Not long ago, I had been just an ordinary office worker in Korea. My only small joy in life was reading romance fantasy novels whenever a new chapter happened to be uploaded.

And yet… here I was, experiencing something straight out of one of those very novels.

With a bewildered heart, I looked at the scene unfolding before my eyes.
The room, steeped in old-fashioned elegance, looked like a place where a noble might live.
Had I only seen it in a photograph or while traveling, I might have admired it in peace. But now—faced with this reality—I could hardly notice its beauty at all.

Yes. I had possessed the world of the romance fantasy novel I’d been so happily reading lately.
The possession itself was shocking enough, but there was an even greater problem.

The body I had entered wasn’t that of a person—it was a doll.

The time it took to realize I had possessed a novel and the time it took to realize I had become a doll were hardly any different. In fact, I became aware of being a doll even before fully accepting that I’d entered a novel.

One morning, I woke to find my body unresponsive.
It reminded me of a story I had once read in the newspaper about a man who suddenly became completely paralyzed overnight.

‘Don’t tell me I’ve ended up like that man?’

Gripped by fear, I soon noticed something strange.
The room before my eyes was not the one I knew so well.
The night before, I had clearly fallen asleep in my own bedroom.
So what was this unfamiliar, romance-fantasy-like room?

‘Did someone remodel my studio while I was asleep?’

But that was impossible. I hadn’t heard a single sound all night.

Amid all the confusion, my gaze caught the large mirror on the opposite side of the room—so wide it reflected the entire space.

And there, in the spot where I should have been, sat a doll.

At that sight, the truth struck me: my body was no longer moving as I willed it.

‘No way… This can’t be real.’

That was the first moment I realized I had become a doll.

How absurd, to wake up one day, not as an animal, but as an inanimate doll.
The situation was so ridiculous that I didn’t even have the energy to lament my fate.

Whose doll had I become? Where was I?
I wanted to grasp the situation, but I couldn’t even move.
No one entered the room, leaving me with no way of knowing exactly what had happened.

The room itself looked Western, so old-fashioned it seemed almost foreign.
Then… had I possessed the body of a doll belonging to some wealthy household abroad?

As I was wondering, the door opened.

‘Beautiful…’

The thought came to me at once. A man so striking in appearance had stepped inside.

He didn’t look Korean. His features were those of a Westerner.
That confirmed it, or so I thought. I must have possessed a foreigner’s doll.

“Prepare for bed immediately.”

“Yes, Duke Layton.”

At his words, answered by a maid in uniform standing near the door, I froze.

‘Wait… How can I understand this? It isn’t Korean. Is this some kind of perk for transmigrators?’

Nothing made sense. Least of all the fact that I had become a doll.

Then, suddenly, the name the maid had spoken ‘Layton’ struck me as familiar.

Of course, it was a name that could easily appear in any number of stories or media. But why did it feel this familiar?

‘Ah…!’

At last, I realized where I had heard it.
It was the very name of the dark lord in the romance fantasy I had been reading only yesterday.

In fact, it was strange I hadn’t recognized it immediately.

Come to think of it, wasn’t the novel’s mastermind also the lord of a territory, and a duke?

I turned back to the man the maid had addressed as Duke Layton, recalling the description of the dark lord, ‘Keris Layton’.

『The jet-black hair that fell over Keris’s brow was like ebony. His eyes, so dark they seemed to pull you in, had a dullness to them. Whether from poor health or constant overwork, his skin was always pale. That pallor only amplified his beauty, giving him an almost otherworldly air.』

Apart from anything else, the dark-eyed, black-haired lord and the family name Layton matched the dark mastermind from the novel I’d been reading.

‘Really. So what am I supposed to do with that? As if it weren’t bad enough to wake up as a doll, now I’ve even entered the actual novel. Isn’t this a little too much?’

While I was busy thinking that, the door closed and the man was left alone. He muttered to himself as if denying my thoughts.

“His Majesty Schmidt said he would reconsider the matter I mentioned last time.”

Schmidt? Schmidt, you say?

I couldn’t recall anything about Keris all at once, but the name Schmidt made every memory I had snap into place. Schmidt Ratia, he was the male lead I’d been reading about, the emperor of a country in that novel. Since the man had used the honorific ‘His Majesty,’ Schmidt had to be the same emperor.

Denying it any further was pointless. The half-beliefs I’d had cleared up in an instant. The man before my eyes was the dark mastermind from the book I’d been reading: Keris Layton.

Was I dreaming? First the novel’s villain appeared, and now the male lead was being mentioned, had I been reading too deeply into it? But it felt far too vivid for a dream, and neither the maid’s speech, the clothing nor the room’s décor made sense for the modern world.

I had no choice but to accept it: I had transmigrated into the romance fantasy I’d been reading, and into a doll, no less.

‘Of all things, why did I have to possess a doll that happens to be in the dark lord’s chamber?’

It surprised me to learn that Keris, the mastermind, kept such a doll—something out of a little girl’s story—by his bed. In the book, Keris had been depicted as cold, sharp, and almost inhuman in his lack of warmth; so much so that I’d wondered whether he was really even a living person. Yet here he was, treating a doll like a cherished companion, placing it beside his bed.

And then he said its name.

“Sarina, as you know, I have lived my life for our family.”

He named the doll and spoke to it every night before sleep. In short, the doll I had possessed was Keris’s beloved doll.

“If you weren’t here, I probably wouldn’t be able to sleep properly.”

Apparently, unless he spoke to that doll, he could not sleep. I was dumbfounded.

‘Is this truly the villain from the book? The one who torments the heroine and the male lead and meets a tragic end?’ 

It was hard to believe, but everything he said matched what I’d read in the novel.

Who would have thought Keris Layton had such a cute hobby?

Each morning, Keris left for the palace like clockwork. Each night, he returned to this very mansion—this bedroom—and poured out his day’s events and his feelings to me. From what I’d read in the book, I knew the outline, but seeing him confess like this made it clear that his becoming a ‘dark mastermind’ had a lot to do with his upbringing. He was always written as cynical, so I’d assumed he didn’t dwell on the past. But hearing him confide in me every night, that proved otherwise.

“Sometimes I wonder if this is the right way to live. It’s ridiculous. I know such thoughts are no use to the Layton family but still…”

He had lived his whole life for his family. With no one to share his true feelings with, he confessed to a doll, and if he didn’t, he couldn’t sleep. The more I listened, the more genuinely sorry I felt for the circumstances Keris faced.

“How I wish you were a real person. Now there’s truly no one I can tell anything to.”

The more nights I heard Keris speak, the more I wanted to be the person who could keep him company. I knew well that simply having someone listen could be an enormous comfort. In my eyes, Keris’s ultimate downfall in the novel felt like the result of never having anyone by his side.

‘I never expected to feel pity for the villain in a book.’ 

If it had been back when I only enjoyed novels as a pastime, I never would have thought that.

Even so, there was nothing I could do. I was only Keris Layton’s beloved doll unable to speak, unable to move. Even if I longed to listen to him, comfort him, and console him in person, what use was such a wish?

Perhaps that wish was the cause of what followed. At an unexpected moment, my desire came true.