5

“The gods are watching! Are you not afraid!”

“Not particularly.”

“Divine punishment will come. Upon Idmazel, divine punishment will……. urk!”

The man kicked the resisting man in the stomach and flicked his fingers. From the tips of his elegant hand, a shimmering flame took shape, and a small ball of fire appeared.

A Master’s abilities could often be guessed from the color of their eyes and hair. From the moment she had seen those crimson eyes the color of a red flame, she had suspected fire, but she hadn’t expected it to burn this brilliantly, this vividly.

It was past warm, it was hot, and the force radiating off him was almost too much to bear.

Yul felt a strange urge to open her mouth and swallow that fire whole.

“……”

Thud.

The fire caught.

It burned like the trailing fingers of a dancer, like a veil scattered on the wind.

“AAAARGH!”

“Please, please save us—!”

“I don’t want to die, nooooo—!”

The crackling of flames wove through the screams filling the air. With the hospital that had kept Yul caged for so many years as its kindling, the fire blazed with terrifying force.

Flames this fierce should have burned her too, but strangely, Yul felt a deep calm at the center of the firestorm. She was certain this fire would never harm her.

“Save me. Please…… I was wrong about everything. Do whatever you want to me, just please let me live!”

It happened then.

The director had somehow worked free of his ropes and came crawling toward her, half-melting, dragging himself across the ground.

Yul looked down at him as he seized her ankle, then knocked his hand away with a sharp tap.

“Filthy.”

“……!”

“How dare something like you lay a hand on me.”

She was mimicking the man’s arrogant manner of speaking. She couldn’t fully replicate someone born with nobility in his very bones, but Yul wanted to show him something. That she was useful. That she could perform to whatever standard he required.

“Ha! You really are something, aren’t you?”

He laughed, just as she had expected. After chuckling to himself for a good while, he stepped on the director’s head and ground him back down into the ground.

“Feel better now?”

Then, with a massive wall of fire at his back, the beautiful man smiled.

His smile had an almost breezy quality to it, as though the people burning alive behind him were of no concern whatsoever.

“…… Yes.”

Yul, for her part, was equally indifferent to those dying in the flames.

Her past was gone with this.

‘Yulia Vergeus’ would be recorded as having perished in a sudden fire.

Yul found herself curious about the new identity she was about to be given. And how far she could climb with it.

***

“Wh, where am I? My name is Yul! Lee Yul. What country is this?”

“Yulia, Miss, please come to your senses.”

“It’s not Yulia, it’s Yul! Why can’t you understand what I’m saying?”

“And please stop using formal speech with the servants. What on earth has gotten into you?”

“No, listen to me, please! Is there a police station? The police!”

Her consciousness drifted.

Words like distant echoes floated around her ears and tormented her.

Looking back, it was spectacularly foolish, but she had been desperate then. She was only seventeen. At that age, how could anyone immediately accept that they had transmigrated? Calling for the police was a perfectly natural reaction.

“Oh dear, it seems Yulia has gone mad. She must be grief-stricken over losing her mother.”

She had been grabbing every person she could find and asking questions, when a middle-aged woman appeared. Dressed in a violet gown, she shook her head at Yul with a pitying look, but the corners of her mouth were unmistakably lifted.

The girl Yul had transmigrated into was ‘Yulia Cretus,’ the same age as her. Her mother had died of illness less than a year ago, and her father had wasted no time bringing home a stepmother and a stepbrother.

Like something out of a fairy tale, Yulia had been subjected to all manner of mistreatment, and her standing within the household had been steadily shrinking. Then Yulia had made an extreme choice. Yul suspected it had happened at the very same moment she was struck by the freight truck.

“Lock Yulia in her room. I shudder to think what would happen if word spread that the Cretus family’s daughter had lost her mind.”

“Let go of me. Just a moment, just a, aaah!”

Bang!

The door slammed shut. She didn’t make it out through that locked door until a year later, after a Yul on the verge of madness had torn the room apart searching and found Yulia’s diary, reading it cover to cover until she understood everything.

“This is your husband. You’ve turned eighteen, so it’s time to be married.”

When her stepmother had brought in some snake of a man and said those words, Yul should have read the room and run.

But she had hesitated and missed her chance to flee. Back in Korea, all she had ever done was study. Obedience to adults had been drilled into her, and at the time she had simply not known what to do. If it were now, she would have grabbed the vase beside her and smashed it over her stepmother’s head.

“Morgon Vergeus.”

“Oh, h-hello……”

“Tch, pitifully thin. Not much to hold onto in bed.”

Oh, if it were now, she would press her thumbs into those two eyes that swept over her with such contempt and dig them out. Make sure he could never look at anyone like that again.

Yul ground her teeth even knowing this was all a dream.

She kept dreaming it because the injustice still burned. Every time she looked back, the version of herself trembling with fear back then made her want to scream.

“Now, sign this document. From today, you’ll be Yulia Vergeus.”

“I, I don’t want to. I don’t want to get married!”

“Everyone, hold Yulia down.”

“No—!”

The strong servants pinned her down. Then the man who was to be her husband stepped on her right wrist to keep her still. That was how her thumbprint was forced onto the page. A single mark that rewrote her identity.

It was the beginning of hell.

But after walking through the wasteland of hell, Yul had finally found her demon.

All those years of believing that staying alive would eventually open a path to revenge had finally paid off.

With neither life nor death holding any fear over her, there was nothing in this world she could not do.

***

“Ah, ah! Ah!”

Yul forced her eyes open at the nasal sounds coming through the thin wall. Whatever was happening over there was far too loud, but fortunately the noise died down quickly.

‘This is…… an inn?’

Her entire body ached like it was falling apart, as though she had been lying still for a very long time.

Thud!

Forcing her stiff, protesting body to move, Yul ended up tumbling off the bed entirely.

“I’m free.”

Face-down on the floor, she mumbled the words.

An unfamiliar smell. An unfamiliar carpet. The dust of an unfamiliar place.

“Finally. Finally……”

Scratch.

Dragging her nails across the floor, Yul pushed herself upright on trembling legs. Barely managing to stay standing, she moved her gaunt, branch-thin body toward the window.

Drawn as though in a trance, she stared outside and fumbled to undo the window latch. But something was wrong with it. The latch just spun in place and wouldn’t open.

‘Should I just break the glass.’

Yul had been glaring at the latch with unfocused eyes, and she spun around to look for something to use as a hammer, when:

“Want me to open it?”

The man was looking down at her with a sly, lopsided grin.

Yul narrowed her eyes into slits, crossed her arms, and looked him up and down. The meaning was clear. Open it already.

“Beg me to open it and I will. Looks like you don’t even know how.”

“……”

“Don’t want to? You really ought to know at least that much. Worrying.”

The man stroked his chin and studied her. His eyes had the calculating look of someone at a market, lifting a fish out of a basket to weigh it.

Yul’s instincts told her this was a moment to yield.

He hadn’t finished sizing up her worth yet. And he still hadn’t even told her his name, had he. She had picked up that his family name was ‘Idmazel,’ but she had no idea how significant that name was. She had been thrown into a locked ward before she could learn anything about this world.

“Sweet……heart. Open it…… please.”

The pet name felt foreign in her mouth, but she had borrowed it from him. He used that cringeworthy word ‘sweetheart,’ so she figured she could use it back.

But the man wasn’t satisfied with that. He pushed further and snickered.

Yul swallowed the urge to stomp on his foot and forced her reluctant lips to move.

“……Please.”

“Good girl. Obedient and quick on the uptake.”

He ruffled her hair the way someone might praise a house cat. Her hair, still unwashed and utterly filthy.

At this point, Yul began to seriously wonder about his preferences. Maybe he had some kind of f*tish for dirty things.

“Here, watch. This is an anti-theft lock. You have to press this pin and flick it to open it.”