ABFR 02

Chapter 2

1. Your World and Mine

Why is it that when you read romance novels, there are often stories like that? A man from another world falls in love with the heroine and follows her all the way into the real world, leading to a happy ending.

It probably sounds strange, but four years ago, I possessed the body of a character in a book and experienced that kind of love. When that man appeared in the real world, the novel reached its happy ending.

The man from a harsh world said that he had fallen in love with a woman from a peaceful world, with her peaceful, kind, and sweet atmosphere. He said he wanted the stable way she lived her life. He wanted to stay by her side.

That was the reason for his love.

For a man who had loved the peace of a modern person, I might now be nothing more than an ordinary stone lying around on the road. What remains between us now? Loyalty? Or love?

That novel ended back then, but perhaps love had not even begun yet.

Without even realizing it, I sometimes found myself thinking that way.

I had always been the kind of person who did not care how things turned out.

In many cases, I was easily swayed by other people’s opinions. But rather than being an act of compromise, consideration, or resignation, it was closer to the choice of someone who simply did not care either way and therefore did not mind being swept along.

If there was something I truly wanted, I would speak up.

I also had a rather low emotional threshold. I got angry easily and cooled down just as easily, so I probably would have spoken up then too.

Even so, I always lived like a floating weed, thinking that either way was fine, because I was literally the kind of person who thought, “Either way is fine.”

Even becoming a novelist had happened as an extension of that.

I literally became a genre novelist by chance.

In fact, I had chosen my undergraduate major in much the same careless way, so my career had simply been chosen in a similarly haphazard manner.

I was lucky enough to get a chance to publish the stories I had written little by little during middle and high school.

I had always liked creating stories.

Every story I wrote felt as though it were a real world existing somewhere.

Otherwise, how could such an unfamiliar world unfold before my eyes as if it were truly alive?

That was why I liked bringing their stories into my world.

No matter how much I expressed them, I wanted to keep expressing them.

Perhaps I was happy because I could peek into stories different from my own reality and believe that those worlds truly existed somewhere.

But one day, I really experienced that world and returned.

After learning about surprising settings in my own novel that I had not even imagined yet, I began to think that perhaps this world really existed somewhere, and that I was merely somehow getting a glimpse of what happened there and turning it into the form of a novel.

And then I woke up.

With a manuscript that had not even begun lying before me.

Naturally, I thought that I had simply caught a glimpse of that “story,” just as I always had.

I thought I had merely suddenly come up with the settings and characters of that world before writing the novel.

So now, I only had to write.

It would not actually be anything like a novel.

That story of love that sounded like something out of a novel was not really my story at all. It was simply an imagination I had created in order to write a novel.

Railey had told me to wait for him, and I had left the possibility open for him.

But a sane person should not mistake a momentary dream, like a brief fantasy, for something that truly existed.

Getting basic worldbuilding settings or story ideas through dreams was nothing unusual for me.

I would receive the basic setting or story of a world through a dream, almost like a revelation, and then wake up and systematically create the characters and fill in the gaps.

That had always been my working method.

It was only because I could not completely let go of one last thread of attachment that I kept my promise to him.

Railey had asked me to leave him a way to reach me even if I dated another man.

At the very least, I decided not to break my own promise that I would make an effort to help him reach me.

Why, aren’t there plenty of stories like that in novels?

A male protagonist from another world follows the heroine all the way into the real world because he truly loves her.

If I had really possessed a character inside a novel, I thought perhaps I could hope for that kind of ending.

I simply wanted to escape.

If I desperately clung to one particular thing, it would mean admitting that I could not live without it.

Of course, it would be wonderful if Railey really appeared before my eyes like magic.

But I knew that if I got my hopes up and Railey never appeared, I would be the one who suffered.

By the time about half a year had passed, I had already given up on every possibility.

I had always been quick to give up.

By then, the events I had experienced with Railey, whom I had met in what felt like a “dream,” had already become a vague memory.

The memory had faded so much that I could no longer even properly remember Railey’s face.

Once that happened, I became genuinely confused.

Had I really only dreamed about it?

Or had I really woken up from an incredible adventure in that amazing world?

In the end, the truth no longer seemed important.

I had always had unnecessarily good luck with romance.

Even when I did not want one, two or three people would usually become interested in me every year before eventually dropping away.

So I picked someone suitable and dated him for a while.

I thought that if I found someone else I liked, perhaps the “two-dimensional boyfriend” from my delusion, whom I had only seen once in a dream, would quickly disappear from my memory.

A new boyfriend to forget my ex-boyfriend.

Even the sentence itself sounded ominous.

But humans are foolish. Sometimes we do things even when we know perfectly well that they are wrong.

I did exactly that.

To put the conclusion first, it was the worst.

Though I suppose that was obvious.

To be honest, Railey was a well-mannered and kind man who had everything except for his personality.

The problem was that the missing part was far too important.

Still, with a face and body like that, along with those abilities and domestic skills, he was enough to make me brainwash myself into thinking, “Maybe his personality can get a failing grade.”

As a result, it was difficult to find a man I liked more than Railey.

And after several years, I painfully realized once again that romance simply was not suited to me.

In the first place, I did not need other people in my life.

I had never believed in something as pointless as love, either.

As I said before, I was usually the kind of person who thought, “Either way is fine.”

But if someone told me, “Do this, do that,” I became like a rebellious frog that refused to do it precisely because someone had told me to.

So there was no way I could enjoy having various restrictions placed on me through a romantic relationship.

I had only forgotten that because of that bastard, Railey Kraha.

No matter how many times I thought about it, the most important part of him was still shitty, but somehow I had been brainwashed too.

The day when I was possessed—or perhaps dreaming, I still did not know which—came when I was twenty-three.

Up until then, my romantic experience consisted of only a few boyfriends I had dated during middle and high school.

Actually, I had not dated them because I particularly liked them.

It was closer to, “Everyone else is dating, so I should too.”

Because of that, I could barely remember those relationships.

Before dating, while dating, and even after breaking up, we simply became good friends.

Since none of those relationships had begun with romantic feelings, it was a strange kind of dating where we practically avoided doing anything that might make us feel embarrassed later.

So for a twenty-three-year-old me, who had experienced nothing but those kinds of relationships, how stimulating must a romance with a character from a romance novel have been?

At that time, Railey Kraha was a wild beast with a violent personality and no concern for anyone but himself.

In other words, he was a crazy bastard with a terrible personality and a messy past, the kind of person who should only exist in a novel.

Honestly, there was no good way to explain how I got involved with such a bastard, and no matter how I thought about it, it was something I should have regretted.

But no matter how much time passed after that day when I was twenty-three, I could not forget that stimulating relationship.

That was probably why I eventually came up with the stupid thought that perhaps an unbelievably stimulating relationship with someone else could overwrite Railey Kraha.

To be completely honest, from then on, I was a little promiscuous in my relationships.

I was an independent adult. What was wrong with having somewhat stimulating relationships?

I met all kinds of bastards.

I did not know whether the problem was the personalities of the bastards I met or my own attitude.

But I was dissatisfied with every one of those relationships.

In the end, I dated and broke up, dated and broke up, over and over again.

Then, after turning twenty-five, I gave up on dating altogether.

Fortunately, around that time, my sense of reality had recovered to some extent, so the timing was actually quite good.

Around then, I also decided that I needed to properly attend university after repeatedly taking leaves of absence and returning.

Even before that, I had taken leaves of absence as casually as eating meals because of language tests and other things.

And so, at the age of twenty-five, I was attending my fifth semester.

It was an amazing university life where the last digit of my age and the number of semesters I had attended somehow went together.

I had lived so recklessly throughout university that even after coming to my senses, I still had to postpone graduation and take additional semesters.

Still, I was fortunate that my wandering had been resolved within a range that could be covered by taking leaves of absence.

Only after spending nearly two more years trying did I finally become able to write again.

In other words, after traveling to another world, I had spent four years wandering because I could not regain my sense of reality.

But unfortunately, only after I finally came to my senses did Railey Kraha actually appear before my eyes.

Thanks to that, I began to think that “that thing” might not have been a dream or some kind of divine revelation of story settings after all, but perhaps really had been a form of “possession.”

In any case, by then, whether Railey Kraha had truly appeared before me or not was no longer important.

He simply appeared.

And I simply accepted him.

Because that was what we had decided to do.

And because, to some extent, I still liked him.

In fact, I did not even know why I had been so anxious and obsessed over something that could be explained so simply.

Railey Kraha had originally fallen for the peaceful, relaxed, and safe kind of leisure possessed only by someone who had spent their entire life living in a safe place as a modern person.

That was why he had followed me into my world.

But he no longer had any particular reason to love me.

I wanted to be okay even if he left me soon.

I knew that if I let myself be affected by it, I would only be the one who got dragged around and suffered.

And so, somehow, we ended up in an ambiguous relationship.

I rolled around on the huge bed before sluggishly sitting up and stared blankly at the back of Railey Kraha’s head as he operated four computers at the same time.

I lived alone in my little rented apartment, while Railey Kraha had gotten himself a spacious and comfortable penthouse.

The crazy bastard was from another world, yet he had already managed to buy a home in downtown Yongsan.

I had no idea how he had forged his identity and obtained the initial funds after coming to this world.

But fundamentally, he was once a villain from the end of the world who had held the fate of the continent in his hands.

Now, he watched the state of world affairs and manipulated the financial markets, earning unimaginable amounts of money as “income.”

All I could think was that, as expected, even human trash knew how to make money in an extraordinary way.

After retiring from his career as a villain known as the “Crow of Mreou,” he had lived as a butler.

These days, he even ran an ultra-luxury dessert shop as a hobby.

To explain it in detail…

He was basically just messing with me as a hobby.

He did technically do various things as the owner, but he had not left that awful personality behind and ran the shop like an absolute bastard.

He opened the shop whenever he felt like it and did not even bother operating it when he did not.

Whenever he came up with a new dessert he wanted to feed me, he would immediately go downstairs, make test products, and post the news on social media.

The shop had a handsome, well-built pastry chef, and his skills were also far beyond those of an ordinary modern person, so word of the shop spread quickly.

As a result, the test products would sell out that very day.

Then he would force the best-made result into my mouth.

I had received his suspicious gifts through express delivery in front of my classmates more than once.

To be honest, I was being raised by him after being lured in with food.

Then what exactly was so ambiguous about this relationship?

The time had come when everyone listening to my story would be wondering about that.

Actually, it was a simple question.

First question. Do I still love Railey Kraha?

Honestly, I don’t know.

Second question. Then does Railey Kraha still love me?

I should at least have been able to answer this question with confidence if our relationship had any chance of continuing.

But I couldn’t.

Whatever else I might not know, after I reunited with him at the age of twenty-seven, Railey Kraha had never once touched me in a way appropriate for lovers.

For reference, before that, he had done all sorts of things with me and advanced our relationship before we had even started dating.

So, as a human being, I could not help feeling a little strange about it.

I first met him with my real face on the day we reunited half a year ago.

Seeing me in reality must have been very different from what he had imagined.

The body I had possessed, “Yuri Yelechenika,” was one of the most beautiful women on the continent.

There was no way my real face could even dare to compare with Yuri Yelechenika’s appearance.

Perhaps he had also come to realize that the messy life I had lived, which he had considered my “special quality,” was not particularly impressive from a modern perspective and simply looked pathetic.

Either way, the real me probably had many more shortcomings than the me from that world.

As for his obsession, that beast had been obsessed with anything he acquired since long ago, so that part had not really changed.

From his perspective, I was already in his grasp, so perhaps he thought there was no way I should even stand shoulder to shoulder with another man.

Thinking about it again, he really was an asshole.

Anyway, that was how things were.

A lot had changed from before.

Did Railey Kraha still love me?

Was what existed between us real love?

I pulled up the oversized T-shirt that had slipped down my shoulder and, while watching Railey Kraha’s back, thought about it again.

This was, so to speak…

“Like the seven-year itch of a couple married for ten years?”

“You woke up and stared blankly into space, and the moment you opened your mouth, you started talking nonsense. What would you like for breakfast?”

“Strawberries.”

“What grains would you like?”

“Anything is fine.”

“Would you like me to mix strawberries into your rice?”

“Let’s at least have toast and strawberries, Butler. I mean, seriously, did you really think I was asking you to mix strawberries into rice?”

Railey lightly pushed his chair away from the computers he had been checking and turned toward me.

He narrowed his eyes and tapped his left cheek.

Facing him, I absentmindedly touched my right cheek.

“The other side.”

“Oh.”

Only after Railey pointed it out did I properly touch my left cheek and realize that there was a clear mark from the pillow.

Railey, who would have touched my cheek immediately in the past, simply stared at me as I rubbed it.

Then he stood up.

He seemed to be going to prepare breakfast.

I sat on the bed for a while, still somewhat dazed, before flopping backward again.

Even now, whenever I was with him, he behaved as though he were taking care of my daily life.

But strictly speaking, I could no longer call him my butler.

Does there really have to be something like love?

Railey had never been a person who had much to do with love in the first place, and neither was I.

So maybe living like this wasn’t so bad.

But after burying my face in the pillow and rubbing against it a little, I thought about the four years or so I had spent wandering around, unable to control my overwhelming affection for Railey Kraha.

Then I seriously thought about it once more.

Hmm.

I still didn’t know.

If Railey Kraha no longer loved me, what was the point of me continuing to cherish him?

And what was I supposed to trust in order to maintain this relationship that felt like a couple on the verge of divorce, with no idea when it would end?

Wouldn’t it be better to simply bring things to an end at an appropriate point?

Honestly, perhaps I still had lingering feelings.

But that did not mean I wanted to hold onto him through marriage.

I myself had absolutely no interest in marriage.

In fact, I hated the idea of it.

So, although I had thought about it for a long time, it was ultimately a meaningless concern that I neither acted on nor had any intention of acting on.

That was how we ended up in such an ambiguous relationship.