Chapter 2 

“No, my daughter, you’re already thinking about marriage!”

Celia burst into laughter. Let alone marriage, there were still eight whole years left before she would even become an adult.

Finding her daughter, already sad over being separated someday, unbearably adorable, Celia pulled her tightly into an embrace and kissed the crown of her head.

Viviana’s expression, laughing along with her, was hidden within Celia’s arms and could not be seen, but if someone had been able to look through, they would have noticed that she was not truly smiling.

Her expression was smiling, yet her gaze blazed intensely.

The look in her eyes, streaked with worn anger, disappointment, and sorrow that flashed at a glance, shimmered faintly within Celia’s embrace.

‘Yes, nothing has happened yet.’

But it soon would. He had always been that way.

After drawing her in when she was shining and smiling in happiness, he would throw her into the mud and grind her down, then place someone other than her by his side, and would not even look back at her as she reached out and begged him not to go.

Buried in the mire and weeping, she would cling to him, pleading for even a handspan of space at his side, but he was the kind of person who would smile kindly while casting her into hell.

Viviana’s shining eyes were hidden beneath her eyelids.

Swallowing down her emotions behind an unreadable expression, she put on the outer shell of an affectionate daughter and looked up at her mother, Celia.

Yes, if only she was unhappy, she could protect this smiling face.

That was why Viviana decided she would endure just a little.

Later, even if he threw her into the mud once again, it would not matter.

Unlike before, the moment she fell into the mud, she would rise, leave him, and never look back.

This time, she would not cling to him.

Nestling once more into Celia’s arms, Viviana made that vow.

* * *

Viviana had a secret she could tell no one.

She had reincarnated several times. In other words, this life was not her first.

At first she counted one by one how many times she had reincarnated, but before long Viviana gave up.

After all, they were not good memories, so assigning them numbers herself felt absurd.

Of all them, her first memory was truly intense.

At that time, she had not yet been stained by the world, and unlike now, when she was like some worn-out old soul in a child’s body, she had truly been an innocent and naive child.

In that first life, when she was about twelve? When she saw a certain boy whom her father had brought by the hand, she felt a shock as though lightning had pierced through the crown of her head.

He was the son of her parents’ friend, and after all those who should have cared for him died, he drifted into her household. The two fell in love at first sight, nurtured a fresh first love, and believed they would walk together to the end of life.

But unlike what they thought, parting came quickly. Before they came of age, he died after being hit by a carriage through sheer bad luck.

There was no way the carriage could avoid him when he suddenly darted out in front of the one speeding past, and so he was trampled by horse hooves and crushed beyond recognition, disappearing just like that.

And so the end of her first love concluded with the two of them separated in sorrow.

Not long after that, she too passed away from illness.

‘It is not even funny. Truly.’

It was a death that truly was not even funny. One died in an accident, and the other from a sudden fever.

Even so, back then, even with death before her, she had been positive in her own way.

At least in the afterlife, she would be able to meet him.

However, when she opened her eyes, once again she had become a small child, wailing in the arms of the woman who was now her mother.

‘My first reincarnation.’

When she closed her eyes and woke to find herself a child, living in an unfamiliar place, she had been so bewildered, wondering why something like this had happened to her, but she overcame the dazed confusion of that first reincarnation and lived peacefully.

Then, after she turned eleven, she was finally able to find the reason for that new life.

A young slave her father in that second life had bought.

The moment she saw him, she realized as naturally as if it were obvious that he was the first love from her previous life, the one who had never been allowed to bloom.

That realization soon turned into joy and made her smile.

And as expected, she came to love him naturally.

In this life, she wanted to surely have him, the one who had taken a piece of the regret from her previous life. She wanted the two of them to be happy together.

‘And every time, you pushed me away.’

With a humbled expression, saying that someone as noble as a young lady should not desire something as insignificant as himself, he knelt at her feet.

And yet his gaze never left her, and when even the slightest bit of her touch reached him, he trembled as though entranced.

As if he wanted to reach out to her, his arms would twitch, and he would clench and unclench his fists.

He wanted her too. That made her happy.

Even while pushing her away because of status, if she was close with someone else, he would become helpless with a face drenched in jealousy, and when her touch finally reached him, he would melt and look at her with greedy eyes.

Perhaps he wanted it. With her status, she could have forced him to remain by her side. Of course, it would have become a relationship that could not stand in the light.

She had wanted him to come to her of his own will. She wanted all of him, body and heart. She wanted him to say that he desired her regardless of obstacles like the gap in their statuses.

‘You should not have done that.’

She should have simply taken him. She should not have cared what others said around her.

When he was finally taking one step, then another, toward her, war broke out, he was conscripted, and she was killed by enemy soldiers who had pushed all the way into the capital.

‘At least I should be grateful my body was not violated.’

She let out a soft laugh. In any case, she had died, and once again she had lost him. And then once again she lived a new life.

Even after that, he died, and died, and died again, and as though following behind him, she died, and died, and died again.

Sadly, just when it seemed they might reach each other, death came.

The reasons for the deaths of the two of them were varied.

By accident, by war, by illness, if he died first, she died as though following after him.

Each time, a new life began, and in that new life she could find him somewhere close at hand.

‘Then we met as ordinary childhood friends living next door.’

One cannot imagine how happy that made her. He and she had been born as men, and also as women.

They had been born as lowly slaves, as nobles, and as commoners.

So random was it that sometimes the two of them were of the same s*x, and sometimes of the opposite s*x.

At times they were both nobles and it did not matter, but sometimes they were born with different statuses between them.

Whenever that happened, he pushed her away, blocked by the wall of reality.

Yet even while pushing her away, his eyes followed her.

Without even thinking about what hopeful t*rture that was.

‘I thought we would grow up ordinarily, love ordinarily, and marry ordinarily….’

Their class was the same, and neither had any point of superiority or inferiority over the other, so there was no longer any barrier between them.

Gender, country, class, all of it was on her side.

She believed that this time, at last, she would be able to stand beside him.

Then one day, he came to her with a confused face, at a complete loss.

Unable to sit still, moving here and there with an anxious face as though pursued by something, he made her reach out her hand to him.

“Hey, what is wrong?”

At the moment her fingertips touched him, he jerked back in fright and slapped her hand away, then with a despairing expression apologized, said he was sorry, and ran outside. And when she saw him again, he returned to her with a haggard face and told her that he had found someone he loved.

She felt as if the ground beneath her feet was collapsing. Why? How? How could that even be possible?

He still wanted her. She could feel it in his eyes, in his gestures, so how could he lie and say he loved someone else?

Her lips parted and moved, but in the end there was only one word she managed to let out.

“…What about me?”

It was nothing but a tearful question asking whether he did not love her, then.

He showed a pained expression.

That face was full of confusion, and both eyes wandered as though they had lost their way.

“…We…. We are just friends.”

In the end, what came out of his mouth was this kind of thing.

We were just friends? We were? The affection he felt for her was visible in his eyes. Insisting that such a burning feeling was friendship, he ended up abandoning her and marrying someone who looked exactly like her.

When the friendship built over twenty years between the neighboring households was completely shattered, and all her hope was shattered as well, she ended her life in an epidemic that had spread that year.

And then again, and yet again, and over and over, each time she reincarnated, he and she crossed paths, and after giving her hope that this time it might work, he cast her back into hell once more.

If only the person he loved had always been the same, she might have given up, thinking that must simply be fate.

But the people he fell in love with changed with every reincarnation.

Strangely, she could tell. They were not the same person.

Their personalities were always different, and so were their temperaments. Their atmosphere, everything about them, was different.

Sometimes it was a dignified man, and sometimes a gentle lady. Sometimes a gloomy loner, and sometimes a lively little troublemaker.

He and she were always the same, yet they always changed. And helplessly, he would fall for them.

‘They are possible, so why am I not?’

Her love, continually never chosen, rotted little by little as though it had swallowed poison, and transformed into a mixture of love and hatred.

After that, with every reincarnation, she lashed out at and drove away those who seemed likely to fall in love with him, and bound him so that he could not leave her.

At first he accepted it too, but by the time he was about to fall in love, he hated that side of her, grew tired of it, and despised her for tormenting the one he loved.

Even knowing all of that, she could not let him go. Across all her lives, the wish and longing she possessed was to stand in the place beside him.

‘Once again, I am meeting you.’

Looking outside from within the slightly swaying carriage, Viviana twisted her lips into a smile. Once again, cruelly enough, fate had made them meet and pushed them into a position where she could not help but expect something.

‘This time will be different.’

Because Viviana would no longer love him.

All her love and hatred had been left behind in that cold water on that day.

Together with her corpse from her previous life, they had sunk into that cold Han River.

When Viviana, who had been looking outside like that, smoothed away her expressionless face and turned her head toward her family, what she saw was her brother, two years older than she was, acting affectionately toward their parents in place of her blunt self, and their parents smiling warmly as they looked at him.

Seeing a warm and harmonious family that was affectionate even without her, Viviana always felt a certain loneliness. A sense of floating outside it all, that she was a stranger here as well.