That creepy gaze that had always followed her.
When she felt that gaze and looked out the window, the senior was sitting in a red sports car, looking this way with a mocking smile.
Why was he doing this?
When she glared back at him in disgust, the senior suddenly cut in front of the bus.
Startled, the bus driver swerved sharply.
Screeeech—
It was unfortunate that a truck happened to be coming from the opposite direction.
Crash!
Her vision shook violently.
A massive impact struck her chest, and when the bus overturned, her body was flung toward the ceiling.
After that, she felt something warm running down her head.
Within her flickering vision, only the man inside the red sports car remained clear.
Everything else was blurry, yet the vile smile on his face was unmistakable.
After tormenting her endlessly, now he was even taking her life.
She had thought he was a good person.
He was a senior who had everything. Intelligence, wealth, popularity.
She had never imagined that someone like him would resort to such dirty tricks behind the scenes just to defeat her.
‘Is this a life review?’
For a moment, her days at university flashed before her eyes.
When she entered the department room, the atmosphere turned cold.
With a stiff expression, she spoke in a low voice.
‘I told you it wasn’t me.’
‘Come on, they said they saw you linking arms and kissing some older guy.’
A male classmate joked with a sly grin.
As they made jokes that were not even funny, they laughed and chatted.
Chewing her up and spitting her out as if she were a snack.
‘Hey, didn’t you try to seduce Senior Suhyuk for money and fail? Aren’t you embarrassed?’
‘I heard that if someone pays you, you’ll do anything. Is that true?’
It was humiliating.
Classmates who casually committed sexual harassment.
False rumors that had already spread as if they were fact.
The classmates she thought she was close to turned their backs on her, and the absurd rumors followed her like a label.
She wanted to correct it.
She shouted countless times that it was not true, that she had never done such things. She kept explaining.
But it was all useless.
Then one day, while she was fighting a lonely battle by herself, a classmate she had barely spoken to approached her and said,
‘Those rumors… I think Senior Suhyuk started them.’
Only then did she realize his vile nature.
‘I was resting in an empty classroom and accidentally heard Senior Suhyuk… cursing. Saying how dare you rank first.’
Right.
After she ranked first in the department, the rumors about money began.
She had heard that he was strangely entangled in the spreading rumors.
A hollow laugh escaped her.
Now that she knew the cause and reason for the rumors, she felt even less willing to yield.
She did not want things to go the way he wanted.
She stubbornly registered for the next semester and ranked first again.
The rumors grew even louder, but she no longer cared.
Until the harassment that did not suit him began.
Back then, she should have realized.
That his inferiority complex was worse than she had thought.
Perhaps it would have been better to take a leave of absence.
If there is filth in front of you, you should step aside rather than step on it just because it blocks your path.
Only now did she understand that.
And so she died meaninglessly.
When she opened her eyes, she was in an unfamiliar room.
Had she miraculously survived?
The blanket covering her body felt soft against her skin.
She cautiously rose from the bed.
Every piece of furniture carried an antique atmosphere, like something that would belong in an antique shop.
At a glance, it was a luxurious room that could not even be compared with her own.
Rather than a hospital, it looked more suitable to be called a hotel.
‘I was definitely on a bus heading to my part time job just a moment ago. I was bored on the way, so I was rereading a discontinued novel…’
She tried to recall how she had ended up in this place.
‘Right. Then the light changed, and the bus overturned while trying to avoid a sports car that suddenly cut in.’
That was the end.
After that, everything went dark along with the sensation of her neck snapping.
The unpleasant feeling resurfaced, and she touched her neck.
The neck that had snapped moved far more normally than she expected.
She had been certain she was dead, yet she was perfectly alive.
At that moment, something like a yellow bundle of thread caught her eye.
When she lowered her head to look closer, similar strands poured down.
It was not thread.
It was her hair.
Startled, she grabbed her hair.
It was an unreal shade of bright blond.
She looked around for a mirror. There was a dressing table in one corner of the room.
Just as she tried to leave the bed and run toward the mirror, a sharp pain struck her stomach.
“Ugh!”
It stung as if someone had kicked her.
Clutching her stomach and groaning softly, she crawled toward the dressing table.
A moment later, when she confirmed her appearance in the mirror, her eyes widened.
She blinked repeatedly and rubbed them, but nothing changed.
The woman in the mirror was not her.
She was a completely different person.
Originally, she did not look like that.
‘I always tied my black hair roughly because it got in the way…’
Her eyes used to look hollow from lack of sleep, and her skin had been dull with fatigue.
That was how it should have been.
But the person in the mirror looked nothing like her former self.
Would hair shine like this if it were coated in honey?
The blond hair flowing smoothly through her fingers resembled yellow marigolds.
The wavy hair was thick and abundant, and the skin was white without a single blemish.
When she opened her mouth in shock, the beauty in the mirror did the same.
A moment later, the lemon colored eyes hidden between long eyelashes trembled violently.
“How on earth…?”
She muttered, then closed her mouth.
Even the voice that came out sounded nothing like her own.
A complete stranger was pretending to be her.
At that moment, the abdominal pain returned, and she collapsed onto the floor.
Every movement sent a throbbing ache through her body.
With a stiff expression, she lifted the chemise style nightgown she was wearing.
“What is this?”
Her face twisted as she saw the injuries on her body.
Her abdomen was covered in marks that looked as though someone had kicked her.
Just like her bruised stomach, her face also turned pale.
‘Who would do something like this…?’
The entire situation only confused her.
While she tried to calm her spinning thoughts, someone suddenly burst the door open.
“Oh my, you’re awake.”
Turning toward the unfamiliar voice, she saw a woman she had never seen before speaking to her.
The woman’s eyes narrowed as if she had seen something strange.
Her outfit was extremely unusual.
A black dress with a white apron trimmed with lace.
It looked exactly like a maid’s uniform.
Her gaze shifted to the woman’s hair.
A deep green color that seemed impossible even with dye.
When she only stared silently for a while, the woman sighed deeply and approached her.
Just as the woman reached out her hand to help her up from the floor, she spoke.
“Excuse me… do you know me?”
“What?”
“Where is this? Is this a hospital? Did I die?”
As she poured out the questions she had been wondering about, the woman’s expression gradually stiffened.
After a moment, the woman scolded her in a slightly stern voice.
“Miss Eliana, what are you talking about? Who died?”
“What did you say?”
As soon as the words left the woman’s mouth, she asked again with a serious expression.
The woman flinched.
Ignoring the reaction, she grabbed the woman’s shoulders and asked again.
“What did you just say?”
“I just… you kept saying you were going to die…”
The woman answered with a slightly dejected face.
It seemed she had misunderstood and thought she was being scolded.
‘That is not what I meant!’
Shaking her head, she said,
“No, before that, what did you call me?”
“Miss Eliana?”
“…Did you just call me Eliana?”
She asked in disbelief, shaking the woman’s shoulders.
The woman gently pushed her hands away and replied with a slightly distressed expression.
“Then what should I call you if not Miss Eliana Mushe? Do you dislike that name now?”
“That makes no sense.”
After hearing the name “Eliana Mushe” confirmed again, Eliana dropped her hands with a blank expression.
In the meantime, the woman helped her back to the bed.
Even after sitting on the bed again, Eliana could not come to her senses.
She ran her hand through her long, glossy blond hair.
The name that had come from the woman’s mouth was far too familiar.
It was the first familiar thing she had encountered in this strange place.
Eliana stared blankly into the air like a patient who had just received a terminal diagnosis.
She had thought the blond hair was unusually beautiful.
A slender body, a face as white as jade.
Delicate features arranged neatly on a small face, and among them lemon colored eyes that stood out unmistakably.
Everything pointed to one person.
Eliana Mushe.
It seemed this place was inside the novel.
A full day had passed since she arrived here.
Her wishful thinking that “when I wake up, I will be back” did not work.
Morning came without fail, and she still woke up as “Eliana Mushe.”
“Ugh…!”
Eliana writhed beneath the blanket with a twisted expression.
‘I died unfairly, and now I have possessed a woman who is destined to die again!’
She had never imagined she would be transported into the very novel she had been reading before she died.
Eliana raised her head with a resentful expression.