Chapter 2
Chapter 2
"Ah, h-huh, eep, ack."
I opened my mouth, figuring I needed to make some excuse, but what came out failed to qualify as language.
Hearing the bizarre sounds I was producing, the maid seemed to decide my condition was extremely serious.
"The food is hot. If you were to spill it, you could be burned, so allow me to assist you with your meal."
"Ah, no, I'm fine, really!"
Even if my body had become that of a girl, the consciousness inside was a full-grown adult. I'd even held a job, as far as appearances went. So the thought of this woman, who hardly looked much older than me, maybe even younger, spoon-feeding me porridge felt wrong in so many ways.
The maid was beautiful, no question about that. But no matter how beautiful she was, having someone who wasn't a lover do something like that would be incredibly awkward.
I already felt unbearably out of place from waking up in a body that wasn't mine. If things got any more awkward than this, every single day would become an ordeal I wasn't sure I could survive.
With that thought, I raised both hands toward the maid, opening and closing my fingers.
"See? My hands are perfectly fine, and my arms move, so—"
But I couldn't finish the sentence.
Because the maid was standing there, staring at me as if I were some creature she'd never seen before.
"......."
"......."
Seeing her slightly parted lips and dazed expression, I realized I'd made a mistake.
The person in front of me was a maid.
Not that I didn't know this world wasn't some medieval fantasy. An ambulance had come, the police wore standard Korean police uniforms, and the doctor had been in a suit and white coat. The setting was clearly the modern day.
But... that aside, a maid was living in this absurdly huge mansion far too large for a single family, wearing a uniform that was practically the dictionary definition of a maid outfit. And judging by the fact that she called me "young lady," regardless of any age gap between us, this maid either served the original owner of this body, or at the very least was an employee here.
...And while it might not be everyone, plenty of people speak down to their employees and treat them like dirt. Age has nothing to do with it.
Or maybe, having worked here a long time, the maid and this girl had built up some kind of bond. The way the maid had unhesitatingly placed a hand on my forehead last night suggested a relationship more like a close older sister and younger sister. The maid used polite speech, but perhaps this child had spoken casually in return.
"......."
"......."
In the lingering silence, I slowly lowered my raised hands.
"It would indeed be better for me to assist you with your meal at your side."
The maid's voice was stern.
Was I supposed to answer with a formal yes, or a casual okay?
Unable to decide, I simply nodded in place of a reply.
It took almost an hour to finish the porridge, with the maid scooping each spoonful, carefully blowing on it to cool it, and feeding it to me bit by bit.
My face blazing scarlet, I barely managed to finish the meal. As soon as I saw the maid retreat backwards out of the room, I immediately sat up.
Then I started rummaging through the room.
*
The information I managed to gather from the room was limited. While the room was large and tastefully decorated, the only signs the girl had actually lived here were around the bed. There was a bookshelf, but aside from a few classics, it was completely empty.
I sat in front of the mirror on the vanity, but the face reflected back offered little beyond that it was a beautiful girl with long black hair and pale skin. The most distinctive feature, perhaps, was that her eyes were quite sharp. Even sharper-looking than the maid I'd seen earlier.
Red eyes might be another distinguishing feature... but in web novels and light novels, characters with red eyes and black hair are practically a dime a dozen.
Having gotten nothing useful there, I immediately stood up and went into the en suite shower room.
*
I came out of the shower and let out a long sigh. What I'd learned in the shower had only complicated my thoughts.
The girl's body I'd examined seemed terribly frail.
It looked like the body of someone who hadn't been eating right. Though I couldn't immediately jump to the conclusion it was from domestic violence. The fact that no parents had come along when I was taken to the hospital was worth keeping in mind, but if they truly had been abusing this girl by starving her, surely they wouldn't have allowed the maid to personally bring her porridge and spoon-feed her.
And the bruises. At least the front view in the mirror hadn't shown any bruises. But as for the back...
That was utterly horrific.
Mainly from the shoulders down the arms, and across the buttocks and calves, the areas that would directly touch the ground when lying down, she was covered in dark blue bruises.
You could say it looked like she'd been beaten... but do abusive parents normally single out such specific areas and strike them so persistently?
...Well, judging by how badly bruised her buttocks were, maybe so.
Then again, I'd never lived through abuse myself, so relying solely on my limited perspective was dangerous.
If she really was a character who got beaten by her parents every day, that was a huge problem in its own right. Could I even put up a proper fight in a body like this? Even if I tried to resist, it would clearly only get me beaten more.
.......
...At least it's a relief that looking at her body didn't stir any sexually inappropriate thoughts.
*
After that, I scoured the room from top to bottom. The clothes in the wardrobe, the desk, the drawers, even every book on the bookshelf. I checked between the pages of the books in case something was tucked inside, but found nothing. In one of the desk drawers, I discovered a thick, unlabeled hardbound notebook, a sealed envelope, and a half-used bottle of sleeping pills.
I found a school uniform in the wardrobe. Seeing the large 中 character on the school emblem on the left breast pocket, it seemed to be the middle school uniform. The name tag above the pocket read 'Ye Sa-ra.'
And only then did I understand exactly which world I had fallen into.
...I was in 'If You Wish.' The game I'd been watching a streamer play not long ago.
I was Ye Sa-ra, the chaebol heiress and villainess who appeared in that game. Of course I hadn't recognized the connection; the in-game character CG looked like it had been drawn with a mouse in Paint. Even going from 2D to 3D would make someone hard to recognize, so if the 2D art was that poor, recognition was practically impossible.
I'm screwed...
...No, wait. Am I really screwed?
I sat cross-legged on the bed in front of the clues I'd spread out and considered the situation seriously.
I was a villainess, sure, but I wasn't one yet. Apparently, I hadn't even started high school.
It made sense; searching the wardrobe had only turned up a middle school uniform, no high school one. The digital clock on the desk showed today was January 1st, which meant there were still about two months and a day until the entrance ceremony.
The high school dynamics hadn't been established yet, so I hadn't even had the chance to become the "villain" of the narrative.
Besides, even if the graphics made it hard to recognize people, the high school uniforms would obviously have name tags too. That meant, at the very least, once I was in high school, I'd have no trouble telling who was who. All I needed to do was get along smoothly with the game's main characters, or just become mutually indifferent acquaintances, making sure I stayed uninvolved no matter which character the female protagonist ended up with.
And that wouldn't be hard. I couldn't say for sure about making friends, but when it came to not meeting people, I was confident. I could just huddle in a corner of the classroom.
I already had plenty of experience doing exactly that throughout my entire high school career!
...Not something to be proud of, admittedly.
"Haaah...."
Setting aside the depressing memories of my high school days for the moment, I began examining the remaining clues one by one.
First, the sleeping pills.
...What kind of stress does a kid who's barely in middle school have to be under to need sleeping pills?
Actually, do they even prescribe sleeping pills to minors? And this bottle already had a good dozen or so pills inside. Do they normally prescribe this many at once?
...I had no idea. I'd grown up in a household you couldn't exactly call well-off, but I'd never suffered from mental issues serious enough to require regular psychiatric visits.
I set the sleeping pills aside. Then I picked up the blank notebook and opened it.
I'd assumed it was a diary, but it was closer to a workbook.
And not just any workbook, but something more like a fantasy notebook.
Inside was a pile of stories Ye Sa-ra had likely written all through middle school.
[His skin was pure white, like a blank sheet of paper...]
[Heh-heh, the power sealed within my left arm...]
[Beyond nayuta, muryangdaesu, geungalla, I shall still...]
[Die die die die die—]
"......."
I quietly closed the notebook.
I mean, sure. I roughly understood why someone would write this kind of thing. I'd had my own share of those years, and introverted people who can't externalize their wild side tend to have to let it out somewhere, even if only internally like this.
Honestly, it was painful to read, but more than that, it felt like I was prying into someone else's private life. No matter how short I was on clues, did I really need to stoop to stealing glances at someone's cringe fantasy notebook?
Somewhere deep inside, my conscience was asking whether going into the shower room earlier was really okay, but I breezily ignored it. Separate from the notebook issue, going into the shower or bathroom was something I'd inevitably have to do while inside this body. No matter what, I couldn't ask the maid to handle bathing and restroom cleanup too. That would be a different kind of sexual harassment.
Besides, I had no clue how to get back anyway.
.......
Right. I used to grumble to myself every time I read a TS Novel—why bother looking for a way back? But before twenty-four hours had passed, here I was, already going on about finding a way back.
When I put the notebook down, I spotted a white envelope next to it. A plain one without any decoration, the kind you could grab at a dollar store for a thousand won. On the front, in neat handwriting, it read: "To Mother."
The handwriting was pretty.
Then again, the handwriting in the notebook had been pretty, too.
After glimpsing that notebook earlier, opening the envelope felt even more intimidating. This was genuinely personal. Even if I couldn't know what this girl wanted to say to her mother, did I really have the right to tear it open and read it?
After a moment of hesitation, I let out a deep sigh and stood up. I picked up both the notebook and the envelope and tucked them back deep inside the desk drawer.
Who knows, maybe I'd just wandered into this body temporarily, and before long I'd slip out again the same way. Maybe, just like when I ended up here, I'd suddenly wake up back in my original body one morning. For all I knew, I'd dozed off, not a bus crash at all, just a blink. Though it didn't exactly feel like a dream.
And if that happened, when the real Ye Sa-ra opened the drawer and found the envelope already torn open... what would she think?
If I'm only here for a little while and then going back, better to just keep my hands to myself, right?
...I am going back soon, aren't I?
"......Status Window?"
I tried murmuring it again, but nothing even close to a Status Window appeared.
I buried my head in my hands and sighed.
I racked my brain for what I knew about the game's mechanics.
Stats consisted of three categories: Knowledge, Stamina, and Charm. Since it wasn't a fantasy setting, there was no mana, and Stamina here didn't mean HP. It meant the everyday kind of stamina, the stuff you think about in real life.
Your stats affected which choices were available. Some dialogue options required specific stat thresholds, and if your stats fell short, certain choices would simply fail. To pursue a character on their route, you needed the stats to keep up with them. I thought back to a streamer's first playthrough, where he mismanaged his stats so badly he ended up on a route he never wanted.
...If this world really was that game, I'd need some way to check those stats.
Wait, could it be that I couldn't open a Status Window because I wasn't the main character?
But that would be a serious problem.
The stats, fine. Outside the protagonist, they were presumably fixed anyway. But there was another game mechanic: the so-called "Sixth Sense."
It was a kind of convenience power the developers had built in so players could get through the game reasonably smoothly even with subpar stats. Nothing supernatural, just a gameplay aid, a QoL feature. Before you started, you could pick one. Depending on the type, it might show how a dialogue choice would affect the other person's mood, or let you view a romance target's normally hidden stats. Anything that gave you an edge in pursuing routes. In the lore, it was framed as the female protagonist's "intuition."
And in-universe, this Sixth Sense wasn't just a system function; the story treated it as a real thing. Most major characters supposedly had one. The game never outright called it "Sixth Sense," but it showed up constantly as a fourth-wall-breaking gag: a character guessing which choice the protagonist was hovering over, or somehow noticing her stat values.
Trouble was, all I knew was "major characters have a Sixth Sense." I had no clue what Ye Sa-ra's Sixth Sense actually was.
...Heck, she might not even have one. Sure, she was a romance target, but I'd never heard anyone say every single major character had one.
"Hah......"
It would've been nice to have something actually useful.
*
"Back soon," my ass.
A month and two weeks passed.
In all that time, I never went back to my original body.
The one small mercy was that my guess turned out right; Ye Sa-ra wasn't the sort of character who got beaten at home. Truth was, the woman who was Ye Sa-ra's mother simply had no interest in her. They didn't even live together.
Over the past month and a half, through intense silent observation and frantic internet searches, I'd pieced together the facts:
Ye Sa-ra's great-grandfather had founded Yujin Group. Her grandfather and father had run it after him, and when Ye Sa-ra's father died young, Ye Sa-ra's mother stepped in as the current chairwoman.
And that mother? Not her birth mother. Ye Sa-ra's birth mother had died right after giving birth. The person she called "Mother" now was the woman her father remarried afterward.
Not all stepmothers are wicked, but maybe because this world operated on makjang-drama logic, Ye Sa-ra's stepmother didn't seem to love her as a daughter. At least Ye Sa-ra's father and stepmother never had children together, so her life wasn't in immediate danger, but that didn't mean the woman looked kindly on her. It seemed she'd simply bought her this house and told her to live on her own.
In this world, Yujin Group was the number-one conglomerate in the Republic of Korea. In terms of liquid assets, real estate, stocks, any category you could call "wealth", what Yujin Group held dwarfed every other conglomerate. As a result, it wasn't hard to dig up information about Ye Sa-ra online.
...Admittedly, it was mostly just a few childhood photos.
Some people were drawn to her striking looks and felt favorably toward her. But plenty of others couldn't stomach Ye Sa-ra because of the endless public nuisance Yujin Group caused.
...Well. At least I wouldn't have to worry about money.
The mansion, built solely for Ye Sa-ra, had a permanent staff of twelve. There was Ye Sa-ra's personal maid—the young woman who'd directly ladled porridge into my mouth, Yang Hye-in. She seemed to serve as head of the household staff.
Out of the remaining eleven, four were the guys in black suits. That was just the permanent security team, of course. Everyone except Yang Hye-in worked in shifts, so in an emergency they could call in far more people, like the last time I was at the hospital.
The rest... three personal chefs, three cleaners, and one groundskeeper.
Before I'd actually seen the house, I'd vaguely imagined a big place somewhere in Seongbuk-dong. In reality, it was a sprawling mansion with a lobby, split across two floors, the kind of place you'd see in a movie. It threw me off completely.
The house itself was apparently even a Registered Cultural Property, or something like that.
Having a mansion that huge right in the middle of Seoul, where land prices are famously insane, said everything about how deep Yujin Group's pockets ran. People were already grumbling about it being a land-grab scheme or a play for redevelopment rights.
Maybe that was part of why Ye Sa-ra lived there, so they could claim, "We're actively using the house."
"What are you looking at so intently?"
As I stared at my phone, Yang Hye-in, seated beside me, spoke up. She was my personal maid, and despite her rather cool impression, it seemed she did have a certain familiarity with Ye Sa-ra.
"......I was looking up information about Yujin Group."
Over the past month, I'd made a decision: I'd keep using polite speech and hope a thick skin would carry me through. Whatever conversations she'd had with Ye Sa-ra before, I had zero information. I hadn't played the game myself; I'd only watched a streamer play. So even if I knew who Ye Sa-ra was as a character, I hadn't known she came with a personal maid attached.
Hell, even if I had played the game, I probably wouldn't have known unless I'd gone down Ye Sa-ra's route.
But casually using informal speech with a grown adult, someone who was, as far as I was concerned, a total stranger, just felt like way too high a difficulty spike.
Besides, I'd done the risk assessment. Between "used polite speech with someone I was supposed to talk casually to" and "used casual speech with someone I was supposed to be formal with," the second one carried a lot more danger.
At first, Yang Hye-in had looked thrown off, but it didn't take long for her to adjust. She never brought up my speech pattern again.
"A good habit. Someday, the entire group will be yours, so it's wise to stay ahead of public opinion now."
She smiled lightly. Like when I'd seen her at the hospital, Yang Hye-in was wearing that black coat. I hadn't realized at the time, but that coat went straight over her maid uniform, which made it flare out a little below the waist. Still, in a way, wearing thick clothes somehow made her waist look even sharper, so it wasn't a bad look at all.
"......So, where exactly are we going right now?"
"Did I not tell you?"
Yang Hye-in's eyes went just slightly wider as she asked.
"No, you just said... we were continuing the appointment that got canceled last time. What appointment was it?"
At my question, Yang Hye-in blinked a couple of times.
Like the fact that I'd forgotten was utterly bewildering.
"Miss, do you really not remember?"
"Uh......"
I darted my eyes around. What was I supposed to say? If it were something minor, fine, but her reaction told me it was genuinely important. So important that forgetting it would be bizarre.
"Miss."
Yang Hye-in's expression turned serious, her voice a little quieter.
"You are on your way to meet your fiancé right now."
"......."
What?
That the words didn't fly out of my mouth was a miracle.
"......Excuse me?"
I swallowed the curse that nearly burst out and asked again, a beat too slow. Yang Hye-in calmly repeated herself.
"Right now, you are on your way to meet your fiancé."
Oh, you have got to be shitting me.
Fortunately, once again, I managed to keep that particular sentiment inside my head.