Chapter 3
Morning sunlight streamed in. A suffocating clash of wills was unfolding in the middle of my room. My opponent was that insubordinate maid who had audaciously clicked her tongue at me yesterday.
"You barely managed to keep your life in the Head's office, and now you've decided to commit to a new personality entirely, I see?" She stood there with her arms crossed since morning, looking down at me with eyes that were absolutely merciless.
"The rumor has already spread like wildfire among the mansion's servants, you know. That ridiculous farce about how you hit your head hard and got amnesia."
"A person almost dies and comes back to life, and you still talk to them like this?" I retorted, carefully propping myself up from my languid position on the bed. Couldn't she just let me rest in peace, at least in my own damn room?
When I let out a hollow laugh of disbelief, the maid's glare sharpened even further.
"What's harsh is your own shallow scheming, Young Master. Facing excommunication from the Head, you've decided to play crazy now, have you?"
"If you're that suspicious, just bring a doctor. That'll prove it right away, won't it…?" Go ahead, try it. I was confident I'd score a perfect hundred on a mock amnesia exam anyway.
"And, are the servants in this house always this hostile to the person they're supposed to serve?"
"Serve you? Don't fool yourself. There isn't a single person in this mansion who 'serves' you, Young Master."
The woman snorted and strode up to the bedside. The sound of her practically throwing the silver tray onto the table stung my ears.
"I'm here on orders from Lady Evelyn. She commanded me to watch you, to see if you've genuinely gone mad or if you're up to some new trick."
Ah, right. Since we're on the subject, I should take a proper survey of this terrifying household's figures.
As long as I kept my head down, the Head probably wouldn't be an immediate problem. But I needed intel on the other two people who had been in the Head's office, and I needed it right now for my own survival.
I quickly wiped the sullen expression off my face and asked in the most polite voice I could muster.
"So, is this 'Evelyn' you're referring to… the tall woman with emerald eyes?"
"Ha, now you're pretending you've even forgotten the eldest young lady's name?"
"I keep telling you, I really have forgotten everything. So, who was that tiny kid hiding behind her?"
My cautious question caused the maid's facial muscles to contort grotesquely.
"…Surely you don't mean our youngest, Lady Irina, when you say 'tiny kid'?"
"Haa…" I felt like I was going to burn up from frustration. I was asking because I genuinely didn't know anything! Even if we were half-siblings, was it normal to act like you'd seen a monster and tremble in fear just at the sight of your own brother?
"Then, what the hell did I do in the past that makes everyone look at me like I'm a bug?"
The maid twisted her lips in disbelief.
"You want me to recite them for you? Have you developed a strange new hobby of enjoying hearing about your own garbage atrocities from the mouths of others?"
Her sharp voice was full of thorns.
Listening to her, I had to admit she was a hundred percent right. I was getting a well-deserved verbal thrashing. I must have done things that would make anyone curse me out just hearing about them, and I was a terrible person for trying to force someone who was practically a victim to spell them out for me.
"Ah… I see what you mean." I felt awkward and bowed my head. "It must have been really terrible things. That was short-sighted of me. I'm sorry."
"…What?"
For a moment, the maid's expression completely froze.
She stared at me blankly with her mouth half open, then pinched her throbbing temple and let out a deep sigh.
"Haah… Honestly, how shameless can you get? Embezzling family funds to gamble them away was just the cute stuff, wasn't it."
Her voice dripped with contempt. With her arms tightly crossed, she started rattling off the bizarre acts the 'original Rian' had committed, one by one.
Embezzling from the family coffers. Abusing his younger sister and stealing from her. Plus, getting drunk and assaulting innocent territory residents to take out his anger.
As I listened, my jaw dropped without me even realizing it.
"Wait. Hold on." I quickly raised my hand to stop the maid's brutal exposé. "Uh, how old am I right now?"
At my out-of-the-blue question, the maid's lips started trembling. She was past the point of anger and had moved straight to convinced that 'this bastard's brain is genuinely broken.'
"…Sixteen." It was a resigned, flat answer dripping with despair.
Sixteen? Now that I thought about it, when I'd checked my face in the mirror, I did look younger than the illustrations my sister had drooled over and shown me. But just sixteen? Wait. If my memory was right, that game was definitely an 'adult' otome game. Meaning, for the main story filled with explicit scenes to really start, all the main characters would have to be at least adults. This point in time was way before all those crazy events like the empire's destruction were supposed to happen. But even before the main story had started, he was already running around committing atrocities on this scale? Just how utterly, bone-deep pure evil was this crazy bastard?!
Which meant I, a total stranger, had to take the full backlash of his immense karma.
"A-agh…" I was so shocked that I clutched my head. My vision went dark, and I could only tremble my lips without being able to utter a single word.
"…" Silence fell over the room. The maid's gaze, which had been coldly watching me with her arms crossed, began to waver ever so slightly. Even from her perspective, it must have seemed like the situation was taking a strange turn. My despair was too pure to be the act of someone playing a cheap trick or telling a lie.
"…Young Master." For the first time, the maid's malicious aura softened. The eyes that had treated me like trash wavered, and then she carefully opened her mouth. "Could you truly… have lost your memory?"
At that momentous question, I nearly shed tears. I scraped together every ounce of resentment that had been piling up on my spine, dragging it up from the very bottom of my soul. And then I screamed.
After screaming my lungs out, my head felt much clearer. Sitting in a corner and despairing wasn't going to solve anything. If I got excommunicated, I'd freeze to death or get beaten to death on the streets of this unfamiliar world. First, I had to learn the landscape and figure out the situation before I could either run or grovel. I finally kicked open the door and stepped out. Of course, the maid assigned to keep an eye on me was trailing right behind.
"Where are you rushing off to if you don't even remember anything?"
"I need to figure out how to survive. I don't even know the layout of this mansion right now."
"Scared of getting kicked out, are you? And yet you were throwing teacups at the Head's face just yesterday."
"…You're crazy, absolutely crazy."
"I'm joking."
"…"
As we walked through the mansion's corridors and gardens, talking like that, the strange sense of dissonance I'd felt from the start began to sink into my skin.
The male servants I met in the hallway would either crawl away on all fours like animals or smash their foreheads to the ground at the mere sight of my shadow. I could excuse that, since the original owner of this body was a trashy person.
But the reactions of the female knights or maids patrolling the mansion were strangely different.
Sure, they despised me and looked at me like I was a bug, just the same. But at the end of those gazes was a sticky, unpleasant feeling. Their eyes roaming from my head to my toes felt just like…
Unable to bear it any longer, I stopped walking and spun around.
"Speaking of which, I've been really curious since earlier."
"What is it now? If you're going to talk nonsense, just shut your mouth."
"No, it's about those male servants. They crawl around trembling like they've seen some crazy psychotic monster the moment they see me."
"Because if they displease you by not knowing their place, their wrists might fly off, just like in the old days."
"…Okay, I get that I'm trash. But then why aren't the women scared?"
"Pardon?"
"They all despise me like a bug, but they don't seem the least bit scared. It's weird, isn't it?"
The maid's footsteps stopped. She looked me up and down as if she were seeing a hopelessly irredeemable fool, then let out a sarcastic snort.
"Oh my. It seems your common sense has completely flown away. Isn't it obvious?"
"…Obvious?"
"Why would a strong woman who wields a sword and handles mana to protect the empire tremble in fear before a mere man?"
"…What?"
"Men are merely tools for political marriage for the prosperity of the family, or fragile and beautiful ornaments that add to a woman's prestige. What woman in this world is afraid of a mere man?"
The maid's eyes swept over my crimson hair and face as she smirked slyly.
"Do you know why you haven't been excommunicated yet with that dog-shit personality of yours?"
"…"
"It's because of that one uselessly pretty face of yours. You're a 'top-tier product' that can be sold off for a high price at any time."
Ah. I was allowed to be a bit crooked, given this. I finally understood. The true meaning of the phrase 'otome game' that my sister used to rave about finally slammed into me with brutal clarity.
It wasn't just about the target audience. It was a social structure where the power dynamics were completely reversed. Those eyes that had scanned my body as if swallowing their saliva…
Crazy. Was this a world where women dominated and men were beneath them?!