewing down a terrible sense of helplessness.
Several days into confinement.
The only people who came and went in this gorgeous prison without bars were maids trembling like leaves. The only signs of life were hushed footsteps and the clatter of trays. In a silence where not even an ant could be seen, all I could do was eat the food I was given and force the pieces of the situation to fit together.
Even my sense of time had grown hazy. In this room without a single window, I couldn’t tell whether the sun had risen or set. The meals that came at regular intervals were the only proof that time was passing at all.
Judging by the fact that food arrived without fail, they didn’t seem to intend to starve me to death. But that absolutely did not mean this place was safe.
The door had not opened from the inside even once.
The heavy iron door was always firmly locked from the outside, and every attempt I made to grab the handle and turn it ended in vain. At first, I’d even tried breaking it by force. I slammed my shoulder into it, kicked it, twisted the handle, but the result was obvious. My body hurt, and the door didn’t budge.
No matter how kindly you tried to dress this up, it wasn’t “protection.” It was “confinement.”
And this development was far too familiar.
The entrance to that obsessive route I’d seen countless times in the original. Locking the other person up, cutting them off from the outside world, and slowly making them depend on you alone—the classic pattern.
I tried clinging to the hope that it might not have truly begun yet, but the more I bit my nails, the clearer my anxiety became.
“Haa……”
A long sigh slipped out.
“Storm clouds have gathered over my comfortable no-romance fantasy life.”
Confinement? This was clearly a crime. No matter how barbaric the medieval fantasy setting was, this had crossed the line by miles. To Kim Yujin, a modern Korean, it was a fucking development I could never accept.
But the really infuriating part was something else.
I got up from the bed and walked over to the wardrobe. Then, without much expectation, I flung the doors wide open.
The moment I did, a curse escaped me on reflex.
“That crazy emperor bastard. This is an illness. An illness.”
My vision was dyed white.
Lace. Frills. Ribbons. Maid uniforms so plastered with decorations they made my eyes ache were packed tightly inside. Not just one or two, either, but dozens of them, each with slightly different designs. The sleeve lengths, the width of the skirts, the positions of the ribbons were subtly different, but the overall concept was exactly the same.
Even the colors were uniform.
All white. To be precise, only “shades of white” with subtle differences in tone. Ivory, pure white, cream, white with a silvery sheen.
At this point, I had no choice but to be certain. Cassian, the male lead of this novel and the emperor, wasn’t just an obsessive lunatic. He was a pervert with an extremely distinct taste.
If not that, then was the author who created this world a maid fetishist to begin with?
Once my thoughts reached that point, a hollow laugh escaped me.
At first, I couldn’t understand the reactions of the maids who came to serve me either. Whenever they saw my face, they froze as if they’d seen a ghost, or squeezed their eyes shut and trembled. They couldn’t exchange a single proper word with me and couldn’t even meet my gaze.
At first, I’d briefly had the arrogant misunderstanding of, “Is the body I possessed so beautiful that they’re intimidated?” But I soon realized that wasn’t it.
There was a perfectly good reason they were afraid of me.
Because the original owner of this body, Iliana Levni, had originally been a “man.”
To be exact, that was the very premise of the romance fantasy novel I’d possessed, “The Reason the Fourth Prince Must Be Saved.”
Originally, he was a mercenary from the Eastern Kingdom, Rodri Cotton. A rough man who wandered battlefields soaked in the smell of blood and dirt, whose daily life consisted of smashing enemies’ heads open to survive.
After making some sort of contract with a witch and swearing to protect the fourth prince, Cassian, for five years, he was cursed with a terrible spell as the price and turned into a woman. The result was the silver-haired, big-breasted pretty girl I was currently wearing like a skin: “Iliana Levni.”
On the outside, she was a perfect pretty maid who looked like she would break if touched. But inside was a mercenary like a wild horse drenched in the smell of blood.
The problem was that the “inside” of that complicated shell had now become ordinary modern person Kim Yujin.
Was I Rodri Cotton, eldest son of a fallen noble family of the Eastern Kingdom?
Was I Iliana Levni, a young lady of a minor noble house in the Western Empire?
Or was I Kim Yujin, a transmigrator dropped into this fucking situation?
“My head’s going to split, seriously.”
I pressed hard against my temple.
But there was only one conclusion. The one moving this body and breathing right now was “me.” That alone was enough.
If I had to classify Iliana’s position, she was closer to a “villainess.” It was no wonder the maids were terrified. Though her outward appearance had been changed into something delicate by the witch’s curse, the soul of a mercenary still seethed inside, radiating murderous intent. Her gaze alone must have been brutal enough to cut people down.
The emperor bastard in the original fell head over heels for that rough yet devoted charm with a twist. Suffering from severe emotional deprivation, he went mad for Iliana, who threw herself into danger for his sake, and when she tried to leave, he grabbed hold of her and began the full-fledged drive into ruin.
The original Rodri silently endured all that humiliation and hell to protect the younger siblings he had left behind in his hometown.
But I was different.
They were just characters from scraps of text I had never even seen. There was not the slightest reason for me to grind away my one and only life for them. The revival of House Cotton? I cared about that less than someone else’s ancestral rites getting flipped over.
“Younger siblings? What does it have to do with me whether they die or not?”
I sprawled out on the bed and glared at the ceiling.
The emperor bastard, who had no idea the contents had been completely swapped, would soon crawl into this room with a slimy face drunk on victory. And from the moment that door opened, my own hell would truly begin.
It was then.
Clack.
The sound of the heavy doorknob turning split the silence in an instant. I raised my upper body on reflex.
The one who entered through the open door was a maid carrying a tray with dishes on it. With her head bowed deeply, she carefully moved while trying to erase her presence, doing everything she could not to offend me.
Now. If I just sat here blankly eating whatever food they gave me, I would be locked up until the ending without even knowing why. Figuring out why that bastard had imprisoned me, and what point in the original novel this was, came first. I squeezed out my courage and opened my mouth.
“Excuse me.”
“Hiiik! Y-yes?! Yes, please speak!”
The maid flinched and jumped as if she had just been given a death sentence. The dishes on the tray rattled so pitifully that it almost hurt, but I paid it no mind and struck at the heart of the matter.
“How long has it been…… since His Highness Cassian ascended the throne?”
“Yes? What do you mean…… His Highness ascended one month ago, but…….”
“……What?”
For a moment, my brain stopped. The maid tilted her head as if confused by my dumbfounded expression. Unable to suppress the impulse boiling up inside me, I sprang off the bed and grabbed the maid’s slender arm.
“He’s only been emperor for one month? Seriously?!”
“A-ah! Yes, y-yes! You saw the coronation ceremony yourself a month ago, didn’t you! W-why are you acting like this? It’s frightening……!”
The maid trembled and sniffled, but my mind was spinning busily.
Was it a setting error? Or had the plot twisted because I possessed this body?
In the original novel, “The Reason the Fourth Prince Must Be Saved,” Cassian’s insane obsession exploded two years after his ascension. Right after Iliana declared she was leaving and blindsided him. But solitary confinement only one month after ascension? The timeline didn’t match at all.
My eyes flashed as I pressed the maid even harder. The inside story that spilled from the terrified maid’s trembling lips was far simpler and more extreme than I’d expected.
“D-didn’t you show hostility toward His Highness, Lady Iliana? At the coronation ceremony, as if you were about to put a blade to his throat right then and there……! You shouted that you would kill His Highness, and that is why you are currently under house arrest!”
Ah. So that was it.
Once the situation was sorted out, I understood the fucking feelings of this body’s previous owner, Rodri, a hundred, a thousand times over.
The Western Empire was his sworn enemy, the one that had brutally trampled his homeland, the Eastern Kingdom, and exterminated the Ducal House of Cotton. Because of that damned contract with the witch, he had forced the prince onto the throne, but actually watching the bloodline of his enemy wear a resplendent imperial crown in real time must have made him so furious he nearly went insane.
I could vividly picture Rodri losing it in the middle of the coronation ceremony and lunging at the emperor. Grinding his teeth, glaring with a murderous look as if he would slice his neck off right then and there.
When I imagined that crazy scene in my head, a hollow laugh burst out of me before I knew it.
“……Is this real?”
“Yes? Pardon?”
The maid stiffened as if she had seen some monster she shouldn’t have. The sight of a cold-looking silver-haired beauty rolling her eyes and muttering like a madwoman must have been horror itself. But my mood was soaring higher than ever.
It was before the main story of the original began.
Before Cassian’s suffocating obsession even began to bud toward the heroine, and at a point where, rather than blind “love,” his feeling was far more “anger toward a mere maid who didn’t know her place and dared to rebel.”
In other words, I arrived at the perfect calculation that even if one maid vanished without a trace at this timing, the emperor would not lose his mind and overturn the entire imperial continent.
Just imagining it made my heart swell. Countless god-tier open-world games I had enjoyed in my past life, rolling around all night clutching a controller, flashed through my mind.
“Skyfall.”
“Witch.”
“Blue Desert.”
Vast fields, endless freedom, romantic times spent telling the main quest to go to hell while I wandered wherever my heart led and uncovered the map.
Those overwhelming memories came vividly back to life, flowing through my blood.
That’s right. Fuck romance. Let the dogs have it. Once I threw off this detestable maid uniform, I would be perfectly free.
The fields of this other world were vast. There was not a single reason for me to cling to the side of a mad emperor, get my mentality shredded, and be dragged through a miserable route. Unknown adventures, free exploration, and a comfortable no-romance life without survival worries.
That alone would be more than enough for my second life.
“Heehee, heeheehee……”
At the sound of my loose, giddy laughter, the maid threw down the tray and ran out of the room.
Before the mad emperor’s sticky obsession could even take root, the perfect plan to make a clean escape from this damned novel was coming together inside my head.