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A 20-year-old fresh graduate begins each day with excitement as they step into society.

Juyeon, who recently succeeded in joining the company she had wanted since college, looked at her employee ID card with satisfaction.

Yeo Juyeon | Product Designer

How much she had struggled just to wear this necklace around her neck!

Still, Juyeon considered herself very fortunate. Many of her peers were still job hunting.

“Whew, I can do this. Let’s go.”

Just before leaving home, Juyeon muttered as if giving herself a pep talk while looking in the mirror.

Reading web novels is the best way to relieve the tension of the morning commute. As soon as Juyeon found a seat on the city bus, she habitually opened her smartphone.

⟨The Lady’s Advance⟩. A truly simple and straightforward title.

Juyeon was in the middle of rereading a completed romance fantasy novel. Even if you’ve already read it, you need to go through it one more time to truly enjoy it.

She turned past the illustrated cover showing the gorgeous female and male leads and opened to the main text.

The part she was about to read was the climax of the novel. The scene where the villainous supporting character loses everything under the joint attack of the female and male leads, ending her life by suicide.

But just as she was about to focus……

“!”

Before she could realize what was happening, the smartphone flew far from Juyeon’s hand. Her body was thrown along with it.

CRASH!

The road became a scene of chaos. A driver suffering from a hangover had crashed into the side of the city bus.

The injured were rushed to the hospital.

“……”

Juyeon, having lost consciousness, was loaded into an ambulance.

After some time passed, Juyeon opened her eyes to the sensation of a warm energy enveloping her entire body.

“……?”

A space where light rippled gently. She hurriedly looked around. She too had become a formless mass of light.

“What, what is this……?”

Could it be that she was dead!

Juyeon was bewildered. No, how could she die so suddenly? She still had so much to do, had just started working at the company, and hadn’t even called her mom this morning!

At that moment….

「Do you want to live again?」

“!”

Juyeon was startled by the sudden voice.

But there was no one else around. As the confused Juyeon looked around the light space….

「Don’t you want to live?」

Indeed, she hadn’t misheard. For a moment she was curious about hearing a voice without seeing a person, but because she had a more desperate wish than this question, Juyeon shouted loudly.

“I want to live!”

In fact, there was no need to think about it.

She had just boarded her usual commuter bus. She had just started an extremely ordinary day, not deviating at all from her routine.

How did it come to this?

She couldn’t die like this. She couldn’t die so emptily, without any preparation, in an instant.

So Juyeon desperately grasped at the opportunity.

“So, am I not dead yet?”

The mysterious voice answered.

「To be precise, you are at the boundary between death and life. You can either die or live according to your will. What will you do?」

Juyeon snapped to attention.

The boundary between death and life.

Whether that voice defined life and death in a biological or philosophical sense—questions like ‘what do humans live by’ and so on—regardless, it meant she was still alive.

But at the same time, doubts assailed her.

Was living or dying a matter of will? If a fading life could be saved by the will to live alone, there would be few people in the world who would die.

Nevertheless, Juyeon felt that this mysterious voice somehow had sufficient ability.

An omnipotent being that could transcend shallow human common sense and even revive the dead. That must be the identity of that voice. It was mysterious that only the sound could be heard without seeing a form, and above all, the voice contained a power that convinced the listener.

If that was really the case.

“I don’t want to die……”

Her voice, which had been as small as if it were creeping in, began to gain strength little by little, like something formless gradually taking shape.

“Save me. I want to live again!”

All wishes become concrete and powerful only when spoken aloud, not kept in the heart. Finally, Juyeon cried out with a wail.

“I will definitely live again!”

Why didn’t she want to die? To be honest, Juyeon had no strong motivation to stay alive.

She simply didn’t know she would die today and had made no preparations for death.

“I’m going back!”

So if she got her life back, she would live each day more fully, always remembering the death that was close to everyday life, and spend more meaningful days.

She would absolutely, absolutely not waste even a single moment.

But despite hearing her desperate wish, the mysterious voice was quite dry.

「Then there is a condition.」

“……?”

Juyeon felt as if cold water had been dumped on her. Wasn’t it just a matter of ‘will’ to be saved? She had already clearly expressed that will.

But as if her feelings didn’t matter, the emotionless voice sounded.

「You must completely pass the test that will be given to you now. It will certainly not be easy. Will you accept it anyway?」

If she could gain her future life just by passing a test, there was no reason to refuse!

Juyeon shouted.

“I’ll do anything!”

As if her desperation had reached through, a faint warmth circulated in the light space. As if the mysterious voice was smiling.

A voice that had become warmer was heard.

「From now on, you will be given a story. You must make it have a happy ending for everyone. Even if the given conditions are extremely difficult, prove to me with the same desperate and earnest heart as now whether you deserve to receive life again, whether it is worth it.」

Juyeon repeated as if engraving it in her heart.

“A happy ending……”

「If you complete this task well, I will send you back to your original life.」

Soon, everything before Juyeon’s eyes turned black.

She lost consciousness again.

⁕⁕⁕

“Ugh……”

She opened her eyes again. A room filled with exotic furniture and decorations, completely different from the light space just before.

Juyeon got up groggily. A bluish dawn shone through the window. Morning, perhaps.

“Where am I……”

As she muttered with furrowed brows, there was a light knock and the door swung open. A maid in an apron appeared before the startled Juyeon.

“Lady Nelisa, are you awake? I’ll leave water for you to wash your face.”

The maid spoke in a businesslike tone, saying only what she needed to say, then put down a washbasin beside the bed and left abruptly.

Juyeon’s face contorted.

“Nelisa……?”

She hurriedly jumped out of bed. Then she ran to an antique frame hanging on the wall.

In one of several frames, there was a painting of a middle-aged man and a blonde girl who appeared to be father and daughter. Below the portrait of the father and daughter, the names of the subjects were written in small letters.

⟨Wiesbaden⟩

A name Juyeon knew very well.

And in the frame next to it was a portrait of a young woman with auburn hair and black eyes.

Juyeon’s gaze, which had been looking at the portrait, slowly turned sideways. The appearance reflected in the elegant dressing mirror was undoubtedly identical to the young woman in that portrait.

Below it, the name ‘Nelisa’ was written conspicuously.

“Ha…… What is this……”

This is a novel. The very web novel she was about to read on her way to work.

Moreover, Nelisa was the hopeless villainess character in that novel.

The original content of the novel was as follows:

Duke Wiesbaden brought young Nelisa from a fallen noble family to be a companion for his only daughter, Adelaide, who had lost her mother early. Adelaide and Nelisa became best friends and were always together.

Nelisa pretended to be Adelaide’s true friend on the surface, but inside she envied and was jealous of her. Behind Adelaide’s back, she spread malicious rumors and committed sinister acts.

⟨Look at this wound. It’s a mark from when Lady Wiesbaden hit me yesterday.⟩

⟨I have to please her to survive. It’s so hard to stay alive……⟩

But Adelaide, who grew up without hardship as the duke’s daughter, never suspected Nelisa.

One day when the two reached adulthood, Adelaide, at Nelisa’s instigation, rode a newly untamed horse toward the mountain behind the mansion. However, as the horse violently thrashed, Adelaide fell off the horse on the mountain path.

She rolled down and barely hung on to a cliff. But Nelisa did not save Adelaide and ran away, leaving her behind. In the end, Adelaide fell from the cliff and died.

Thus the female lead entered the mysterious light space. She learned that after her death, Nelisa became the adopted daughter of the Wiesbaden family and took everything that originally belonged to the female lead. Not satisfied with that, the villainess even stole the male lead, Crown Prince Roberto, whom the female lead loved.

Adelaide received the grace of a second life from the mysterious voice. And the female lead, who returned to the day she fell from the cliff, escaped the villainess’s plot with her life, and from that moment on, she thoroughly punished the villainess who had constantly deceived her. When the villainess’s true nature, full of inferiority and hypocrisy, was revealed, she fought back with all her might.

However, Adelaide subdued Nelisa with refreshing satisfaction, and finally held a happy wedding with Roberto. The novel ended like this.

Only then could Juyeon fully understand the meaning of the test the mysterious voice had mentioned.

‘Make the story have a happy ending.’

She quietly recalled the task given to her.

Fortunately, the plot of the original novel was perfectly in her head. If she just followed it, the happy ending of this novel would be complete.

But there was a big problem. The character Juyeon had transmigrated into was the villainess Nelisa, and Nelisa left the novel by losing everything to the joint attack of the female and male leads, falling into despair, and taking her own life.

Moreover, there was another problem. Juyeon had a fundamentally different personality from the malicious and inferiority-complex-ridden Nelisa. Originally, she was quiet and docile, and hated fighting. Rather than fighting and confronting, she found it more comfortable to endure.

She let out a deep sigh. Of all the characters to transmigrate into, why this one?

Now she understood why the mysterious voice emphasized that it wouldn’t be easy, that there would be many constraints. It was a task too difficult for her.

But she soon coolly put her mind to work.

The mysterious voice did not require her to become a ‘villainess.’ The exact task was to create ‘a happy ending for everyone.’