Chapter 1: Chapter 1

Chapter 1

It was a normal day. As usual, I left work exhausted from being harassed by my boss. I stood in front of the crosswalk, waited for the light to change, and immediately took a step forward as soon as the light turned green.

But as I trudged with my head bowed down because I was so exhausted—suddenly, there was a beaming light flashing into my eyes, and a car’s horn that blared straight into my ears. Without raising my head, my body was flung and fell to the ground in an instant. I could hear all sorts of sounds: someone screaming, murmuring, people approaching. But, I slowly closed my eyes as I got more and more unfocused.

When I opened my eyes without realizing that I had died, I was on a bed. There was a man beside me.

‘What the hell. Is this a dream?’

It was a situation that could only be a dream, so I thought it was one.

“…Wife?”

A man with a low-pitched, very hoarse voice was looking at me. The headache remained, perhaps as a result of the accident. I frowned involuntarily. It looked as if I wasn’t dead yet. Yes, this was definitely a dream.

“I’m sorry. I’ll do better…”

Huh? What did you do wrong and what are you going to do better?

The moment I thought of that, the man raised his bare upper body and hurriedly kissed me.

It was then that I realized that I, like the man, wore nothing. Because the body in contact with the man felt raw.

‘What— what in the world?’

Without a moment’s notice, the man’s moist and soft tongue slipped through my slightly gaping lips, prodding into every corner of my mouth. In particular, the moment his tongue scraped the roof of my mouth and continued to meet with my own tongue tenaciously, my whole body tickled, and at the same time, I felt wet down below.

The man must have felt it too, and suddenly, something deep inside me wriggled. And it gradually grew in size and completely took over me, and from then on he started moving his body little by little.

“…Heuuk.”

An unbearable moan flowed between my lips, and I instantly regained my senses. I wasn’t naive enough that I didn’t realize what was happening. I instinctively pushed the man away as hard as I could. Then I got out of the man’s embrace, wrapped a blanket around my body, and jumped out of the bed.

“W-what is this!”

Even if it was a dream, this wasn’t something I could have dreamt about. I screamed at him. However, as much as I did, the man looked at me with a bewildered expression, almost like he was about to cry.

“Wife… What did I do wrong? I’ll fix it. Please forgive me.”

“What are you talking about!”

What the hell is this dream? Why am I this man’s wife?

‘By the way… Can you feel sensations in a dream?’

What I just felt below was so vivid…

With such doubts, I couldn’t look straight into the man’s eyes, so I turned my head to the side in embarrassment.

“Please cover up!”

Since I took the blanket, he should find something else to cover himself. How could he be so careless and just sit still like that?

I shook my head frantically, as I couldn’t forget the splendid bulge of the man that was standing upright.

‘Don’t think about it. Obscene devil. Get away from me. please!’

“…I covered it.”

Not believing the man’s words, I kept my eyes averted and looked at him while squinting. Fortunately, he pulled out a piece of clothing and covered his lower body, but that part was still bulging.

However, because I shook my head too much, a severe headache began in an instant. It was so painful that I wrapped my head and sat down. And things that were not my memories began to flood into my head.

“It hurts! It hurts so much…!”

“Wife…!”

The man came to my side at once and held me in his arms carefully, talking to me to soothe me. But there was no sound coming into my ears.

‘What memory is this now?’

The images that flashed through my mind weren’t mine. But I was constantly being instilled with things I didn’t know.

It was so painful that it felt like my head was about to split into two.

“Aaaaack!”

The last memory I had was the man holding me with a face that expressed so much pain that I couldn’t comprehend.

* * *

I woke up already, but I kept pretending to sleep without opening my eyes. It was because I could hear the voice of the man who was beside me before I passed out. The man kept sighing as if something was making him nervous, and he was constantly talking to me, folding my limp hands between his own.

“Haa… Please, I will do better.”

“I did everything wrong. Wife.”

“Please don’t leave me alone. I cannot live without my wife.”

For the second hour, he spoke mostly like this. When I heard those words, it almost felt like I was about to die soon. Again. Anyway, I lay there with my eyes closed as I still hadn’t decided what to do when I woke up.

Of course, now I knew why the man was doing this. It was because of the images that flashed before my eyes as I fainted—in a dream that was more detailed—explained the current situation I was in.

Among the people in the dream, he appeared in almost all of my memories.

It all started with a scene where I was marrying a child… And that child was this man when he was younger. At first, he was always smiling, but after a certain time, he withdrew and became more depressed. It was because the owner of this body threw all kinds of bad things at the child.

Dirty. Ugly. No one likes you, if you don’t listen, I’ll throw you away. The intensity of the abusive language she directed at him was severe. However, the treatment after giving the child pain and sadness was always the same— she hugged the child as he cried and begged for her forgiveness, and in return, she also cried and apologized.

The dream that followed was a bit more recent, where the man had a physique that was similar to what he had now. From that time on, the moments when this man had been properly dressed were too few to be counted. He was either half-dressed or completely naked, moaning here and there on the bed.

I understood what that meant. And when I woke up, I realized what I was doing with the man.

‘Did I reincarnate?’

At first glance, my appearance was entirely different from how I looked before I died. It just wasn’t my body. Above all else, the man had blonde hair and blue eyes. It was rare to encounter such a man who looked like that, let alone talk to him. I’m sure this wasn’t the world I originally lived in.

And there was a name that kept repeating in my dreams. It was my name and the man’s name.

‘Astelle Einer and Bleon Einer.’

Bleon Einer…

‘I remember. I think I was the male lead in a serialized novel I read recently…’

Yes, I think that’s right.

This was clearly the novel, [Can the male lead in a tragedy novel be saved by the female lead?]

The title was too long and I was curious about the ending, so I went to read it. However, as the title of the novel suggested, the story was still vivid in my memory because of the experience of being so tragic. So, based on my memories, I could surmise that I became the ex-wife who abused her ex-husband, who would become the male lead.

‘I’m going to die soon.’

After the male lead met the female lead and fell in love with her, he would eventually pursue revenge and come to kill me…

It wasn’t like I had any regrets about living. But I already knew how the ex-wife was going to die.

‘It was too much of an R-19 crisis.’

Really, it was beyond my imagination. Just thinking about it gave me goosebumps.

‘I don’t want to suffer like that.’

After all, it wasn’t my fault and I wasn’t responsible for making him like that, so I didn’t want to be subjected to strange things disguised as such pleasures. But come to think about it, the male lead was not normal either.

No, he couldn’t be normal.

He’d been abused for such a long time…

When the male lead went to see his ex-wife, the readers, including myself, finally felt like the scene would be as refreshing as drinking cider, knowing he was going to exact revenge. Prior to that, there was considerable speculation as to whether that was the end of the story because he only announced the divorce and expelled her from the Duchy, but no revenge against the ex-wife came. So in the end, I thought he had found his ex-wife a perfect revenge, but now—what? It wasn’t cider, but a development completely beyond imagination.

First of all, the male lead bound his ex-wife and then used various things to torment her in the same way he had suffered, or even worse. And the two of them mixed bodies day and night for days and days. At the end of the novel in which the female lead appeared and saved the male lead—who was now legally married to her at the time—when the man was motionless, stunned by the fact that his ex-wife suddenly died in his arms. At that moment, he also wanted to die.

‘It was really eye popping.’

That’s when I realized how crazy an R-19 tragedy novel was. So it was a novel that received a lot of criticism and became a hot issue for a while because of the ending.

Starting with ‘How can the man sleep with a woman other than the female lead,’ ‘That’s not a real male lead,’ ‘I would rather ship the female lead with another man.’ Even after the novel ended, there were many troubling critiques.

And then there was one topic on which opinions were very divided.

It was about ‘Did the male lead really love his ex-wife?’

Like most people I thought it was some sort of Stockholm Syndrome. He was brainwashed from a very young age, and the sexual relationship he had with his ex-wife might be the result of being forced into it.

Anyway, love or whatever, the conclusion was that I was going to die.

‘I don’t want to die in such a dirty and unpleasant way.’

So what should I do?

As soon as I woke up, should I ask for a divorce? I think he will find me though…

He must have already lost his mind, but running away wouldn’t bring any good results. Because in the original story, he eventually found his ex-wife, who was hiding from the public eye.

Then there was only one way.

Playing the role of a good wife and changing the male lead for the better, even a little bit. That was the only way I could live. And when I would do enough work to some extent, it would be best to hand him over to the female lead and get a divorce.

‘If that happens, there will be bad memories, but there will also be good memories, so will you still come to kill me?’

Of course I’d have to try, but a well-founded confidence arose that I would be better than the vicious ex-wife anyway.

Good. Let’s try it.

After making the decision, I slowly opened my eyes. And I met the tearful blue eyes that were staring right at me.

“…Wife?”

As soon as I opened my eyes, the man cautiously called to me.