Hans didn’t listen further and went outside with a lantern to start chopping wood.
‘I didn’t bring you here to make you work like this!’
Marie followed him out with an indignant face.
She had planned to treat him well and receive a grand reward from the imperial family later, but why was this prince so oblivious?
He was even good at chopping wood.
‘My sin is great, Hans.’
Please forgive me, a worthless extra who can’t even take care of herself, for picking up the male lead and not being able to treat him properly.
“That’s enough! Come inside, it’s cold.”
“No. I might as well make plenty while I’m at it. The market won’t be open tomorrow.”
After concentrating on chopping wood for a while, he was soon sweating despite the cold outside.
Hans rolled up his sleeves and wiped the sweat from his forehead.
Marie unconsciously gulped at the sight of his muscular forearms and the distinct tendons rising over the back of his hands.
The author of 「Dear Prince」 had written so many descriptions about the male lead’s good physique, and they were all true.
‘Stop those bad thoughts! He’s not my man!’
The male lead rightfully belongs to the female lead.
While she was busily repeating this in her mind, enough firewood had piled up.
When Marie reached out to help carry it, Hans stopped her again, saying she might get splinters.
“Should I move these to the living room?”
“No! To the kitchen.”
“For cooking?”
The question was soon answered.
Marie lit fires in each furnace and explained the principle.
“There are ondol stones laid under each bedroom floor. Oh, in other words, heated stone floors. The furnaces are all connected underneath them, you see? The heat travels there to warm the floor.”
This was K-heating at its finest.
What do you think of my ancestors’ wisdom?
“Maybe I should patent this? From application to registration, it takes at least a year and a half, even at the fastest. Should I pay extra for priority examination? Even then, if the patent examiners reject it midway, the period gets extended again.”
Marie inadvertently muttered to herself.
The problem was that her self-talk was louder than she intended.
Hans’s expression suddenly hardened at the technical terms flowing effortlessly from the mouth of a noble Miss who had barely passed twenty.
“You…… Who are you really?”
That’s how the male lead of this world questioned the book transmigrator.
※※※
In her past life, Marie was an ordinary K-office worker.
“Are you really going to do your job this poorly?”
The department head shouted, throwing a thick binder, causing the neatly filed papers to scatter across the floor as individual sheets.
The woman standing before him was an employee responsible for managing foreign patent applications at this patent law firm.
This person was Marie’s past life.
This small office handled a much higher proportion of “incoming” cases—representing foreign applicants seeking domestic patents based on their overseas applications—than “outgoing” cases representing domestic applicants seeking foreign patents.
For “outgoing” cases, the filing work was handled by partnered foreign patent offices, so they only needed to communicate with them, which wasn’t much work.
But “incoming” cases required everything from filing to registration to maintenance, making the work endless.
“Didn’t you properly remind the client to pay the annual registration fee to the Patent Office?”
“I’m sorry.”
“What if we had missed the additional payment period? Are you going to take responsibility if a patent that was successfully registered expires?”
Unlike other patent law firms that used paid patent management software to computerize everything, this place insisted on analog methods.
All documents and emails had to be printed, filed for each case, and instead of electronic approvals, they had to collect stamps on each document.
As a result, the bookshelves were filled with hundreds or thousands of binders, and it was difficult to find older cases because previous employees who had already quit hadn’t organized them properly before leaving.
The current problem had also occurred because senior employees had misplaced binders instead of returning them to their proper locations.
But in organizational life, the lowest-ranking employee was always the guilty one.
“Send an apology email right away and wait for a reply, then text me as soon as it comes.”
The department head turned off his computer and put on his coat as he stood up.
“Sir…… then for the email approval……”
“Just send the email yourself. It’s something you do every day, and your English is better than mine anyway. I need to head home now.”
“I’ll text you then.”
“Yes. Oh, and while you’re at it, reorganize all the bookshelves by case name in alphabetical order. If everyone helps, it should be done quickly.”
He spoke lightly, unaware of the severity of the bookshelf situation, but it was essentially telling her not to go home today.
After the department head left, other employees who had been watching approached her.
“Geez, he could have just said it normally without yelling.”
“I know, right? Even if you’re the newest employee, how many years have you been here that he still talks down to you?”
“Don’t take the department head’s words too seriously, okay?”
After obligatorily offering words of comfort to their junior who had been scolded in their place, the senior employees stealthily gathered their coats and bags.
“Are you leaving? What about the bookshelves……”
“Ah, sorry. I have a blind date today. I should spend this Christmas with a partner too.”
Weren’t you crying about breaking up at yesterday’s company dinner? Isn’t it a club, not a date?
“Today’s my wedding anniversary. You know my wife’s temper.”
Judging by how you celebrate your wedding anniversary twice a year, in the first and second half, you must be maintaining two households.
“Sorry. My child suddenly got sick.”
Are you going to the airport now to see your son who you said was studying abroad?
But she couldn’t bring herself to voice any of these thoughts that had risen to the tip of her tongue.
The senior employees offered excuses that were obviously lies, but Marie in her past life just smiled, knowing everything.
“I can’t help it. Please go home.”
Taking on extra work was something she was used to.
Sitting in the empty office, she sent an email to the foreign client and started organizing the bookshelves while waiting for a reply.
By the time she had barely finished organizing the first bookshelf, a reply came from the client.
They had already paid this year’s annual registration fee and would prepay future annual fees as she had recommended.
The Patent Office offered discounts for prepaying annual registration fees.
She created an invoice with the discounted amount, sent it, and reported to the department head via text.
[Young lady……at such a late hour……sending texts to a married man? What would my wifey think~~^^;]
[You told me to report when I received a reply.]
[Why are foreigners so……slow? Sending a reply only now;;; Shouldn’t you be heading home?]
[No. I haven’t finished organizing the bookshelves yet.]
[Why are you so stubborn? Sigh……I just said that in the heat of the moment to make the other employees reflect……People should……live with some tact……to survive in society.]
The moment she read that text, rage surged up and her neck tensed.
The hot-tempered department head calmed down as quickly as he got angry.
If she had ignored his words and gone home, he would have taken out his anger on her again.
The department head didn’t exactly apologize, seeming a bit embarrassed, but at least he gave permission to leave work early.
Looking at the clock, it was already eleven.
Her home was in the opposite direction from the office.
Missing the Line 9 express train would be disastrous.
After locking the office door, she discovered the elevator was under maintenance.
She opened the emergency stairwell door and started descending quickly, when suddenly everything began spinning before her eyes.
Was this the result of accumulated fatigue from working overtime for a whole week?
Marie from her past life tumbled down the stairs.
Sticky blood flowed from the back of her neck where she had hit her head on the railing before collapsing face-down on the floor, matting her hair.
‘Is this how I die?’
The thought briefly crossed her fading consciousness.
She knew she needed to stay alert, but honestly, the will to do so wouldn’t come.
‘If I die now, I won’t have to go to work tomorrow.’
Strangely, that’s what she thought.
In that case, I’ll just die.
She closed her eyes and let go.
※※※
When she opened her eyes again, she was in a cradle.
She had been reborn as Marie, the youngest daughter of Baron Klein.
That’s how she came to be living her twenty-first year here.
“You…… Who are you really?”
Hans’s question momentarily brought back old memories, and Marie regained her composure.
‘Who am I?’
“Marie Klein.”
“……”
“I am Marie Klein.”
She had erased her past self.
Even if, like in dramas, her real-world self was in a coma or had been dreaming for twenty-one years, that was fine with her.
She never wanted to go back to that time.
Of course, she still retained her memories from Korea and couldn’t completely abandon her reader’s perspective, but she was still Marie Klein.
Hans burst out laughing at her resolute answer.
“Did I ask for your name?”
“What?”
“I’m just amazed that a noble Miss who’s been sheltered at home knows all these technical terms. Where did you learn such things?”
“Well……”
Spin, spin, spin the wheel!
After frantically racking her brain for a short time, Marie came up with a plausible excuse.
“My father is known as an investor with great foresight. He invests a lot in patents, so I picked up bits and pieces by watching over his shoulder.”
“So this ondol stone too? Is that also someone else’s idea?”
“Hey, I’d get arrested for that! That’s serious!”
She completely denied the plagiarism accusation.
True, she had copied it, but it was the wisdom of ancestors from another world, so it didn’t violate any laws.
“It’s my completely original idea, inspired by records of heated stones in ancient history from another country!”
She felt a pang of guilt, but patents were all about being first anyway.
Since romance fantasy worlds were typically based on early modern Europe, there was no way something like Korea’s ondol system would exist here.
Hans, who had been helping to tend the fire with a poker, moved closer to her, seemingly intrigued by her explanation.
“Which country’s history is it from?”
