I Recalled My Past Life and Realized I Was Fucked
The teacup shattered with a loud crash.
“Fuck…”
“M-Milady? W-What’s wrong?”
“Ah, no… It’s nothing.”
The maid beside me looked utterly flustered by the sudden string of profanity that had burst out alongside the noise.
“I-I’m so sorry! Milady, I’ve committed a grave offense!”
“No, that’s not what I—haaa… Shit…”
“Eek! Forgive me! Please forgive me!”
The maid kept slamming her forehead against the floor, apologizing over and over. I tried my best to calm her down while dabbing at the tea stain on my dress with a handkerchief, but none of that stopped my hands from shaking like crazy.
My name is Rosette Christian. Sixteen years old. A beauty with black hair and golden eyes, eldest daughter of the influential Christian Ducal House that rules the empire, and a notorious troublemaker both at home and at the academy.
And at the same time… I was the villainess in this world—the hupijip villainess from the romance fantasy novel The Betrayed Hero’s Demon Lover.
Although I was currently the duke’s daughter, in my previous life I had been an ordinary young salaryman named Kim Changseok. Only today, on the day I turned seventeen in this life, had I finally recalled the contents of that novel I’d finished reading right before I died.
‘Holy shit… What the hell have I been doing all this time…’
The memories of my past life had flooded into my mind like a tidal wave just moments ago. Unlike my current self, I had been a fairly upright young man back then. Those memories and sense of self fused together with the personality I possessed as Rosette as naturally as two perfectly matching parts of a combining robot.
The very first emotion I felt afterward was overwhelming shame.
Up until the age of seventeen, my naturally foul temper had made me the family’s biggest headache. My face was objectively stunning, yet I was a genuine trashy villainess who failed to live up to it. I had long since thrown away any dignity expected of a duke’s daughter, treating studies like an afterthought. The only thing I’d bothered to develop was my combat ability, which was at least decent. But the way I’d abused both that power and my status as a noblewoman was nothing short of complete and utter delinquency.
At the academy, picking fights with other students or verbally tearing them apart was an everyday occurrence. Just two days ago, I’d beaten a passing student black and blue in front of everyone simply because something they did during practice had annoyed me.
Given how many insane things I’d done, it made perfect sense that the maid was practically having a seizure and pouring out apologies just because I’d accidentally broken a teacup.
Until now, I’d thought nothing of that kind of behavior… but with my past-life memories restored and my original self fully awake, those actions now felt like…
‘Haaaa… Fuck… This isn’t even childish, it’s straight-up toddler behavior…’
Memories that made my face burn just thinking about them—like throwing a tantrum on the department store floor as a kid, screaming for a toy. But right now I didn’t even have the luxury of trembling in shame over that dark history.
This world was a romance fantasy with heavy hupijip elements. As the title suggested, the main story followed a hero who, after being betrayed and abandoned by his comrades right after defeating the Demon King, ended up in a sweet, pure romance with the demon woman who saved him. Later, he became the new Demon King and thoroughly destroyed everyone who had betrayed him. That was the novel’s overall plot.
And within that story, my role as Rosette Christian was to become one of the hero’s party members as the empire’s representative White Knight, only to later betray him along with the others. I would desperately cling to the hero after he became the Demon King, get used and then brutally murdered.
All because of the special treatment I’d earned from bullying the protagonist relentlessly ever since our academy days.
My fate was to suffer a slow, agonizing death as my bones and flesh were sliced apart… literally ending in neungjicheocham.
In other words, if things continued like this, my life was guaranteed a gruesome death ending.
So maybe from now on I could try getting along with the hero or avoid betraying him…? That might have been possible, except for one problem.
‘The issue is… the person I beat the absolute shit out of during practice two days ago is the hero himself.’
Not only that, I had already been constantly harassing and tormenting him long before then. The hero had always been incredibly timid—in a good way, you could say he was far too kind. To my previous trashy personality, he had been the perfect prey to chew up and spit out.
And this time I’d publicly humiliated him in front of everyone during practice, so it would be strange if he didn’t hold a grudge deep in his bones.
In fact, he did. In the original story, he had mentioned that exact incident while slowly taking my body apart piece by piece.
‘I’m screwed… This is seriously fucked. No, shit… Why the hell did I go and do something so stupid?!’
Even from my own perspective, if I ran into the ringleader of my childhood school bullying, I might not show it right away, but the moment an opportunity appeared I would repay them a hundred, a thousand times over. And once he became the Demon King and lost all mercy toward humans, forgiveness wouldn’t even be on the table. It would be a free pass straight to neungjicheocham.
Of course, I could try to earn that much goodwill instead, but considering the situation where his own party turned on him and powerful figures got involved… if I clumsily tried to befriend the hero or protect him, I’d just get buried alongside them.
When I thought about what happened to the heroine (a fake one) who had been his fiancée and tried to protect him until the very end, I knew I’d end up in a similar state.
Then what if I took an extreme measure and killed the hero right here and now?
In that case, humanity would be destroyed by the original Demon King instead. At the very least, the story had to progress normally for the next five years so the hero could kill the Demon King as written.
Therefore.
The only way to survive from here on was…
‘At this point, the only option is to flip the entire board over.’
No matter how you looked at it, the decisive reason the hero fell into corruption was the betrayal of those he trusted. After achieving a great victory against the demons and cutting off the Demon King’s head deep inside his castle, the hero was supposed to bask in the glory of triumph. Instead, that was the exact moment he got stabbed in the back—by me, by comrades jealous of his overwhelming success, and by powerful figures wary of his growing fame.
The fact that his fiancée, the only one who tried to protect him, met a miserable end was just the cherry on top.
After being thoroughly betrayed by the comrades he trusted, the hero hardened his hostility toward humanity and completely reversed his sword.
In the end, the trigger for the hero’s corruption was the betrayal of trust.
And there was a famous line from a game I’d played in my past life that fit perfectly here.
—Listen well. People only get betrayed because they had expectations in the first place.
In other words, if there are no expectations, there can be no betrayal.
If I could prevent the hero from forming any “expectations”—things like friendship or trust—with the people who would only wag their tails now and stab him in the back later… If I cut off contact with them entirely and filled those positions with normal humans who wouldn’t betray him, maybe I could stop the flow of this shitty hupijip world.
Sure, that would mean the sweet romance between the hero and the original demon heroine would never happen, but who cared? I was the one who was going to get torn apart limb from limb!
Thankfully, there was still some time before things really kicked off, so I began carefully listing out what I needed to do.
‘This… There aren’t just one or two people I need to deal with…’
The betrayal had been a meticulously planned event involving the will of those in power. The hero’s party members who carried it out were all exceptionally skilled, and their backers were anything but ordinary. Among them were quite a few people that even I—the eldest daughter of a ducal house—would find difficult to approach at this point in time.
Of course, “difficult” was still a far cry from “impossible.” It was much better than the 100% certainty of being turned into a pile of human Legos by the hero’s hands.
My resolve remained unchanged.
Having firmly decided to eliminate those hupijip triggers and avoid the neungjicheocham route, I reached out and picked up the teacup lying upside down on the table.
It was completely empty after the shock from earlier. Honestly, it wasn’t even particularly good tea, and with my current wealth I could drink as much as I wanted without a second thought. The old me wouldn’t have cared at all, but thanks to my past-life memories, I suddenly felt it was a waste.
Right now I was the eldest daughter of a filthy rich ducal family, but in my previous life I had scraped by on a pathetic salary, always having to save even the money for a cup of coffee.
‘And that same guy bought ten outfits he’d never even wear just yesterday… Haaa… Damn it. What the hell was I doing with my life?’
As I chewed over my general dissatisfaction with life while sipping another cup of tea, a heavy sigh escaped my lips once more.
-Glug glug.
The maid poured fresh tea into the empty cup. Watching it fill up again after I’d knocked it over without even taking a sip, I felt an inexplicable tightness in my chest and slowly brought it to my lips.
But then—
“Pffft!”
A sudden impact struck the back of my head. The moment something bumped into me, the tea that had been about to enter my mouth splashed straight onto my face instead.
“Hic! E-Excuse me! A-Are you all right?”
Along with the hurried apology, I turned around.
It seemed she had been cleaning the seat next to me and accidentally bumped into me. The old me would have thrown a massive fit, but with my past-life memories making me considerably more “lenient,” I could let something like this slide.
“It’s fi—?!”
But then—
-Crash.
The moment I turned my head to accept the apology, the teacup slipped from my hand and shattered on the floor. Both the maid beside me and the woman who had accidentally bumped into me turned deathly pale.
“M-Miss…?”
“…”
The woman stammered as she looked at me. She had short purple hair and an Eastern appearance—a rather unique and undeniably beautiful woman.
But despite that striking impression, the moment I recognized her face, my mind began spinning in real time.
Because the woman who had just made a mistake with me was—
‘Angela… Why the hell is this bitch here?’
She was one of the hupijip triggers I had just resolved to deal with. She was going to become a member of the hero’s party in the future.