Chapter 05
The teacher was gentle and intelligent. As if proving she had once been in charge of educating the Crown Prince, everything she taught entered my mind perfectly.
The problem was that during one of our lessons, I realized something.
“Y-Yes?”
“Our Empire is called Enderos. Is there a problem, Miss Azalea?”
“Enderos…?”
Yes.
There was a serious problem.
Why is that name here?
My mouth fell open, and for a moment I forgot to breathe.
Then, because I was so shocked, I almost went into serious breathing trouble.
“M-Miss Azalea!”
“My lady!”
The knights watching nearby turned pale and called the maids. The maids screamed and rubbed my back.
The reason I was shocked was simple.
Enderos.
A place name that was not unfamiliar.
The name of the country.
The titles of the nobles.
Everything was far too familiar.
In a trembling voice, I asked, “W-What is the name of the current Crown Prince?”
My teacher answered.
Amazingly, the Crown Prince’s name was Adrian.
In that instant, I almost fainted.
Adrian.
The gentle yet passionate male lead of the novel Red Rose.
My favorite.
Kyaaah!
Unbelievably, the world I had been reborn into was the very world where my favorite character was alive and breathing.
Red Rose.
My heart pounded as if cheering.
Then—
Does that mean I can meet my favorite?
Does that mean the lovable heroine, the one who made everyone around her fall for her, really exists here?
And—
Because I died before reading the 19+ side story, I might even find out who the “true male lead” was, the one who ended up with the heroine.
Kyaaah, I love you, Author!
“Wait. Something’s strange… Was there a character named Azalea in the novel?”
Soon, I realized something.
If this world was the novel—
Then what was my role in it?
I was a true fan.
I had reread Red Rose more than twenty times.
And—
There was no “Azalea” in the novel.
“I” did not exist.
I could recite the lines of the characters word for word.
If someone asked, I could repeat whole pages from memory.
But I was not there.
My family name, my name, the names of the people around me—none of them were properly mentioned in the novel.
They had appeared only once, as a single background line.
Boom.
A terrible conclusion came to me.
Oh my God.
I was an extra.
An extra who would never even get close to the main characters.
Compared to the shock of that realization, giving up was surprisingly easy.
Because my daily life was already a brutal war.
In short—
My body hurt too much to think about anything else.
Fate was cruel.
Being reincarnated was a blessing.
But why did I have to be reborn into the body of a weak, fragile fish?
Even breathing hurt.
“Cough, cough!”
Did I betray my country in my past life or something?
Today again, I held my stomach as if my insides were about to spill out and seriously wondered.
There was not a single part of my body that didn’t hurt.
Only after being reborn did I understand what it meant for your joints to ache constantly.
In my past life, I used to laugh at old people who said their bodies hurt when it rained, calling them human weather forecasts.
I deserved to be hit.
When it rained, it really did hurt.
Do you know what it feels like to live with a cough for years?
Just walking made me tired.
Even taking a deep breath caused trouble.
So I had barely managed to give up my attachment to the original story and focus only on surviving—
And now this happened.
I blinked gloomily.
“My lady, here. Please wipe.”
“Mm. Thank you, Sasha.”
Sasha showed her professional side and handed me a white handkerchief.
I accepted it smoothly and calmly blocked my nose.
Ah.
My nosebleed was warm again today.
Strange body. I only coughed—why am I bleeding from my nose?
“How many times is this today?”
I asked indifferently.
Sasha answered just as calmly.
“Five times. My lady, I think you were shocked because of that boy earlier.”
“Mm. Maybe. The carriage was completely destroyed. Of course I’d be surprised.”
Stress is the source of all illness!
“Today is such a strange day.”
Even without the carriage, we still had horses and knights.
So I was carried back to the Duke’s mansion as carefully as if I were fragile glassware.
And now—
I glanced at another maid who handed me a small cookie and whispered.
Mother had not yet returned from the Imperial Palace.
Father was still drowning in tears.
I could guarantee that after a few hours, Father’s pitiful sobbing would turn into rage about destroying the frauds in the Magic Tower.
Our flower-like, beautiful father was terrifying like a wild dog when he got angry.
And only Mother could stop him.
I looked at my now-familiar reflection in the mirror and hesitated before asking,
“Sasha. Um… what happened to that child?”
The boy was currently being examined by our family doctors.
Strangely, he had no visible wounds, yet he had slept the entire way to the mansion.
I frowned.
My excellent memory replayed Red Rose in detail.
But nowhere in the novel did it mention the childhood of the main characters.
The fiery romance between the heroine Tesha and the male leads Adrian and Vasilisa began only after they turned twenty.
That delicate line between all-ages and 15+ romance—
I blinked dreamily.
Even now, thinking about the novel made my eyes tear up.
Ugh.
My 19+ side story…
The author had written that only after finishing the side story could it truly be called Red Rose.
“My lady?”
“Mm?”
“Are you that worried?”
“Huh?”
Sasha smiled gently at me.
I made a small choking sound.
I couldn’t exactly tell her I had been imagining the 19+ side story filled with red scenes.
“If you’re curious, would you like to go see him?”
“Huh?”
“Let’s go, my lady.”
Sasha, please don’t say “Let’s go” so brightly when you mean visiting the child who destroyed our carriage…
Still, I did not refuse her outstretched hand.
I held it tightly.
I have to go see him.
I wasn’t foolish enough to trust the original story and approach a main character recklessly.
What I trusted was Sasha.
Reliable Sasha.
My coolest maid.
As long as she was beside me, even a dragon’s claws—or the furious Hellfire of the Magic Tower Master—could not burn a single strand of my hair.
“My lady, you’ve arrived?”
“Wait! Your complexion looks bad.”
“Lady Sasha, did she have another nosebleed? How many times?”
The family doctors were kind people.
They rushed toward me like a swarm of bees.
Sometimes, I felt a strange obsession in their shining eyes, as if they saw my mysterious weak body as a research subject.
But they were still kind.
…Sometimes they seemed crazy.
No, often.
Maybe every day.
“How is he? I came because I was curious.”
“Ah, that rock-like boy? He’s still sleeping.”
“Still?”
“Yes. We checked to see if he had taken medicine, but that wasn’t the case. He’s just sleeping normally.”
Listening to the gentle doctor auntie, I parted the white curtain and stepped inside carefully.
The bitter smell of medicine.
The clean white room.
And inside—
That child.
For a moment, I forgot to breathe.
I wasn’t mistaken.
It’s really Vasilisa.
One of the male leads of Red Rose.
The King of Shadows.
A cruel man.
A frightening man with a dual personality who showed sticky love and obsession toward Tesha.
Readers loved the bad-boy charm of the man who spoke politely while hiding his true thoughts and was warm only to her.
I’m on Adrian’s side.
No matter what, a sincerely kind man is best. Hmph.
Sadly, because the novel ended openly, fans of Vasilisa and Adrian had even fought in the comments about who the true male lead was.
The heroine Tesha was an elegant and charming woman who made both men lose their minds.
But that’s not important.
What matters is that the boy in front of me would one day struggle in the heroine’s romantic net.
And that main character was right here.
Hiding my trembling feelings, I forced a calm expression.
“Did you find out who he is?”
“Hmm, not yet.”
One of the knights who always followed me stepped forward to answer.
I rubbed my chin thoughtfully.
“What should we do…”
Mother would soon return from the Imperial Palace, probably holding Father’s hand.
How were we going to explain this?
The two of them had once destroyed the training grounds after a huge argument while I wasn’t there.
Father had even gone to the Palace with a bouquet of flowers to chase after Mother.
They lived quite passionately.
Watching them was like seeing what the novel’s lovers might look like when they grew old together.
There were many funny stories about them.
Sir Jeffrey once told me that Father had sung loudly in the middle of the Imperial Palace to ask Mother on a date.
Mother had walked over slowly—
And then they had reconciled fiercely.
No one was allowed into the office afterward.
Ahem.
And ten months later, I was born.
They were truly passionate people.
