BSOV | Chapter 1

0. Once a Civil Servant, Always a Civil Servant

 

 

So, I am… well, that.

A transmigrator.

And not just any transmigrator, but one who ended up in the most cliché setup of all: transmigrating into a villainess.

When I first realized I had transmigrated into a novel, I nearly tore my hair out.

Not because of anything else, but because it felt so unfair. Insanely unfair that I had transmigrated!

I had not deliberately misstepped off an overpass.

I had not thrown myself into the Han River after breaking up with my boyfriend.

I had not been running from a troubled and precarious past.

Strictly speaking, I had been living a successful life.

Throughout all three years of high school, I had never once lost my straight Grade 1 rankings in every subject on the CSAT mock exams, and even on the notoriously difficult actual CSAT that people called the hardest ever, I had not missed a single question.

After that, honoring my grandmother’s wish to produce at least one doctor in the family, I had smashed my way through the gates of S University’s pre-med program.

But being a doctor was not something just anyone could do. Of course, becoming a doctor was not the only path in life, so I quickly chose to take a leave of absence.

Then, at twenty-three, I passed the Grade 5 Civil Service Exam and promptly withdrew from the university without a second thought.

After becoming a respectable civil servant, I often read romance fantasy novels while commuting on the subway.

And that day too, I had been turning the page to read the next chapter of the romance fantasy novel I was reading at the time.

The problem was that, at that exact moment, I suddenly felt dizzy. I closed my eyes for a second, and when I opened them again, I had transmigrated into the very romance fantasy novel I had been reading.

I tore at my hair in frustration, cursing up a storm inwardly.

To make things worse, the character I had transmigrated into, “Blaine Nostelgia,” died in a truly absurd and futile way.

And just how pathetic was her death?

Despite supposedly being a villain, all she did was chase after the male lead while loudly declaring her love for him, then she got caught by the Emperor, the true villain and the second male lead, who used her however he pleased before discarding her and letting her die.

In short, she was what people would call a punching bag character, a mere pawn used to highlight the hidden villain’s charm, a disposable character created for the author’s convenience.

For that reason, right after transmigrating, just like every female lead in transmigration stories, I decided to completely twist the plot in order to survive.

I felt a little sorry for the author, who had poured their heart into writing this, but my pride would not allow someone who had lived a fairly successful life like me to die as miserably as Blaine Nostelgia.

Fortunately, the moment I was transmigrated into the story was right at the very beginning.

I would survive somehow, return to reality, and reclaim my life as a civil servant.

On the first day I realized I had transmigrated, I wrote down the things I absolutely must never do going forward.

 

1. Do not catch the Emperor’s attention.

2. Do not get involved with the main characters.

 

I figured if I could just manage those two things, I would at least be fine.

But whenever someone says something like this, they always end up getting involved with the female lead, the male lead, and even the villain…

For a moment, an ominous thought crossed my mind, but I snapped myself out of it by smacking both cheeks.

“Who do I think I am? I’m Min Doyeon, the woman who got into S University’s pre-med program and passed the civil service exam.”

Things other people could not do, I was confident I could.

I truly meant that.

 

 

However, that confidence did not last long.

“Ah… What exactly went wrong?”

About two years ago.

I stood in front of the burned-down mansion belonging to the Count Nostelgia family and muttered to myself.

“What went wrong?”

Until then, I hadn’t crossed paths with the hidden villain, hadn’t met the female lead, hadn’t encountered the male lead.

I had skipped every event where I could have met them. I had avoided any semblance of a social life and stayed home like a hermit.

And yet why…

“How did our family end up ruined?”

I watched as the culprit who had set my mansion ablaze was dragged away.

He was an incredibly handsome man, with deep blue hair and striking golden eyes.

Of course he was.

He was the male lead, after all.

That was right.

The arsonist who had burned the Nostelgia estate to the ground was none other than Mellen, the male protagonist of the novel I had transmigrated into, ⟨Romance with a Kind Person⟩.

I had tried so hard to avoid the male lead, and yet that bastard burned my entire house down.

“Ah, I’m screwed.”

Yeah, I was screwed.

The male lead I had tried so hard to avoid completely ruined both my plans and my family.

But even at that point, I had assumed that the Nostelgia family, a Count’s household, would not suddenly end up out on the streets.

First, I comforted my father, who was pounding the ground and crying.

Where the male lead of ⟨R.K.P.⟩ was being dragged off to was none of my concern.

“It’s fine. It’s not like we’re going to starve to death just because our house collapsed, right?”

I truly believed that.

It was obvious we would struggle financially for a while, but no matter how completely our house had burned down, we were still a Count’s family in name. Surely we would not starve to death.

But a few days later, as the old saying goes, words have a way of coming true. We really did end up on the verge of starving to death.

It turned out that the person who had threatened the male lead into setting our house on fire was none other than our family’s butler.

 

 

The butler had been embezzling our family’s money little by little for a very long time.

Then, when there was no longer much left for him to siphon off, he kidnapped the male lead’s older brother and threatened the male lead into committing arson because he feared his crimes would be discovered.

Seriously, what kind of ridiculous train wreck plot was this?

And I’m supposed to be the villain of this book, right? So why was the butler suddenly volunteering to be the villain?!

Absurd as it was, it was the reality we lived in.

The one saving grace was that we had property insurance, which meant we were eligible for compensation, but there was no telling when it would actually come.

To receive compensation for the burned mansion and property, the imperial administration had to process the insurance claim.

But even after several days had passed, there was no sign that our insurance payout would be processed.

No matter how many times we went to ask, all we got was a bureaucratic runaround. ‘This isn’t under our jurisdiction. Please visit department so-and-so.’

In the end, my family found ourselves out on the street.

For all the prestige of being a Count’s family, we had become nobles in name only, penniless and impoverished.

The nobles who used to attend parties with us every day completely washed their hands of us and turned their backs.

Since no one knew when our family fortunes would recover, they all withdrew completely. In other words, every friendship my father had ever cultivated had crumbled to nothing overnight.

And then a second problem arose.

Around that time, when our family had become poorer than tenant farmers, someone reached out to help us.

At first, I had no idea who this girl was. I simply thought there was a saint living next door.

She even split her already meager household budget to lend us money, and whenever she somehow managed to get potatoes, she always shared them with us, too.

When I asked this kind girl her name, would you believe she gave me the female lead’s name?

That’s right.

The person who helped us was Glumi, the female protagonist of ⟨R.K.P.⟩.

Come to think of it, I was not entirely wrong about there being a saint living next door. Glumi would become a saint later, after all.

And as if it was not enough to learn that the female lead I had spent all that time avoiding lived right next door to me, I also heard that the male lead, Mellen, had been released after it was acknowledged that he had committed the arson under duress, coerced by our butler.

Our family’s mansion was still a pile of ash and rubble, so why was the arsonist already being released?

What exactly was wrong with this country’s legal system?!

And you main leads too. Have you no pride?

Do you know how hard I worked to avoid you? Why do you keep showing up so easily?

I could not have felt more wronged.

For a while, before going to bed, I bit down hard on the coarse, scratchy fabric of my blanket and muttered, “So… This is how it’s going to be…”

No matter how much I struggled, no matter how desperately I tried to break free from the fate written for this character.

If I were going to meet the main characters in the end, no matter how hard I tried to avoid them…

And if I was only going to meet them in increasingly worse ways…

I came to a decision.

If all my plans were already ruined anyway, then I might as well ruin things properly.

 

* * *

 

The next day, I said to my father, who was listlessly stirring a bowl of watery potato soup, “Father. I’m going to become an imperial official.”

“…What?”

Having thought it through the entire night, I had arrived at an unavoidable conclusion that I was apparently destined to meet every major character eventually. If that were the case, then I would inevitably cross paths with the hidden villain as well.

And perhaps, just as avoiding the male lead had resulted in my house burning down, avoiding the villain would lead to something even more catastrophic.

The true final villain of ⟨R.K.P.⟩ was the Emperor, the second male lead.

And what would the worst possible encounter with the Emperor be?

Execution!

My death!

At the very least, I had to avoid the absolute worst-case scenario of dying.

“The reason we’re living like this right now is because those imperial official basta… I mean, because the officials aren’t doing their jobs properly, isn’t it?”

By then, we had already been living like that for two whole months.

“So I’ll become an imperial official and handle our family’s case myself.”

I declared resolutely.

If our compensation was indefinitely delayed because the officials were not doing their jobs, then I would just become one myself and get it sorted out personally!

I had originally been a civil servant.

Just like someone whose body had grown smaller but whose mind remained the same, my body had changed, but my mind was still intact.

After informing my father of my decision, I immediately began preparing for the imperial official examination.

And naturally, I passed six months later.

I even sat through a panel interview with senior imperial officials, outnumbered on all sides.

Who did they think I was? I was someone who had smashed through the gates of S University’s pre-med program!

Personal statements? Self-promotion during interviews?

That stuff was easy.

I was someone who had survived a hyper-competitive society built on rote memorization!

Other people might think I sounded a little arrogant.

But I was on a completely different level from lower-ranking nobles who had grown up spoiled by empty praise and were full of nothing but arrogance, or commoners who knew nothing but studying.

For someone forged through years of entrance exams and grueling study sessions, sweeping past the competition and passing with ease was simply the natural order of things.

I, the elite talent who burst onto the scene of the Infelion Empire like a comet, the strongest rookie of them all, was promoted to an 8th-rank imperial official within just one year.

And just a few days ago, I finally resolved my family’s case.

It happened exactly two years after our house burned down.

Tears welled in my eyes.

I had transmigrated into the body of a Count’s daughter, yet I could not even properly enjoy the life of a noble because I spent all my time hiding from the male lead, the female lead, and the hidden villain.

Then my house burned down, and my family ended up on the streets. I even met the male and female leads I had sworn I would never meet…

They were truly difficult times.

Everyone else seemed to transmigrate into romance fantasy novels and end up dating handsome men while getting nothing but happy endings.

Why was I the one who had to take another civil service exam after transmigrating and end up becoming a civil servant all over again…?

Everyone else spent their time laughing and enjoying themselves among handsome and beautiful protagonists, so why had I spent an entire year working myself to death among sweaty middle-aged breadwinners…?

My fists trembled, but none of that mattered anymore.

My family had recovered its wealth.

There had been no news about the male lead since his release, so I did not know whether he was dead or alive, and now that I had money, I could simply give the female lead a reasonable reward and never see her again for the rest of my life.

And the one silver lining, the thing I was most grateful for, was that I had still not encountered the hidden villain.

They say that those who cling to life will die, and those who embrace death will live. That saying fit my situation perfectly.

I had become an imperial official prepared for the possibility of meeting the hidden villain, but realistically, what were the chances that a low-ranking official would ever cross paths with the Emperor?

As the saying goes, if you want to hide a tree, hide it in a forest. I had hidden myself in exactly the right place.

Anyway, today I handed the resignation letter I had kept close to my heart throughout my entire year as an imperial official to my superior.

Ah! How long had I waited for this day!

It felt as though petals of blessing were raining down from the heavens and the trumpets of angels were sounding in my ears.

But when my superior looked down at my resignation letter, something in his expression was off.

“Hmm… That’s not going to work.”

Huh? What was not going to work?

My superior looked at me sympathetically before slowly shaking his head.

“I understand that your family’s situation has improved and that you want to resign, but…”

But?

“It’ll be difficult to accept your resignation.”

“W-What? Why?!”

“Well…”

With a troubled look, my superior furrowed his brows deeply and spoke.

“You’ve been promoted to His Majesty the Emperor’s personal secretary.”