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Translator: Wjin
Chapter: 2
Chapter Title: Ripples in the Deep
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#2.
Dohwa did her utmost to calm her racing mind.
Her body was stiffening up, almost like her arm had cramped.
'Where am I?'
She struggled to compose herself and scanned her surroundings.
Before her eyes, large and small decorations stood in neat rows, and beneath her feet, she could see coins settled on the bottom.
'...Looks like some kind of well?'
The depth was far beyond the reach of her feet, but the water's stillness without any currents made it clear this was an artificial space.
Dohwa stopped thrashing and let her body sink calmly downward.
Her breath grew tight, filling her with impatience, but she knew this was the quickest way.
Mount Hua Sect sat high in the mountains, yet there were plenty of spots for water play. Raised amid martial artists, Dohwa had dabbled in every sort of perilous water stunt imaginable.
'Got it!'
The instant her feet touched bottom, she kicked off powerfully with both legs.
Once she had her bearings, the rest was simple. Alternating her legs with smooth grace, the water's surface drew near.
Light shimmered right before her eyes.
Puhah!
As she thrust her head above water and gulped in air, a torrent of roaring laughter erupted.
'...What did I just hear?'
Dohwa swept aside her hair, clinging like wet seaweed, seized the fountain's edge, and hauled herself out.
She'd thought it a hallucination at first, but the finely dressed children were staring straight at her, laughing.
Laughing at her—the one who'd nearly just drowned.
"Uhahaha, look at that idiot Charlotte Setia!"
"She said she'd die, but I knew she'd crawl out."
"Kekeke, why dive in if you can't even drown? Bet the fountain's water got all squeezed out."
"Scaredy-cat trying to hog attention, kekeke, too funny."
Her, drenched head to toe in her sodden dress, flailing about—it must have looked like prime entertainment to them.
But their cackling laughter merely grazed her ears.
More strange and alien than the children encircling her was the chill wind whispering over her soaked clothes.
She tilted her head back and gazed at the sky. A vast, brilliant blue stretched overhead.
She drew in another lungful of air.
'Ah... fresh outdoor air. The air I yearned for endlessly over that whole year.'
Vivid blue sky, man-made fountain, garden trees pruned into fanciful shapes.
And limbs that bent to her command.
"...Haha."
Tears threatened to spill, so Dohwa forced a laugh.
She pressed her palm to the fountain.
The playful spray tickling her skin assured her this was no fleeting dream. None of it was illusion.
Her eyes drifted to her reflection in the water.
She stared long at the pink hair unknown to the martial world. At the soft pale-green eyes, too.
The cute, pudgy face appeared no older than eight or ten.
Not the face of Dohwa, who at fourteen had wasted away in bed, drawing her last breath on her fifteenth birthday.
'...This is my face?'
Suddenly, the name she'd just heard—'Charlotte Setia'—flashed to mind.
And with it, the tale from the book that bedside child had read to her endlessly in her final days.
And the cover of the book clutched in the Reaper of Souls' hand.
'...No way. Did I really become the Charlotte from that book?'
The martial world brimmed with fortuitous encounters.
But to gain one in death, only to become a book's side character...
And not just any—a bungling nobody shunned by all.
More than shock at entering the book, Dohwa first sensed her lot hadn't much improved.
The story centered on the neighboring Serres Kingdom's princess, whose mad love drove her to conquer Cheiker Kingdom for its Third Prince.
Yet Charlotte hailed not from the heroine's realm, but conquered Cheiker.
Worse, her Setia Ducal House—leaders of Cheiker's second knight order—backed the wrong horse, the talentless Second Prince, blind to the true heir.
Even there, for failing to show talent, she was sidelined and scorned...
'...To end up as this side character's side character, a mere brat of all things.'
Lost in the book's plot, boisterous voices crashed in again.
"Hey, Charlotte. Ignoring me now?"
"Charlotte, Lancelot's calling you!"
"Hey!"
Dohwa finally grasped who these noisy children haranguing her were.
Ducal house brats surrounded her.
They lived to torment Charlotte. Young as she was, no softer mark than the family's discarded child.
'No plans to indulge their childish games. Pathetic.'
Ignoring the raucous yells, as she peered once more at her pallid face in the water, something flickered behind her reflection.
A boy stood right at her back.
Skin whiter than milk, hair blacker than ebony, lips redder than plum blossoms.
How could a boy's face hold such exquisite beauty?
Beautiful enough to unsettle the heart.
As she gaped blankly, the boy snapped his head away.
"What, think Prince Joseph will save you? You're no different."
His mocking words snapped Charlotte around in shock.
'Prince Joseph?'
Through the rippling water, she hadn't noticed—but face-to-face, astonishment parted her lips.
Prince Joseph was bound to a massive tree at the garden's heart. Ropes cinched tight from knees to neck.
His poise masked it well, but the black-and-blue bruises on his calves and hands screamed his battered state.
Having endured brutal bullying in her past life, she spotted such signs far quicker than most.
'...Who the hell did this to Prince Joseph?'
Her heart clenched in pain.
Prince Joseph was this novel's male lead.
In the book, not this child—but a man in full bloom.
Swordmaster besting any foe general, genius crushing all debaters.
She'd wondered endlessly while reading.
Emperor dead, Second Prince seizes throne—Cheiker turns hellish. Tyranny drains the people's marrow; only as ruin looms do ministers unearth and crown the Third Prince.
But he slaughters the imperial clan like a blood-crazed fiend before aiding the realm. Stability won, he cedes the throne to a side kin without a backward glance and vanishes.
As if duty done.
He returns amid crisis, falls in battle—kidnapped by the princess, fueling her obsessive romance...
She'd truly pondered.
The empire's princess fixates on a Joseph who spares her no glance—so peerless in beauty and perfection. Why forsake the throne so readily?
Why butcher the royals so mercilessly?
Now, it felt like she'd uncovered the truth.
'The prince's childhood, unmentioned in the book... it was like this.'
Plop.
A stone dropped at Prince Joseph's feet.
Charlotte whipped her head toward the source.
The pack that mocked her near-drowning stood there.
And frontmost, the burliest boy scooping up another rock.
Lancelot showed no qualms hurling at a person. He flung it without pause.
The stone spanned half a palm.
Left alone, it'd strike Joseph dead-on.
Unthinking, Charlotte edged half a step between them, thrusting her hand high.
Thwack.
Reading its path perfectly, the stone slapped into her palm.
No inner force, no external training—her grip screamed in agony, near torn, but her eyes never faltered, snaring it clean.
The instant Lancelot's stone met Charlotte's hand, silence blanketed the jeering crowd. Gasps followed. Stunned stares swarmed her.
"...Wow."
"How..."
"Lancelot, caught by that Charlotte?"
But their awe soured quick; sensing the tension, mouths sealed shut.
"...What was that, Charlotte? His Highness bade us educate Third Prince ourselves. Who are you to meddle? Craving the same?"
A threat, plain?
Reason mattered not.
She was bone-weary of it all.
The strong preying on weak.
A pack of mighty ganging one frail soul, sealing off aid.
She knew—from having been that prey.
How vicious. How it drained the blood from life.
Charlotte tugged her lips into a smirk.
"Do it."
"What...?"
"Make me 'the same'? Think you can? Go on."
Charlotte's voice rang clear and defiant. The Third Prince's fathomless black eyes—blank till now—stirred.
A single ripple across a bottomless lake.
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