My name is Mia Branda Agatha.
Once, I was the eldest daughter of the Agatha family—so influential within the Empire that the word prestigious followed our name wherever it went—and a woman who could steal the hearts of countless men with nothing more than a single glance.

And that wasn’t all.
Whatever I wore or adorned myself with became the next trend, spreading like wildfire. Anything I crafted with my own hands was more than enough to set hearts trembling. Every woman envied me, and even men dared not treat me lightly.

Yes—once.
Once, that is.

***

I no longer know how many lives it has been.
I stopped counting at the tenth regression. After dying and returning so many times, I had long since lost my sanity.

My sense of time has grown dull now, but it hardly matters.
After all, I have already died and been reborn dozens of times, repeating the same life over and over again.

My life, repeated countless times, was not as bad as one might expect—at least at first.
I grew up lacking nothing in any regard. I was loved by many, and I was even born with a beauty that time itself could not erode. Everything was perfect.

Everything, except love.

The woman I am now is the wife of a sluggard. Upon marriage, I lost my family name and came to be called Mia Regi Simon. At the same time, the family that had once supported me collapsed along with my marriage.

All that remained to me was a single title—the wife of Louis Regi Simon.
That was it. Nothing more.

My current husband, Louis, is a playwright so famous that merely mentioning his name would be known across the entire Empire. Once, he worked as a novelist and sold tens of thousands of copies of his books. For that reason, he has now become a powerful figure, keeping many fledgling writers under his wing.

The wealth he amassed was every bit as immense as his fame. It was to the point that, if he reached out his hand while lying in bed, everything he touched might as well have been gold bars—his fortune truly rivaled his renown.

Money came in even if he did nothing at all, and living with him, I never once experienced financial hardship. I was always affluent, always ate well, indulged freely, and dressed in only the finest things.

Seen from the outside, anyone would assume that I married Louis because I was dazzled by his fame and wealth.

But that wasn’t the truth.
Louis and I married after a long—endlessly long—courtship. We loved each other fervently, again and again.

And so, I entrusted my future to him.

Across the entire Empire, marriages like ours were exceedingly rare. And for good reason.
In this era, marriage was nothing more than a kind of alliance contract—a means for one family to prosper through another. Women, moreover, were little more than luxury items meant to make men shine all the brighter.

“I love you, Mia.”

I still remember it.
The moment he shyly whispered those words to me.

Unlike other men, Louis treated me not as a luxury item, but as a person. He whispered love to me every day, courted me earnestly, and even swore that he would devote himself to me. Above all else, he did not try to win my favor with extravagant gifts. Nor did he seek to possess me by force.

I loved him for that.
A man for whom everything began with me and ended with me. That was what I believed Louis Regi Simon to be at his core.

The man he once was was nothing like those vermin who cared only to covet my body.

That was why I could not acknowledge it for a long time.
The fact that Louis had used me.

By the time I realized the truth, I had already been forgotten by the public.

That is why, now, so many people point their fingers at me and claim that I married Louis for his background.
But that is a blatant contradiction—a lie.

To begin with, Louis was neither the son of a wealthy household nor a man of great renown. If anything, it was I, Mia Branda Agatha, who received love calls from every corner of society as a public figure.

I was the one who raised him to where he stands now.
Yes—without a doubt, it was me.

Then why is it that you curse me, and not Louis?

Louis took all of my property, slept with women who were not me, and used my talent to build his own prestige. As if that weren’t enough, his obsession grew increasingly severe—until, in the end, he made it impossible for me to even step outside the mansion.

Ironically, the higher he climbed, the further I sank.
My wings were torn away, shredded to pieces… and at the very end of it all, there was only the abyss.

“Mia, you have more than you need.”

Even as Louis claimed to love me, there had always been a hint of discomfort beneath it. At the time, I had no idea why. Now, thinking back in silence, I realize what he showed me was a form of envy.

It was an inferiority complex—toward me, who was born into wealth and knew far more than he ever could, unlike a mere commoner such as himself. Come to think of it, he was afraid that I knew too much.

“Learn how to be obedient.”

In this era, women were not allowed to be intelligent.
They had to be beautiful—and 반드시 foolish. People called this “innocent charm,” and only women who possessed it were praised.

That was why, given the social climate, women were not taught scholarship. The only learning permitted to them was etiquette—just enough to be displayed in public settings. After all, even if a woman was foolish, she was not allowed to disgrace appearances.

To the point that a poet famous throughout the Empire once put it this way:
A woman is nothing more than an object meant to fill a man’s lacking parts. Her beauty is his prestige, and her body is a field that receives and bears all the seeds he scatters.

What a nauseating piece of nonsense.

“Mia, can’t you act more feminine?”

My mother taught me how to obey, hoping that I would become “the kind of woman this era desires.”
A woman who would kneel like a beast wherever her husband wished, submit even to unjust treatment, and adorn herself beautifully so as not to damage her husband’s reputation.

Everything you lived your entire life doing.

It wasn’t natural—but it had to be. That was the life my mother forced upon me.

“You must always be grateful to your husband and obey him. You have to keep a tight hold on his lower half so his heart doesn’t turn away. That’s the only way you survive.”

I hated hearing those words from my mother’s mouth every single day—more than death itself.
Those words that had been passed down like a sacred duty, from my grandmother, and from her grandmother before her.

They were shameful.
And at the same time… they were terrifying.

I was afraid that those words would become my entire life.

When I was young, I swore that I would never live like my mother. And so, instead of learning flower arrangement or bridal etiquette, I secretly studied. I let nothing slip by if it could raise my worth in any way.

As I learned, I began to think. And before I knew it, I was dreaming of becoming a novelist. By the time I turned eighteen, I was wandering from place to place, trying to publish my story as a book.

“Who would ever buy and read something written by a woman? Get lost!”

The response was always the same. In the end, I submitted my work under a pen name—and before long, my writing entered the world.

The reaction was explosive.

“What? It was written by a woman?”

But it didn’t last long.

“A woman should stay at home, doing housework and supporting her husband. How dare she get above herself and think she can hold a pen. Tsk, tsk!”

Only then did I realize it—the clear limit of how far a woman like me could rise.
If I tried hard enough, I could reach the top in no time.

But society would not allow it.

And so I struggled desperately, trying to stand on equal footing with men in whatever way I could.
I wanted to believe in the miracle of what if.

Even when my mother caught me and beat my calves until they split and bled, I could not bring myself to abandon my dream. It was unbearably unjust—to be forced to live like an object, like a beast, simply because I was not a man. To spend my one and only life as an ordinary woman was worse than death itself.

But in the end, I lived a life no different from my mother’s.
I ran with all my strength and climbed as far as I could, yet the sky was still impossibly high.

There was no such thing as a miracle called what if in this world.

After realizing that with my own body, I chose the path of becoming an ordinary woman.
A life where being loved was enough.

“Are you really quitting writing? Why? There are so few people who write as well as you do, Miss Agatha.”

In that period of deep despair, when I was floundering helplessly, the one I met was Louis.

“What’s wrong with being a woman? Everyone says that no matter how smart a woman is, there’s no use for it—but I think it’s precisely because you’re intelligent that you’re admirable.”

I couldn’t help but be drawn to a man who held ideas so rare in an era like this.

“I’ll help you keep writing.”

The me that even my parents had never supported.
The talent of mine that no one had ever acknowledged.

Louis seemed to understand it—truly.

That was why I never once doubted that the man I chose would be different from the countless vermin out there. I loved him enough that even when Louis changed completely, I was able to understand him.

That forgiving everything, and enduring anything, under the name of love…
was just how foolish it truly was.

Back then, I didn’t know.