Chapter 1. The Death of Ivan Ivanovich

In the birch forests of Russia, a demon lives.

The demon grants one desperate wish in exchange for a precious memory. Thanks to this, people achieve the very thing they dreamed of and yet cannot even remember that it came true.

When I first heard this story from my mother, I thought there could be no tale more foolish in all the world.

Little did I dream that I would become that very fool myself.

* * *

There was a meme that circulated online for a while.

English literature: I shall die for honor.

French literature: I shall die for love.

American literature: I shall die for freedom.

And Russian literature: I shall die.

And here, in all its quintessentially Russian glory, is the novel “The Death of Ivan Ivanovich.”

I was an ordinary graduate student majoring in Russian literature. I fell asleep slumped over my desk as usual, and woke up as a character inside the novel.

Not a romance fantasy, not an otome game… I had transmigrated into Russian classical literature.

In this cold, sodden, nothing-works-right novel, the character I had transmigrated into was the protagonist Ivan Ivanovich’s fiancée, “Katerina Vladimirovna Shatova.”

In a story that always ended with Ivan Ivanovich’s death no matter what, I had already been repeating the same year for the eleventh time.

“Farewell, then, Katerina Vladimirovna. I am going to die now.”

Click. Ivan Ivanovich loaded his pistol with a hollow expression.

Yet my heart was not stirred in the slightest.

‘Here we go again, you insufferable wretch.’

I simply ground my teeth.

As I had demonstrated across several years’ worth of essays during my master’s program in Russian literature in twenty-first-century South Korea, my fiancé Ivan Ivanovich would, no matter what, no matter the circumstances…

K*ll himself.

“Oh, Ivan Ivanovich!”

I rushed forward with the expression of a tragic heroine from an old film and seized Ivan’s arm.

I knew perfectly well that this wouldn’t stop him. I had already watched his head get blown apart six times at close range.

But I couldn’t go on like this. I couldn’t let him die again without a single clue to show for it.

“Why? Why on earth are you so determined to die, Ivan Ivanovich!”

“Because……”

Ivan looked down at my tearful face and murmured as if speaking to himself.

“Because there is no reason not to.”

“……Pardon?”

“And now happens to be…… a fitting time, it seems.”

His green eyes drifted toward the snowfield beyond the window. A smile settled on his pale lips.

‘Lunatic……’

And at last, bang.

The moment he pulled the trigger, the last thing I saw was his straw-colored hair staining red, and my eleventh life as Katerina Vladimirovna came to an end.

* * *

‘Have you heard, Olga Sergeyevna? Apparently the greatest rake in all of Saint Petersburg has moved to our little town.’

‘Oh, I heard as well. That would be the famous Count Morozov?’

‘Exactly. From what I understand, he hasn’t left the house since unpacking his things. Whatever could he be scheming? Have you heard anything from the baroness?’

Here we go again.

I opened my eyes on the bed, listening to gossip I had already heard eleven times before.

“Ugh, it’s cold.”

Truly, the soundproofing and insulation in this room were both appalling. What had woken me wasn’t even the chatter drifting up from downstairs but the cold threatening to freeze my toes solid.

Wondering whether I had perhaps left the window open while sleeping, I pulled back the curtain for the twelfth time.

“Of course not……”

Everything was exactly the same. Even……

Tweet, tweet.

“Good grief, there she goes again.”

Let me clarify: that tweeting sound coming from our backyard was not birdsong.

The setting of this novel was a small town near Saint Petersburg, the capital of the nineteenth-century Russian Empire, and at this point in the year, as winter was setting in, the temperature had dropped to twenty degrees below zero.

It was weather in which even humans avoided going outside, let alone birds.

Tweet, tweet.

So what was that sound? It was our maid Mariya, who had forgotten to bring in the laundry the night before, now beating the frozen clothes off the line with a pole.

“Mariya!”

I called out through the window, and Mariya looked up.

“My, our young miss is awake before noon? What’s gotten into you?”

That’s because this town is so cold it slows your metabolism, that’s what. Do you have any idea how early I used to rise back in my real life?

I swallowed those words and smiled pleasantly.

“Leave the laundry and come deliver a letter for me.”

Mariya pulled off her apron with a sullen expression.

“A letter, first thing in the morning?”

It was an attitude that never failed to irritate me, but I held my tongue. In this hopeless household, Mariya was the only person I could rely on.

Besides, for all her manner, she was good at her job.

“It’s for young Master Dmitri. I’m going to the baroness’s house for tea this afternoon.”

The moment she heard my cousin Dmitri’s name, Mariya brightened predictably.

“I’ll get ready right away!”

“What do you mean, get ready……”

But Mariya had already vanished inside.

‘Hah…… Let me just write the letter.’

I took out some stationery from the drawer and scrawled with my quill.

<Dmitri, come pick me up by two o’clock. If you don’t, I’ll tell Uncle that you’ve been courting Nastasya and planning to run off with her.>

Nastasya was Uncle’s breathtakingly beautiful maid. And true to form for a beautiful maid in a Russian novel, she was simultaneously carrying on with both my uncle and my cousin Dmitri, that is, employer and son at the same time.

A fact I had uncovered during the third loop.

“Miss! The letter, the letter!”

And my poor, oblivious maid Mariya, who knew nothing of any of this, came bursting into my room in the meantime having shed her headscarf and applied lipstick.

“I told you to knock first.”

I handed her the letter.

Over eleven loops, I had not simply sat back and taken everything as it came. I had gathered information and formed plans. It was only that things never went the way I intended.

The moment Ivan’s breathing stopped, my life as Katerina went dark like the end of a film, and I was sent back to the beginning of the novel, one year prior.

By now there was no way not to know it. To break this wretched loop, I had to prevent this man’s death.

This time, I intended to throw away whatever scrap of humanity I still had left in me. To break this insufferable loop, I would stop at nothing.

[Because there is no reason not to.]

That’s what he said, the wretch.

Then I had no choice but to manufacture as many reasons as possible for him not to die.

And what was it that generally saved a person drowning in despair? That thing. You know the one.

“Miss, why do you look like you’re about to be sick?”

Urgh.

I suppressed the nausea and smiled.

“Not at all. I’m in quite a good mood, actually. Because I’m about to try it.”

“Try what?”

“Lo……”

“Lo?”

“Love…… Urgh.”

Yes, objectively speaking, Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov was a remarkably handsome man. But I was someone who had already watched that man’s head explode right in front of me multiple times.

“Miss?”

“Ah, never mind. Go on, hurry. It’d be even better if you brought young Master Dmitri back with you.”

“Leave it to me!”

After Mariya left the room, I sat down at the vanity.

I had already tried leaving this place and disappearing quietly somewhere else several times, and every attempt had failed.

One way or another, Ivan always died or met a similar end, and each time that happened, I was sent back through the loop again.

Ivan and I, Katerina, were bound by a political engagement made in childhood, but after coming of age we had never met privately. The engagement itself was closer to a promise made between our mothers, and after Ivan’s mother passed away, even that had quietly faded into nothing.

In the original story, Katerina’s first meeting with Ivan came in the second half, well after Ivan’s descent into darkness was already quite advanced.

By that point, Ivan barely remembered Katerina, and so her tearful pleading had served only to heighten the tragedy rather than reach him in any meaningful way.

But what if I appeared from the very beginning and saved Ivan from some difficulty? And then stayed close to his side, pouring love over him in abundance?

Fortunately, the Katerina I had transmigrated into had a rather lovely appearance. Bright golden hair, captivating light-brown eyes, and full, vivid red lips. Ah, she was irresistibly alluring.

Ivan, whatever kind of man you are, I will make absolutely certain you cannot die and leave me behind.

When I smiled, the beauty in the mirror smiled back with a quietly sinister grin.