Chapter 1

“No! This cannot be. Sister!”

A sharp, breathless cry sliced through the quiet of the woods. An arrow had pierced my chest. Through the searing, burning agony and my swiftly fading consciousness, the desperate, weeping voice of my younger sister, Dana, filtered in.

I wanted to tell her that I was alright, to comfort her, but I could not even nudge my lips to form the words. Abandoning all resistance, my body surrendered, and my eyelids slipped shut like a heavy curtain.

I will likely never open my eyes again. A cold, sharp instinct told me so.

If there was anything I regretted, it was that I wouldn’t get to see Dana’s wedding, and that I had never managed to catch a glimpse of the vast world beyond these trees. There, in the forest where I had lived confined for the grand majority of my life, I met my end.

The Maylin Who Became Maylin

When my mother was struck down by an unidentified illness, and the physicians repeatedly shook their heads in defeat before exiting our house, the village people began to whisper. They murmured maliciously that my mother had been cursed.

Eventually, my mother and I were driven out into the forest to live in a tiny, dilapidated hut. The villagers barred my mother from ever showing her face, and they ensured that I, her child, could not wander anywhere near the village either.

It was a stroke of immense luck that a kind-hearted, childless relative living in another village took Dana in to raise her. Although we could not meet often out of fear of the villagers’ watchful eyes, it was enough for me just to know that Dana was living a good life.

Many years passed. Mother eventually left this world, and around the time I was preparing to finally step out into society, Dana sought me out at the forest cabin. She had come to deliver the news that she would soon be having her wedding. Had she said he was a baker’s son? Dana described him as an innocent, charming man, but since I had never seen him with my own eyes, I didn’t entirely believe her words.

On that particular day, darkness fell exceptionally fast. Worried about Dana traveling back alone after delivering her news, I secretly followed her from a distance. My plan was only to keep watch until she safely cleared the perimeter of the forest.

Fortunately, the wild beasts or thugs I had fretted over never materialized. Instead, a hunter’s blind arrow flew straight toward Dana. Judging by how the hunter immediately bellowed, “Get down!” right after releasing the string, I figured he must have mistaken Dana for something else due to her dark robe. I threw my weight forward, lunging off the dirt, and took the arrow in Dana’s stead.

And that was how I died.

I remembered the exact moment the shadow of death draped over my body with absolute clarity. I had been certain that no matter what a physician might try afterward, there was no resurrecting me.

Yet, as if it were a lie, I opened my eyes once more. The arrow that had torn clean through my chest was nowhere to be found. For a long time, I sat in a daze, my fingers absently tracing my unblemished skin, unable to find a single scar.

“…What are you doing?” a voice asked.

“Ah!”

I inhaled sharply at the sudden, unfamiliar sound. Turning my head, I saw a young woman I had never met before sitting on the adjacent bed, staring at me as if I were a freak.

“Why are you so startled?” she pressed, raising an eyebrow. “More importantly… why are you suddenly fondling your own chest?”

As I would come to learn later, her name was Ephel. She was a maid who shared this room with me. She was a brown-haired woman with a slightly upturned, sharp gaze that gave her a charming, catty demeanor. She didn’t give off the impression that she liked me very much, but whenever I sat lost in a daze, she would occasionally throw a worried glance my way.

But I had a perfectly valid reason for losing my mind.

I had awakened in an entirely different world. I possessed the exact same name, and the exact same face, as I had in my past life.

Had that been the extent of it, my confusion might have subsided much earlier. Unluckily, however, this ‘different world’ happened to be… the interior of a novel I had once read.

***

The Adventures of the Sword God was an adventure novel detailing how the protagonist overcomes all sorts of misfortunes and obstructions to finally become a Sword Master through sheer innate talent and passion.

Among the many books I had read aloud to my bedridden mother, that novel remained uniquely vivid in my memory. While it was certainly entertaining, the biggest reason it stuck with me was that a minor supporting character shared my exact name. Though, I truly hadn’t expected the face to be identical as well.

The character was Maylin, a maid of the Count Kotner estate.

“Maylin, from the very first moment I laid eyes on you, my soul became imprisoned in a dungeon called love and…”

For context, the Maylin of this world was a person who heard this exact flavor of confession multiple times a day.

‘A magnificent beauty of such scale that when she walks down the street, swinging her long, softly gleaming blonde hair that looks as though it has swallowed the sun, the entire village falls into a frenzy.’

I recalled the text describing her roughly along those lines. In my past life, I had pitch-black hair, and because the villagers refused to come near my mother and me out of fear that the curse might be contagious, I had gone about with my face shrouded in a robe. I had almost never experienced anything like this. Granted, there had been one boy who approached me despite everything, but…

“Maylin? Are you listening to me?”

The man blocking my path jolted my consciousness away from the unpleasant memories it was drifting toward.

“Ah… I have to go to work,” I replied flatly.

“Just a moment, Maylin! I haven’t finished speaking yet!” the man cried out.

He lunged forward to grab my arm, prompting me to swiftly pivot my body backward to avoid his reach.

“Ugh!”

He lost his footing entirely, staggering violently as he nearly crashed hard into the floor. The water inside the bucket I carried sloshed precariously. Had someone said he was a merchant who came to sell goods to the Count’s estate? I had already forgotten his name.

“Hey, what do you think you’re doing to the lady?”

Just as I was mulling over how best to rid myself of this persistent nuisance, a man passing through the hallway stepped in to intercept the merchant. He was a knight, his shoulder-length red hair pulled back into a single ponytail. If you were to ask how I knew he was a knight, my answer would be that only knights walked around this castle strapped with longswords of that caliber.

“Oh, it’s—it’s nothing, Sir Knight. Well then, I shall take my leave.”

The moment the knight intervened, the merchant immediately beat a hasty retreat, backing away into the shadows.

I assumed that would be the end of the encounter, but the knight who had aided me didn’t continue on his way. Instead, he stood hovering in front of me, fidgeting awkwardly. Ah, I realized, I haven’t offered my thanks.

“Thank you,” I said.

“…No, it is quite alright, Lady,” he stammered.

From what I understood, the title of ‘Lady’ was typically reserved for noblewomen, yet for some reason, this knight stubbornly insisted on addressing a mere maid like myself as one.

Furthermore, despite receiving my gratitude, he simply continued to linger. Having spent over ten years speaking almost exclusively to no one but my mother and sister, my social skills were severely stunted—a deficit I could keenly feel myself. Consequently, I had absolutely no inkling of what else one was supposed to say in a situation like this.

“Where were you heading?” he asked flustrously, reaching out. “I—I shall carry that for you.”

The knight hurriedly tried to wrestle the water bucket from my grip, but I pulled my hands behind my back to block him.

“I am fine. I must get to work.”

I offered a brief, polite nod of my head and brushed past him. The knight looked as though he had more to say, but unlike the merchant from before, he did not reach out to detain me.

“Madame. I have arrived. Let me wash your feet right away,” I called out.

The moment I stepped into the dim room, I intentionally raised the pitch of my voice to a cheerful note while drawing back the heavy curtains. The gloomy, oppressive space instantly transformed, turning bright as a torrent of sunlight poured inside.

I guided the vacant-faced elderly lady into a chair, gently turning her head so that she could appreciate the scenery outside the window. Then, sinking to my knees before her, I began to wash her feet. This was the sole reason I had brought the bucket of water.

It had already been ten days since I woke up in this alternate world. Amidst all the bewildering changes, the single task that felt intimately familiar was caring for an invalid. After all, taking care of my ailing mother was the one thing I had done until I was thoroughly sick of it since childhood.

“The clouds today look exactly like a bird,” I murmured. “That part over there looks just like a beak. Don’t you think so?”

Prattling away to myself was another deeply ingrained habit. The elderly lady—the mother of Count Kotner—did not speak, but she never ignored my voice either. Watching her gaze drift toward the clouds following my guidance, a small smile traced my lips.

I continued to chatter by myself for a good while longer before finally putting the elderly lady to sleep and stepping out of the chamber.

Had anyone been looking at my face right then, they would have been startled by how instantly my expression darkened the moment the door clicked shut.

“Maylin! I assume you finished washing the old madame’s feet?”

The head maid, possessing a thoroughly impatient countenance, called out the moment she spotted me in the corridor.

“Yes,” I answered simply.

“As if I could ever truly trust you,” she huffed, crossing her arms. “If I catch you slacking off again, expect a proper thrashing!”

In the original text, the version of Maylin that existed here was a lazy worker who constantly cut corners. It wasn’t entirely unreasonable for the head maid to throw such harsh words my way. I meekly bowed my head in acknowledgment and quietly blended in among the maids who were sweeping the hallway. Behind me, I could hear the head maid muttering to herself under her breath.

“Why has that girl been acting so docile lately?”

That would be because the soul inside has changed, I thought. Naturally, I couldn’t utter the truth aloud. I had no clue where the original Maylin had vanished to. For all I knew, she might have slipped into my previous body in reverse—assuming that corpse was even considered salvageable.

Thwack!

“Ah, my apologies. I was trying to hand it to you,” a voice sneered.

A maid had deliberately hurled her broom straight at me. A ripple of snickers and muffled laughter erupted among several of the maids sweeping the corridor.

The servants here utterly loathed me—or rather, they loathed ‘Maylin.’ If the events of the book served any indication, the primary catalyst was that Maylin routinely bragged about herself while looking down on everyone else.

My roommate, Ephel, who was also tasked with cleaning the hallway, continued wiping the window panes while pretending not to see a thing. Naturally, I harbored no feelings of betrayal.

…This felt exactly like being thrown back into my childhood. I recalled the village children who used to torment me right before we were banished to the forest, screaming that I was cursed because my mother was cursed. Whenever they did that, do you know what I did?

Thwack!

“Eek!”

For the most part, I paid them back in kind. The maid who was struck by the broom I threw back tumbled to the floor in sheer shock. I trudged over with heavy steps and hoisted the rolling broom back into my hands. Then, I spoke with complete apathy.

“My apologies.”

To reiterate, my social skills had not developed a single millimeter since those days. Without waiting around to hear her response, I began pushing the broom along the floor. Behind me, I could hear the maids throwing a furious tantrum, whispering about what kind of psycho I was.

The Maylin of the original novel possessed that exact nasty temperament, yet she had suffered immensely under the collective bullying of the maids. Ultimately, she had whined to Joel Kotner—the Count’s son who was deeply infatuated with her—prompting him to execute a mass firing of the estate’s maids.

However, I had absolutely no intention of doing such a thing. It wasn’t out of any noble concern for the maids. I had to refrain for the sake of this body—or rather, for myself.

Because doing that would only put my own life in jeopardy.

I had assumed I was dead, only to open my eyes perfectly intact within another world. Though the ‘Maylin’ here was fundamentally a different person, her name and face matched my own. Furthermore, the people here didn’t shun me under the pretext of a curse. At first glance, shouldn’t I just kick back and enjoy this second lease on life?

…That was exactly what I had initially thought.

That is, until I realized that Maylin, the maid appearing in The Adventures of the Sword God, was destined for an early grave.

To make matters worse, she didn’t die of some chronic illness or a freak accident. To be entirely precise, she was murdered in a homicide meticulously staged to look like an accident.

And the culprits were none other than the master and mistress of this very estate—the Count and Countess Kotner themselves.