A midsummer terrace open to the night, stars pouring down.
I stood with my back against the railing, facing the darkness before me.
In that darkness, I could feel his breathing—still uneven, still unsteady.
Beyond that breath, a soft violin melody settled again between us.
“……Rohella.”
His slightly husky, languid voice blended into the music.
When I flinched faintly, he reached a hand toward me. With him came a sudden swirl of garden flowers.
A gentle summer breeze stirred his hair—blacker than the night sky itself.
My eyes stung. He whispered to me.
“Did I frighten you?”
Frighten me? Only then did I notice how fast my heart was pounding. Heat flooded my face.
Yes, this is just because I was startled. As he watched me touch my cheek, he continued speaking.
“I’m sorry I’m late.”
His voice carried bitterness. It wasn’t something he needed to apologize for.
I shook my head.
“You’re not late.”
Dorian stepped a pace closer to me.
“Rohella.”
My heart slammed dangerously at the tone of his voice.
He shouldn’t get any closer. I had to remain only his contract mother.
With difficulty, I forced out the words I had to say.
“……You should call me Mother.”
Please don’t call me by name.
But I couldn’t bring myself to say that last part aloud.
Dorian’s eyes, fixed on me, were startlingly vivid.
“I will never think of you as my mother.”
Before I realized it, he had come near—close enough to whisper with gentle, aching tenderness.
I squeezed my eyes shut without answering. His next words fell over me like raindrops.
“You are clearly not her. It would be cruel—to you, and to me—to pretend otherwise.”
His sincerity washed over my heart like a wave. Overwhelmed by the emotion spilling from him, I opened my eyes.
He was looking at me.
He didn’t even blink, and the corners of his eyes were red.
There are a few unchanging laws in a novel world.
The youngest child always succeeds; the bullied stepchild always meets a fairy godmother.
A child adopted by a villain becomes adored, and a transmigrated extra ends up with the male lead instead of the heroine.
But I wasn’t any of those.
I fiddled with the envelope in my hands.
“Independence allowance.”
Of course, my hands felt nothing. It was like touching empty air—a weight I still couldn’t believe even while staring at it.
That’s how novel worlds are. Ever since I transmigrated, nothing has felt real.
Was this how VR games felt? I’d never even visited one of those VR cafes, so I didn’t know.
A job-hunting student who died alone while working part-time. Too common to even describe—just another statistic.
I lived my whole life without parents, clawing my way forward, only to collapse in a one-room apartment and wake up inside the romance novel I read before I died.
How cliché. Yet after transmigrating, nothing about my life stayed cliché. Everyone else became nobles or prodigies with hidden abilities, right?
Anyway, now it was time to say goodbye to the orphanage that had taken me in. I looked around the building once more. I could see faint pinks and pale yellows—but nothing was clear anymore.
The symptoms were getting worse.
Whoever said novel orphans always lived happily?
I still remembered that day.
Late autumn rain pouring down. A damp stone wall soaking in the cold.
I was the orphan who sat under that wall, staring blankly at the rain, with nowhere to go.
Normally, I would’ve gotten into a temporary shelter, but adults had filled all the spots long before I arrived, leaving no place for a kid like me.
‘The rain won’t stop……’
It fell endlessly, like the sky wanted to dump an entire season’s worth tonight.
As my body and mind grew cold and sluggish, I remembered the things the gang had said the night before.
<I’ve never seen someone as useless as you. This is the end. Leave while we’re still speaking nicely.>
Because I was slow and clumsy, unable to pick pockets, even my scrap-stuffed mattress had been taken from me.
‘My body feels so heavy……’
I had no place left to go, no will to keep living.
My cold body slowly grew hot. My vision blurred.
Hunger and cold faded. I only felt crushing exhaustion.
And with that, I fainted.
Was it being cast out from the gang that triggered it? Or being thrown out of the shelter too?
I thought I would die there, but I didn’t—thanks to the patrol guard who found me collapsed in the alley.
While unconscious, I had a long, vivid dream.
A dream of myself living another life in a strange place. Every emotion I experienced there rose from deep within my soul.
I realized naturally that it was my previous life.
Even in that previous life, I had no parents.
I lived on the government’s self-support fund, paying rent and tuition with loans and part-time work.
At the kids’ café where I worked, I’d envy the children who played happily with their loving parents.
I didn’t know how I died. My memory just cut off somewhere.
I remembered finishing work, tired but too awake to sleep, reading a novel on my phone… then nothing.
Maybe it was overwork.
At the time, I didn’t think too deeply about those returning memories.
That life wasn’t much different from this one.
I already felt miserable enough without comparing it to another miserable life.
It was as though someone whispered endlessly in my ear that I would always be an orphan.
The guards sent me to an orphanage. Thankfully, it was a much better place than in my previous life.
I focused entirely on studying.
Those past-life memories told me my only chance of survival was gaining knowledge.
I studied hard enough to win tuition support.
At least I wouldn’t have to work myself to death paying off student loans this time.
But the moment I heard the name “Rembrandt Academy,” I couldn’t help sighing.
This wasn’t just reincarnation—it was transmigration into a novel.
Rembrandt Academy. The familiar setting of the extremely dark, misery-filled web novel I read before dying.
I had thought it was a casual reverse-harem fantasy academy story…
But then the villainous duke appeared, dragging the entire empire into chaos. The author had basically scammed the readers.
And right upon enrollment, I was diagnosed with a “peculiar constitution.”
“Miss Rohella… you have no mana at all?”
The magic theory professor tilted his head at my results.
“Your mana affinity is unusually—abnormally—high, but… Tell me, do you feel like the world is getting blurrier? Voices echoing? Your senses or body getting slow?”
Even his voice, clearer than most, sounded like I was hearing him underwater.
I nodded.
The professor frowned.
“You know that humans need mana to survive, right, Miss Rohella?”
I shook my head—it was news to me. He cleared his throat.
“Mana is nature’s energy. The foundation of this world. Most people have very little, but…”
He examined my results again.
Then, puzzled, he continued.
“If a person has no mana, they can’t live in this world. There are old records of this. People without mana would eventually become ‘insensate’—separated from the world and their own mind.”
“‘Insensate’?”
“The loss of the five senses. You can’t see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. You can’t even speak.”
“What…?”
“In that state, a person can’t communicate, can’t eat, can’t sleep, can’t move. They just sit blankly until they die. And that’s the state you’re in, Miss Rohella.”
And I immediately understood.
Mana is the foundation of this world—so I don’t have it.
Because I came from another world. This world is rejecting me.
The words were terrifying, but I stayed calm.
Instead, I asked:
“Then how am I still alive?”
“It seems your high mana affinity lets you maintain your senses when you’re near people with mana. But… even my mana may not be enough to fully sustain you. And most people barely have any mana at all…”
He stopped speaking. Then looked at me steadily.
His expression, movements—everything looked blurred, as if seen through dirty glass.
He continued.
“To survive, you’ll need to find someone with an immense amount of mana.”
I was stunned at the diagnosis, but one person immediately came to mind.
The Duke of Brecht.
The man who, according to the protagonists, held more mana than anyone on the continent.
But—he belonged to the villain family! The type who imprisoned people in underground cells and tortured them whether they were enemies or his own subordinates!
The owner of the mansion that stank of rot so horribly the protagonist had a fever for days after witnessing it.
Child kidnappings in the capital. And the introduction of drugs—in a fantasy novel with mages and knights! The comment section had exploded.
Drugs? In this era?? Really??
He even used those drugs to control the imperial family. The imperial family couldn’t touch him—why would he help someone like me?
If I went to him in this state and got turned into one of his test subjects, it’d be over. Over. Dead.
I couldn’t take that risk.
I flopped back onto my bed and wriggled in frustration.
Every time I moved my arms, the manastone bracelet the professor gave me for emergencies sparkled faintly.
“This is seriously hell.”
The name Rohella, and a negative-quirk constitution on top of it.
If it was this significant, the novel should’ve mentioned me—but I couldn’t remember anything like that. I must have died early in the original.
If I die again, will I transmigrate into yet another novel?
At this point, that possibility didn’t excite me at all.
Should I just die?
…But I hate pain.
And what if the next world has an even weirder constitution? I don’t even know how many worlds there are.
How long would this cycle go on?
Maybe I should just live as long as possible this time.
I sat up suddenly. Then calmly recalled the novel details.
The professor had told me to find someone powerful, but honestly, staying near the professor had improved me enough to live normally.
I didn’t even really know what “insensate” actually felt like.
And besides—there were other continents, right? Surely someone out there had strong mana too.
I clenched my fist.
Okay. Then I’ll survive. No matter what!
But first… how could I meet someone with a lot of mana easily?
I sat on my bed cross-legged, deep in thought.
And so, the moment I graduated from the academy, I opened a small tutoring center on the outskirts of the capital.
“You’ll really look after the children?”
“Of course. I, a certified graduate of Rembrandt Academy, will personally teach them academics and noble etiquette.”
If I wanted promising talents, the best way was to raise them myself!
And being on the outskirts meant I could escape quickly if anything happened in the capital.
It was also an area full of commoners—families without money but with high enthusiasm for education.
Smiling, I guided visiting parents into the receiving room.
Thanks to the Rembrandt Academy name tag, the place quickly filled with commoner children.
And just in case I didn’t find any talents, I saved money little by little so I could travel to another continent someday.
“At least the villain family would never come to a place like this.”
Not knowing the most important rule:
—never, ever let your guard down.
