Prologue: Nobody Cares About a Villain's Story
Modern readers couldn't care less about a villain's tragic backstory.
After all, villains only trot out their excuses after they've committed every atrocity under the sun and tasted defeat. I absolutely loathe that tired old trope—the one that tries to claim "he was actually a good guy deep down" or "it was society's fault he turned out this way."
Even a passionate performance by an A-list actor can't salvage a terrible script and cheap melodrama. Clumsy prose trying to peddle cheap sentimentality will never win anyone's sympathy.
And besides, look at the era we live in now. It's an age where if a character fails to please the readers, even the heroine's fate is twisted until she's killed off. It is a brutal era of "Kill the Heroine," where even the most beautiful girls are ruthlessly discarded if they slow down the plot. The world is simply no longer kind enough to sit through a villain's long-winded sob story.
I, too, didn't care in the slightest about their reasons.
I really should have given it more thought, though.
Why did I forget that while this was the "Kill the Heroine" era, it was also the era of the random transmigration meta—where readers are routinely sucked into the very novels they read?
A meta where the universe seemingly handpicks the worst possible candidates for transmigration, making it the default to end up as a minor extra or a doomed villain. Since there was zero chance of me landing in the protagonist's shoes, I should have paid closer attention to my surroundings.
But seriously. It was incredibly unfair.
Sure, simply knowing that you're inside a novel is supposed to be a massive advantage for any transmigrator. Since the world doesn't revolve around me, I was willing to compromise on who I ended up as. After all, there was no guarantee I'd get to possess someone with a silver spoon in their mouth.
Besides, in this day and age, being the final boss—or at least someone close to them—usually guaranteed a pretty comfortable transmigrator life.
But what if the novel in question wasn't even well-written?
What if it was a mass-produced romance fantasy where the female lead spent twenty-four hours a day flirting with a harem of perfect male leads?
What if the only parts of the book I actually read were the leads' nauseatingly sweet romance, but I was born a villain?
Modern readers truly had no interest in a villain's circumstances. And the author of this particular novel knew exactly how to cater to that crowd. They didn't dedicate a single line of text to the villains' backstories.
From the moment a powerful enemy fell on the battlefield to the very second a villainess was beheaded on the scaffold, they never uttered a single word of explanation. Even in their final breaths, they never begged for mercy.
Thanks to that, while I didn't have the slightest clue what my own immediate future held, I knew exactly what kind of dessert the neighboring kingdom's princess preferred.
I had no idea how the young girl standing right in front of me would eventually transform into the Saintess of the Evil Goddess, but I knew the crown prince's childhood like the back of my hand. I didn't know why my own body was covered in burn marks, yet I knew exactly how the count's daughter got the scar on her wrist.
Every piece of knowledge I possessed was utterly useless like that.
I didn't know the things that actually mattered, and even if I did, I couldn't have prepared for them.
No, wait. I think I finally understand a few things now.
Because off in the distance, a massive fireball was hurtling straight toward me.