[Year 20XX, Martius I, Spring]
"Lady!"
Huh? What was that? My head was spinning and memories that weren't mine kept assaulting my mind.
"God, why is this happening?" I clutched my head as a sharp headache hit me suddenly.
"Argh!!!"
"W-what...?!" Where am I? Memories that weren't mine kept flooding in, and I could barely keep up with them, and I was in another world, a normal citizen of a country where everything was different and advanced, and I had read a novel named "How to Live as the Black Swan of the Cursed Ducal Family," and after I finished reading it, a car crashed into me, and then there was nothing but darkness.
While stumbling, I put my hand to my head as a reflex and felt blood dripping from a wound.
"Huh?" Before I knew it, I collapsed to the ground.
"Lady!"
I heard the maid calling for help as I fell unconscious.
[Year 20XX, Martius II, Spring]
When I opened my eyes, a maid named Save told me that I had fallen and hit my head, and that the doctor said there was no major damage but I should rest for a few days.
I looked at myself in the mirror. Black hair, red eyes, and a beauty that could captivate anyone, and a slender body that was perfect by any standard, and I thought that I would have been captivated by her too if I were looking from the outside. This was Josephine von Konrow, the villainess of the novel "How to Live as the Black Swan of the Cursed Ducal Family," or "Black Swan" for short, and it was a typical regression novel where the female lead was abused by her family and sought revenge on them, and Adele in particular held high contempt for Josephine, who had tormented her the most.
Seeing how the servants treated me and how much influence Adele had in the mansion already, I could tell that the novel had already reached its halfway point, and that the ultimate fate waiting for me at the end of it was death by execution.
As a reader, it had felt exciting because the one who tormented the female lead got what she deserved, and what she had done was honestly worth it, the bullying, the torture, the starvation, and more. In the novel, she was hanged to death in front of a crowd.
Instinctively, I held my neck.
I don't want to die again, and that was my genuine thought, because getting rammed to death by a car was one thing, but a public execution in a medieval period seemed even more horrific than it looked on the page.
At least it wasn't a guillotine, so I supposed I should be grateful for small mercies.
But one thing was certain, and that was that I could not afford to die right now.
I walked towards the balcony and gazed upon the garden, and what I saw was a well-kept maze maintained by the duchy.
"Is this what rich people want?" I wondered out loud.
More than that, in the middle of the maze, there was a small cottage where people were having tea, and from the looks of it, it was undoubtedly Adele and Mark.
Adele von Konrow was the protagonist of this novel, and she was born from a commoner as an illegitimate child and bore platinum blonde hair and red eyes, and most Konrow family members had black hair, which was why she earned the nickname "Black Swan," but she had the undeniable proof of Konrow blood in those red eyes. In the novel, it was said that the previous deceased head had forced himself on a commoner and the result was Adele, and my family took her in to avoid creating a scandal, and this aligned very well with the memories that Josephine had left behind.
I stared at them as they happily ate and talked.
For my part, I didn't really despise them, and even though I was synced with Josephine, I couldn't help but worry more about my own fate than theirs, and that felt a little selfish but it also felt honest.
On Earth, I was born as an orphan, so I didn't really have a family aside from my kind daycare worker who raised me, and Josephine had felt something similar, because ever since she was a kid she wasn't taken care of either, and she didn't have any talent or anything particularly special about her, so she felt jealous of Adele, who kept receiving the praise and affection that Josephine never got.
"It's a shitty predicament."
That's why my conclusion was simple, and it was just to escape, and it was a good thing that Josephine had only a few ties to this family, or else I wouldn't have even thought of it as an option.
Her relationship with her family was rock-bottom since Josephine was seen as a troublemaker, and it wouldn't be surprising if they didn't even notice my disappearance, given that only one mold was disrupting their lives anyway.
I also had a fair chunk of wealth since Josephine had smuggled a few valuables to fund her schemes to torment Adele, and honestly, the girl would incite large-scale disasters just to spite the female lead, and I kind of admired that dedication as far as villainess behavior went, but as a normal person I was also fairly certain she was a psychopath.
The only real problem I had was my engagement, because even as an outcast, the Konrow family had designated a fiancé for Josephine.
"Hmmmm..."
I went towards the drawer of my table and checked the calendar, and if I remembered correctly they were scheduled to meet at least once a month.
"It's tomorrow…"
I rang the bell and a maid came to my room and bowed. "What do you need, Lady?"
"Tell Marquis Jhake that our meeting tomorrow will continue."
"But Lady, the doctor said—"
"No, it's fine and our meeting is in the cathedral anyway, so I'll just get it healed there."
The maid looked visibly shocked.
'Right, Josephine hates the clergy more than her own family.'
In the novel, it was the church that had revealed that Josephine had no talent after all, and the procedure was called divination, and because it was expensive, only noble children could really afford it freely, and when they divined Josephine it came back with nothing significant, but when they divined Adele it revealed a whole list of talents, and that was the first real humiliation Josephine suffered at Adele's hands, or at least that was how Josephine had seen it.
For that reason, Josephine harbored an intense hatred for the church, and it was deep enough that she would rather die than be treated by healing magic.
"Anyways, just get it scheduled."
"As you wish, my Lady," the maid bowed and left the room.
Marquis Jhake, also known by his moniker "The Marquis of Wealth," was a renowned merchant throughout the continent with business ventures scattered across the kingdom, and it was said that he was the one who actually operated the kingdom from behind the scenes, and somehow this influential man was my fiancé.
There were really only two ways to think about it, and I turned both of them over in my head as I stared at the ceiling.
The first was that the Marquis didn't care about his fiancée at all, because Josephine only offered him power and position and nothing else, which meant he would likely deny any involvement with her situation, and in plain terms it was just a political marriage, and this seemed plausible based on the few meetings I had already sat through in Josephine's memory.
The second was that his ending simply wasn't written in the novel, which was actually more likely, because although he was a mentioned character he never really appeared in the main narrative, and the one thing that the novel and my own gut feeling agreed on was that he was a shifty and selfish man.
I laid down on my bed and stared at the ceiling.
'I have to break this engagement no matter what.'
It was my only real tie to this family, and without it, I would be free to do whatever I wanted.