That night, beneath the thin spill of moonlight filtering through the attic window, Megrie drifted into sleep.
The dream came like an old reel of film—yellowed at the edges yet painfully vivid—rewinding itself again and again inside her mind.
In the dream, the original Megrie was soft and full.
She had rose-tinted cheeks and delicate hands untouched by smoke or grease. The city lord adored her as his precious jewel. On her eighteenth birthday, he had fastened a silver necklace around her neck with his own hands.
"This was crafted by your mother before she passed," he had said, his eyes warm with affection. "She wanted you to have it on your eighteenth birthday. It will protect you for the rest of your life."
That protection lasted less than a month.
One day, her father returned with the woman who would change everything—Nata—and her three children.
"Megrie, you won't be lonely anymore," her father said, holding Nata's hand. There had been relief in his smile, almost like someone laying down a burden. "She will love you like her own daughter. And they will be your siblings."
At that moment, Nata had seemed beautiful, almost saintly. She embraced Megrie gently, her voice sweet as honey.
"My dear, I will devote myself to caring for the city lord. He is my sky—our family's hope."
But that sky collapsed quickly.
Her father's health deteriorated without warning. Each time Megrie tried to approach his bedside, Nata stopped her with a sorrowful expression.
"Child, your father's illness is contagious—like a cold that spreads before you know it," Nata would say, gripping Megrie's hands with palms as cold as ice, her eyes filled with convincing sincerity. "Be obedient and wait outside. I have professional knowledge in nursing. I will care for him with my life."
The naïve girl believed her.
She watched Nata remain by his side day and night. She watched Gray and Loya enter and leave the sickroom with bowls of "tonic."
She never realized that every bowl carried inside was not medicine—but oil draining the last flicker of her father's lamp.
Then came the grand and merciless funeral.
On the day the city lord was buried, Nata wept before nobles and relatives until she nearly fainted. Soon after, she announced that Megrie was "overwhelmed by grief" and needed to recuperate in the countryside.
With elegant precision, she severed the girl's ties to the entire social circle—publicly, gracefully, irreversibly.
When Megrie next opened her eyes, her world had already turned upside down.
The loyal old servants were gone, replaced by cold unfamiliar faces. She was driven out of her luxurious chamber into the drafty attic.
Her jewels.
Her lace gowns.
Even the inheritance her father left her—
All swallowed by Nata.
"Here, you're just a debt-ridden maid," Kiki sneered, twirling in one of Megrie's former dresses.
"Don't show your face unless necessary. That ghostly look of yours will frighten the guests," Gray had said coldly.
The once-plush body withered under starvation and exhausting labor. No one remembered she had been a noble daughter. No one recognized her face.
In the freezing attic, clutching the silver necklace hidden beneath her pillow, the girl slowly starved to death.
The final breath came quietly. Alone.
And at the very end of the dream—
"Boom!"
A violent explosion ripped through the darkness.
It was the last sound modern Megrie had heard—the gas explosion that ended her previous life.
She shot upright in bed, drenched in cold sweat, gasping for air.
Her hand flew instinctively to the silver necklace at her chest. It felt cool now. Her gaze sharpened in the darkness, turning cold and cutting—bearing the ruthlessness of a thirty-eight-year-old soul.
"So that's how it was…"
She stared out at the black silhouette of the castle.
"You were too naïve, Megrie," she murmured, as though speaking to the other self lingering somewhere in the air. "You thought it was a cold. It was a noose she wove with her own hands. You thought it was love. It was a trap meant to grind your bones to dust."
She rose from the bed and walked to the cracked standing mirror.
The girl reflected there was still thin—but her eyes burned with a fire fierce enough to reduce the entire castle to ash.
"Since I'm living in your place now, every hunger you suffered—I will make them repay a hundredfold."
"The fullness you lost, I will reclaim—piece by piece—from the finest flesh this castle hoards."
She turned and walked toward her kitchen—the one that did not belong to this world.
Her revenge would not begin with blades.
It would begin with refinement.
With elegance.
She would dismantle what these parasites prided themselves on—their taste, their desire, their power—until nothing remained.
Nata's conspiracy.
The truth behind the city lord's death.
The tangled threads of love and hatred.
This castle was far more rotten than she had imagined.
And now—
Megrie was awake.