Chapter 1
“Milady, this is the annex where you will be staying.”
The butler, Chrono, guided me there with an apologetic look on his face.
Chrono was kind to everyone, and always attentive toward me.
“I am terribly sorry. If I can find a maid who is available, I will instruct her to begin cleaning at once. Please wait a little longer.”
It seemed that Chrono had cleaned only the room I was to use, and he had done it alone.
He was far more capable than the other servants, and because of that, he was constantly busy with a heavier workload.
So it was natural that he could only manage one room.
The annex was located a little distance away from the main mansion. From the outside, it looked neat and well-kept, but inside, it felt as though it had been left untended for years.
Dust clung thickly to the decorations, and since only a few small windows had been built into the walls, hardly any light streamed in. The air was cold, damp, and heavy.
It was far too awful—certainly not a place fit for a child to live in.
“I don’t want to stay in a place like this! I’ll go tell Father to let me return to the main mansion!”
“Milady. His Grace the Duke is very busy at the moment. If you wish to speak with him, it may be better to do so later.”
Chrono said that in order to calm me, and to prevent the matter from escalating further.
That night, I was overwhelmed with sadness, frustration, and a mess of tangled emotions.
It wasn’t even my fault, and yet Father never listened to my side of things.
It’s so unfair… Sister gets all the attention.
Why won’t he ever come to me? Why… why not me…?
On the bed, I curled up into a ball and wept.
I kept thinking of how I would explain that I had done nothing wrong.
I believed Father would come to me…
But in the end, he never did.
No—in truth, not once in all this time had he ever come to ask me why I had done what I did.
Exhausted from sorrow and tears, my body gave in, and I drifted into sleep.
“Where… am I?”
When I looked around, I found myself surrounded by a pure white landscape, and stretching out endlessly before me was a sea of bookshelves.
Every shelf was packed without a gap, their spines painted in a myriad of colors: some red, some light blue, some yellow, green, and many more.
Huh? This one’s different. A book completely black, unlike all the others.
Almost without thinking, I picked up the strange, mysterious black book.
The title read:
“March 20th — Age 18 — Sato Yuzu”?
That isn’t written in Rios language, is it?
I’ve never seen characters like this before… so why can I read them?
I don’t know whose book it is, but… is it really okay if I open it?
Though a little frightened, my curiosity won out, and I began to turn the pages.
