CH 2

“I thought you were just crazy.”

“Really?”

“Your head always spins in vain like a clock without a single cogwheel missing.”

There was no need to react because what he said wasn’t wrong. Felix just snickered at the fact that she accepted it. He walks up to the closet she burned down.

The wooden closet was old, yet it was quite luxurious because it was used by the Duke. However, it was burnt frugally. He looked closely at the burnt block of wood, barely maintaining its shape, as if it were a piece of art. He quickly turned around and asked.

“So why did you do that?”

“Because there was a rat.”

Beatrice responded with the same answer to Calex’s question earlier, and looked at Felix. It wasn’t because she wanted to look at him, rather it’s because she wanted to simply turn her head around.

Felix’s eyes widened when he saw something disgusting. Of course, neither of them cared.

“Crazy bitch.”

I didn’t answer back. I was right, so I didn’t have much to say. I just picked up the water that had been around for a long time, took a sip, and looked at him. When there was no response from me, he turned his interest back to the burnt closet.

Yes, her handling in this mansion was not as good as dealing with an old closet.

The former Duke Amber, who is now dead. The Father of Calex and Felix was a rare case of an affectionate marriage to the Duchess of Amber.

Of course, their relationship was good and the four of them were living a happy life. Up until 19 years ago, Duke Amber went missing on a business trip to quell the disturbance of different species in a distant estate.

The sudden disappearance of the Duke plunged the family into a pit of sorrow. With only two young sons and the Duchess remaining, the Duke’s Mansion had an atmosphere where it felt like you were walking on thin ice.

I chuckled forcibly. When someone brought up the Duke’s story, the thin ice cracked. Fortunately, however, the duke returned alive after two years.

The two sons and the Duchess were genuinely delighted. She was truly happy that her husband had returned. Perhaps it would have been a more perfect reunion without the one-year-old girl in his arms.

“Argh!”

I was deep in my thoughts until it was interrupted by a scream. Why are there only things that disturb you in this house? With a sigh, she placed down water and looked into the situation. Felix had opened the door of the burnt closet.

Oh, that. She speaks in a cold voice. Felix, who urgently looked back at her, pointed his finger inside the closet and made another loud noise.

“That, what is that!”

The closet he pointed to was full of burnt rat corpres. About 10 to 20 of them. You must have had a hard time collecting them.

“Rats.”

“I’m asking because why is there such a thing in the closet?!”

“My maid must like rats. It happens often.”

It was clear that her maid, Mai, was very fond of rats. So she would always carefully collect the rats that may be in the basement and place them in Beatrice’s room.

I’ve seen stories in books that cats, who love their owners, come with rats to give them as gifts. I tried to think it was in that context, but unfortunately, my personal maid simply hated me.

Yes, humans and cats are quite different species, so their behavior patterns may be different. After convincing myself to look at Felix again, his expression of bewilderment was obvious. What else do you not like about that?

“The maid often puts rats in your room?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re not doing anything about it?”

“What would you do then?”

Felix shuts his mouth. As he looked into her golden eyes, he gave a faintly confused look . Beatrice didn’t care what he was confused about, so she turned her head forward and began to wait for her meal.

After staring into the thin air for a while, I soon heard the sound of thumping footsteps going out of the room. Now, I can quietly carry on my thoughts.

Beatrice was the evidence that Duke Amber betrayed his beloved wife. At first, she was satisfied that her father and husband had returned alive, but as time went on, her presence began to gnaw between them.

The Duchess and her two sons are not bad people. She remembered that she was treated like a human being, in her own way. Regardless of whether you like it or not, a little girl is innocent.

However, as the years passed, they began to dislike her. Their relationship was irreversibly ruined when the duke died when she was thirteen, from the disease he had suffered at the time of his disappearance.

From the time when the Duchess, who was preoccupied with grief, slapped Beatrice at the funeral, and the two sons, who were stopping the Duchess, had a look of embarrassment and slight disgust in their eyes.

“Miss, I’ve prepared your meal.”

It seems that Mai has arrived. When I looked up, I saw the new noodle dish placed on the table. Mai always brought the dishes after they had cooled down.

I don’t know if she’s slacking off or just making fun of me, but that’s not what’s important right now, so let’s move on.

“You try it first.”

“What?”

I would have eaten it without saying a word if it was just a dish that had cooled down. I was used to it in the first place.

However, if there was an accident today, there would be no such thing as a hot noodle dish on the table, and I did not feel like receiving it because I was just burned alive to death. As I stared into Mai’s trembling eyes in bewilderment, she opens her mouth as if she was trying to change the situation.

“If you don’t like the food, I’ll change it.”

“You know that’s not what I mean.”

Beatrice picked up the round plate and threw it at Mai’s feet. A solid plate fell on the floor with a clattering sound, and round things that were laid down under the red noodles spilled out.

Mai’s expression turned blue. I can’t tell if it’s anger or embarrassment. She usually only puts one or two in. As she silently stares at over ten dead bugs, like her rats, Mai shamelessly opens her mouth.

“Sorry, I’m sorry. It must have been there in the middle of cooking.”

With a quivering voice, she spat out excuses that weren’t her usual ones. As the red sauce wets the floor, the corpses of ten bugs, that rolled out together, are also wet.

Her face, which had turned blue in embarrassment, was now burning red. She must be angry. Because she’s a girl who usually eats food with bugs.

“You clean that up.”

Her glaring eyes are starting to burn a hole on me. Mai was a child with a strange sense of duty. She feels obligated to punish her master for tormenting the Duke’s beloved wife and the two handsome masters.

I never wondered why she had such a sense of duty. You won’t understand even if you know it anyway.

Beatrice stands up with a short sigh. No matter how much her family hated her, they didn’t give Mai direct orders to harass her.

So, it means that everything Mai does to me is at her discretion. I don’t know how it can be called a punishment to keep shoving rats and bugs, as I compared them to cats earlier, but so did all the servants who messed around. 

I left the room without any regrets because I wouldn’t do anything stupid other than to leave the spilled food as it is. I went out to the garden, crawling out barefoot again. It was cold.

It had been a week since it had snowed, and there was no snow piled up, but the grass was dead and the dirt floor was ice-cold. Instead of wearing her shoes, she sat under the largest tree in the garden and hugged her knees.

I could see a white carriage coming into the main gate of the mansion. Maybe it’s the priest’s carriage that the Duchess called.

The Duchess, who was a faithful believer, would call the priest to her house once a week to hold a small prayer meeting with her family or consult personal concerns about her family.

Originally, prayer meetings were most common in which the temples were opened and aristocrats gathered, but it is also possible to call in the temple to pray if you are the Duke of Amber of the Empire. Of course, the power of huge donations will be included.

Well, the prayer meetings had nothing to do with her because she doesn’t belong to the Amber family, or ‘her family’. Beatrice began to trace back to her past.

She did not know exactly how much time had passed since she started to return back. The standard of her regression is her own death.

In one life, she died at the age of 32 and in another, she lived to be over 70 years old. She has committed suicide and has been murdered.

Once she loses her breath and close her eyes, she will surely open her eyes at 9 a.m. in January when she was eighteen years old.

When I first returned, I thought I had a very long, long dream. I thought that it was a precognitive dream when things that seemed like I had been through continued.

In that life, I lived a normal life until I married a man arranged by my family at the age of 23 and was executed by killing my husband. And it wasn’t until I opened my eyes again that I realized that I returned back.

On my second return, I lived far away from my family and lived my whole life in the territories on the outskirts. I must have lived to be over seventy at that time.

The third time I opened my eyes, I was stuck in bed. I didn’t feel like doing anything at all, so I didn’t do anything except lie down and breathe.

Maybe I starved while staying on the bed? I don’t remember in detail. I repeated my life that way. And right before my current life, I was angry as soon as I opened my eyes.

I don’t know how much I would have to repeat this fun and meaningless life to the end, so the pointless anger bubbled up from the bottom of my stomach. So if I wanted to kill, I just go for it.

I lived the life of a witch who was to be punished. I must die to go to hell. And so does the servants who killed people in the territories that the Duchess owned.