Chapter 06
If you pinch your nose, you can’t breathe.
I saw my flushed, blotchy face reflected in the mirror after trying it several times already just to confirm the fact.
I had also tried every classic method of waking up from a dream.
I had slapped my own cheeks hard, and from so much pinching my forearm was covered in blue bruises.
After what felt like over an hour of desperate effort, I had no choice but to accept it.
This wasn’t a dream.
And if it wasn’t a dream, then I was…
“What do I do?”
I couldn’t stay here. What could possibly be here for me?
Sure, suddenly rising in status was novel, but in this heat, with no air conditioning, no internet—there was nothing about this place I wanted.
There wasn’t even a television!
Most terrifying of all was the fate already decided for me.
“Am I just going to die?”
Here, I was the villainess. My chance of survival was nonexistent, and my sins already piled up high.
And then there was my allergy.
This body wasn’t mine, yet it was mine. Here, I—no, Maribel—would die from a bee sting.
In 21st-century Korea, anaphylaxis was nothing a single epinephrine shot couldn’t handle.
“As if there’d be anything like that here.”
Was there really no escape? I had to get out of this nonsensical world.
No, there had to be something…!
I grabbed my hair and shouted.
“The original!”
They say even in a tiger’s den you survive if you keep your wits.
In my case, it was like I’d just poked a hornet’s nest, but still—there had to be something.
I slowly retraced my memories.
If I wanted to live, I had to understand this damned world Yoon Gabi had written.
In the novel, there were five nations of similar strength. After a bloody war, they were united under one name, the Naparo Empire, on a huge peninsula.
The victorious Bernaue family, located at the center, was elevated to the imperial throne.
The other four nations swore fealty to the Emperor in exchange for retaining power as grand dukes over their lands.
The east—Romero.
The north—Eskia.
The west—Puerto.
And the south—Sephardi.
Before the war, each grand ducal family had been treated as royalty.
Barely a generation after the war, the newly founded empire was still unstable.
Many within the duchies still longed for independence.
To unify the empire, the imperial family pursued two policies.
Internally: intermarry the highest-ranking houses as much as possible.
Externally: create a common enemy through war.
The first to bleed under this policy was the Morro people’s nation, Marcus.
It lay next to Sephardi to the south, the last remaining desert, home to a tiny nation of dark-eyed, dark-haired “heathens.”
Naparo didn’t covet Marcus just because it was a nearby heathen land.
“It was because of the miracle.”
Marcus’s mountain pearls were called miracles.
They were black pearls found in rare oases in the desert of Marcus.
The Morro people went further, devising the most effective way to sell these black pearls.
The Morro pearl rosary.
Strung only with the largest and highest-quality pearls of Marcus’s “miracles,” and crafted with the unmatched skill of the Morro jewelers, these rosaries were exquisite.
Even the Pope coveted them, so their price soared sky-high and many countries fought to obtain them.
“It was the Naparo Empire who started the war first, but…”
The difference in national scale was enormous.
A war they thought they would easily win dragged on longer than expected—because of the desert.
But after two years of fighting, the advantage shifted to Naparo.
And one night, a princess of Marcus, who had been a prisoner but escaped, appeared at the Sephardi ducal house.
The princess brought with her a little girl, claiming she was the Duke’s child, and along with a ring said to be a gift from the Duke on the night they spent together, she offered a perfect pearl rosary.
She declared that if this girl were given the Sephardi name and raised as such, the Morro people would swear eternal obedience to Sephardi.
The Duke agreed. But he already had a pregnant fiancée from Puerto, so the princess of Marcus was executed.
That was how the war ended.
Marcus’s pearl rosary thus became Sephardi’s pearl rosary—a blessed holy relic.
It became a sacred object produced only for special reasons approved by the Pope at the chosen place by the chosen people.
Just like Puerto’s cedarwood, Romero’s sword, Bernaue’s golden crown of thorns, and Eskia’s silk ceremonial robe.
“Maribel’s only reason for even being treated as a young lady here is thanks to that.”
Right. The child who survived and was raised there was the villainess, Maribel Sephardi.
Half of Marcus’s people were scattered throughout the Naparo Empire; the other half fell into a life of wandering.
And I—no, Maribel—ended up just like Yoon Mari.
An illegitimate child, but the firstborn.
“No, actually… even worse, right?”
Unlike her siblings with white hair and blue eyes, she had black hair and deep, almost black navy eyes.
Of course she was a thorn in the Duchess’s side.
Maribel was never allowed outside the ducal estate.
To appease his wife, the Duke even forced Maribel to wear a black veil.
In Morro tradition, one wore a black veil for a year outside private spaces to mourn the dead, but here it was just an excuse.
Maribel never once removed her veil except inside her own room.
Her wearing the veil had nothing to do with Morro tradition.
It was simply a way to mark her as “different from the other Sephardis.”
Shut away in her palacio, isolated and uneducated, always under a black veil—
Of course Maribel hated Sephardi.
She especially loathed Gabriel(l)a, the one loved by everyone.
“No need to imagine it.”
I muttered bitterly to myself. This was my story.
Until I got close to Yoon Mari at the very end, I too had hated everyone in the Yoon family.
Whatever the villainess’s circumstances, the protagonist was Gabriella.
In the original story, my younger sister Gabriella’s first life was far from easy.
Jose hadn’t been wrong. Maribel really had pushed Gabriella into a well out of jealousy, lured her into the underground prison, and gifted her poisonous plants.
Despite all the villainous interference, Gabriella became Empress but was caught in a rebellion and lived a life of suffering before being burned at the stake.
Then she regressed—starting her second life—overcame all the villains perfectly, and lived happily with the Crown Prince.
“And me? I just died, right?”
Of course, as the villainess, Maribel strutted about committing every atrocity in Gabriella’s first life, but after Gabriella regressed she died miserably.
A neat, beautiful morality tale.
It didn’t feel very beautiful now that it was my story.
“Sigh.”
In the original, was there any way for the possessed person to escape back?
I had read it while crying outside the operating room, and maybe because I’d focused on Maribel’s parts, which were like me, my memory was still hazy.
There definitely had been some way back…
As I tapped the armrest, searching my fading memory, there was a knock at the door.
“Um… Lady Maribel.”
“Yes? Oh. Mm. Come in, Luisa.”
First I corrected the polite speech I’d been using out of habit. This wasn’t a dream, so I needed to start adapting to Naparo, Sephardi, and all that.
Luisa entered and cautiously showed me an invitation.
“Lady Gabriella has sent a letter asking if you’re feeling better. She wonders if you’d like to have a light tea time tomorrow after lunch.”
“Ah.”
There was an even more serious problem than how to escape Maribel’s body.
Right now—was this before Gabriella’s regression, or after? That would decide whether I kept my head or lost it.
After the regression, Gabriella had no mercy for Maribel.
When I glimpsed her briefly, she still called me “sister” and acted kindly, so maybe this was before the regression.
As my thoughts spiraled, Luisa’s worried voice came.
“Lady Maribel, do you dislike the idea?”
