“Episode 30”
Yuliana buried her burning face deep in the blanket, murmuring to herself as she squirmed. “Why, why did you come? I haven’t even put on my clothes yet.”
‘Ah, I acted presumptuously for no reason. Think before you act. Second chances in life…’
Yuliana felt like she would die of embarrassment. Peeking out from under the blanket, she grumbled, “What’s with the morning breeze?”
“It’s more like noon than morning. I thought we could have lunch together.”
Evan grinned slyly. Then, he casually uncovered Yuliana, who was wrapped snugly in the blanket.
“Oops!”
Having only passed out in her pajamas the previous night, she wasn’t wearing anything else.
Yuliana let out a startled yelp at her own lack of attire. But Evan seemed to anticipate even her surprise as he effortlessly climbed onto the bed. Then, he covered her with a blanket.
A moment of silence passed. Yuliana found the situation both amusing and surprising, suppressing a giggle that threatened to escape.
Finally, she said abruptly, “What are you doing?”
“Just covering us with the blanket.”
“You said you wanted to have lunch. We don’t need to lie in bed for that.”
Yuliana protested. Blushing furiously, she tried to slip out, but Evan gently pulled her into his arms.
“Eek!”
Yuliana let out a short scream like a startled cat, then quickly turned around.
“W-what—”
“Just thought we could take a cozy nap together.”
“…Fickle.”
Yuliana retorted, then awkwardly coughed and glanced at Evan’s face near her shoulder. Somehow, she found herself saying, “You’re handsome.”
“Me?”
It was an unintended murmur from her.
“…You’re handsome…”
“I am?”
It was a self-deprecating comment from him.
“…”
Unable to find the next words with her mouth shut, Yuliana reluctantly admitted with a sheepish smile.
“Yes. You’re handsome. What did you eat?”
Evan chuckled as he kissed Yuliana’s shoulder, his warm breath lingering on her exposed skin.
“I didn’t expect you to compliment me on my looks.”
“…Huh! Well then, I’ll compliment you more from now on. Ah… You’re handsome, my husband!”
Yuliana giggled. Then, as she tried to get out of his embrace to leave, Evan hugged her tightly.
“What, what’s this?”
“Just cuddling with you.”
“If you want to cuddle, we don’t need to lie in bed.”
Yuliana protested again. But as she tried to slip out, Evan gently hugged her from behind.
“Are you feeling better after sleeping?”
“…A little. My body feels better too.”
“I was worried about you last night because you seemed anxious.”
“Me?”
Yuliana pretended not to notice Evan’s persistent gaze and eventually gave in.
“…Well, yeah. I was scared because you said there was an intruder. I thought I should check it out. I am the Duchess of the Heilchen Duchy, after all. Weren’t you worried?”
Instead of answering directly, Yuliana asked Evan a question. Evan smiled brightly, looking into her sparkling bronze eyes. Then, he leaned in to kiss her cheek, turning his gaze to meet hers.
“Your anxiety affects me. If you’re worried, I’m worried too.”
“What does that mean? Are we twins or something?”
“No. Twins can’t get married.”
Evan frowned at her teasing and kissed her cheek again. He then slipped his arm under her head and met her gaze directly.
“If your anxiety is because of that woman, you don’t have to worry about her fate.”
“What?”
“If she wakes up, I’ll investigate her and maybe kill her. If she doesn’t wake up, I’ll still kill her.”
Yuliana pondered silently in response to Evan’s unwavering words.
‘…But without the heroine, there might be trouble in the Ayhart tribe’s war… She was also a saint.’
Yuliana chewed her lower lip, her anxiety evident. Evan watched her intently, waiting for her answer.
“…I don’t know.”
It felt pitiful to openly talk about killing the heroine. But leaving her to freely enter the original plot also didn’t sit well with her.
With a thoughtful look, Evan nestled closer to Yuliana’s chest.
“I’ll take care of it. At least, I won’t let you worry about it.”
‘Is he suggesting to discreetly eliminate her?’
Her heart raced for a different reason. Yuliana nervously clung to Evan’s shoulder.
“E-Evan.”
Feigning ignorance, Evan casually asked as he untied the pajama string around her chest and pretended to chew on it for a moment.
Then, he quickly grabbed Yuliana’s hands that were clinging to his shoulders.
“!”
Yuliana froze in surprise. Evan’s firm thigh pressed against her legs, barely fitting between them due to her long dress-like pajamas.
As the thin fabric started to rise unavoidably, Yuliana flapped her hands in an attempt to push it down. But Evan held her hands, not knowing what to do with them. With one hand, he firmly grabbed both of her wrists, his sly smile still present. Then, he raised his hand, burying his face between her breasts once again.
“You said you wanted to sleep!”
“Yeah, like this.”
“Eek!”
Yuliana quickly wrapped her arms around Evan’s head, trying to prevent him from burrowing inward. Due to her struggling, she let go of his wrist, and Evan, unable to move and pinned down in her embrace, ended up even closer to her soft chest.
From Evan’s perspective, it was quite an amusing sight, but this method wasn’t bad either. He felt satisfied listening to his wife’s heartbeat so close to him, and he said contentedly, “Yuliana, there have been other strange occurrences. Your stepbrother, or the antics of Lucian Bu Ariaque…”
“Yeah, that’s right. Is that person really your friend from the academy? She said strange things after you left.”
“What?”
Evan chuckled and wriggled slightly.
Unable to move due to Yuliana holding his head tightly, he strangely felt trapped by her. His breath stuck to her through the thin fabric of her pajamas, and her skin, which was starting to become prickly, tickled him.
Finally, Yuliana couldn’t resist and released the grip on her arms that were holding him. As if waiting for it, Evan suddenly rose up between them. His messy black hair got pressed and dampened due to being squeezed, making a mess of it all.
Yuliana giggled at the sight, handing him his soft locks and saying, “Hmm… Lucian, when he was a young boy participating in the succession of the emperor, helped him make strange magic tools. Some of your memories might have been lost and trapped in those magic tools due to their side effects. So, there’s a part where we share memories, right?”
“Oh.”
Evan smirked mischievously and narrowed his eyes slightly.
“Lucian was a friend from my childhood. Yeah. I used to make something like magic tools for him. It preserved some memories and magic power to keep him from going completely crazy.”
Still smiling, Evan’s eyes, reminiscent of his childhood, were darker than the bottom of a lake.
“After all, he went crazy in the end, and because he was crazy, he didn’t want to pass on that power to his future child. That’s why he distanced himself from the Empress after his book club.”
After a brief pause, Evan looked up and met Yuliana’s gaze directly. The intensity that had thickened in his eyes as he revisited the past had cleared up again.
“But other than that, it’s all nonsense. I didn’t help Lucian Bu Ariaque despite experiencing side effects. Maybe the crazy guy made some crazy remarks.”
Evan gently held Yuliana’s fingertips, his affectionate and romantic demeanor evident in his neat fingernails and the fingers that extended beneath them.
But Yuliana instinctively sensed the lie hidden in his eloquent speech. The lie that couldn’t be completely ignored was concealed in his graceful words.
Feeling jittery, Yuliana bit her lip.
The remarks Lucian Bu Ariaque made about pretending to answer the Duke’s questions to please him… The Duke may want to show off like a snake, only showing the good side and hiding his past and secrets.
But the Duchess, as she knew, was not someone who would be satisfied with such a person.
As Lucian said, he was someone who would pretend and hide his past and secrets like a snake.
And Yuliana Auban had never seen such a person in her past life as Isian, nor in her present life as Yuliana. Unable to find a way to express herself, Yuliana bit her lip even harder.
That’s when Anna, who had left the room because of the Duke’s sudden arrival, smartly knocked on the door. Then, with a somewhat sympathetic voice, she said, “M-Master Duke. The Duchess. The woman in the prison woke up, but she seems a bit strange.”
Evan furrowed his brows in dissatisfaction at Anna’s report. Upon closer inspection, his tired expression mixed with exhaustion. His smooth skin looked pale at a glance.
After taking a long sigh, Evan suggested first, “You should rest a little more.”
While stroking Evan’s cheek with one hand and tidying his hair with the other, Yuliana worriedly said, “You didn’t sleep well last night, did you?”
“I feel like I wasted time on unnecessary things. Maybe there was no need to put her in prison in the first place…”
After reading further out of curiosity, you reached this point. Did they even include clichés about enlightening medieval people with modern culture? I’m not sure if they’re trying to convey catharsis, but honestly, it’s just tear-inducing. Putting all the narrative weight on the female lead and still not making it seem particularly remarkable is quite impressive in a way. The fact that it can fall to this level… The female lead just babbling on, and the whole narrative flowing like crap…
Then the comments came without fail.
“You appear every time, when are you going to quit?”
“Even though you’re ranting like that, you’re quite something, and I’m quite something for catching up to 134 episodes of a novel that stressed me out… ”
Silently sighing, Yuliana slowly descended the stairs of the underground dungeon.
As she caught the nauseating smell, her thoughts became even more complex because the novel’s content had changed. Why did it change…?
“Duke!”
At that moment, the guards stood in front of the iron bars and saluted when they noticed them. Butler Rayeth, who had been waiting, approached Evan and said, “The woman woke up, but her condition is strange.”
Before Yuliana could see the confusion on Rayeth’s face, she sensed the ‘strange’ situation.
It was because the woman tied up inside the bars was glowing red.
“What is that light…?”
Evan frowned.
The attitude of the guards and butler, who looked somewhat awestruck as they gazed at the woman, was completely different from before.
Evan felt somewhat annoyed by the judgment that ‘something annoying’ had appeared. He walked briskly and opened the barred door with a bang!
The woman’s body, glowing red like blood, gleamed. Although the woman, whose wet clothes still showed signs of being soaked in lake water, looked ordinary, somehow, she seemed beautiful just with that light.
Yuliana wanted to show this scene to ‘lala0419’, whose face she didn’t even know, who had commented on and perhaps dropped out of the novel before reaching Chapter 134, the reader who had paid attention to the female lead and had possibly read the novel for even longer.
As expected, the female lead was the female lead.
Even in this moment, she exuded awe and looked beautiful. Yuliana realized afresh that she was the original female lead of the novel. Even in a broken original work, she was shining.
Originally, the novel was supposed to start with the death of the supporting character Yuliana Auban, who should have realized her past life. However, Yuliana didn’t die. Despite struggling not to intervene in the original, she eventually fell in love with the male lead, Evan, like fate, and survived to this point.
Yuliana hesitated, fearing what would happen to the female protagonist who had entered a world where the supporting character, who was supposed to die, survived, and how her life would affect her.
Her throat tightened.
Evan’s face, turned back to check on his wife’s condition, was obscured by the female lead’s light.
Seeing her husband’s face like that, Yuliana forced herself to smile.
She tried to smile, to speak even though her throat felt dry, but the words stuck to her dried tongue and didn’t come out properly.
“Ev… Evan. It’s, it’s dangerous. Let’s get out of here.”
“Yuliana.”
“Yes?”
Evan called his wife’s name and approached the woman without hesitation, gripping her shoulders. It was a numb gesture, like holding an object. After briefly looking down at the woman, who emitted a red glow, he raised his head.
“My lady. Don’t worry.”
Evan looked directly at Yuliana with reassurance.
Without saying a word, he seemed to understand that the source of Yuliana’s anxiety stemmed from this strange woman.
Yuliana realized anew that Evan’s keen sense could penetrate even to the source of her anxiety.
Thanks to him, she felt a little more stable as she cautiously approached. Gripping the cold, damp iron bars without daring to go inside, she tightly held onto them.
The woman protagonist, shining brightly with holy light, seemed even more beautiful in Evan’s presence, and because of that, Yuliana couldn’t help but swallow back her tears, unnoticed by anyone.
“Don’t worry.”
The woman reached out through the bars.
She wanted to even snatch away Evan’s touch on the female lead’s shoulder. Her writhing heart seemed to engulf her as it was.
Evan released the woman’s shoulder as a matter of course and took his wife’s hand, placing it on his chest.
As they looked into each other’s eyes for a moment, Evan then casually called for Rayeth.
“It seems we can’t handle this within our limits. We’ll have to call in the temple people. Of course, we’ll also have to report to the palace.”
“Y-Yes… Uh, about her…”
Rayeth swallowed nervously due to the tension.
The Emerald Lake of the Hilden family was a place where fairies, who borrowed power from another dimension, had set foot. It was a sacred place for the noble Hilden family, who had a legend of making a contract with that power. The woman who emanated a mysterious power appearing there was not difficult to associate with the legend.
“Don’t make a fuss. I don’t like noisy things.”
Even though it had already become noisy, Evan muttered. Then, leaning over his wife’s hand, moist with tension, he kissed it gently.
“They’ll be in a frenzy when they come. What do you want to do before that? Go to bed or have lunch. Choose one.”
As he spoke with his lips still on her palm, his breath clung to her hand completely.
Yuliana smiled faintly in response.
“What do you want to do?”
“You already know what I want to do.”
He winked and smiled charmingly. Yuliana couldn’t help but giggle and smile back, despite her reluctance.
