The Queen's Great-Granddaughter
The great-granddaughter of the Queen.
To put it mildly, I could hardly call the situation pleasant. Truly, what in the world had I done to deserve this?
Usually, when someone gets dragged into a mess like this, there is a clear cause. Either you leave a five-thousand-seven-hundred-character spiteful essay under a web novel and get transmigrated or gender-swapped by the furious author, or you end up tumbling into a story of your own that you tossed on indefinite hiatus. In the grand scheme of things, it was an established, time-honored cliché. You open your eyes to find a familiar setting, surrounded by characters you already know from the text—or, at the very least, you inhabit an obscure extra loaded with hidden opportunities. In regression, transmigration, and reincarnation stories, especially gender-benders, you generally know the hand you've been dealt. Unless it's a relentless angst novel, that's the golden rule. No matter how botched the world is or how grim the dark fantasy, you're supposed to have some survival strategy or secret power in your back pocket.
Except I had none of that.
"Your Highness, it's time for your feeding!"
Why on earth had I been transmigrated into an English-speaking realm—and worse, one speaking a dialect of British English I couldn't even parse? This wasn't the standard American English drummed into my skull through South Korea's compulsory education curriculum; this was authentic, period British English.
The pronunciation alone was alien. The words were undoubtedly vocabulary I should have recognized, but the moment they spilled from the speaker's lips, they sounded like completely different phonemes. The intonation was foreign, too. The way their voices rose at the ends of sentences, where they placed their stress, and how they enunciated each individual vowel sounded nothing like the recordings I had listened to back in school. It wasn't the English I knew at all. Technically speaking, since the word English originates from England, perhaps what I had learned back home was merely "American."
If fate was determined to transmigrate me, couldn't it have at least tossed me into Japan or China? At least over there, I had actual linguistic training. I could have finally justified the grueling years spent double-majoring in creative writing and Asian languages at a provincial university. All that backbreaking misery working odd jobs to pay off my student loans might have held some retroactive meaning. Instead, I had been reborn as a native speaker surrounded by other native speakers, completely unable to understand them.
Of course, I couldn't even be certain whether this was truly Britain. I lacked the requisite information to compare my surroundings with the historical Great Britain in my head. My daily routine consisted of nothing more than drinking milk from my wet nurse's breast, soiling myself, and sleeping. One day blurred into the next. Eat, sleep, wail, defecate, and then eat and sleep all over again. It was an existence devoid of anything resembling personal volition. I had assumed I wouldn't experience the horror of losing control over my basic bodily functions until my dotage, not right at the starting line.
It was an utterly bizarre sensation. The memories and consciousness of a twenty-nine-year-old man were fully intact inside my head, yet my physical vessel was that of a newborn infant. I couldn't even wiggle my fingers the way I wanted. If I needed to make a sound, I had to wail. When hunger struck, I had to cry. If I felt the slightest discomfort, I wept. If drowsiness crept over me, tears burst forth once more. And even when I had no desire to cry at all, this newborn body burst into howling sobs entirely of its own accord.
I had once read that human memory and cognitive self-awareness only properly activate around three or four years of age. Whatever scientific weight that theory held, I found myself desperately wishing it were true for me right now. Being a twenty-nine-year-old soul stuffed inside a newborn's husk was pure torture. No sane person would want to carry lifelong memories of being unable to control their bowels or breaking into spontaneous hysterics against their own will. I would have preferred being born with total amnesia, or having my memories unlock around six or seven. If I had lived in blissful ignorance or awakened later, I wouldn't be suffering this wretched sense of cognitive dissonance. But I knew far too much, and that knowledge was precisely my undoing.
Even so, the path ahead looked hopelessly bleak. Once I grew a little older and gained proper motor control, a mountainous heap of chores would await me. The most pressing of all was the language barrier. When I got bigger, I would have to master British English to the point where it functioned as my native tongue. Yet right now, I couldn't even make heads or tails of their fluent banter. I never imagined that regressing into a child would feel like this. De-aging biologically and having to restart life from scratch were two entirely different beasts—especially for someone who had already lived long enough as an adult in modern Korea.
Then, something occurred that instantly obliterated one of my deepest perplexities.
"Your Highness, you must get ready! We are to accompany Their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess to an audience with Her Majesty the Queen!"
It was Rose, my maid, who spoke. Having heard her prattle every day, I had managed to memorize her name at least. I had eight maids in total, though I could only match names to three of them so far. Rose was the youngest of the bunch, Florence was the wet nurse who fed me, and Agnes was the eldest senior maid. My biological father was the Duke of Clarence and Avondale—a title I had never once heard of—and my mother was his Duchess. That was the entirety of the cast I had identified thus far. I simply hadn't heard the other names often enough, and my infant senses weren't sharp enough to piece together the rest.
Regardless, Rose's flurry of words contained a crucial clue, provided my ears hadn't deceived me.
...She definitely said "Her Majesty the Queen."
There were only two British queens prominent in my head: Queen Victoria and Elizabeth II. History books obviously held many more sovereign queens, but those two were the immediate fixtures of my general knowledge. Judging by the elaborate period attire of the staff, along with the gas lamps and early incandescent bulbs illuminating my nursery, we had to be in the nineteenth century at the very least.
Wait a second. If that's the case... could it be?
"Waaaah...!"
A shriek ripped from my tiny throat. Naturally, it wasn't an intentional act. The infant body simply reacted on instinct. But inside my head, the gears had already locked into a terrifying conclusion.
This isn't a romance-fantasy... it's an alternate history novel?!
Only then did all the disparate anomalies snap together like puzzle pieces. Why everyone spoke English. Why it had to be British English. Why a reigning queen existed. Why I had been born a highborn princess. And why the surrounding atmosphere felt so fundamentally estranged from the modern world I remembered. Could it really be? Was this setting not some fictional pseudo-Victorian romance-fantasy empire after all?
"O-Oh dear, Your Highness...?! Her Majesty the Queen is your great-grandmother! There is no need to fret, none at all!"
Rose's frantic soothing reached my ears, and I froze instantly.
Great-grandmother. The reigning Queen was my great-grandmother? For Elizabeth II to be my great-grandmother, I would have had to be Prince William's child. But that made zero sense. I swept my gaze across the nursery once more. By no metric could this be the twenty-first century. Gas sconces hissingly burned beside carbon-filament electric bulbs, while silver and gold candelabras lined the mantels. The dresses were opulent antiquities from an era I couldn't precisely date, and the faces surrounding me were utter strangers. Above all, there wasn't a single smartphone in sight.
No matter how traditional or secluded a royal estate might be, a twenty-first-century palace would still display ubiquitous traces of the modern world. My cascading thoughts chased each other in circles until they collided with an inescapable deduction.
"Uwaaaang—!"
My Instagram reels! My YouTube shorts! My precious dopamine hit...!
In that shattering instant, reality struck home with brutal clarity. I had been gender-swapped and hurled back into the late nineteenth century.
I honestly didn't know what to think. Even my everyday baby clothes had been astonishingly lavish garments embroidered with golden thread, but dressing a mere infant in something this overwhelmingly ornate bordered on the absurd.
Before long, my biological father and mother came into view—the first time I had seen them in quite a while. Perhaps calling them that sounded disrespectful, but biologically speaking, they were merely the progenitors of this infant body; the soul residing within belonged to a twenty-first-century Korean man, not a nineteenth-century English gentlewoman. Truth be told, they didn't seem like particularly stellar parents. Their marital affection appeared remarkably deep, almost excessively so. The problem was that they seemed far more enamored with each other than with their own offspring. Consequently, resting in their embrace felt profoundly awkward.
Aargh, Rose! Florence! Agnes! Where did you all go...?!
While I desperately yearned for my maids, my biological mother carried me past dazzling gold-leaf moldings and priceless oil paintings before coming to a halt before a colossal set of double doors. The entrance was designed to declare, in no uncertain terms, that an absolute sovereign resided just beyond. It was breathtakingly massive and grand.
...Is this really Britain? Wasn't this supposed to be a constitutional monarchy?
This hall looked extravagant enough to slap the Palace of Versailles across the face. Had real-world history been hybridized with high fantasy? Did that mean magic existed here too? Just as I was indulging in such optimistic daydreams, the heavy doors parted.
A vast drawing room unfolded before my eyes, occupied by three distinct silhouettes. One figure sat poised upon an armchair, while two men stood at attention nearby. And then, I saw her—the woman who made regular appearances in history textbooks and political cartoons depicting the Opium Wars and the imperial partitioning of Qing China. The woman who was now, unbelievably, my biological great-grandmother.
"Long live Her Majesty the Queen! God save the Queen!"
There sat Queen Victoria in the flesh.
It was the exact moment every worst-case scenario converged into horrifying reality. Every fiber of my being wanted to scream, but I knew better than anyone that keeping my mouth shut was my only viable play. Whatever happened, I could not afford to make a sound. I simply didn't possess the sheer audacity required to throw a tantrum before a monarch—let alone one who doubled as my biological great-grandmother.
"You have arrived..."
"Yes, Grandmamma."
"...And you as well, my dear."
"...Yes, Your Majesty."
If there was any silver lining to clutch onto, it was that my biological father wasn't George V. And fortunately, I hadn't been born a boy. I had miraculously dodged the catastrophe of reincarnating as Edward VIII or George VI. If I kept my head down and grew up quietly, perhaps I could sip fine tea and enjoy a lifetime of comfortable, unmarried luxury, just like the highborn ladies in romance-fantasy web novels.
I could identify the Queen easily enough, but who were the two bearded older gentlemen standing beside her? Was one of them the future Edward VII? I had no clue. To begin with, I couldn't fathom why I had been brought here in the first place.
"Your Majesty, if I may humbly suggest, perhaps we might conduct the photograph first..."
"Let it be so."
"We thank Your Majesty."
With that decree, I was transferred straight into the arms of my great-grandmother. Not only had I become the great-granddaughter of the monarch who oversaw the absolute zenith of the British Empire—an epoch bearing her very name—but I was now nestled directly against her bosom. Was I supposed to feel profound reverence, or sheer existential dread? Given that my male anatomy had vanished into thin air, swearing felt somewhat paradoxical, but the direness of the situation certainly warranted it.
"We shall now take the photograph. Pray, look toward the camera."
The photographer and the attendant gentlemen in tailored suits stepped back, leaving only Queen Victoria, my biological father, the man who was likely Edward VII, and myself in the frame. Everyone fixed their gaze forward. Taking a photograph in this era was a notoriously delicate and protracted affair. Knowing that nineteenth-century cameras used blinding magnesium flash powder that exploded with terrifying intensity, I instinctively buried my face into the Queen's chest, turning away from the lens.
"...Oh, my."
I had no way of knowing what an enormous mistake that would prove to be.
"Taking the photograph now. Three, two, one..."
A deafening bang shook the air as a brilliant flash of light erupted across the drawing room. That single, blinding instant marked the moment my existence was formally unveiled to the British Empire and the world.
And the very next year, both my biological father and mother died.
Just like that, I became an orphan.