Dying Was Only the Beginning

And so, that was how I came to inhabit this world.

I had been a fourth-year office worker in South Korea, crushed under the wheel of competition all through my school years and dumped straight into a jungle of a society the moment I graduated. Exhausted from yet another night of endless overtime, I was trudging home with my nose buried in my phone when a loud, jarring screech snapped my head up—just in time to see a car with pitch-black tinted windows mounting the sidewalk, barreling straight toward me.

The instant I moved to dodge, I spotted an elderly woman frozen in place beside me, stunned and rooted to the spot. Maybe it was the look on her face—not so much fear as a kind of helpless resignation—that snagged something in my chest. Instead of fleeing, I shoved her out of the way and took the hit myself.

It wasn't as if I'd ever been particularly righteous. So why did I do it?

The violent impact knocked the phone from my hand, and in that same moment, I must have died. When I opened my eyes again, I was somewhere utterly unrecognizable.

It would have been wonderful if this were my reward for a lifetime of hardship—a rebirth into a new world as a new person, walking a path lined with roses.

But the moment I realized this world was the one inside the bleak romance fantasy novel I'd been reading on the very phone I'd dropped, I plunged headlong into despair.

"My lady? Are you all right? Oh dear, it seems her senses still haven't returned."

Even as I stared at the girl in a maid's uniform making a face on the verge of tears, reality refused to sink in.

My whole body was still drenched in cold sweat. I'd already spat out whatever had been lodged in my throat, but breathing remained labored. My swollen throat and the raw lining of my mouth stung mercilessly.

And even setting that aside, my entire body felt heavy as waterlogged cotton, every joint aching, every scrap of strength gone. To borrow a common Korean expression, I had absolutely no gae-mari—not an ounce of fight left in me.

Every part of me wanted to simply lie back down, but the unfamiliar girl's memories, seeping into my head piece by piece, wouldn't allow it.

Arabella Miona—a noble girl who had only just come of age. The bitter, humiliating life of a girl who'd lived as an ugly duckling from the day she was born pressed down on me without a single moment to breathe.

Breaking into a nervous sweat, I surrendered myself to the physician examining me and kept my eyes and ears wide open. Slowly, the conversation around me began to register. Strangely enough, I understood the unfamiliar language without any trouble at all.

"What on earth happened at the Crown Princess selection? How much, and how quickly, must one have eaten to get something lodged in the throat like that?"

"Her Majesty the Empress has suspended the selection for now and postponed the announcement of the Crown Princess until a later date…"

"One can only hope the ill fortune of House Miona hasn't spread to the imperial family itself."

"Crown Prince Sota seems terribly displeased as well, doesn't he?"

Crown Prince Sota. The moment that far-from-ordinary name reached my ears, a chill ran down my spine. Only then did I finally understand what was happening.

I had transmigrated into A Blue Rose for the Apocalypse—the romance fantasy novel I'd been reading right before the traffic accident.

A Blue Rose for the Apocalypse told its story through the first-person narration of Saintess Dorothea, known as the Pure Rose, in a world stained through and through with decadence, corruption, and injustice.

At its heart, the story followed Dorothea as she saved the male lead, Eusilif—a slave treated no better than a beast—and molded him into the hero who would rescue a world on the very brink of the apocalypse.

But because Eusilif was in such a wretched state in the early chapters, it took considerable time before the two of them could form anything resembling a normal emotional connection. Worse, Crown Prince Sota—the second male lead, obsessed with Dorothea—entangled them in a triangle that only deepened the conflict, until at last Dorothea was forced into a relationship with Sota against her will.

After countless twists and turns, Eusilif finally came to love Dorothea and awakened to stand against Sota—but at that very moment, the Closed Labyrinth, ticking away like a time bomb, burst open. Monsters came spilling out, and the world began its headlong sprint toward annihilation.

I'd been in an accident before I could read the ending, but judging from the trajectory of the story up to that point, the apocalypse was more or less a foregone conclusion.

'The plot kept dragging into one long slog of sweet potatoes—getting nowhere, frustrating me to death. I was just about to drop the series entirely… I should have quit while I was ahead.'

But regretting it now was far too late.

What mattered was this: I had already transmigrated into this world, and if the world met its end, then I—the transmigrator—would die right along with it.

'No. I am not dying twice.'

Perhaps because I'd already died once, the instant I grasped my situation, my survival instinct roared to life and jolted me wide awake.

At that moment, the maid who had been hovering anxiously at my side, stamping her feet, spoke up carefully.

"Lady Arabella, are you all right? Shall I bring you some water?"

The instant I heard her words, something clicked.

'Wait a moment. Arabella Miona… that's HER, isn't it?'

Arabella never once appeared on the page in the novel itself, but her poisoning had been mentioned a few times through other characters' mouths.

'Arabella Miona, that woman is already dead? Poisoned, of all things. A far more peaceful end than her sins deserved. Had she fallen into my hands, she would not have gotten off so easily.'

That was the line the male lead, Eusilif, had spat out upon learning of her death through Dorothea.

As far as I could remember, Arabella was the very reason Eusilif ended up a slave of the imperial family, enduring every hardship imaginable. She was the one who had bought him at the slave market and presented him to Princess Regita as a bribe.

'Damn it all… Of all people, I had to transmigrate into the character tangled in bad blood with the male lead.'

Cold sweat trickled down my spine. And that wasn't even the end of my problems.

A candidate dying and coming back to life in the middle of the Crown Princess selection was unquestionably a catastrophic incident—yet the atmosphere around me was disturbingly, excessively unsettled.

One physician clung to my side conducting his examination, but not a single other person stepped forward to investigate what had actually happened.

It felt as though something that ought to be dead had somehow survived, and the hostile glares sticking to my skin made my stomach turn.

'Same with this doctor. What exactly is there to examine that he has to drag the diagnosis out this long? One look and it's obviously poisoning.'

A throat and mouth so swollen I could barely breathe, an itching so maddening I wanted to claw my own skin off—it was unmistakably more than a simple choking accident.

And yet the physician wasn't even checking the cookie I'd forced out of my own throat with my fingers.

'Hold on. What if this man has been bought off by the same person who poisoned Arabella?'

The thought snapped me fully alert. Could I really entrust my treatment to a physician serving the imperial palace? If this man fed me yet another unknown substance claiming it was medicine?

The longer I observed him with that suspicion in mind, the more sinister everything became—even the way his fingertips trembled set my nerves on edge.

'I've already spat out that damned cookie, so first things first: get out of here and find the family physician. I can't trust a single soul in this place!'

Besides, racking Arabella's memories, I had a fairly good guess as to who was behind the cookie that had put my body in this state.

Tap.

Mind made up, I pushed the physician's hands away and rose from my seat.

"…Lady Miona?"

"I think… ahem. I must have choked on something."

"Pardon? But—"

"With everything that's happened today, I suppose I was more on edge than I realized. To make such a blunder. I've spat out whatever was caught in my throat, so I'll be fine now."

Just as I cut him off firmly, a shrill, mischievous voice rang out from behind me.

"What's this? So you were faking it all along?"

Though I'd never heard the voice before, a chill crawled over my skin. I turned around with a sense of foreboding and found a lavishly dressed woman who was, at a glance, far above common standing—sneering at me for all she was worth.

"Honestly, Arabella. However badly you crave attention, isn't this going a bit too far?"

I recognized her beautiful face at once—skin flawless as a peeled egg, makeup applied to perfection. Or rather, it was the subconscious of the real Arabella, still lingering inside this body, that recognized her.

The woman who regarded Arabella as nothing more than a convenient fool to be used, and the current owner of the original novel's male lead, now held as a slave. The imperial family's precious jewel—and, by her own reputation, an utter piece of work.

Princess Regita Monahin Groheim.