ILSMT 01

Chapter 01

A chilly wind seeped through my pajamas.

“Ugh, why is it so cold?”

Half-asleep, I opened my eyes and looked around.

My gaze, following the ominous shadows of tree branches stretched across the room, stopped at the window.

Something’s weird… it was cold for a reason.

Behind the curtain fluttering violently in the wind, the window stood wide open.

I’m pretty sure I closed it before sleeping. Why is it open?

Ignoring my annoyance, I slowly pushed myself upright in bed—only to freeze the moment I noticed a dark figure swaying by the window.

……What?

Someone was sitting at the moonlit window.

Jet-black hair blended into the night sky and scattered in the wind, and beneath the pale moonlight, a face so unrealistically beautiful was revealed.

I stared at the dreamlike scene, spellbound, before forcing myself to come to my senses and rubbing my eyes.

This wasn’t the time to be spacing out.

If my eyes weren’t deceiving me, then that person was clearly…

“…Master of the Tower?”

At my question, the man’s lips curled slightly upward in silent affirmation. A shiver ran down my spine.

Crazy.

I was wide awake now.

The identity of this unwelcome intruder who had shattered my sweet sleep was my boss.

Roakin Arzen.

The most powerful mage in the Empire’s history, Master of the Magic Tower—and also the second male lead of this novel.

I asked again.

“…Why are you here, Tower Master?”

Why are you sitting on my window like that?

I was in hiding, and I hadn’t told a single soul where I was.

How did he find me?

While I was still confused, Roakin spoke in an indifferent tone.

“Why else? I came to catch my runaway secretary.”

“……You insane bastard!”

I knew he wasn’t exactly normal, but this was beyond anything I imagined.

Putting aside how he even found me—

Who breaks into someone’s house through a window in the middle of the night like a thief?

When I was too stunned to respond, his lazy voice, like mist, called my name.

“Serpiene Mirabelle.”

“……”

“You dare run away when I’m not looking?”

A faint, mocking smile appeared on Roakin’s lips.

At the same time, his deep violet eyes, swirling with anger, locked onto me. His gaze was so cold it made my chest tighten.

“That’s…”

Because you refused to accept my resignation!

No matter how I thought about it, I still didn’t understand.

Why was he looking at me like that, as if I had done something terribly wrong?

This isn’t how the original story goes!

In the original plot, Roakin should be in the Magic Tower right now, flirting with the heroine.

A gentle second male lead who protects the heroine in danger.

That was Roakin Arzen’s role—he was supposed to be completely uninterested in an extra like me.

And yet here he was, ignoring the heroine, chasing down a single secretary all the way out to some remote place just because I submitted my resignation.

So you really couldn’t function unless you dragged me back to work, huh?

There was no other way to interpret this obsessive behavior toward a minor supporting character.

At this point, I almost wanted to grab him—no, cling to his pants and scream.

Take your obsession to the heroine, not the secretary!

The truth was, I had been hiding to escape the villainess imperial consort from the original story.

I didn’t want to die again.

But now, the second male lead had gone completely off-script and was ruining my perfect survival plan.

“Tower Master… why are you doing this to me?”

Because of this insane man obsessing over his secretary, I might actually end up dead for real.

I hadn’t always existed in this damned novel world.

Before possessing this body, I was an ordinary office worker in South Korea.

That day, like any other, I was working overtime and trying to fight off sleep when I looked around for something to use as a pillow.

That’s when a certain novel came to mind.

After checking the empty office to make sure no one was there, I quietly pulled a book out of my bag.

<How to Awaken the Cursed You>

It was a romance fantasy novel inspired by Sleeping Beauty, long out of print and only available through secondhand copies.

But maybe I had expected too much.

When I actually read it, it was full of clichés and not even worth a reread, so I immediately sold it on a used marketplace.

I had planned to ship it to the post office that day—but got buried in work and forgot.

…So this is why I forgot it.

The thick book looked like the perfect pillow.

With a satisfied smile, I rested my head on it.

I was exhausted from days of overtime, and I immediately fell into a fainting-like sleep.

How much time had passed?

…Isn’t it about time my alarm went off?

When I opened my eyes with a strange sense of unease—

I was lying face-down on a desk buried in stacks of documents.

As my vision cleared, a strange room replaced the dull gray office.

Where am I?

The floor was covered with a velvet carpet engraved with geometric patterns, and in one corner of the room, colorful liquids in transparent bottles bubbled softly.

It felt like I had wandered into a witch’s room from a fairy tale.

“Is this… a dream?”

As I tilted my head and sat up, the piles of paper around me suddenly collapsed with a crash.

“Ah! What is this!”

The sensation of papers raining down on my head felt far too real to be a dream.

While I was struggling with the flying sheets, another voice suddenly spoke.

“…Lady Serpiene? What are you doing?”

A man peeked his face through the door, looking at me like I was strange.

Pink hair, like something out of a romance fantasy novel… wait.

Serpiene?

Serpiene was a character from the romance fantasy novel How to Awaken the Cursed You, the book I had used as a pillow.

It was such a distinctive name that I immediately remembered it.

Did he just call me Serpiene?

I grabbed the last drifting sheet of paper and looked around.

But there was no one else in the room.

The moment I felt confused, fragments of unfamiliar scenes flashed through my mind, and a headache struck me.

At the same time, Serpiene’s memories began to merge with my own.

“This can’t be…”

That was when I realized it.

I had possessed a character in a romance fantasy novel—How to Awaken the Cursed You.

How to Awaken the Cursed You was a novel inspired by the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty, and its plot went like this.

The Arkhina Empire, the story’s setting, had won a long war against monsters and built a barrier to protect itself from them.

The heroine, Ramona, came from the prestigious House of Silodien, which guarded the northernmost part of this barrier.

Loved by her people, Ramona suddenly becomes a fugitive when her entire family is accused of treason.

This was the scheme of the imperial consort, Dahlia.

The consort was the stepmother of the crown prince and wanted her own son, Prince Enoch, to become emperor.

When she noticed that Ramona, daughter of a powerful northern noble house, was likely to become engaged to the crown prince, she felt threatened and destroyed her family.

She falsely accused the Silodien Duke of plotting to overthrow the crown prince through a marriage alliance.

Enraged, the emperor orders the execution of the entire Silodien family.

The consort, emboldened by her success, begins an even more terrifying scheme.

Poisoning the crown prince.

She secretly commissions poison from a witch of the Magic Tower.

The crown prince drinks it, falls into a deep sleep, and does not awaken—seemingly marking the consort’s victory.

But then the heroine appears.

Ramona, who escaped execution, disguises herself as a cleaner and hides in the Magic Tower.

While cleaning, she discovers the poison request letter and realizes the crown prince was poisoned due to the consort’s conspiracy.

At the moment the hidden truth is revealed, Ramona cannot ignore her childhood friend, the crown prince.

So, risking her life, she infiltrates the palace and awakens the sleeping prince with true love’s kiss.

She saves him, exposes the villainess’s plot, clears her family’s name, and…

marries the crown prince, living happily ever after.

A fairy-tale ending, just as expected.

So the real problem is—who did I possess in this story?

In How to Awaken the Cursed You, after the imperial consort receives the poison, she kills the witch who made it to erase all evidence.

In other words, I had become that witch of the Magic Tower.

Serpiene Mirabelle.

A minor extra destined to be killed by the villainess after being used.

That unfortunate person… is me.

Of all things to possess…

“Why did I end up in a role like this?!”

In frustration, I slammed the desk—and the neatly stacked documents toppled over again.

“Gasp.”

The pink-haired man named Eliser (in Serpiene’s memory) looked at me with a troubled expression before quietly closing the door and leaving.

Left alone in the room, I stared blankly at the scattered papers on the floor.

Why is this happening to me…!

Was I punished by heaven for using a sacred book as a pillow?

“I just worked hard—that’s my only crime!”

I also wanted a soft pillow and a comfortable bed!

My life had ended so abruptly with me falling asleep at my desk during overtime.

I died from overwork…

If I had known, I would’ve traveled, eaten at fancy restaurants, lived a little.

But it was too late for regrets.

I had already entered the world of the book I slept on—

as a minor