“I won’t kill you.”
Good.
I told him to kill me, sure—but that didn’t mean I actually wanted to die.
“I’ll show you. I’ll show you what kind of emperor I’ll become—how great—someone you looked down on so completely.”
I already knew, because I’d read it in the book, but still… sparing the person who’d tried to kill him over and over. Yeah. The protagonist really was built different.
Instead of spitting out curse-soaked lines like in the original and getting her throat cut by the protagonist’s knight, Sasha answered quietly.
“…I’ll look forward to it.”
At Sasha’s sudden politeness—Sasha, who normally spat casual speech like it was nothing—the gold eyes that had been shining with crystalline clarity rippled hard.
Yeah! That was me admitting I recognize you. You noticed, right?
Hiding her excitable inner voice, Sasha exited the novel like that.
And then—
Even while constantly watching the protagonist’s mood, Sasha was living her most comfortable days since the possession.
That was when the thunderbolt hit.
[Isn’t Sasha the real loyal subject?]
She nags him nonstop for “not acting like royalty,” but then demonstrates perfect etiquette right in front of Eddie every time (Eddie gets stimulated and masters etiquette in a year; she’s basically a one-hit legendary tutor).
Yeah, she poisoned Eddie, but thanks to that he avoided a much bigger assassination plot (if he’d stayed at the party venue, he would’ve gotten wiped out with his subordinates—bad ending).
She insults his dead dad to his face, but she never actually lays a hand on Eddie’s family (other guys smile in front of him, then the second they’re at a disadvantage they go straight for his family).
Eddie literally says from their first meeting that he’s never seen someone so beautiful (the only eye candy in Eddie’s bleak life).
The moment she loses, she doesn’t get pathetic—she surrenders immediately (and sincerely advises Emperor Eddie that for a strong imperial authority, he should kill her).
When you list it out, there’s nobody as kind as Sasha.
⌎Are you just face-blind for hotties?
⌎Okay okay, but there’s something weird mixed in there lol
⌎Sasha stans could open a laundry shop with how hard they’re washing her
⌎One more: Edward gets used to Sasha’s face so seduction schemes don’t work at all. His beauty standard becomes Sasha, so every day he’s like “she’s not as pretty as Sasha” lmao
⌎If we’re being serious, even the “protagonist’s side” did bad stuff too. People just let it slide as “a mistake.” Sasha gets framed as a villain, but compared to them she’s pretty mild.
⌎Exactly. They excuse the protagonist’s friends and subordinates because “circumstances,” but only call Sasha wicked.
⌎If you judge by circumstances, Sasha is the most understandable one, no? Like—ten years ago your sister dies and you cut ties with your brother-in-law, then he suddenly dumps his illegitimate kid at your house. And that kid keeps dragging in foster parents and relatives until your home turns into a marketplace. You’d just accept that?
⌎Whatever. If Sasha’s face is that level, even if she ruins a country she’s innocent
⌎Facts. The one most serious about Sasha’s face is Edward.
.
.
.
⌎Sudden re-evaluation lol
⌎Sasha, do whatever you want!!
Re-evaluation—there was nothing Sasha wanted less.
She wanted to live quietly and peacefully, without attracting anyone’s attention, just like this.
But the thing she’d brushed off as a ridiculous dream grabbed her by the ankle.
“By His Majesty’s sacred command, Marquess Sasha Ambrose is to return to the capital at once!”
*****
The first time I even learned that book existed was because of a friend with a reputation for being a human beauty detector.
“Hey. The villain in here is insanely handsome.”
My friend was the type who loved anything and everything—celebrity, random person, cartoon character, even animals—as long as it was pretty. But this time, it was hard to agree so easily.
“…It’s a novel. You can see their face?”
I got called an uncultured idiot, and then I was forced to read it.
I took the book anyway because I had nothing to do over the weekend, but the moment I saw it was over ten volumes long, I was instantly sick of it.
Since I couldn’t possibly read all of it, I figured I’d at least pretend—so I searched online.
Except there was no plot summary anywhere.
Everyone was just suffering over one character’s looks.
[How is he even named Sasha?]
[Sasha, marry me. Right now.]
[No matter how I think about it, Sasha was insane from his very first appearance.]
[In this dry, ruined world, the only time spring breezes blow and everything goes sparkly is when Sasha shows up. Literally only then! When he talks, though—lol]
[Pretty isn’t everything? The protagonist himself—Mr. Righteousness Incarnate—still gasps in admiration every time he sees Sasha’s face, even after all the trash he pulls.]
Reading the titles one after another, it was easy to guess that the villain my friend had been praising and the character named “Sasha” were the same person.
Sasha Ambrose.
Age in the story: twenty-five to twenty-seven.
Head of a marquessate.
A face capable of conquering the world.
“If he can conquer the world with his face, why does he start a rebellion?”
Once I learned Sasha’s setup, a fundamental question hit me.
“Do you only find out if you actually read the book?”
No matter how deep I dug through the boards, it didn’t look like anyone was going to answer that. And if I asked my friend, I’d just get yelled at.
So in the end, I opened the book.
I should’ve just read it from the start.
Muttering that I’d wasted a whole day, I pushed through the wall of dense text filling every page.
“Can we get some readability, please.”
Past the protagonist’s depressing, gutter-dump childhood, past the revelation of his birth secret—finally came the first appearance scene of Sasha that everyone had been applauding.
From the protagonist’s point of view, Sasha’s looks were… overwhelmingly beautiful.
“Isn’t this love at first sight?”
If not, then how was he spending an entire page doing nothing but praising the guy’s face?
“The protagonist’s a looks guy.”
I snorted—then got sucked into the book without realizing it.
When the weekend ended and I returned it, my friend looked at me with bright, expectant eyes. I nodded.
“Sasha’s pretty.”
“Right?”
They started bragging again about how they only ever stan the prettiest people, how pretty people rule the worl—
“But he died.”
I said it without thinking, and instantly became a dead man walking.
If anyone deserved to be called a dead man, wasn’t it Sasha Ambrose?
“How could you kill Sasha?!”
I didn’t kill him—the protagonist’s knight did. And considering what he’d done up to that point, it was karma.
“I admit his face is gorgeous, but he’s total trash. He kind of deserved it, didn’t he?”
Being pretty didn’t erase everything he’d done.
Even if that was true, though, I probably didn’t need to say it that bluntly.
Not if I’d known I was about to become Sasha Ambrose.
“Milord Marquess—have you awakened?”
*****
I died of a heart attack.
And when I opened my eyes again, I was Sasha Ambrose.
Worse—I was him during his most miserable, brutal period.
The Marquess and Marchioness had died in an accident. And then, as if that weren’t enough, his only remaining blood relative—his older sister—was reported dead as well.
Seventeen-year-old Sasha Ambrose had collapsed from the news, and then woken up.
That was me.
If someone had to become Sasha Ambrose anyway, wouldn’t it have been better if it was one of the countless fans?
Turning seventeen again wasn’t the worst thing in the world.
But being crushed by backbreaking work from this age?
That was too much.
A kid loses his parents, then his sister dies a month later, then he collapses and stays down for two whole weeks—and nobody thought to cover his work even once?
If that was impossible, at least give the kid time to process reality after he wakes up.
But no.
The second they confirmed there was nothing physically wrong with “Sasha’s body,” they shoved work into my hands.
“How can a seventeen-year-old be a marquess?”
This world was insane.
They expected a not-even-an-adult kid to govern an entire territory. The emperor who approved it, the vassals who brought him work like it was the most natural thing in the world—none of them were sane.
Because of that, I didn’t even have time to properly admire the face that supposedly could conquer the world.
And that had consequences.
“Milord Marquess, are you all right?”
I still hadn’t adjusted to this face.
I nearly collapsed just from seeing my reflection in the window, and I clenched my teeth. How did the people in this world look at this face and not faint?
“Perhaps a restorative tonic—”
“I’m fine.”
I couldn’t even joke that I almost fainted because I was too shocked by my own face.
Sasha Ambrose was a boy who never opened his heart to anyone except his parents and sister—a boy whose looks matched his price tag.
It was impressive enough that the Marquess and Marchioness had accepted, without complaint, the name their seven-year-old eldest daughter picked for the baby sibling she was about to get.
But Sasha was impressive too—because he’d made it this far without ever resenting the sister who’d given him a name like that.
Anyway.
The boy overflowing with love for his family spent all the kindness and patience he had—exclusively on his family.
Which meant he never joked around with vassals or servants.
Acting cute because he was sick, pouting because he didn’t want to work—those were all things Sasha would never do.
And I’d tried it.
But people just assumed I’d finally snapped from the shock.
Besides, doing things like that with this face was an actual public nuisance.
No one else nearly fainted at the face the way I did, but everyone started making mistake after mistake—breaking household items, ruining documents they’d just finished organizing.
In the end, I became what Sasha was in the original: a cold, prickly, expressionless boy.
My body was a noble’s, but my soul was still an ordinary person.
I couldn’t stand watching things I couldn’t even bring myself to ask the price of get destroyed, or seeing a full day’s work become worthless.
I haven’t even gotten used to my own face yet.
Expecting other people to be fine was shameless.
So seventeen-year-old Marquess Sasha handled everything assigned to him without a single complaint, quietly, steadily—until he gradually grew accustomed to being “Sasha Ambrose.”
Eight years later.
Even now, with the beginning of the original story right in front of me, I still hadn’t rested once. I’d worked like a dog, nonstop, while filling my chest with bitter resentment toward the emperor—my dead sister’s husband.
“Are you insane? Absolutely not.”
The moment I let my inner voice slip, the knight the emperor sent began to flounder.
“B-but His Majesty—”
“I said it’s not possible.”
At my icy reply that left no room to wedge even a hair into, the knight made a pitiful face.
“The Ambrose house and the imperial family have a deep bond, do they not?”
“What bond?”
His words were ridiculous.
“The current empress is the third one, is she? No—she changed recently, so she’s the fourth now. What is some not-even-previous empress—some empress from three empresses ago—supposed to mean to me?”
Even saying it is exhausting.
An emperor with no ability who only ever made work and dumped the consequences on the lower nobles—now he was trying to dump his filth directly onto my head.
Of course, that “filth” was the protagonist.
And no matter what I said here, the protagonist was going to come to my estate.
Like this.
“However… he has already arrived.”
Eight years was plenty of time to get used to how this world worked.
Call it the novel’s “force,” call it whatever—no matter what I did, the end result was always the same.
Whether because people misunderstood things, or because circumstances conveniently appeared that made it “inevitable,” for every possible reason, the image of Marquess Ambrose remained unchanged: a beautiful but cold, ruthless man.
The harder I tried to change the outcome, the worse things became—and the more time I wasted.
It wasn’t the result that changed.
Only the process leading up to it.
But I didn’t despair.
Like I said: even if the result couldn’t change, the process could change as much as I wanted.
And the ending of this novel wasn’t Sasha’s death—it was the protagonist becoming emperor.
From his first appearance to his final exit, Sasha influenced the protagonist’s growth massively, for better or worse—so I couldn’t change the fact that I became the villain.
But what if I changed the way I tormented the protagonist?
The method.
Then I can avoid dying.
I wasn’t particularly imaginative, and if I got greedy and slipped—if I accidentally stepped outside the “villain” frame—the whole plan could collapse.
So all I had to do was follow the original reasonably closely…
…while making sure I didn’t die at the very end.
At first, I need to make it unmistakably clear who I am.
After all, I was the main villain of the novel.
Sasha threw open the drawing room door—where an uninvited guest was waiting—and greeted the protagonist.
“You really can’t hide how vulgar you are, no matter who you take after.”
A villain’s first impression was supposed to be unforgettable.