The World Is Not Equal
I stared at the pretty boy in front of me, the one who looked like he belonged in a historical drama, and felt my blood pressure skyrocket.
“Milene, our engagement is over.”
Just like that. Out of nowhere. The sheer audacity made my insides boil. Because I wasn’t supposed to be here. I wasn’t even from this world.
Back in my real life, I was the kind of person who finished a brutal day at work, crawled home, and passed out while reading web novels. That night had been no different. After pulling another soul-crushing overtime shift at a company that treated its employees like livestock, I’d flopped onto my bed and started scrolling for something decent to read.
“There’s seriously nothing worth reading.”
And I meant it. Sure, if I widened my net across genres and tags, there were plenty of options, but nothing hit my particular taste. I’d even gone as far as digging through American and Japanese web novel platforms. Desperate times.
“What about those villainess stories?”
In Korea, villainess novels usually followed the same formula: the female lead gets framed, dies, then regresses, makes her ex-husband regret everything, dumps her trash lover, hops into a luxury carriage, and rides off into a happy ending. In Japan, the protagonist possesses the villainess and desperately tries to avoid her doom route, usually building a reverse harem or finding new love along the way.
I’d dropped the Korean ones because they always went on indefinite hiatus around chapter twenty or thirty. But since there was truly nothing else available, I decided to give them another shot.
That’s when I found it. A story with the painfully generic title: The Villainess Who Was Dumped Is Actually Innocent!
It screamed standard romance fantasy. So I read the synopsis.
“What the actual fuck is this?”
The villainess was apparently a kind, genuine saint. But because the world’s setting forced her to also possess dark attribute magic, she got framed by the fake saint—her own little sister, the heroine. She ended up dumped, killed, and then the heroine lived happily ever after with the prince. Later, when the villainess was resurrected by the Lich of the Four Heavenly Kings, the heroine killed her again.
What kind of unholy hybrid was this? And it had finished its main story, was currently running side stories, and sat at number one in the rankings? The level of fabrication was insane. This wasn’t just bad writing; this was a crime.
Worse, it was blatantly stitched together from the top three Japanese villainess novels I’d read recently. At least the visible parts were Japanese. I suspected it had ripped off even more. What kind of sloppy plagiarism mashup was this?
And the web novel community was eating it up. Seriously, why?
Completely baffled, I left a comment.
The replies came flying in immediately.
A strange chill ran down my spine. It suddenly hit me. These days, a lot of novels started with the protagonist complaining about something and then getting isekai’d as punishment.
“No way… is this really that trope?”
“You son of a bitch!”
I was still furiously typing at the keyboard in rage when I lost consciousness.
When I woke up… I had become Milene, the villainess from that trashy, rootless romance fantasy novel.
“Milene! Are you even listening to me?”
I let out a long, exhausted sigh.
What a pathetic life I’d been reborn into.