Misfortune Leaves No Time to Prepare
Misfortune always arrives without warning — sudden, unannounced, leaving no room to prepare.
Perhaps that is precisely why we call it misfortune.
A beloved family's car accident. An incurable disease that strikes like a bolt from the blue. A sudden layoff from a workplace you've devoted your entire life to. Against disasters of this kind, what preparation is even possible? The best we can do is simply accept them.
Just as I had accepted the fact that I had entered the world of a game I used to play.
"…Haa."
At first I thought I had developed some kind of mental illness that left me unable to tell reality from dreams. Or that I had somehow taken a drug with powerful hallucinogenic effects without realizing it. I came up with countless explanations, all of them ways of denying what was happening.
But three months have already passed. By now I had no choice but to accept that this place was neither a dream nor an illusion — it was a real world.
A game world, of course. But real all the same.
Transmigration… I suppose that's what you'd call it.
I remember nothing of why it happened, or how. It simply struck one ordinary day. I had fallen asleep after playing the game in my usual exhausted state, and when I woke up, I was inside that game's world.
What became of my original body?
Did it just die like that?
I didn't have much attachment left, honestly. I had no parents to speak of, and the closest thing I had to family was a single childhood friend. Even so, losing my original body in an instant left me feeling hollow.
I let out a short sigh and looked at the mirror resting beside the bed.
Soft pure-white hair falling in perfect, unbroken strands. Clear, translucent eyes the color of a pale sky over open sea. Skin so fair it was almost porcelain, and cherry-red lips blooming against it.
Yes — even from the description alone, you could tell. None of these were features a man would have.
"Why on earth did I have to transmigrate as a woman…"
I had become a woman.
More precisely, I had become a noble young lady.
The first time I looked in the mirror, I couldn't help screaming. The body parts I had lived with for half my life were gone, replaced by two softly rising breasts.
Whether it was the female hormones flooding through me or something else, even my mind seemed to tilt feminine for a while — the sudden transformation of my body had left me depressed on top of everything else.
I had been so disoriented that the three months slipped by in a blur.
I had accepted the reality of my transmigration, but living as a woman was something I still hadn't adapted to. After twenty years as a man, absorbing a woman's life in a matter of days was never going to be easy.
What I had managed to figure out over those three months was the state of the world, and who I was supposed to be. The result of locking myself in this room and studying hard, you could say.
From newspapers, from questioning the maids about this and that, I pieced together a series of shocking discoveries.
This was the world of a game I had once played — Princess Raising Simulator.
My suspicions began when the emperor's name, and the names of several powerful figures, all matched characters from the game. They became certainty the moment I learned that the empire I now lived in was called Solatis.
You might wonder why a guy would play a game like that, but it had been something of a hit in online gaming circles. The freedom was fairly high, and the illustrations of the female characters and male leads were excellent, so the reception had been largely positive. Of course, if I had known I would end up transmigrating into it, I would have demanded a refund and run for the hills on the spot…
Either way, this was the game's world. And the body I had possessed belonged to an NPC named Tina Bland.
Tina Bland was the sole daughter of the Bland Barony, a house teetering on the brink of ruin. In the game she was nothing more than a pretty extra — a few throwaway lines of dialogue, a minor character among minor characters.
"I guess I should be grateful I'm a noble even if it's a fallen one…"
As long as I hadn't transmigrated as a commoner, I would take what I could get. This world was a rigid class society. Even a baronial house on the verge of collapse was far better than nothing, so long as I still wore the shell of nobility.
In a society where catching a noble's eye the wrong way could get your head cut clean off, transmigrating as a commoner was a fate I genuinely did not want to imagine. Setting aside the fact that I had become a woman, I was trying to look on the bright side.
I sighed again and looked back into the mirror.
"She really is pretty…"
The words slipped out before I could stop them. Faced with a beauty that drew admiration on its own, I decided to think positively about the whole mess. If I was going to transmigrate as a woman, better a beautiful one than not.
Even in the game, Tina Bland ranked among the prettier NPCs. Her looks held up against the main cast without shame, and her uncommon white hair only sharpened the effect.
Of course, being an NPC, she had no other real charms. A quiet personality and a love of books — that was the entire character sheet. Nothing distinctive enough to put her on players' lips. But her appearance alone was unmistakably exceptional.
I exhaled one last deep breath and pushed the tangle of complicated feelings out of me. Whatever else was true, from now on I would be living Tina Bland's life. Three months had been enough for that much to sink into my skin.
Time to start thinking.
I sat at the desk, spread out a sheet of parchment, and took up a fountain pen. I began listing every scrap of game knowledge I could recall in chronological order, trying to figure out what I needed to do next.
One stroke of luck: I had seen this game's endings more than once. I knew the worldbuilding reasonably well.
The genre of Princess Raising Simulator was all over the place. There was combat. There were strategic elements for growing a faction and conquering territory. If that wasn't your style, you could play it as a pure romance sim, lock in love stories with the surrounding cast, and roll credits that way.
For all the variety, everything ultimately circled back to the heroine's growth.
The game began by choosing one of two protagonists. Given the title Princess Raising Simulator, you might assume the lead was some kingdom's princess — but that wasn't the case at all.
Even now, I still had no idea why they named the game that.
Viviana Merdelia.
Daughter of the Merdelia Ducal House, one of the empire's four great ducal families. With a house that bankrolled her without limit, hidden backing buried beneath that wealth, and monstrous stats on top of it all, she was the kind of protagonist who could steamroll the entire overpowered-heroine genre.
Her one real flaw? She corrupted easily. One wrong turn and you were staring straight at a bad ending.
The other heroine was Lillian Endoria.
Her house had already fallen, leaving her with little more than a name, and in practice she lived as a mid-ranking cleric of the temple. Her background lagged far behind Viviana's — but Lillian would one day be chosen as the Saintess of the Goddess's faith.
She was built for a convenient, beloved-by-the-world playthrough. Choose the right options and she even had a path to becoming empress and ruling the empire.
Unlike me, they're both absolute monsters…
Meanwhile, I was the daughter of a house circling the drain.
Well. Self-pity later. Back to the point.
Being a game, of course there were villain factions too. The Kingdom of Caladwen, openly hostile to the empire. A corrupted goddess cult that worshipped demons that weren't even supposed to exist.
In a world like that, what was I supposed to do?
Do what, exactly?
My own survival was already more than enough to worry about.
I drew lines across the parchment one by one. Looking at the protagonists' specs alone made it obvious: this story was not something the daughter of a collapsing barony could carry.
This world was not kind.
There was no convenient miracle where drinking a single potion turned you into an overpowered monster, the way other transmigration novels worked. Nor could I drag some business idea over from South Korea, the way romance-fantasy transmigrators did, and start living large. Even if a venture somehow succeeded, some powerful merchant would squeeze me out and take it in the end.
The only path to growth was steady, sincere effort — and you had to pick the right option among countless choices if you ever wanted to see a happy ending.
For someone who had spent a lifetime building walls against diligence, that was far too heavy a story. If I had been a diligent person in the first place, I wouldn't have finished this game as many times as I did.
In a way, maybe it made sense that I had transmigrated into Tina. A side character ending up in a side character's body — that tracked.
Still, it wasn't completely hopeless.
I roughly knew the flow of the game. If I dug up enough of my past-life knowledge, there had to be things that would help. No method for raking in a fortune, maybe — but with the right information, I could at least keep food on the table.
Honestly, that was all I needed. I had no desire to work myself to the bone chasing success. I just wanted easy money and a peaceful life.
A perfectly ordinary freeloader's existence, if you will.
As for the villains and the main plot… I trusted the two protagonists to handle all of that just fine.
But I couldn't do anything alone. That much was obvious. I was an ordinary person. Even knowing the future, information in the hands of someone like me would rot into something worthless.
I needed an ally — someone who could take my knowledge and actually turn it into results.
One person came to mind immediately. For the peaceful freeloader life I wanted, I was going to need her help.
Knock, knock—
"My lady. May I come in?"
The voice filtering through the door pulled me out of my deep thoughts. I cleared my throat once and answered evenly.
"Come in."
The door opened almost before the words finished leaving my mouth, and a mature woman with brown hair stepped into view. Lanihel — that was her name. She looked considerably older than me, and she had devoted herself to the Bland Barony for a full fifteen years.
Even a house on the decline, it seemed, still had enough funds left to keep a few servants.
"The Baroness has asked that you be brought to her, my lady."
At Lanihel's words, I blinked blankly for a moment.
Speak of the devil and she appears.
She hadn't sought me out once in three months, and she chose to call for me now of all times. Coincidence?
Well. Either way, this worked out. I had been thinking I needed to go see her soon anyway.
This was the person I had just been talking about. The ally essential to my freeloader life — someone stronger, more capable, and in every way more formidable than I was.
"Take me to Mother right away."
For the first time in three months, it was time to face the woman called Mother.