Prologue

I used to have dreams about my current job.

It was an internship at a five-star hotel that I had just managed to get. As if the job wasn’t hard enough, I had to take care of people all over again in my dreams.

I was becoming increasingly annoyed.

Last time I dreamt I was in a fight in the hotel lobby with a guest, but this time it seemed to be some kind of western man.

A handsome man with jet-black hair was looking at me with a terrifying face.

To be honest, I was a little intimidated, but I kept a poker face and soaked a towel in the basin in front of me.

When the man removed his gloves, there was sticky blood on his hands, as if he had just killed someone.

I stared at the man’s hand through blurry eyes and wondered what the hell I had seen before I went to bed.

Did I watch an American TV series?

But in contrast to the TV shows, the room had a more Middle Ages feel.

The place I was in was filled with stylized decorations and ornate patterns I’d never seen before.

“Wipe.”

The man who so brazenly commanded me was obviously a noble.

Even in my damned dreams, I was a maid or a servant.

Why the hell am I doing other people’s work, especially in my dreams.

I should have listened to my mum. Why did I say I would do this, leaving behind other convenient and easy things.

Oh, I don’t actually know.

I knelt down in front of the man and measured the temperature of the towel.

The temperature was just right.

I then carefully unfolded the man’s hand.

I almost frowned right then and there.

Because his palm was marked with a cross-shaped scar that looked quite old.

With a strange feeling of deja-vu, I began to clean his hand even more thoroughly.

Fortunately, unlike in reality, the dream customer didn’t waste any energy, despite the fact that he looked like he’d been chewing sh*t the whole time.

At least it didn’t smell as bad.

I mean I could smell the faint scent of blood, which made me feel bad, but it was a dream, so I didn’t really care.

From the looks of it, he didn’t seem to be the type of person who likes small talk. Without a comment, I did exactly what he told me to do and stepped back neatly.

“Go back.”

The man waved as he sat tiredly on the couch, and I made my way to the door in silence.

As the ornate door closed behind me with a gentle, yet heavy, thud, I was greeted by the startled eyes of people.

‘What?’

For once in my life, a dream was so detailed. I admired it silently to myself.

“Rose…….”

A brown-eyed woman said, running to me.

“You made it out alive!”

I frowned at her words.

At that moment, with a loud clang, the porcelain plate someone was holding shattered, and the shards flew towards my ankle, scratching it.

I stood still, looking for the culprit of the commotion.

It was a frightened looking middle-aged man who appeared to be a servant.

“Oh my gosh!”

The brown-eyed woman shifted her gaze to my ankle and I flinched at the dull pain.

It was only then that I realized the strange language I had been listening to wasn’t Korean.

I looked at my ankle with red blood slightly leaking out.

By the way, do you feel pain in your dreams?

‘Where am I?’

Suddenly, my head started to throb and hurt.

Panorama-like scenes passing by, various sounds, and then, I passed out.

Chapter 0

I opened my eyes wide.

Outside, it was dawn. I reached for my mobile phone out of habit, but it was strangely absent.

“Where did it go?”

I frowned and forced my eyes open. When I blinked, I could faintly see a strange bundle of pink threads.

…… What the hell.

I ran my fingers along the mysterious pink threads and touched the top of my head.

“…….”

I swallowed hard and jerked upright from the bed like I was having a seizure, and found myself in a mirror.

My hair was the color of a blossoming cherry blossom, a pretty overwhelming color, and my face was flushed white.

“Ugh, aaaagh!”

This wasn’t my face.

Worst of all, my hair was pink…… and it made me dizzy. It didn’t make sense.

It was soft to the touch and not even dyed hair.

“Kyaah!”

I pulled at my hair.

Did this make any sense?

I slid off the bed, almost crawling, and stepped in front of the mirror.

“Ha, haha.”

The face I’d been familiar with for years was gone, and in its place stood a girl who looked about 19 years old.

My heart skipped a beat, and my head spun when I saw someone other than myself in the mirror.

Suddenly, a few fragmentary memories rushed through my mind.

Images flashed before my eyes, one after the other.

This girl’s name is Rose, and she is the daughter of an unimportant local baron.

Her parents died young, and she began working as a maid at the crown prince’s palace a year ago.

And as of yesterday, she has become the crown prince’s bedchamber maid. A maid who cleans and tidies the bedroom.

Goosebumps broke out all over my body as I was frightened to relive Rose’s memory.

‘Pow-!’

“Ugh!”

I clamped my ears tightly against the hearing that followed.

The familiar crosswalk on my way home from work, the scenery, and even the novel I was reading to the very end.

My heart plummeted to my throat.

I reflexively pinched my cheek.

It hurts.

That means the situation I was in now was real, not a dream conjured up by some damn internship neuroses.

I wished it were not true.

My eyes flashed back to the last sentence I’d read on my phone screen.

And then I remembered the big hand I had wiped last night, just before I passed out.

The cross-shaped scar across his palm.

I had a strong thought that the identity of the deja vu I felt at that time was not something that could be taken lightly.

The stares of horror as I walked out of the room unharmed, in a line, moments before passing out.

And then.

I started to fiddle with my thumb nail.

A hysterical chuckle escaped my lips.

“This is crazy.”

There was no doubt that something deranged had happened.

I turned around and began to search the room.

I needed some kind of proof.

Proof that I wasn’t crazy.

I rummaged around like a madman.

Then, on a small desk, a leather-bound book caught my eye.

It was a diary.

Who in the world writes a diary these days.

Just seeing it lying there on an empty desk sent a chill down my spine.

It’s funny, but the situation I was in felt like something out of one of my favorite genre novels.

A different world, a different person, and a diary lying in plain sight.

I reached out with a trembling hand and picked it up.

Suddenly, it glowed with a pale light.

“What a weird effect…….”

As I expected, the first page of the diary outlined the day’s routine I was to follow, and the back page contained the diary of this body, Rose.

[Scary.

Emily, the previous bedchamber maid, is dead.

It’s my turn next, what am I going to do?]

I furrowed my brow.

What kind of bullshit is this?

I quickly turned the page to the next page.

This was weird, to say the least.

This diary…….

It’s almost as if it was made for me to see, isn’t it?

[The Duke wants to kill the Crown Prince, Calix Posman.]

I gasped at the name at the top of the page.

Calix Posman?

I instantly recognised him.

This was no mere coincidence.

The scar on his palm, and then the name.

“No way…….”

It matched the description of the male lead in my favorite r19 romance fantasy novel from the early 2000s.

I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs that this couldn’t possibly be true. I couldn’t accept the reality.

My hands began to shake.

[I have been ordered to kill the crown prince. If I fail to do so, I will be killed.

I’m just a maid, how can I kill the crown prince? They’re telling me to just die].

Kill the crown prince?

I couldn’t help but laugh.

This is some kind of nightmare scenario.

And what is she doing writing this in her personal diary?

Is she suicidal?

If this diary falls into the wrong hands, it would be quicker to be killed by the crown prince than by the Duke himself.

I nervously tossed the diary onto the bed and rubbed my forehead.

So, to roughly summarize the situation, I had become a bedchamber maid for a man called the Crown Prince.

And that crown prince is…… a f*cking bloodthirsty tyrant.

And this was the beginning of a novel from the early 2000s.

It’s a far cry from the shitty protagonists being published now.

I regretted, bitterly, that I had picked up an older book at that time.

I should have rather read a reverse harem romance than a bloodshed story.

If I was really possessing someone in the book, it was definitely not one of the main characters, but an extra.

And worse, I’d fallen off the face of the earth long before the real story began.

I really didn’t understand anything.

The novel is told entirely within the limited scope of the male and female protagonists.

Other than that, there was nothing about the life of any kind of working-class people in the novel, which didn’t even distinguish between manservants and maids despite their obvious differences.

I frowned and thought back to last night.

Someone had died by his hands yesterday, too, judging by the fact that the male protagonist had blood on his hands.

I looked at myself in the mirror again with a mixed feeling.

My pink hair was particularly noticeable.

I’d been told I shouldn’t offend the crown prince, but I was one hundred percent sure I would.

“I’m going to lose my mind.”

I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them. Even if this was a mental problem and I was hallucinating, I had to stay alive.

I neatly tied my hair up with a rubber band that lay on my desk.

I opened the diary I’d thrown away and began to memorize the first page of my daily routine.

I chewed through two days’ worth of English in high school in ten minutes.

Memorizing this much was not a chore if I kept my mind straight.

‘Let’s find a way to get out of the palace safely and return home.’

It didn’t matter when that was.

The only way to survive next to a lunatic future tyrant is to wait for the heroine to show up.

Once the heroine appears, the interest in the subordinates will naturally diminish.

I feel a little sorry for the heroine, but the more time she spends with him, the less he’ll care about his maid running away, or at least not chasing her down and killing her.

In the end, there was only one thing I had to do right now.

There was the duke from the diary, and then there was the soon-to-be tyrant.

Whose side would I take, whose way of acting would prolong my life?

The outcome was all too obvious.

According to the original story, the crown prince, Calix Posman, soon kills all his brothers and ascends the throne.

Shouldn’t I at least live another day on the victor’s side?

I fastened up my uniform lying on the tabletop.

Only the world had changed. It would be no different from what I was used to.

I was going to survive this as a modern hospitality professional who was proud to call this my major.

I’d somehow managed to land an internship at a five-star hotel, and I couldn’t miss out on it because of a damn book possession.

I would make it out alive.

No matter what.