Chapter 1

The sky was unusually clear that day.

As the only daughter of Viscount Albre, I was preparing to one day lead the family and had been throwing myself into my studies for the academy entrance exams.

“Hmmmm~”

I rolled my pencil across my book, savoring the feel of grass blades poking between my toes. It was probably improper for the only daughter of Viscount Albre to wander the garden barefoot, but today felt like a day when even that kind of freedom could be forgiven.

“Miss, humming like that, you look just like you did when you were little,” said the gardener passing by, his wrinkled face creasing into a smile.

“We won’t be seeing this once you’re off at the academy.”

“I’ll be back for the holidays, won’t I? Time flies in the blink of an eye, so don’t worry. By the time I know it, you’ll all be marveling that I’ve already graduated.”

The butler, who had glided over with his usual graceful bearing, set down the teapot and sighed.

“That’s the sort of thing we old folks say.”

I let their fond worrying wash over me. It all felt like it would last forever.

‘A life of luxury I never could’ve imagined in my previous life.’

Unlike the last life I’d lived as a completely alone orphan, everything was perfect this time around.

Servants who’d cherished me unconditionally from the moment I was born, like family.

Parents who gladly supported whatever I wanted to do.

Abundance that came naturally, without me having to claw and fight to keep what was mine!

‘I was born with a silver spoon, so there’s no way I’m letting some uncle who keeps showing up with his hand out take it all away.’

So I’d made up my mind. To inherit the viscountcy as a woman in this patriarchal Empire. It wouldn’t be an easy road, but if not me, who would protect this family?

‘Honestly, there’s no one else who could do it.’

I couldn’t pull off anything as grand as leveraging modern knowledge to rise to the top the way characters in web novels did, but I could at least protect the family. I’d live out the rest of this life as peacefully and comfortably as today, right up until the very end.

‘Absolute paradise.’

But life wasn’t so accommodating. Even after all that suffering in my previous life, it seemed like the universe wanted to punish me for getting too comfortable, because a bolt-from-the-blue piece of news arrived.

“Miss!”

Even from a distance, I could see Merry, the young maid, running toward me with a face drained white. She didn’t even have the presence of mind to fix her disheveled hair.

I think I sensed it then. That something had gone terribly wrong.

I pushed down the anxious pounding of my heart and asked, “Merry, what’s the matter?”

“M-Miss! Mr. Butler! S-s-something terrible has happened!”

It was an event large enough to turn the rest of my life completely upside down.

“The m-master and the mistress…… they’ve both died in a carriage accident!”

* * *

Five years later.

The small townhouse of Viscount Albre in the capital was busy from early morning. Servants hurried back and forth carrying luggage, and an elaborately decorated wedding carriage stood at the entrance.

Today was the wedding of Solana Albre of the Albre family.

My wedding.

A maid clutching her skirts rushed down the corridor and threw open the door.

“Miss Solana!”

Pink petals heralding the end of winter and the arrival of spring spun lazily in the light breeze and drifted down.

I’d been lying there, unable to believe today was actually my wedding day, and only then did I open my eyes.

“Oh, Merry. What is it?”

I tried to look away, but Merry, who’d been with me since childhood, hauled me upright without mercy.

“How can you still be lying there when you’re getting married today! There’s so much to prepare!”

She shoved me bodily into the bathroom despite my resistance.

“Come on, there’s no time. Wash up and get out here!”

Bang!

The door slammed shut behind me and a brief silence followed. I stared at the bathtub in front of me, steam rising from the water, and let out a sigh.

There were no hot water hoses in this era. Filling a tub this warm meant boiling water and pouring it in by hand. Merry must have taken special care with the preparations, knowing today was my wedding.

I sank into the bathwater and grumbled.

“What’s the point of rushing?”

Would getting there a few minutes earlier make any difference besides signing the marriage register sooner?

After my parents died five years ago, my comfortable life had crumbled entirely. Still a minor and a woman, there was nothing I could do, and I lost everything in the Albre family to my uncle right then and there.

The butler, the gardener, and all the servants who’d been with me since birth were driven out of the household. There was nothing I could do in the midst of it all.

Under imperial law, if a head of household died without a son, the position automatically passed to another male relative. For me, a woman, to become head of household, I’d need to have been formally designated as successor by the previous head, or the family would need to have no men left at all, only women.

‘What a rotten law.’

I looked at my reflection in the water. A girl on the eve of her wedding stared back at me with dull green eyes.

Black hair heavy with water, hanging limp. The face visible between the strands wasn’t a breathtaking beauty, but it was pretty enough.

My face in this life.

My looks had been one of the things I’d been satisfied with after being reborn. By the standards of the world I’d lived in before, a pretty face was an asset, never a liability.

‘In romance fantasy novels, if the heroine’s pretty, becoming an empress or a duchess is basically the rule.’

After my parents died, when I was at my most lost, I’d even secretly entertained the delusion that I might be the heroine of this world. The situation was desperate enough to drive anyone to escapism.

Having been a heavy reader of web novels in my previous life, I’d had a theory.

‘What if this world is the world inside a fantasy novel?’

A reincarnated heroine with a pretty face who lost her parents young. Wasn’t that a combination I’d seen somewhere before? This had to be that genre.

‘Reincarnation romance fantasy!’

Usually in cases like this, the story could go one of two ways.

1. The heroine, mistreated by her uncle, meets the male lead and enters a contract marriage. A few years later, the condition is that upon divorce, she receives her freedom and a vast fortune!
2. The heroine is forced to marry a male lead rumored to be terrible, scarred, or beast-like, but none of it turns out to be true. Marriage first, love later, a sweet newlywed life!

Either way, the heroine’s husband ends up being a young, wealthy member of the imperial family or a duke.

“Not some shameless old man without a single scrap of conscience!”

By the standards of the world I’d lived in before, I’d be a girl in the prime of her life, just starting to enjoy university.

I wasn’t the heroine of any novel, and today I was marrying a seventy-year-old man.

Reality had thrown cold water on my daydreaming.

The seed of all this misery had been the marriage proposal my uncle handed me a few days ago. The sender was Viscount Montrashu, known as a wealthy man, a widower who’d recently lost his wife.

“You’re nearly of age, so it’s time you married. Viscount Montrashu is a proper nobleman and a wealthy one. You won’t find a better match than this. He has no children, so if you go and give him one, everything in that family becomes yours.”

It was outrageous enough that a seventy-year-old man had the nerve to propose to a young woman who’d just come of age, but what my uncle said was even more absurd.

Where to even begin.

The fact that this wasn’t a good match for me but for my uncle, who was after the dowry Viscount Montrashu would hand over?

Or the question of whether it was even physically possible to have a child with a man in his seventies?

“Oh, my wretched fate.”

Who could’ve known that the precious darling of the Albre family would end up in a situation like this?

I’d thought this life was a gift from whatever god had taken pity on me after everything I’d suffered before.

[Breaking News! Chain carriage collision in the heart of the capital!]

That day, the one that had turned everything upside down, was still a nightmare to me.

On that day, my father, who had been head of the Albre household, and my mother, who had been traveling with him, both died simultaneously in a carriage accident.

Unable to believe it, I’d wanted to dig into the details of the incident, but at the time I hadn’t had the chance. The moment the news broke, my uncle had come swooping into the household, acting like the most grief-stricken person in the world.

“Good heavens, Solana! To think your father and your aunt would go like this! You’re not alone, so don’t worry. Trust in your uncle!”

The man who’d spent years cursing my father for not giving him money had made the biggest scene of all the moment my parents died.