At last, butler Beryl led the two of them to a certain room. It was a worn, storage-like room that could only be described as the most miserable in the entire Grand Ducal estate.

Beryl said with indifference.

“You’ll eat and sleep here, and work alongside the other servants. When His Highness the Grand Duke calls for you, drop whatever you’re doing and come running immediately.”

Mari asked in surprise.

“Miss and I are to share one room? And in such a shabby room, how could Miss possibly…….”

“Did you not say you would repay the debt? Well, if you wish, I can provide an additional room. Though the cost of the room will be added to what you must repay each month.”

At those words, Mari fell completely silent. She had realized that pushing any further would only make things worse.

‘As expected, what a disagreeable man, Butler Beryl.’

Knowing that he was the very icon of betrayal, Linia glared at him on the sly.

With only people like this surrounding Huslan, she thought, there would have been no one to stop him even when he went too far astray.

No, before that, perhaps it was precisely because he had only people like this around him that his character had become so twisted in the first place.

The butler turned away coldly, and Linia, recalling the scene from earlier, opened the notebook once more.

「Huslan falls for Linia at first sight the moment he sees her!」

‘Why isn’t it coming true as I wrote it here? Is it because the ink ran out……?’

Looking more closely, the part where she had written “falls for” seemed a little difficult to make out. She tried scratching over the faint letters with the quill pen again, but no ink came out.

“Ah right, the first meeting has already passed, so this one might not come true anymore…….”

Linia felt a slight pang of disappointment.

She tried to think of another sentence to write, but a sudden and overwhelming wave of exhaustion washed over her and her mind refused to work.

She wanted to be summoned to Huslan’s room quickly and see him again, but strangely, an irresistible drowsiness came flooding in. It seemed that going through a situation so incredibly real had naturally drained her energy as well.

‘So even inside a dream, sleep can come. What a truly strange and vivid dream this is…….’

Linia quietly lay her body down on the shabby bed. She had always slept in her single room with only a thin blanket spread beneath her, but at least here there was an actual bed.

As Linia, soaked in exhaustion, fell into a deep sleep even in such poor conditions, Mari’s eyes grew sadder still.

She had stood her ground boldly before His Highness the Grand Duke, but surely Miss had been frightened and struggling on the inside all along.

Mari knelt down beside the bed and whispered as she looked at Linia’s tired face.

“Rest well, Miss. I will keep watch by your side.”

– – –

Huslan had been attending to business in his room until the sun went down. On the desk in his study, countless documents awaiting approval were piled high.

But as he glanced at the contract set on the edge of the desk, Linia’s voice suddenly surfaced in his mind.

[Your Highness the Grand Duke is going to fall for me.]

Huslan stopped mid-signature and set down the quill pen.

He felt as though something feather-light had quietly slipped into his chest and was tickling his heart. This strange feeling was entirely new to him.

Black ink seeped from the nib he had been holding and left a round, indelible stain on the parchment.

‘What an impudent woman…….’

He let out a brief, hollow laugh, set down the quill pen, and rubbed his face dry with one hand.

Someone standing before him without a trace of fear, staring back at him with a smile, and even boldly declaring that he would fall for her, was truly something he had never experienced in his entire life.

A very strange emotion stirred within him, one he had never felt even with Lariette.

Huslan soon wiped the smile from his face and cast a sharp glance upward from beneath the hand pressed to his forehead. His gray eyes gleamed with quiet significance.

He had grown curious about her.

Meanwhile, the adjutant standing by the doorway waiting for his orders tensed slightly upon seeing Huslan’s keen gaze.

His mood seemed particularly foul today. It was exactly the kind of day when someone was liable to end up dead.

Chapter 2. “The Color of the Heart”

Feeling something like droplets of water touching her face, Linia suddenly woke from her sleep.

When she opened her eyes, a dark ceiling came into view.

Thinking she had returned to her single room, Linia rubbed her eyes and pushed herself upright, only for her eyes to go wide at the creaking sound of wood.

She was still lying in the bed.

‘What is this? Is this what they call a dream within a dream……?’

But at that moment, that strange sensation touched her face once again.

Without thinking, Linia swatted at it with her hand as though shooing away a mosquito, then spotted something in the room and opened her mouth.

‘W-what is this!’

Now that she looked, dark, round objects were drifting freely through the dimly lit room.

Linia contorted her body dramatically as though she had spotted a bug and scrambled to the corner of the bed, curling herself into a ball.

If anything, a passing insect that witnessed her bizarre, joint-twisting dance would have been the one to faint in shock.

Bugs had been one of the things she had been terribly afraid of since childhood. Among them, the worst panic of all was when a cockroach appeared in her single room.

It was telling that her ideal type was “a man who casually swats cockroaches without making a fuss.”

But amid the confusion, she suddenly noticed that those round objects looked rather like black soap bubbles. The unidentified bubbles were drifting leisurely through the air.

They could have been some kind of poison, but the fact that nothing had happened when she had absentmindedly swatted one earlier gave her a little courage.

Linia swallowed and reached out to give one a light tap. At that instant, the docile bubble bristled all over with what looked like tiny spines.

Linia nearly let out a scream, but the bubble settled back down and nuzzled itself against her hand.

It was clearly an inanimate object, yet somehow it felt as though it was longing for her touch.

As she found herself absently stroking a bubble that would not pop, the notebook she had left on the bedside table suddenly began to glow a brilliant white.

The light was flowing from inside the book.

When she opened the notebook, a new message appeared within.

「Linia’s special ability has been activated. Try piercing a color drop with the nib of the correction pen.」

Linia picked up the correction pen, which resembled a quill pen, and carefully prodded the unidentified object now called a “color drop.”

To her amazement, the black color drop seeped into the pen’s nib.

Once inside the pen, the color drop became a very small amount of ink. It seemed to have great volume but little mass, much like a soap bubble.

“Oh! Could this possibly be the ink of this world……?”

Linia immediately tried drawing a line in the notebook with the pen. She could finally write in the notebook.

“Aha! So this is how you collect ink!”

Excited, she quickly wrote down the next line.

「Huslan calls Linia to his room and they share a deep, passionate kiss.」

She giggled, burning with desire. This time she had made sure to write it with a full charge of ink, so it was certain to work.

She was just about to fill the notebook with even more scandalous things after that. But once again the ink ran dry and she could no longer write.

Linia looked around in search of ink and suddenly noticed Mari curled up asleep beside the bed.

It seemed she had chosen to sleep on the bare floor next to the bed so that Linia could rest comfortably alone.

Despite her promise to keep watch, Mari was fast asleep, snoring away without a care in the world.

A sudden pang of sympathy struck her, and Linia pulled the blanket from the bed and carefully draped it over Mari’s body.

She had only thought of her as a minor extra in the dream, but the more she saw of her, the more fond she grew. Even if it was just a dream, she was grateful to her for not leaving her side.

Linia’s eyes softened. In reality, everyone either ignored her or left, leaving no one by her side, but for the first time, she felt as though she had someone unconditionally in her corner.

It seemed like a good idea to write some things in the notebook for Mari’s sake as well. That way, she would no longer have to suffer within her dream either.

As Linia searched for color drops to collect more ink, she suddenly noticed color drops drifting in through the gap under the door.

She carefully got up so as not to wake Mari, quietly closed the door behind her, and stepped outside.

But the moment she stepped out, Linia’s eyes went wide.

The corridor was filled with countless black color drops floating through the air.

The farther she moved from the room, the larger and more numerous the color drops became. Diligently poking the color drops one by one with her pen to collect them, Linia found herself drifting further and further from her room without even realizing it.

But then, she suddenly noticed an unusually large color drop, bigger than any she had seen before, slowly crawling through the gap under one of the room doors.

‘That’s a big one! What a windfall!’

Linia lay flat on the floor and touched the large color drop with her pen nib.

“With this, my happy dream can finally begin! Ah, I really hope this dream never ends.”

She murmured to herself without realizing it, letting her imagination drift toward happy things. But for some reason, this time she could not draw the color drop into the pen nib.

‘What’s going on? Is it too big?’

Linia grunted and pushed her pen through the gap under the door, swishing it around.

But just then, the unsettling sound of the door creaking slowly open reached her ears. And immediately after, a cold, low voice came from above her head.

“……What brings you here at this hour of the night? Miss Linia.”

Linia froze in that exact position, then slowly lifted her head and looked up.

Standing there was Grand Duke Huslan in a black nightgown, looking down at her with a shadowed expression and his gray eyes gleaming in the dark.