Lee Ji-hwan, an ordinary Korean male college student.
That was my identity in my past life.
I didn’t have such a spectacular life that I can recall every memory from childhood to college.
All I know is that I studied throughout my middle and high school years, like everyone else, and went to a decent university in Seoul for college.
For various reasons, I never had a relationship. Even so, I had a normal life where I was supposed to make a reasonable number of friends, get decent grades in college, and join a suitable company when I graduated.
In retrospect, it’s not like I’ve lived the most extraordinary life or anything, and I certainly haven’t lived to the point where I’d HAVE to be reincarnated in a game like this.
The only relevant bit of karma is that Luminor Academy was the game of my life, and I put nearly 2,000 hours of playtime into it.
…and the fact that I consistently wrote in the Luminor Academy Gallery forum that Lilith was a slut.
The only saving grace was that by the time I regained my memory, Lilith was not a slut… or rather, a pure body that had never had an experience with a man.
If I’d been possessed by her after her training as a maid was completed, I would have wanted to bite my tongue and end it all.
‘If I’m going to possess her, I’d rather have it done before I’m sold into this house.’
There was something strangely malicious about the fact that they didn’t give me my memories back until a year after I’d been hired at Blackwood Manor.
I felt like a crab in a steamer, slowly steaming to death with no escape.
If things continued to go as they had in the original game, I would be left with a horrible and predictable future.
To summarize my situation, I had to work as a maid for the Blackwood family for the next seven years.
Serving as a maid for the Blackwoods for eight years in exchange for repaying my father’s gambling debts was the choice I, Lilith Rosewood, made before I regained my memories.
Not counting the year already gone, I was doomed to serve the manor as a user for the next seven years.
If you’ve been working for seven years, you’ll probably find a chance to escape at least once. Unfortunately, the world wasn’t exactly a hospitable place for a commoner girl to navigate in the first place.
First of all, the idea of running away and turning a noble family into an enemy didn’t really make sense.
The Blackwoods are a venerable and historic ducal family.
Even if I somehow managed to get lucky and escaped from the Blackwood estate, it wouldn’t be too difficult for Blackwood to recapture an unidentified commoner girl.
Of course, it would be illogical for Blackwood to send out an army to capture a girl, so he’d probably leave her alone as soon as she managed to escape the estate.
If I were to become involved with the Blackwoods in any way in the future, a terrible fate would await me from which there would be no escape.
It would be a textbook example of how to dishonor the Duke’s family.
There would be a good chance I’d end up in a future where I’d be better off being trained by some cult as per the original plot. Simply put, it was better not to even think about it.
Given Lilith’s abilities, a life as an adventurer in a decent guild would probably be enough to keep her afloat. At the end of the day, however, adventuring is a job where you live off the favors of the nobility.
Even if I wanted to find another steady job, the only place that would hire a Jane Doe unconditionally would be a brothel, at best.
Therefore, I put the idea of escaping Blackwood Manor and living a different life on hold. Not that escaping was that easy in the first place.
The most realistic solution would be to complete the remaining seven years of the required contract and become independent.
The other option would be to be ‘saved’ by the ‘protagonist’ at Luminor Academy and escape.
‘That’s a shitty ending, too….’
There were two main problems with using a protagonist-saved ending to escape the Blackwoods.
One was that I would have to accept the position of Ethan’s exclusive maid first, as I would have to enter Luminor Academy to meet the protagonist.
The other was that after being saved by the protagonist, she would have to stay with him until the end of the story.
To summarize, I had to go through all the shit with some cult, then switch to the protagonist and do it all over again.
To add insult to injury, this meant that I had to follow the story of Lilith Rosewood, the game’s version of the slutty whore route.
‘Fuck me. I can’t do that route either…’
In order to escape the Hateful One, you first have to become their exclusive maid…. and you’re stuck with him until he enters the academy? That doesn’t even make sense.
Besides, after you run away from the asshole, you have to live as one of the other asshole girls until the end?
Those few years could turn into a lifetime if the protagonist ever went down the harem route or the individual Lilith route.
I shook my head to clear my mind of those disgusting thoughts.
Besides, it would be far worse if I were to enter Luminor Academy while being hounded by a cult and then find myself furthest down in the main character’s order of salvation.
‘Let’s go for the safer option. No risks.’
Seven years isn’t an incredibly short time, but it’s also not an unbearable amount of time.
In the first place, working as a maid for the Blackwoods implied that food, clothing, and shelter were guaranteed. This was easily much safer than going out and adventuring alone.
Besides, Lilith Rosewood’s abilities were more specialized for party hunting than solo leveling, so working alone would prove difficult.
‘Seven years, blink and you’ll be in your mid-twenties by the time you’re done with your contract, so if you save up enough money, you’ll be able to strike out on your own somehow, whether it’s farming in the rural areas or opening a small shop in a small city….’
It was a far-off future that had yet to arrive, but it wasn’t so bad considering how that future would somehow work out.
Entering the world of my favorite game, Luminor Academy, was enough to make me happy…
…except for one thing: the fact that I now possess this foolish maid, Lilith.
It had been three days since I remembered my past life and lay on the bed.
“Lilith, how are you feeling?”
“Ah, Isabel….”
The fellow maid now standing beside me with a smile on her face is Isabel.
As I said, she was a fellow maid who came to Blackwood Manor with me about a year ago.
Of course, at the time, I hadn’t yet regained my memories of my previous life. Clearly, it’s a normal relationship I developed when I was just Lilith Rosewood.
I had no intention of treating Isabel like a stranger just because I had regained my memories.
I’m grateful to Isabel, who picked up the maid duties as quickly as if she’d always been in the same line of work, and I’ve gotten a lot of help from her over the past year.
As I said before, not all of the memories of my 18 years as Lilith were lost two days ago.
It was more like the feeling that 20 years of memories from my previous life had suddenly rushed in and added to those existing.
Essentially, I am now a hybrid with the memories of 18-year-old Lilith Rosewood and 26-year-old Ji-Hwan Lee.
It might have been better if I had been reincarnated as a baby girl with the memories of being a man. As 18 years passed, I would have gradually come to terms with the reality of being a woman.
…No, if I’d had a memory from back then, I wouldn’t have gotten my damn father into gambling, and I wouldn’t have been sold as a maid to the Blackwoods.
The timing of the possession was ridiculous, to say the least. If I’d gotten my memory back a year sooner, I’d be in a much better place right now.
If the trigger for regaining my memories had been seeing Ethan’s face in the first place, I couldn’t have done so without it.
“…Lilith.”
‘It’s not too late though; if I can somehow make it through seven years, I can say goodbye to this Blackwood for good, and by then, I’ll be away from Ethan, in a faraway city with no one else….’
“Lilith!”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!”
The sound of Isabel’s voice, right next to my right ear, caused me to fall backward on my ass.
I turned to see Isabel looking somewhat puzzled as if she hadn’t expected me to freak out this much.
“Damn, are you okay, Lilith?!”
“Ouch…. That hurt like a bitch….”
“Sorry! I didn’t realize you would be this surprised….”
With her hands clasped together, Isabel bowed her head and apologized profusely.
I didn’t feel like getting mad at her to her face, so I quickly stood up and dusted off my ass.
After all, it was partly my fault for getting lost in my own world in the middle of a conversation with her.
“It’s okay, it’s just that I was thinking about something else in the middle of our conversation.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I really am fine. I’ve always told you, I’m too strong to get hurt anyway.”
“That’s the first time I’ve heard that today….”
“……ah.”
…Come to think of it, having a strong body was an advantage in my previous life.
Then again, since I died in an accident in my last life, I don’t even think it counts as an advantage.
Even so, what’s the point in thinking about that now?
“By the way, Lilith, what are you thinking so hard about when you’re not cleaning? You don’t even notice me when I call, do you?”
“It’s just… It’s not a big deal, so you don’t have to worry about it…”
“Also, you’ve been feeling a little off since the other day…. You’re not sick still, are you?”
“No, I’m not. My body is fine! There’s nothing wrong with it.”
The problem is that I’m physically well, but my mind is exhausted.
There were so many problems to face, and nothing had been resolved, so my mind was bound to become impatient.
The good news was that I’d regained memories of my previous life before becoming Ethan’s exclusive maid, so I had a way to prepare.
In the first place, there was nothing I could do right away as a lowly maid.
I was forbidden to leave the mansion, especially since I was a long-term contract servant who had been sold into debt.
The only thing I could think of doing was trying to do something within the mansion, but the problem was that there was no one in the mansion with a lower status than me.
Isabel, my fellow maid, is of the same rank as me, and most of the other maids are related to House Blackwood, so there’s no room for me, a commoner maid.
Even amongst the maids, we were not allowed to be disrespectful to the senior maids.
So, in the end, the only person in the manor that I could potentially push around was Isabel.
“…….”
“What’s the matter, Lilith? You’ve been staring me in the face for quite some time now.”
“…No, it’s nothing.”
Of course, just because I could move somehow didn’t mean I would take full advantage of her.
Even if I had to struggle to escape my fate as a maid with memories of my former life, I would never think of throwing Isabel into that hell on my behalf.
I’m not so stupid as to forget our friendship over the past year and her graciousness in teaching me things behind my seniors’ backs when I was an apprentice maid.
The knowledge I’d gained then was why I could act like an ordinary maid now.
If it weren’t for the knowledge of her trade that Isabel taught me overnight in the same quarters while she was an apprentice maid, I’d probably still be serving salad and soup the other way around this morning.
I wouldn’t be able to learn how not to wrinkle a garment while ironing or how to greet a maid.
Drawing attention to myself was not good for me in many ways, so I had to keep a low profile until I was in a position to do something about it.
Isabel, who had made me who I was, was someone I owed a favor to. She was not someone I could ungratefully scapegoat on my behalf.
‘Ugh, what the hell am I gonna do now…?’
If I’m asked to become Ethan’s exclusive maid as soon as tomorrow morning, I won’t be able to object as I have to repay the favor…
Being the lowest-ranking maid of the Duke’s family is an unimaginably tiring position.
I could only hope that the next seven years would pass without incident.