Chapter 2
It had been an uneventful day.
The kids had finished their exams, summer vacation was just around the corner, and so, on that Friday afternoon, I ended class early and went home early.
With a cold beer in hand for the first time in a while, I logged onto one of my favorite sites and began rereading from the first chapter a novel whose author had gone AWOL months ago.
The title was The Beast’s Flower.
Hmm. From the title alone, it sounded like an intense obsession romance about a rough, beast-like tyrant emperor, but in reality, it was just a lighthearted story about a female exchange student who kept three of the Empire’s most outstanding men dangling on her hook at the same time.
The “angel-faced” heroine, who never lost her bright smile and innocence no matter what happened, would toss the crown prince, the youngest duke in history, and the heir to the magic tower into her fishpond one after another. The content was more fun than I’d expected.
It was packed full of clichés and obvious flags, but maybe because the author was talented, the prose was smooth and easy to read—and, above all, the male leads were so handsome that it was a pleasure just to look at them.
If there was one drawback, it was that the author, who in the early days seemed to do nothing but eat and write, suddenly vanished—as if they’d been dragged into the front lines of real life.
As a result, the comments section on the latest chapter was filled with desperate cries begging for the author’s return.
I was, of course, one of them.
“Evelyn.”
“Your Highness…”
“Drop the ‘Your Highness.’ How many times have I told you to call me by my name?”
“But…”
Evelyn’s long lashes trembled faintly.
The warmth seeping from the wrist he held made her acutely aware of it.
Was it because of the moonlight?
It was a face she saw all the time, but for some reason, tonight Londmio’s features seemed especially beautiful, and Evelyn’s cheeks flushed.
Just as their eyes locked and her heartbeat quickened—
“Please let go of her hand, Your Highness.”
“…Kenneth.”
A low, resonant voice, openly dripping with jealousy, sliced between them.
Kenneth von Esvande.
The head of House Esvande curved his lips into a crooked smile at the crown prince. In the dark garden lit only by moonlight, he made no effort to hide his hostility toward his rival in love.
“This is a clear violation of the rules, isn’t it?”
“Rules…? I don’t recall ever agreeing to any rules that restrict my actions.”
“Ha… Your Highness, are you truly going to—”
“Oh? So we’re breaking the rules? Then I guess I can do whatever I want too.”
“…Arwin!”
When had he appeared?
With a boyish, mischievous smile, Arwin Hebrim suddenly inserted himself between them.
Evelyn knew well that although Arwin looked like a playful boy when he smiled like that, whenever he faced her, he bore the unmistakable look of a grown man.
Even reading it again, the not-quite-love-triangle but love-quadrangle was so thrilling I swallowed hard.
Just as I was about to vent my frustration at the chapter that refused to move on to the next scene—by leaving my third “update, please!” comment—
Huh? What’s this?
I suddenly felt dizzy, as if my head were spinning.
I wasn’t the fragile type to suffer from migraines, nor did I get anemia—unless it was during my period.
And I never got motion sickness, so this kind of vertigo was completely unfamiliar to me.
Surely this wasn’t from just an hour of staring at a monitor. Maybe I’d been working too hard lately… That was my thought, right before—
“Huh?”
Have you ever had the experience of the entire scene before your eyes changing in an instant? Not like on a roller coaster.
It was as if the view of my world had flipped like a movie scene change.
Suddenly, without the slightest warning, the altered world swallowed me whole.
The new world standing before me was utterly unfamiliar.
“…Uh?”
I didn’t even have the presence of mind to notice that the voice coming from my throat sounded strange.
I first had to determine whether I was hallucinating or dreaming.
Was this a dream? And if so, from where exactly did it start?
My brain, as if its functions had broken down, refused to think properly, but I tried to push it into working—only to realize I couldn’t grasp my situation.
When I looked ahead in my daze, letters began appearing one by one in the empty air where there had been nothing.
What the—? Was this a poltergeist now?
As soon as a curse slipped out, the sentence finished forming:
Welcome to the world of the novel The Beast’s Flower.
…What? What did it just say? The Beast’s Flower?
Thanks to that infuriatingly polite greeting, I realized the unthinkable: I had, impossibly and unbelievably, been transported from my home straight into the world of the novel.
A serialized romance-fantasy novel on the internet, no less.
That was my first realization. The second was that I hadn’t brought my own body with me.
In the bedroom—straight out of a drama set—I found a full-length mirror, and what stared back at me was not the twenty-five-year-old Korean with the perpetual dark circles I knew well, but a blonde, Western-looking girl of about seven or eight years old.
Up-down, up-up down.
When I experimentally waved my arm, the girl in the mirror faithfully copied me. My short, child’s arm flapped earnestly.
Ha… ha… ha… Well, it seemed this little girl was, in fact, me.
Not only had I come to another world, my race and age had changed too. This was unwanted, extreme rejuvenation, and all I could do was let out a hollow laugh.
And then—what did I do? Well, I cried. Maybe my mind had regressed along with my body, because tears just kept welling up, and I wailed like a brat.
A Western maid in uniform rushed in, flustered, but I ignored her and kept crying.
I cried until I was exhausted and fell asleep, only to wake up and cry again. Eventually my throat was hoarse, and I could hardly make a sound.
Later, I learned that this child—who’d been unusually mature for her age—had suddenly spent days crying her heart out, throwing not just her parents but all the household staff into a panic.
In any case, once I’d cried myself dry, a certain saying came to mind:
Knowledge is power.
If by any chance this wasn’t a dream or a hallucination, I needed to write down everything I knew before I forgot it.
Using the paper and pen sitting on a desk—whether for study or decoration, I didn’t know—I began jotting down, one by one, everything I could recall.
Fortunately, I could read and write the language of this world.
Here’s what I wrote down:
Me: Latte Ecktry(that’s what they called me when I cried; probably correct).
Traits: Don’t know yet. Seems to be a noble.
Heroine: Evelyn Dote.
Traits: Pretty. Bright and pure. Angel-faced. Always in danger. Exchange student.
Skill: Fishing-for-men Lv. 10
Male Lead #1: Londmio de Heilron.
Traits: Handsome. Crown prince. Mysterious. Always saves heroine from danger.
Skills: Swordsmanship 8, Magic 7 (not certain)
Male Lead #2: Kenneth von Esvande.
Traits: Handsome. Youngest duke in history. Woman-hater. Also saves heroine from danger.
Skills: Swordsmanship 10
Male Lead #3: Arwin Hebrim.
Traits: Handsome. Master of the magic tower. Looks at women like they’re rocks. Also saves heroine from danger.
Skills: Magic 10
Setting: The Heilron Empire.
Traits: Powerful nation.
When I finished writing, I was appalled.
This was all I knew.
After reading the novel three—no, four—times, my background knowledge amounted to this. Was my memory really this lousy, especially for someone who made a living as a cram school teacher?
It was past pathetic; it was baffling. Was I always this stupid?
Thankfully, it turned out to be temporary memory loss from the shock, because after some time, more things came back.
For example, that my (Latte’s) family was of viscount rank; that Latte would, in the future, cling to the final-boss villainess and engage in petty harassment of the heroine, only to be crushed; and that the heroine Evelyn would arrive in the Empire as an exchange student at age eighteen.
And one more thing—a line Male Lead #2 says when he falls for the heroine:
“You are so very different from the ‘women’ I know.”
…Utterly useless information. I had no idea why I remembered that.
In any case, with a rough grasp of my current situation and my limited knowledge, I settled into daily life.
I washed, ate, breathed, and slowly familiarized myself with my house and the people around me.
It took about a month before I stopped flinching at my reflection in the mirror, and half a year before the awkwardness faded.
It took about a year before I could fully accept that all my human and material resources here were mine.
Two years later, I became wholly “Latte Extri.”
That didn’t mean I’d forgotten the past; it just meant I’d stopped running away from reality.
I accepted this place as a real world where I lived and breathed—even if it was inside a novel.
As Viscount’s daughter Latte, I once had an ambitious dream: to dramatically increase my presence in the story.
In the original, Latte splashed juice on the heroine, did other petty things, and got her soul threshed out by a male lead before vanishing. I vowed I wouldn’t let that happen.
Since I’d arrived young, I figured I could seek out the three male leads—who would also be young—and build connections with them.
And if it went well enough to steal the heroine’s role and win all three of their love? That’d be perfect.
It seemed my ambition might come true when I got lost in the imperial gardens and stumbled upon a napping crown prince.
Then, while watching a training ground for fun, I met the not-yet-woman-hating duke-to-be and became his only female friend.
And on a trip to the marketplace, I got caught up in an incident and was helped by the future master of the magic tower.
Before the heroine even appeared, I’d formed connections with all three male leads—
…or so I dreamed.
In reality, none of that ever happened.
All my wandering as a child yielded no bonds with the three, only a bitter life lesson: once a side character, always a side character.
There was a solid, insurmountable wall between villainess Latte and the Empire’s most capable men.
Take the imperial gardens. Yes, I “met” something there. But it wasn’t the crown prince.
I want to go back and smack my younger self for getting excited at a rustling sound behind me.
The rustling culprit wasn’t a prince, nor even a person—it was a rabbit.
That day, I spent the whole day running around the gardens, having “dramatic encounters” only with rabbits, and went home.
As for the training ground—same story.
The only things to greet me were heat, sweat, and the clang of metal on metal. That was all.
I came home that day worn out from watching “musclemen” all day—at least, that’s what they were to Latte’s young eyes.
And the marketplace… sigh. I don’t know what I was thinking.
I guess I blindly charged in, thinking it was one of those “heroine goes out → gets harassed → danger → male lead rescues her” set pieces from novels.
In hindsight, I must’ve been a little insane.
The marketplace really was a hotspot for trouble, and I got caught up in it. Naturally, I was in danger.
And the one who saved me? Not a male lead, but a secret bodyguard my father had assigned to me without my knowledge.
If it hadn’t been for my father’s foresight—worried by my increasingly frequent outings—I wouldn’t be here reminiscing so casually. I wouldn’t have been pouring tea on the heroine; I’d have been poured out like tea myself.
After that, my father scolded me for three days straight, grounded me for a month, and made me promise never to go outside the estate alone.
After experiences like that, you can’t help but accept reality: there isn’t even 0.1 of a flag linking a side-character viscount’s daughter with the Empire’s top men.
It was a world remarkably faithful to the original.
Really, it made sense: why would a mysterious crown prince, a woman-hating genius swordsman duke, and a magic-tower-master prodigy get involved with some random side character?
I let go of my unrealistic ambition and sent it flying far away.
And now, at the age of eighteen—ten years since I became Latte—I still hadn’t seen so much as a hair of any of the three male leads. I was close to forgetting what they even looked like.
But that didn’t mean my past years were meaningless. I hadn’t spent that long just breathing.
Flap!
The familiar sound of wings announced the arrival of what I’d been waiting for. I’d been expecting it, so I’d left the window open, making the arrival even more welcome.
The message bird landed naturally in my hand, and I unrolled the tightly wound letter. On the broad sheet, written in elegant script, was exactly the news I’d hoped for:
This new work is receiving an excellent response, ma’am. Not only is it first in its genre, but it might even take first place overall if things go well. Congratulations. Have you perhaps planned your next work? I’d like to discuss it with you if possible… When might you be available? I’ll await your reply.
Scanning the letter from top to bottom, I couldn’t help the smile tugging at my lips.
It felt like a natural outcome, but I still couldn’t stop the little chuckle escaping me.
Yes—my latest work, Various Affairs of the Imperial Knights, was sailing smoothly. It was satisfying.
That’s right. In the ten years I’d lived inside The Beast’s Flower, I had, in the meantime, written BL novels—and scored a massive hit.
In some ways, I’d achieved something even bigger than my original ambition.
