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Chapter 6
I Was Reincarnated as an Extra in a Parenting Story
Thunk? Not a poke?
It wasn’t the sound of the Northern Duke laughing, but the sound of a cotton ball dropping.
The light brown teddy bear that the lady always carried had toppled over.
Looking into its black, jewel-like, soulless eyes, I suddenly realized.
Ah, the lady was tailing me.
From the teddy bear, my gaze moved up to her.
She looked pale, almost sickly.
Her lips trembled, slowly parting.
-My life has finally bloomed…
Pitch.
Rhythm.
Even the pronunciation was exact.
“Th-That… how could Annie…?”
“Ah…”
“Annie, you too…?”
“Ah… ah…”
The lady cast the bait with the confident look of someone sure that a bite would come.
-Hey, you too?
My soul reacted.
-I can speak English…
This world was a Western fantasy setting called The Contract of the Spirit King.
The protagonist, Serphine, was an angelic girl with blonde hair and blue eyes.
Her father was unknown, but she lived happily with her beloved mother, Liet.
However, after losing her mother to an incurable disease, she was left at an orphanage.
Despite being abused by the stereotypical villainous director, Serphine never lost her kind heart or hope.
As the title suggests, Serphine eventually becomes a genius spirit mage who forms a contract with the Spirit King.
Her power catches the eye of Duke Trisen, Aeon, who sponsors the orphanage.
Aeon instinctively realizes that Serphine, who looks exactly like the only woman he ever truly loved, must be his daughter.
The director is promptly punished, and Serphine becomes a princess of the Trisen family.
However, the family she finds after twelve years isn’t very harmonious.
A father rumored to be a tyrant.
Siblings who dislike her.
But, as befitting a protagonist, Serphine doesn’t shy away and approaches them.
The Trisen family gradually warms to her bright and spirited personality.
All except one.
Her younger half-sister, Delia, the Duke’s illegitimate daughter, with darker blonde hair and green eyes.
Delia and Serphine were in similar circumstances, yet fate split them into villain and protagonist.
Delia, the classic villain, follows Serphine from the Trisen household to the academy and even the palace, committing countless misdeeds along the way.
Her motives were obvious: Serphine took what was rightfully hers.
The princess of the Trisen family, a beloved daughter, a cherished younger sister, a socialite darling, the crown prince’s fiancée—yet Delia had none of it. She believed that if it weren’t for Serphine, all these things would have been hers.
Eventually, Delia conspires with the Mage Tower to kill Serphine.
Of course, she fails, even losing her tail in the process.
Afterward, the villain’s fate follows the typical path: execution by her family.
Right before the guillotine, Delia clings to her family.
“You can’t do this! I’m… I’m Trisen too…!”
Aeon, who had watched impassively, declares:
“I have never once considered you Trisen.”
Desperate, Delia clutches her older brothers’ pants.
“Narcis! Leoni! It’s me, me! Delia! Are you going to abandon your bloodline?”
Narcis sends a detached look as if it doesn’t matter what happens to her.
Leoni, showing nothing but disgust, shoves her hand away.
“Foolish child. My only sister is Serphine.”
A stereotypical ending.
I felt like Serphine’s name should be in the place of the final line.
“…The lady is Delia?”
I asked carefully, and she nodded.
“Uh-huh.”
The lady led me to a private sitting room, dismissed the servants, and served tea.
I had suggested making it a normal tea time, but with the lady and maid 82, nothing could ever be ordinary. Soon, we’d probably be summoned by Aeon or Narcis.
But with a reincarnated person from South Korea sitting right in front of me, what did it matter?
The lady revealed she was a second-year civil service exam candidate.
She had suddenly died before taking the national exam and had been reincarnated into a Western fantasy story she had read before.
She realized this when her biological mother’s name, Aeon Trisen, came up.
Only when she met Aeon, fiercely determined, at Moonmist Castle did it fully sink in.
At this rate, she’d be executed without fail.
“I don’t wanna die with my head chopped off…”
She muttered tragically, and I couldn’t respond.
Hearing the actual plot of the story, mixed with talk of reincarnation, gave me complicated feelings.
“The lady is the protagonist of a parenting story.”
It probably had a separate title. What it was, we’d never know.
“A villain reincarnation story.”
I had expected that.
“A lovely child as a survival strategy.”
Not surprising either.
Yet she let her identity slip by being careless—so humiliatingly. She had sulked alone, only to be picked as a protagonist’s ally.
Even if I wanted to run out of this tea party immediately, I had no authority. We were still just the lady and her maid.
Now was the time to quietly point out the crucial error.
“But… the lady is Edel, right?”
Aeon’s daughter and Narcis and Leoni’s sister. The person destined to become villain Delia was Lady Edel, yet the name was different.
The lady’s heart-shaped lips twitched.
“Guge… almost became Delia.”
“And?”
“Cecile picked a dandelion and wanted to call me Delia, but Dad…”
She glanced at me and corrected the name.
“Aeon said dandelions are too common, the roots annoy him…”
“So that’s why they named you Edel?”
“Uh-huh…”
Such a flimsy reason.
The year she entered the Duke’s household, Edelweiss flowers were planted in the front yard of Moonmist Castle.
They deliberately planted a flower native to the southern highlands because her name came from Edelweiss.
“Why Edelweiss?” I asked hesitantly.
She shifted her eyes and answered:
“Well… it wasn’t directly Aeon’s idea… Liet liked Edelweiss.”
That was the setup? The first love’s favorite flower became the name of another woman’s child? A substitute? Typical useless trash.
Even in the original story, Aeon didn’t kill the infant Delia immediately. He told her to be abandoned because of her incessant crying. Rupert intervened, and she barely survived, with her name given by Cecile.
In short, the lady became Edel thanks to a life-risking appeal.
She’s this adorable.
“…Disgusting.”
“Uh-huh?”
“Just talking to myself…”
After divorcing Freda, Aeon left for the southern front.
There he met Liet, a beautiful and kind spirit mage—Serphine’s biological mother.
Liet, unable to control her magic, had her mana drained by natural objects.
All natural objects in this world contained spirits, and mana was made from life energy called aether.
As Liet’s life was ending, she disappeared to avoid holding Aeon back.
Aeon lost his love overnight and fell into despair, his body so resistant to poison it was nearly addicted to medicine.
While living in hallucinations, Aeon met Delia’s biological mother, a blonde resembling Liet.
Only after Aeon left did Liet discover her pregnancy and raise Serphine alone, until the remaining aether ran out.
Later, Aeon, searching for Serphine, blamed himself.
He had let his only lover die alone.
He had left his lover’s child in suffering and raised another woman’s daughter.
“…Yeah, right.”
“Uh-huh?”
“Talking to myself…”
I watched a father shirk responsibility after making a mess of everything.
“Myaang.”
The lady, sulking, suddenly apologized.
“Huh? Why are you apologizing?”
Someone else should be apologizing. She hesitated, then continued:
“Acting like a child is stupid, right? The way you speak, too. Lived like this too long, so it’s a habit…”
Ah, she misunderstood my muttering!
“I wasn’t talking to you!”
I was criticizing the great father!
“But….”
The extreme reality check on her face didn’t suit a seven-year-old.
Real children don’t speak as clumsily as she did.
But I couldn’t criticize her overacting—this was a matter of survival.
“You’re trying to survive, right? I would have done the same.”
Her large eyes twisted with vulnerability.
“Am I… going to survive?”
Even with the same appearance, Delia had died at her family’s hands.
Knowing the future in a world with a fixed fate isn’t always helpful.
The lady only remembered the general plot, not every detail.
The first episode: Serphine’s adoption into the Duke’s household at age twelve.
Timeline: just before Delia’s twelfth birthday in winter.
Serphine, born in December, and Delia, born in January, became sisters with just a month’s difference.
The second episode: their joint birthday party on Delia’s twelfth birthday.
The original story wouldn’t start for another five years, and who knows what would happen before then. The timeline likely had many gaps.
As expected, the maid “Annie” didn’t appear in the original.
Unlike replaceable extras, the lady was the protagonist, reincarnated as the central villain. Escaping the original plot completely would be difficult.
But.
“Your name has changed. Maybe you’ve avoided Delia’s fate.”
“That would be nice….”
Her bowed head looked pitiful. Was she unsure?
There was something even more important than the name. I wondered if I should tell her.
