Chapter 02…
The “Quit Being the Villainess” Plan
The next day, despite having resolved, “I’m going to attend the academy and devote myself to studying!”, I skipped school once again.
That made it two consecutive days.
Even for Luciana, who had a habit of slacking off, this was unusual.
But there was something I absolutely needed one more quiet day to sit down and think through carefully.
And that was my previous life.
I may be burdened with the enormous negative point of being a villainess destined for condemnation, but when I got into bed yesterday, it occurred to me that maybe I also possessed positive points that could cancel it out.
Yes, yes, the world is actually fairly equal and merciful.
…Well, maybe that’s just what I desperately want to believe right now.
So I thought about it.
What exactly are my positive points?
And the conclusion I arrived at was: my previous life.
I mentioned it briefly yesterday, but in my previous life, I was Japanese.
An utterly ordinary citizen living in the countryside.
I was born into an average middle-class family, graduated from a local university, found work at a regional company, rented a small apartment a little ways away from my parents’ house, and lived alone like any other office worker.
Well, to be more precise, there’s also the fact that I was an unmarried woman nearing thirty with no romantic experience.
And since the only memories I have are of being around thirty, I suppose I must have died around that age.
Or perhaps I lived longer and even got married, but my memories stop there, so I can’t know for sure.
Now then, to return to the point, strictly speaking, in my previous life I lived with my parents for a while even after finding a job.
However, I eventually couldn’t stand my mother’s values anymore, which is why I started living alone.
“A woman can only truly be happy once she’s married. The best life is catching yourself a wonderful husband and living in a house with a garden.”
When you hear that over and over again, eventually it starts getting unbearable.
Even if I tried explaining that nowadays there are all kinds of different lifestyles, she would simply dismiss me by saying, “You’re single, so you just don’t understand how wonderful marriage is.”
Grrr… how exactly is that logic supposed to work?
If she argued like that, I was doomed to lose forever!
After all, your daughter has zero experience with men.
I wanted to get married, but I had no idea how to approach men in the first place.
Marriage? Forget that—even dating was nothing more than a distant dream.
After repeating those rebuttals in my head about a hundred times, I finally started living alone.
Yes, you could call it a strategic retreat.
But through living alone, I learned all sorts of things.
First, cooking.
At my parents’ house, meals had always been prepared for me, but eventually I became capable of properly making even my own lunch boxes.
Then there was the habit of saving money.
That connected to making lunches too, of course, because living alone costs money.
And beyond that, things like maintaining the right amount of interaction with neighbors, or how to deal with problems when they arose.
There are plenty of other small things too, but in short, I had been living perfectly well on my own.
And I began thinking that maybe those experiences could be useful here.
Because if an ordinary marquis’s daughter were suddenly thrown out onto the streets, she probably wouldn’t even know where to begin.
But I have experience living alone, so maybe I could use that experience to survive reasonably well somehow. Even without servants, I can cook meals and go shopping myself.
And I think my cooking skills themselves could also be valuable.
Rice balls, hamburg steaks, tonkatsu, karaage, buri daikon, curry rice, and so on.
I’ve never seen dishes like those in this world.
I don’t know whether the people of this world would enjoy them, but what about opening a restaurant that serves these kinds of meals?
Or perhaps useful household goods.
It’s a little sad that I can’t immediately think of concrete examples, but I did spend nearly thirty years living in a scientifically advanced country.
Surely there must be items that would amaze the people of this world.
Couldn’t I make a business out of that somehow?
And then, most valuable of all, this is the world of the otome game I played.
The setting of this game, Cinderella of the Magical Kingdom, only covers the six months beginning half a year from now, but I already know the flow of events during that period.
I feel like that knowledge could be put to very good use somehow.
Something significant enough to help me survive in the future.
If I combine all of this bonus knowledge with the education I’ll gain from studying at the academy, then maybe I could earn enough money for my whole family to live modestly together.
This can work. Somehow, I really feel like this can work!
Filled with baseless confidence, I climbed into bed thinking that tomorrow, for sure, I would finally go to school.
