Chapter 4 – The Male Lead Is the Villain (3)
The Saintess Who Was Thought to Be Fake Was Actually Real was a romance fantasy novel.
It was set in a world where gods, magic, spirits, and monsters all coexisted. Humanity had to defend its territory against monsters.
Fighting monsters wasn’t the main issue.
The real problem was the poison that seeped from their corpses.
That poison soaked into the ground and slowly contaminated the world.
That was why they needed the “Saintess.”
The saintess was the only one who could purify the tainted land, water, and air.
Naturally, she was worshiped as humanity’s savior. Any nation that possessed a saintess was promised prosperity.
The heroine, born as the saintess, had a tragic fate. She was an illegitimate child of a noble family and grew up abused. The male lead happened to discover her, realized she was the saintess, and brought her to the imperial palace.
That was where the story truly began.
And of course, the ending was the male and female leads getting married and living happily ever after.
‘So the happy ending depends entirely on whether the couple gets together? That’s… absurdly simplistic.’
When she read it as a novel, she hadn’t thought much about it.
But now that she was actually living in that world, it felt ridiculous.
Still, it was convenient.
‘As long as the heroine ends up happy, that’s the end.’
The world would be saved.
But not Edelene, the villainess.
‘Damn it, I was always on the heroine’s side! No matter what I read, I empathized with the heroine!’
She ground her teeth.
The male lead wasn’t the only one in love with the heroine.
There was also the true villain, a mage who controlled monsters. The underground crime boss. The crown prince, who stood at the peak of power and schemed as easily as breathing.
The author had created all sorts of male supporting characters to show how even dangerous men could fall for the heroine.
Any one of them could have been the one who killed “Edelene.”
Even the ultimate villain didn’t die until the very end of the story.
But Edelene was fated to exit halfway through.
She was poisoned—or something like that—and it was staged as a suicide. Even the cause of death was never properly revealed.
Wasn’t that too cruel a fate for a girl who had loved her fiancé since childhood and was betrayed?
Even if she did attempt murder.
Even if she tried to poison the heroine.
‘…Okay, novel-Edelene did go too far.’
In any case, Edelene decided she would never lay a hand on the heroine.
In the early part of the story, the villain, Edelene, didn’t exist just to bully the heroine.
Her death was the trigger that fully awakened the saintess’s powers.
Something about guilt and responsibility over not being able to save her.
‘What nonsense. She didn’t feel guilty about stealing someone else’s fiancé.’
Edelene in the novel lost her fiancé, was made an example of and poisoned by someone who loved the heroine, and then was even used as a stepping stone for the heroine’s awakening.
It was bleak.
‘Wasn’t novel-Edelene way too useful?’
If she weren’t needed as a sacrifice to awaken the heroine, she could have quietly disappeared.
But if she passively let the future unfold while knowing what would happen, she would just end up as a convenient tool and get poisoned anyway.
No matter how she thought about it, breaking off the engagement was the only solution.
Edelene wasn’t interested in what belonged to someone else.
Even if Shane Blanchard was handsome, charming, and kind to his young fiancée.
‘So what? Am I supposed to live off his charm?’
To someone who had already died once, charm meant nothing.
Even rolling around in mud was better than dying.
***
From then on, she began investigating the novel’s characters.
With a few cute requests and some coaxing, she got her parents to gather information for her.
The stack of documents was impressively thick.
“The young crown prince is at the palace, so there’s no need to search separately. The heroine, who isn’t yet recognized as the saintess, is being investigated… The mage who will cause the monster rampage hasn’t appeared yet, so we can’t identify him. The crime organization is still being mapped out… As for the male lead, the information is…”
The quality was far too good for a request supposedly made out of childish curiosity.
Especially the information about Shane. It was more detailed.
Her parents must have thought it was natural for her to show interest in her fiancé.
‘This is why powerful families are scary. If they have bad intentions, they can do anything.’
“Edelene Bertrand” was the youngest daughter of a prestigious marquis family, suitable for an engagement to a duke’s heir.
The Bertrand family held the title of marquis—lower than a duke, but still one of the highest ranks in the empire.
They had a long history, rich lands, and especially strong finances.
‘Born with a golden spoon, and I thought I’d just enjoy it.’
She compared her vague memories of the novel with reality.
But no matter how carefully she examined the documents, she couldn’t figure out who would eventually kill her.
It was never revealed in the novel either.
She simply wasn’t important enough.
Edelene grew more and more anxious.
She didn’t care who the saintess was or whether she dated and married her fiancé.
She just didn’t want to get caught in the middle and die.
‘The nightmares are getting more detailed…’
At first, she thought they were just fragments of the novel resurfacing in her dreams.
But that wasn’t it.
She remembered what had happened that morning.
****
From the night the nightmares began, Edelene could barely sleep.
‘What kind of torture is this…’
She would struggle through nightmares until dawn, then drag herself out of bed once the sun rose.
Sometimes, she would spend an entire day inside the dream before waking.
She was never truly rested.
Today had been the same.
‘This is ridiculous. Since when does my brother go on business trips? He’s still a minor.’
In that morning’s dream, she had been murdered by a servant her second brother brought home.
The boy had been hired during her brother’s trip abroad. In reality, he was an assassin sent by a crime boss.
‘My brother went to the Kingdom of Tihit and started some kind of business there…’
The Kingdom of Tihit had no connection to the Bertrand family.
It wasn’t a typical place for the second son of a marquis to study abroad.
The dream had been detailed, but she dismissed it as absurd.
If she could just find out who would kill her, maybe this anxiety would go away.
She pushed her spoon around in her soup, lacking appetite.
Her mother spoke.
“Edelene, you’re not hungry?”
“Not really… I didn’t sleep well.”
“You must be sad about your second brother leaving on such a long journey.”
“Yes, that’s— wait, what?”
“Oh, how thoughtful of you. But he’d rather you smile and send him off. If you give him a kiss on the cheek, I’m sure he’ll bring you lots of gifts when he returns.”
“Where… did he say he was going?”
“To the Kingdom of Tihit, of course. He said he wanted to start a business there.”
“……”
She had never heard that before.
But she had seen it in her dream.
“He said he wanted to start from scratch somewhere beyond our family’s influence. Such ambition. He doesn’t even think about how worried his parents are…”
It wasn’t just a nightmare.
Her face went pale.
***
The nightmares were closer to prophetic dreams.
They showed her various deaths—and events that would soon happen in reality.
If she dreamed her eldest brother was at the estate, she would hear that he was returning to the estate that morning.
If she dreamed her mother was bedridden, her mother would fall ill soon after.
It was as if something was mocking her.
Still not going to believe it?
No matter what Dream-Edelene did to survive—whether she resisted or pretended to accept the heroine—the end was always death.
It was as if she could never avoid her duty to die and influence the heroine.
The types of deaths varied.
If she forced the engagement to be broken off, even at the cost of her family’s reputation, she was poisoned.
If she didn’t break it off and instead acted like the heroine’s follower, she was assassinated in her sleep.
Even if she tried to flee to a monastery, she died in an accident.
‘At this point, I’m not even a villainess. I’m just a fragile fish that dies at everything!’
How was this fair?
She clenched her teeth.
The nightmares followed her like a shadow.
There had been one brief moment of freedom.
The one week when Shane had left the country on official business.
She hadn’t had a single nightmare then.
But the moment he returned, the nightmares resumed.
‘Maybe I only have nightmares when I’m closely entangled with key characters. Unless I distance myself completely from the story, I can’t escape them.’
The nightmares were a warning.
No matter what she did, she could not avoid death.
The more she watched the characters move exactly as written in the novel, the more she felt the crushing force of fate tightening around her neck.
She had to admit it.
This world wanted “Edelene” to die.
‘It’s telling me to die no matter what.’
As if she would obediently accept that.
She didn’t want to die twice.
She wanted to live.
So—
‘There’s only one way.’
She would have to fake her death.
