The garden bathed in sunlight was magnificent. Lush bushes, flowers blooming in every imaginable color, and even a tree that covered more than half the window. If even this garden on the outskirts, barely touched by the palace attendants, was this beautiful, then how beautiful must the central garden be?
It was a thought that naturally wandered in that direction, but Jedrier Olson jolted in alarm and patted his own cheeks. Each time he did, his fluffy pink hair bobbed softly in the air. Hair that looked as though the very color of spring had been melted into it made the man's impression seem even gentler.
...Or perhaps ‘even’ easier to push around.
“I'm crazy, I'm crazy.”
As if it weren't enough that he should be worrying about how to get out of the palace without anyone noticing, here he was leisurely wondering about the central garden. He clearly still hadn't properly grasped the harshness of reality. He couldn't afford to act this foolishly.... He knew that perfectly well, but he couldn't help it.
“This is so unfair....”
Those were the words he had said most often over the past few days. Hundreds of times—no, even thousands wouldn't have been enough.
“Why me?”
Jedrier sighed and lay down on the old bed. If he could have had his way, he wanted to flail his arms and legs and throw a tantrum. If throwing a tantrum could change this situation, he would have done it as many times as necessary.
“Why now?!”
If I was going to possess someone, it should have happened much earlier! What good is possessing someone after everything has already happened?
A clever protagonist would probably take the initiative and act to change the future, but.... Jedrier was a little different from that kind of protagonist.
Drive? He had none.
Courage? He had very little.
Worrying? That was what he did every waking moment.
Risking danger to get what he wanted? Impossible. Why? Because he was a coward!
“Hiing....”
Like a lone weed battered by pouring rain, Jedrier curled himself into a ball. A whiny sound squeezed past his lips. It felt as though this entire situation were forcibly grinding him down. Like it had shoved him into a corner and was kicking him.... And even then, he couldn't fight back and was simply taking the beating.
“Why did it have to be this novel...?”
He had possessed someone. In <The Emperor Who Doesn’t Know Love Is Too Much!>.
Just as the title suggested, it was a romance novel about a cruel emperor who knew nothing of love gradually coming to understand it.
The problem was the role Jedrier played in this novel.
The Emperor? If that were the case, he wouldn't be sitting here feeling this miserable. The Emperor before Jedrier possessed him would surely have been cruel and utterly merciless. But the person occupying that body now would have been an ordinary citizen far removed from cruelty. Therefore, all the countless things the Emperor had done in the novel would never happen. Instead of horrifying events where blood—and sometimes even chunks of flesh—flew everywhere, there would only be peaceful days so uneventful they might become boring. Of course, people would be suspicious if a person changed by 180 degrees overnight, but since the person in question was the Emperor, no one would dare openly question him. It would have been absolutely perfect.
The protagonist who would fall into the romance of the century with the Emperor? The road ahead would be so thorny it could make one choke just thinking about it... but there would still be a little hope. No matter how harsh the process was, the ending was happy.
A villain who caught the Emperor's eye and got quietly disposed of without anyone knowing? Then all he had to do was avoid doing anything that might annoy the Emperor, right? He could live pretending not to see what he saw and not to hear what he heard. Bowing his head servilely in order to survive would have been as easy as eating porridge.
An extra whose role he didn't even know? Then he only had to get away from the imperial palace, the center where everything happened, so that would actually be easier.
Jedrier let out another sigh.
“If my parents saw me, they'd nag me that I'd sigh a hole into the ground.”
But if his parents from his previous life knew about this situation, they would probably allow him to sigh. If anything, they would have sprung upright from their graves and shoved him in the back, demanding to know why he was wasting time sighing when he should be running away immediately.
Jedrier buried his face in the flat pillow that had no volume to speak of.
“It's cold....”
The window latch was broken, so every time the wind blew, the window rattled noisily, and cold air seeped through the cracks in the walls. The birds that went ‘coo, coo’ every night perched beside the broken window, constantly looking for a chance to slip inside. The embarrassing memory of discovering glowing eyes by the window in the middle of the night and screaming his head off rose vividly in his mind again.
“Still, it's a good thing it's winter.”
If it were summer, he wouldn't have been able to escape the scorching sunlight. He would have slowly and painfully suffocated to death in the heat. So being cold was better.
Even if it was cold enough to make his skin crawl....
“Think positively....”
Not a single positive thought came to mind, but he had no choice. He would have to brainwash himself like this if nothing else. Jedrier pulled the clothes scattered around him—clothes that were closer to rags—toward himself.
“I just have to run away.”
Escape from the imperial palace? It would be difficult, but he didn't think it was impossible. If Jedrier were living in the very center of the imperial palace and every little thing he did was reported straight to the Emperor, then it would be impossible even to attempt it, but fortunately, that wasn't the case.
This place was peaceful, monotonous, and an outer palace that no one cared about. If he timed it well, disappearing without anyone noticing should be... as easy as lying down and eating rice cakes, shouldn't it?
As hope began to bubble up little by little, Jedrier clenched his fist.
“I need to run away as soon as possible.”
He had no idea when that incident from the original novel would happen. It could happen tonight, a month from now, or even a year later. The original novel hadn't given an exact time, so there was no way to guess.
[One day, the Emperor swung his sword for no reason at all. There was no one anywhere who could stop him. Only when the sun began to rise dimly at dawn did the massacre come to an end. Those who survived held their breath, and the dead said nothing.
“I'm hungry.”
As he said that, the Emperor threw his blood-soaked sword onto the floor. More than eighty people fell victim to that one-sided massacre. Among them was....]
Jedrier was ‘one’ of the more than eighty people killed by the Emperor.
“Haa....”
Another deep sigh squeezed past his lips.
“He's fucking crazy. Seriously.”
The Emperor was a madman.
And Jedrier was the pitiful madman who had married that madman.
* * *
At first, he had been so bewildered that he had no idea what was happening. He had definitely closed his eyes in his room, on his own bed, but when he opened them, an old, worn ceiling was above him. When he shot upright in alarm, the sight of a room even more run-down than the ceiling entered his eyes.
‘Huh?’
And what was wrong with his voice?
He staggered out of the bed that looked ready to collapse at any moment, crossed a floor riddled with holes, and reached the broken window. The shock he had felt when he saw his face reflected there....
Even now, remembering it made goosebumps rise all over his body.
Fortunately, as time passed, fragments of what the original owner of this body had gone through began returning to him. And he realized that this was inside a novel he had read.
If nothing had come back to him at all, the already bleak road ahead would have felt even more hopeless.
“Jedrier Olson....”
The unwanted child of House Olson, a boy who had spent his entire life being pointed at and treated as though he must surely have been picked up somewhere, had been sold to the Emperor.
No.
It would be more accurate to say that his family had shoved him onto the road to death.
The chances of entering the palace as a concubine and living comfortably in luxury?
It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say they were nonexistent.
After all, to put it nicely, the Emperor was a warlike man who simply did not know the meaning of fear.
Of course, there were also rumors that he was generous as long as people stayed within the line.
But there was one problem.
No one knew what ‘line’ the Emperor had drawn!
An entire week might pass without anyone dying, yet on another day, more than ten people could die at once.
Even so, the nobles worked tirelessly to push their own children into the seat beside the Emperor.
The Emperor tilted his head at the nobles clamoring that he ought to take concubines. Then he lightly tapped the armrest with his fingers. It was hardly any noise at all, yet it was enough to silence the nobles who had been loudly arguing.
‘Concubines?’
‘You must all be struggling to make ends meet. If you're that desperate to reduce the number of mouths you have to feed.’
‘If you want to send them, then send them. I'll wrap them up nicely and send them back.’
‘Though I can't say what condition they'll be in....’
It was practically the same as saying, If you want to send me concubines, then send them. I'll kill them.
Some nobles tucked their tails between their legs and fled after that blood-chilling warning, while others paid it no mind and continued pushing their children into the palace as concubines.
Jedrier Olson's father and family belonged to the latter group.
‘We're finally getting some use out of that decent-looking face. I was wondering when it would ever come in handy.’
‘Exactly. While you're at it, try fluttering around in front of His Majesty a little. You should repay us somehow for raising you all this time.’
‘If he dies, do you think His Majesty will give us a generous compensation payment?’
‘If he does, great. If not, well... at least we'll get rid of the family's disgrace without having to dirty our own hands.’
Remembering the vile things they had said made Jedrier clench his fists without thinking.
He swung them wildly through the air and ground his teeth.
He wanted nothing more than to punch his pillow, but if he did that, the pillow—which at least still vaguely possessed the shape of a pillow—might disappear altogether, so he barely restrained himself.
“You call that raising someone? You call that raising me?”