TDOWD 01

Chapter 1

I was fourteen years old when I realized that I had been reincarnated into a novel.

“Cough, cough!”

As soon as the sound of my violent coughing echoed out, enough to shake my small body, my nanny hurried over in alarm from afar.

“My goodness, Miss. I told you that you need to take your medicine.”

Her worried voice desperately tried to persuade me, and although my body flinched slightly, I shook my head with a sour expression.

“No. That medicine is too bitter.”

Usually, if something was bitter, I could endure it.

Just like the countless medicines I had taken until now.

But the medicine they had recently changed to was so terrible that I would have believed it if someone told me it was poison meant to kill me.

How does something even become that bitter?

The taste was completely lacking in any consideration for a child, and just remembering it made my face twist in disgust.

“Cough!”

Ironically, despite my desperate refusal to take the medicine, bright red blood spread across the hand covering my mouth.

“……”

“……”

A brief silence fell.

Then my nanny spoke with a face that looked ready to faint.

“Oh my goodness! B-Blood…! If you keep refusing your medicine, I’ll tell Lord Sercan!”

“That’s not allowed! Calm down. I’ll take it. I said I’ll take it.”

Ugh, this cursed body…

The tiny body, so frail that it wouldn’t be surprising if it collapsed at any moment, suffered from a rare disease called Lizber.

If I failed to take the medicine that suppressed my coughing on time, blood would rise into my throat like this.

It was truly awful.

I glared half-heartedly at the medicine bottle filled with a bubbling green liquid before pouring it down in one gulp.

“……!”

That was the problem.

As expected, this had to be poison.

“Kegh! Cough!”

The bitterness was so unbelievable that my eyes flew open.

I immediately grabbed my throat and collapsed on the spot.

“My goodness! Miss!”

The miraculous medicine that was supposedly impossible to obtain even with mountains of gold turned out to be nothing more than a stamina-restoring tonic made by a quack doctor, with an unbearably horrible taste.

When my father learned the truth, he became furious and tried to have the quack doctor captured and killed.

Unfortunately, the man had already fled in the middle of the night.

And while I lay on my bed hovering between life and death, I experienced something astonishing.

An impossibly distant past life came back to me.

In that life, I had lived in a completely different world and led a completely different life.

I had been an ordinary office worker in South Korea, struggling through a harsh reality.

Memories surfaced of me forcing myself to go to work every day while suppressing the urge to quit dozens of times.

Even on the crowded train after work, I spent my time reading novels.

The author uploaded extra chapters because it’s the finale. I should read the last chapter when I get home.

I never made it home.

The last thing I saw was the headlights of a speeding car that ran a red light at the crosswalk near my apartment.

“…That bastard got arrested, right?”

I remembered the driver.

Instead of calling an ambulance, he had panicked after hitting someone and ran away.

“Ha…”

I opened my eyes three days after collapsing from the medicine.

After recovering my strength by eating all kinds of delicacies that my nanny had gathered for me, I found myself thinking:

Could it be that I’ve been reincarnated into a romance fantasy novel?

It was a reasonable suspicion.

This world felt far too similar to the setting of a romance fantasy.

But…

I’ve read too many novels. I have no idea which one it could be.

There had been quite a few side characters named Sierra.

Maybe because of the shock of being unconscious for several days, no miracle occurred where the original story suddenly came flooding back to me.

More importantly, the memories of my previous life were still vague, appearing little by little as if covered by fog.

At first, I doubted many things.

But as time passed, I eventually stopped caring.

Whether this world was inside a romance fantasy novel or not made no difference to me.

I was someone who would spend her entire life recuperating inside a mansion.

Even if this were a novel filled with endless incidents and trouble, I would never become involved with the main characters.

That’s actually a relief.

After that, I spent such an unbelievably peaceful life that I became convinced my thoughts were correct.

At least, I thought they were.

“Say hello, Sierra. This is Arzen, the son of Duke Selver.”

At the beginning of summer, a boy visited our mansion.

And after meeting him, I realized that both my assumptions and my relief had been completely wrong.

“Nice to meet you, Sierra. I’m Arzen Selver.”

“……”

A neat hand was extended toward me.

I was speechless.

“Sierra?”

Arzen tilted his head and examined my frozen expression.

The moment our eyes met—

those transparent blue eyes—

“What… what is this?”

I screamed inwardly.

The moment I saw him, one particular novel came to mind.

Out of all the romance fantasy novels I had read, it was famous for being one of the most outrageous disasters ever written.

<The End of Twisted Love Is Destruction>.

Silver hair that shone with a cold, translucent light.

Deep blue eyes that looked as though they contained the ocean itself.

And most importantly—

the blue butterfly mark beneath his right eye.

“……”

His face was breathtakingly beautiful.

But I froze as if I had seen a ghost.

“Is this for real…?”

The very novel that had kept my eyes glued to my phone even on crowded subway rides?

As certainty settled in, the contents of the original story began flooding back into my mind.

And when I finally realized who I had been reincarnated as—

I honestly would have preferred fainting.

“Sierra! Are you okay?!”

Arzen quickly caught me as I nearly collapsed.

“Sierra’s face is so pale! She must be very sick!”

No.

My health was actually better than usual today.

The reason my face had gone pale was because I had just realized that my reality was even more tragic than I thought.

…I’m screwed.

Seriously screwed.

The figures of people rushing toward me became blurry.

And I lost consciousness.

Blink.

Blink.

When I opened my eyes again, the first thing I saw was an impossibly high ceiling.

Everyone had probably left the room so I could rest.

The room was completely silent.

Lying blankly on the bed, I pinched my cheek.

“Ow—”

It hurt.

This wasn’t a dream.

At the same time, tears burst from my eyes.

<The End of Twisted Love Is Destruction>, often shortened to <Twisted Love>.

The title alone was unusual.

The actual story was even more unbelievable.

I recalled Arzen, whom I had just met.

That face was shocking.

Then again, he was the heroine’s older brother.

His beauty was practically blinding.

Although Arzen didn’t appear often in the novel, his name was unforgettable.

“Brother Arzen, I will definitely take revenge for you. I’ll fulfill your dying wish.”

It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that half of the heroine Jena’s dialogue was about avenging her brother.

And the target of that terrifying revenge was…

Me.

This was driving me insane.

Realizing something had gone terribly wrong, I grabbed my head.

The story of <The End of Twisted Love Is Destruction> went roughly like this:

Jena, the beloved daughter of the Selver Ducal House, had gone missing as a child before miraculously returning home.

Like many romance fantasy heroines, she possessed the power of purification.

Naturally, that led her to become entangled with the empire’s collection of lunatics.

The male leads possessed top-tier supernatural powers, but those powers were so curse-like that they could barely maintain their sanity.

They lived in constant agony from the threat of losing control.

Then one day—

“I’ll help you. The power I possess will surely free you from your suffering.”

Jena became their personal purifier.

Although it was an imperial order, Jena, being a sunshine-like heroine, helped the crazy male leads out of genuine kindness rather than obligation.

Of course, they initially treated her horribly because of their awful personalities.

But as they gradually came to understand her sincerity, their attitudes changed.

Eventually, like every romance novel, they fell in love.

But—

If that were all, it wouldn’t be a tragic trainwreck novel.

A terrible villain appeared.

The daughter of the empire’s most powerful noble family.

Sierra Drenihan.

She became obsessively attached to one of the male leads, Ludwig.

To be fair, Sierra wasn’t exactly sane either.

Ludwig was a madman who treated everyone except Jena as insects, yet Sierra boldly proposed marriage to him without hesitation.

Naturally, Ludwig wasn’t interested in her in the slightest.

Not even as much as a speck beneath his fingernail.

Consumed by uncontrollable jealousy, Sierra grew resentful.

Eventually, she seized an opportunity and attempted to kill Jena during the Festival of Night.

And foolishly—

“N-No… that’s not Jena…?!”

She accidentally killed Jena’s twin brother instead.

Unable to distinguish the siblings in the darkness due to their similar appearances, she made a fatal mistake.

That’s right.

Sierra was the idiot villain who became blinded by jealousy and accidentally murdered the heroine’s brother.

That single mistake transformed the story from a healing romance into a brutal revenge tragedy.

After that moment, Jena lost her sunshine-like smile forever.

The darkened Jena began using the male leads to avenge her dead brother.

The male leads, who had become so devoted to her that they would bark if she asked, eventually destroyed the mighty Drenihan family.

And Sierra met her end at the execution grounds.

A lot of details were skipped over, but later in the story, the revenge became so brutal that even Sierra started to seem pitiful.

She was already destined to die young due to her rare illness and wasn’t expected to live past her early twenties.

Yet they didn’t even allow her to live out the remainder of that short lifespan.

After finishing their revenge, it seemed like the story might end with everyone living together in love.

But—

This is a tragic ending.

The reason Ludwig was called the final hidden mastermind, despite being completely obsessed with Jena.

In true disaster-novel fashion, twist followed twist.

Ludwig had inherited the blood of dragons too strongly.

Eventually, he lost control.

The other male leads tried to stop him after he went berserk.

And they died.

[What is this…?]

[Author, why are you doing this…? My favorite ship just got destroyed…]

Comments like these flooded the chapter.

The scene where Ludwig slaughtered them was horrifying enough to send chills down my spine.

Jena desperately tried to purify him.

But she failed.

In the end, Ludwig’s body finally gave out after a week.

He self-destructed.

And the nightmare finally ended.

With the empire’s pillars gone, a dark age descended upon the nation.

Jena disappeared without a trace, no longer in her right mind.

That was how the novel ended.

Or rather—

that was where I had stopped reading on the subway.

There had only been about five chapters left until the finale.

I never got to see the ending.

But honestly, I didn’t need to.

It was obviously heading toward a tragic ending.

[How is the author even going to finish this…?]

I couldn’t believe it myself.

I had been supporting the Crown Prince.

And he died at Ludwig’s hands too.

At that point, the story had become so absurd that it went beyond disappointment and straight into disbelief.

“Haha…”

For the first time in my life, I found myself grateful to the quack doctor who had given me that horrible medicine.

Thanks to collapsing after drinking it, I had regained both my memories of my previous life and the contents of the novel.

Ah, wait.

Why does it feel like cold sweat is coming out of my eyes?