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CHAPTER 01…..
Prologue.
On a day when bread tastes good, luck is rotten.
The chair leg broke, and her body toppled backward.
The moment the corny phrase “That familiar ceiling” flitted through her mind—
“Lady Ellie!”
“Get a doctor! Bring a doctor!”
Ellie regained the memories of her previous life.
“I can’t believe that pig-like girl carries my blood.”
“She’s just as slow-witted and ignorant of her place as her mother.”
“I only have one daughter. And anyone can see it’s not that girl, right?”
Whether he thought a child wouldn’t understand, or he wanted her to hear it,
Ellie could now understand exactly what her father’s voice had meant as he spoke to someone.
“Ellie, you say?”
If it’s Ellie… then it’s her.
The protagonist’s half-sister, the one who bullies her until she’s driven out.
A nasty girl who not only insults and mistreats the heroine but even hits her!
And in the end, a worthless small fry who starves to death.
She was only eight years old.
Lying in bed, Ellie counted her age, then squeezed her eyes shut.
“To think an eight-year-old could achieve this level of morbid obesity…”
At this point, it could practically be called an achievement.
Countless delicious snacks she had mindlessly stuffed into her mouth came to mind.
“This is all my karma…”
Who could she blame? She had eaten it all herself.
But ignoring delicious food in plain sight—that was the real sin. Leaving it to dry out instead of eating it at its prime was just too pitiful.
Ellie quietly admitted this to herself and lifted her hand.
It was a plump little hand.
The flesh was so nicely padded, like a plump sausage, that honestly, she found it rather cute.
“Adults think all kids are cute anyway.”
Right now, she was eight, but in her previous life, she’d been twenty-four.
She wasn’t a detective, but she had an adult’s mind.
The memories of her past life had flooded in like waves, yet they coexisted strangely naturally with Ellie’s current self. Ellie was So-jung from her previous life, and So-jung was Ellie.
Perhaps because she was still young, she didn’t suffer any identity crisis.
But the more she recalled, the clearer one fact became.
“…What do I do…?”
The world she had been reborn into was none other than the ruin-porn romance fantasy If That’s the Case, I’ll Save the World Myself.
The genre was romance fantasy, but the heroine did nothing but suffer, and suffer, and suffer some more.
Born illegitimate, rolling through battlefields, kidnapped, beaten, watching her loved one die before her eyes. People cursed the novel for tormenting the heroine, but you couldn’t help reading to the end just to see how it all wrapped up.
Was the heroine pitiful? Would she ever be happy?
No. I’m the pitiful one. I’m the one who dies…
Better to roll in manure than die!
Ellie recalled the role assigned to her.
She was the heroine’s younger sister, the legitimate daughter.
The heroine was the duke’s illegitimate child, born six months before Ellie.
Naturally, there was no love lost between them. Unlike Ellie, the heroine was cute and pretty… and even received their father’s love. Ellie was insanely jealous.
She bullied her, insulted her… and even hit her.
“Even if I was fat, I never hit people!”
In the story, the heroine couldn’t endure Ellie’s torment, left home like she’d been driven out, and rolled and rolled until she became a savior of the nation.
Easier said than done.
Ellie knew full well all the hardships along the way, and despite herself, she couldn’t help feeling sympathy for the heroine.
But in the end, Ellie—
was stripped of everything by the returned heroine and those who loved her, cast out, and left to starve to death in the streets.
Starved to death. (Important.)
Starved to death! (Important!)
“They could’ve just killed me outright—starving me to death is too cruel…”
Her eyes were already brimming with tears.
In both her past and present lives, Ellie valued food the most among the essentials—food, clothing, and shelter.
Sure, all were important, but could life be joyful without the joy of eating?
After all, happiness starts in the stomach, and generosity comes from a full storehouse.
But to die of starvation of all things?
You wretched, inhuman author!
Did they really have to use such a cruel method to kill off a mere small-fry villain?
Do they know how terrible death by starvation is? Even skipping one meal makes your head spin and your vision go dark!
Whatever happened, she had to avoid starving to death. Absolutely. Positively.
“…I’m hungry…”
Thinking about food made her stomach growl.
Ellie slowly sat up.
Her chubby body cushioned her small frame so well that even small movements took effort. No wonder falling backward hadn’t hurt—her organs and bones had been protected by the armor of expensive meals.
This body fat was a luxury-grade physical shield.
Let’s see if there’s anything to eat.
On the bedside table sat a basket of bread.
Ellie’s eyes lit up, and she eagerly grabbed a roll with her plump hand and took a big bite.
Crunch!
“Ow! Pfft!”
Her front tooth broke.
Ellie—Ellie McClure—was officially the duke’s only daughter.
Officially.
But no one actually thought of her as such.
All thanks to—no, because of—the heroine, Elaine McClure, the duke’s illegitimate child and Ellie’s half-sister.
Better not get on the heroine’s bad side. Oh no, I never thought anything bad about her, not even in my heart.
Despite being illegitimate, Elaine’s name was on the family register, and everyone acknowledged and treated her as the duke’s eldest daughter.
My father really is trash.
It wasn’t that he wasn’t allowed to cheat.
But couldn’t he at least have waited until his wife gave birth to her first child?
When Ellie’s mother, heavily pregnant, saw the baby her husband brought home, she fainted.
She gave birth to Ellie safely, but her health soon failed, and she died of illness.
Whether Elaine was the child of his first love or whatever, the duke doted on her alone, leaving Ellie neglected and twisted from the lack of care.
Honestly, am I not the one in the unfair position here?
Sure, it’s sad for a child to lose her mother. And since Elaine was the child of the woman he loved, he would’ve been attached to her.
But both Elaine and Ellie had lost their mothers. The difference was, Ellie effectively lost her father too.
Young Ellie coped with her loneliness by eating.
Thus, by age eight, she was morbidly obese to the point that her chair leg broke, and the more people pointed fingers at her, the more she took her unresolved stress out on Elaine.
The lucky part was that Ellie regained her past-life memories before she ever resorted to physical violence.
Right now, she was only at the stage of ignoring Elaine like she didn’t exist.
Almost became a child abuser.
Sure, she frowned every time she saw Elaine, but that was it. She hadn’t cursed at her.
From that day on, Ellie avoided Elaine completely.
She had no intention of cursing or hitting a child, but who knew how the role she was “born to play” might manifest?
Accidents could happen—things that could be misinterpreted even without intent.
If they didn’t meet at all, there’d be no misunderstandings.
Ellie avoided her father, too.
Fortunately, if she didn’t seek him out, he wouldn’t bother looking for her either.
All the better.
At this rate, starvation was her ending.
The novel never detailed what happened to Ellie after the heroine left home.
But it was obvious it wasn’t good.
Even now, her father glared at her like he wanted to kill her just for not being sweet to Elaine. There was no way he would’ve let her live well.
Sure, the family elders might have forced him to keep her alive since she was the heir and “only bloodline.”
But the moment the heroine returned as a hero, Ellie would be thrown out and left to starve.
I’ll leave. I’ll stand on my own!
If it came to it, she’d abandon them before they could abandon her.
Letting a child eat herself into morbid obesity was a form of abuse anyway.
There was no one in this household who would love or protect Ellie McClure.
But while she had no trustworthy adults… she did have one thing she could trust.
If this world had nothing but disgustingly bad bread—
I’ll hook them all with modern baking techniques.
I’ll make it so they can’t live without me.
“In the end, it’s something this trivial that keeps people alive.”
Though… isn’t it a little too trivial?
And thus began the story of Ellie McClure, savior of the nation’s bread.
