Chapter 152
Sia did her best not to think about him. She tried to just pass it off as nothing more than a nightmare that was sweeter than expected. She had no intention of ever going back to that world anyway.
Everything she experienced there had all returned to her as memories.
From her first transmigration as the princess, to her last as the noblewoman. All of it was what she herself had gone through. There had never been any original soul inhabiting those bodies. Those bodies, those destinies—they were all Sia’s.
She lived in those bodies, died quickly, and returned to reality—over and over, dozens of times. Looking back, each of them was only a brief life, but when gathered together, they remained in her mind like a vast and distant dream. She knew she would never be able to forget.
Even the way Segleninde, who had treated her as nothing more than prey at first, gradually fell in love with her as the cycles went on.
“Ugh, I should’ve bought some beer.”
Sia shook her head and rummaged through the fridge. There wasn’t even any beer—barely a few bottles of water left, so she just swallowed her saliva.
It was late, and her vision was blurry, but she had to worry about how to survive starting tomorrow. She had just enough living expenses for one month left. From now on, she’d have to find at least a part-time job.
‘These days, companies don’t really take high school grads. The last company only hired me through a special high school graduate program. What am I going to do now?’
Suddenly being hit with reality gave her a headache, but she consoled herself that, except for the last round, at least this was better than constantly having her life threatened in that place, and let out a sigh.
She pulled the dust-covered laptop bag out from under her bed.
Fortunately, as soon as she unzipped it, there was no disaster of white tentacles spilling out. Relieved, she roughly cleared the table, which was piled high with instant noodle bowls, and set the laptop on top.
The moment she carefully opened the laptop and pressed the power button—
Ding—
At the familiar sound, she flinched involuntarily.
Without warning, a game window popped up on the screen.
“What, what the…?”
She shot to her feet on the spot, scrambling backward.
That ornate, antique frame… It was unmistakably ‘Coffin of the White Rose’.
It wasn’t just a hallucination brought on by Segleninde’s suggestion. It was real.
As she hurriedly tried to close the laptop, the title screen of the game, which had just come on, suddenly faded to black, and words appeared.
The words were written in a language she knew all too well.
[…It’s all my fault.]
“…Segleninde?”
The screen slowly brightened.
From the right, someone appeared in that pure white expanse, walking at a slow pace. A beautiful, tall man with long silver hair.
Segleninde.
With a sorrowful face, he looked at Sia and opened his mouth. Instead of a voice, words appeared on the screen.
[Even if you think I deceived you, I have nothing to say…] [I just wanted to be with you. That’s all.]
“……”
[Please come back.] [You liked being here too, didn’t you?]
“Crazy bastard.”
She’d thought she might feel a pang of longing at seeing his face, but instead, Sia felt a wave of anger well up.
Now that all the cycles she’d gone through flashed through her mind, even if his attitude had changed as he grew to love her over time, that didn’t erase all the deaths she’d experienced before.
“So what, you call someone over to that place and kill them dozens of times? I—me! Do you know how many times I died!”
The memories of facing her own corpses in the basement were still vivid.
She had died countless times.
She died at Segleninde’s hands, at the hands of the creatures. She was torn, bitten, cut, sliced, crushed, burned. Driven by nothing but the desperate urge to get home, she clung to life, though at times she even wished she could just die for good.
All those horrific events she had thought were just part of a game had actually happened.
And, more than that, she’d lived through those endings herself.
A few times, her companions had suffered the endings in her place, but all those deaths remained clear in her memory.
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