Chapter 1

Translator and Editor: Nana and Ishy

────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Chapter 1

“Aaah!”

“Miss Eris!”

A group of people walked past me in the middle of the room.

A slender woman with lovely pink hair was lying down in a place where people ran to.

The room was simply a mess.

“Princess, how could you do this?”

“No matter how jealous you are, isn’t this too much?!”

Dozens of resentful eyes full of contempt turned to me, who was standing still.

‘Me? Why?’

I didn’t understand what was going on here at all right now.

Come to think of it, when I came to my senses, the hands that seemed to belong to me were pushing the woman who fell, who looked so fragile.

The pink-haired woman tried to grab something before she fell, but the force was too strong.

‘Ah, that’s right.’

‘Did I push her?’

At last, I came to a logical conclusion. But it still didn’t make sense.

‘Why me? Who is she?’

“Eris, are you all right? Don’t move!”

She must’ve been Eris.

Eris seemed to be the name of that woman, who was raising her body with the support of several people.

“Are you crazy? Open your mouth quickly, you can either make excuses or apologize!”

The man, whose blond hair reflected by the sunlight sparkled unnaturally, said to me.

‘I mean, why me?’

Who were you? And who was Eris?

Where was I? Who were these people?

What was I doing and why was I standing in this position?

‘Shut up, you bastards, so that I can think.’

A cry that couldn’t come out was ringing in my head.

“Lady Veronica!”

I closed my eyes tightly at the man’s yelling.

Just then, a strand of my hair fell to my shoulder. My gaze slowly turned towards it.

‘What’s with this hair?’

My hair was always short.

Having lived a fierce and busy life, I could not afford to grow my hair. For that reason, the silky hair on my shoulder couldn’t have been mine.

Then, my eyes slowly turned to the mirror in front of me.

The light brown luscious hair, white skin like snow, flushed cheeks, and eye-catching golden eyes were definitely not mine.

The moment I saw those golden eyes, a name flashed in my mind.

‘Veronica Bird.’

My favorite character, the biggest villainess in the novel ‘One Spoon of Love, Recipe’ in which she beat a lovely heroine in front of all of the people.

***

It was never a good novel.

It was a cheap novel used for killing time.

‘The title is also weird.’

Who in the world would’ve paid for a novel with such a title? Apparently, that idiot was me.

I didn’t remember why I first started to read it, but I remembered why I kept reading it.

It was because of Veronica Bird, the villainess who constantly tormented the heroine.

‘One Spoon of Love, Recipe’ was as childish as its title. The female lead who kept getting abused had the support of the good-looking male leads, and with their help, she killed the evildoers without raising a finger, and eventually became an empress by marrying the emperor.

Such a ridiculous story was the plot of this novel.

‘What’s more, the plot wasn’t the worst in this novel.’

What was even worse was that all the characters in this novel were stubborn, patriarchal, and didn’t know about gender equality.

The female lead constantly received help and acted as if women were men’s assistants, and the male lead saw women only as objects of salvation and secretly subdued them.

The characters were unappealing this way.

‘I felt like I was shoveling hundreds of sweet potatoes down my throat every time*.’

[TL/N: Koreans use this expression to indicate frustration.]

Therefore, it was a novel that was boring no matter how much the story progressed.

I only liked one character, Veronica Bird.

Veronica was the only person in the novel who gave me cider*. There were limitations because of her role as a villainess, but every word she said made total sense.

*TL/N: Feeling of regret and guilt.

“Get out of here, and tell the emperor to come out first.”

“Do you not have a brain? If you want to say something, say it yourself.”

“I want to wear it, but who says what? A lot of people say that I don’t even care about fashion or looks.”

“If there’s no man who wants to dance with me, will my feet disappear? Why can’t I dance?”

They called her a villainess, but it was different to me. Every part of Veronica was good, and she was the object of my admiration.

‘Veronica also possessed a great beauty, and she was the only daughter of a duke in the empire, so this would have been possible.’

But it didn’t matter anyway. I was too preoccupied with my exhausting life.

In a way, I had a normal life.

I think all Koreans would’ve lived similar lives. It was just that the norm’s standards had become unbearably low.

It took an hour and a half to commute from work, and my workplace was so suffocating. I only had a little time for myself.

I couldn’t even go to the bathroom because there were jobs to do that would be left behind. The boss’s ignorance made me feel like everything was my fault, and yet, I had no choice but to drink soju and bear with it.

After leaving my job to go back home, the situation did not improve much. Walking down the street, I felt angry because I remembered sexual harassment pouring out with casual laughter and ignorance, and ridicules pouring out in the name of advice. It was a life in which I had to constantly keep an eye on people to avoid them.

I had never been properly angry because I didn’t want to win by getting angry and fighting.

Winning didn’t mean anything. Even if I won a fight with one of these people and been happy in the power I had for the moment, my life would be in the same place.

I was exhausted.

When I came to a space where I could be alone, even in a small, moldy, and smelly room, I found satisfaction in cheap novels. That was how I got to live my life.

Aside from that, what was helping me to survive was, surprisingly, volunteering at an orphanage. I felt satisfied because I was also an orphan without a family.

It felt nice that the kindness I gave to others was returned with a bright smile.

‘But I didn’t know I would die…’

I died while volunteering in an orphanage. A child in the orphanage accidentally threw a pot over my head. It was a ceramic pot, how did the child throw that heavy thing? I was killed in the ambulance without even going to the hospital.

There was a child in the orphanage who admired me because I was nice to him. He wanted to give me the pot but I didn’t expect I would die.

‘Bad guy, I had been so nice to him.’

I sighed because it was pathetic that I couldn’t even speak ill of the child since this was an accident.

I buried my face in a soft silk pillow. Whether someone sprayed something or did the laundry well, the strong smell spread through my nose.

A few days ago, I ran out to avoid the interrogation. I wonder how ridiculous it must have been to see me running away, but that’s all I could do at that moment.

I hastily came into my well-managed room. I went to bed straight away, trying to remember what happened, and I remembered that I died.

And when I remembered that, tears welled in my eyes as I remembered how I lived and died just like that. I thought my life was over, and I couldn’t stop crying.

So I cried for days without eating, only drinking only the water on the table. If it wasn’t for a luxurious bathroom inside the room, I would have had to leave the room. But thanks to that luck, I didn’t have to.

Those who were angry at me knocked on the door many times. But that only made me even sadder. I died so pitifully and felt like a debtor because they kept knocking on my door.

After crying for a few days, I came back to my senses with hunger.

‘I remembered how I died, but why did I become a villainess in a cheap novel?’

Maybe it was because it was the most recent novel that I read. If it wasn’t for Veronica, I would not have finished it, but she died near the end so I ended up reading the ending.

‘The happy ending of the protagonist always ended with the death of the villains, which is obvious.’

It was a bad novel, even when I thought about it again.

Eris, the nice and pretty heroine, was an orphan. Eris was poor but always had a good heart. She caught the eyes of an anonymous aristocrat and received education on etiquette.

I couldn’t tell if it was a class of etiquette or a class of priests.

Anyways, Eris, who became such a great lady, participated in a party and accidentally met the male lead, also known as the crown prince. The two fell in love at a glance, but the crown prince already had a fiancée. Nevertheless, the crown prince, who could not resist his love for her, introduced Eris to the world.

‘He already had a fiancée and cheated on her, how could Veronica be considered the villainess?’

The novel said Veronica was filled with jealousy, but I thought she just wanted to kill the Crown Prince and Eris. She became a villainess afterward.

She tried to harass or insult Eris with her maids, and bury her in society by using her position.

However, as Eris was the heroine, the more it happened, the more Veronica became a villainess, as everyone fell in love with Eris.

In the end, Veronica, who was unable to bear it, bullied Eris openly, who was offering a reconciliation.

‘That’s the moment I possessed her body.’

After slowly reflecting on the plot, I remembered the moment I was at.

‘Don’t people usually wake up in their sleep to find themselves possessing someone?’

At least in the novels, they didn’t wake up when they pushed the heroine, not on the brink of pushing, but at the very moment of pushing.

Life couldn’t be worse than this.

────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Join our discord to receive the latest updates as soon as possible!