Chapter 01
The reason why I couldn’t understand why adopting a daughter required such a full-fledged interview was beyond me.
“What are your hobbies?”
“Reading…?”
“You have quite a bit of culture for someone who looks like you.”
What does he mean, “for someone who looks like you”…?
Does that mean I look uncultured?
How rude!
“How old are you?”
“Probably… ten years old?”
“My daughter is eleven. Keep that in mind.”
Hey, then why did you even ask?
What kind of self-righteous person is this?
The man—no, the esteemed head of the Aubrey family—nodded and began constantly asking me questions while diligently checking something.
‘This really feels like an interview.’
Suddenly, I felt sick to my stomach. It wasn’t as though I’d ever had an interview like this before.
It was almost as if it felt familiar….
When he tilted his head and spread out something that looked like an interview questionnaire, the adjutant beside him handed me paper and a pen.
Then he began firing questions at me like a machine gun.
“There is a donut here. Using a knife only twice, divide this donut into five pieces.”
“There are three murderers and three priests. In order to restore the murderers’ humanity, the priests must take them to a temple, but the temple is across the river. The problem is that whenever a murderer encounters fewer people than their own number, they will inevitably kill them. However, the raft can carry only two people at a time, and all of them must cross the river together to reach the temple. How can they all reach the temple alive?”
“Here is a prey that looks like a snail’s shell. It takes a leech ten minutes to eat this prey completely. If you want to measure five minutes, what should you do?”
Where the hell am I, you human being?
Faced with the barrage of questions, I stared blankly with my mouth hanging open.
Why on earth was I here, listening to these ridiculous questions and even solving a test paper…?
My head was throbbing.
‘Is this some kind of Mensa?’
Huh?
Mensa? What was that again?
I had thought of the word, but apparently couldn’t remember its meaning, so I tilted my head.
Then I gripped the pen and stared blankly at the answer sheet.
It was even a written-answer test. The thing I hated most.
‘But these questions feel like I already know the answers.’
They were questions I’d never seen before, yet I had a strange sense of déjà vu, as if I’d seen them somewhere.
Under the strict watch of the Narcissistic Duke, I moved my pen with tears in my eyes.
‘How did I end up like this?’
Ah, to explain the circumstances, I’d have no choice but to tell you about my sad, boring, and even dull life story….
To put it simply, I was originally the experimental subject of some crazy scientist.
Until I was twenty-four.
I had believed that scientist was my father my entire life and endured all sorts of painful experiments for him, only for that bastard to stab me in the back at the very end.
“I thought you were a pretty decent vessel since you were the only one who survived among the ones I bought from the orphanage….”
In other words, I was nothing more than a pitiful and stupid experimental subject who believed a crazy scientist who wasn’t even my father was my father, and endured every experiment for him.
I was supposed to be a vessel for the soul of his deceased wife.
As for why I had no choice but to believe that man was my father…
Whenever I tried to escape, that crazy scientist erased all of my childhood memories and made me recognize him as my father.
Anyway, just before I died, devastated by the betrayal, I regained the childhood memories I’d lost.
And then I died.
Or at least, I thought I did.
But would you look at that?
When I opened my eyes again, I had returned to the past.
To the moment when I had just set foot in the orphanage.
Why is my life so spectacularly filled with nothing but frustrating, dry-as-a-sweet-potato circumstances?
I don’t know either.
I hate myself like this, too….
Fortunately, there was one thing that worked in my favor.
In my previous life, that crazy scientist was the type of person who read the newspaper religiously every day, and I used to pick up the newspapers he threw away to learn about what was happening in the world.
Thanks to that, I knew the major events that would happen over roughly the next ten years.
Yes, this arrogant man was also someone whose name I’d frequently seen in the newspapers.
Duke Shacol Aubrey.
The Ruler of Green, he was the most powerful man in the empire after the Imperial Family.
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that he had a firm grip on half of the empire’s commercial sector.
According to the rumors I’d heard, this arrogant and haughty man had grown up as the youngest among three brothers in what was practically a den of ravenous beasts. As a result, he didn’t easily trust others and had no ability to empathize with their pain.
If there was something he didn’t like, his greatest talent was quietly crushing it beneath the weight of his looks, power, and wealth until it could never raise its head again.
Since he’d had to drink poison every other day from childhood in a ducal family where all sorts of schemes ran rampant in the struggle to claim the position of duke, it was only natural that he’d become such a sensitive person.
Even so, there were exactly two people whose words he listened to without question.
They were his wife, Rosanna Aubrey, and Alph Argo, the Ruler of Blue in the north, the head of House Argo, and one of the four dukes in the empire.
‘But why do I know so much about this man?’
Had there really been such detailed information in the newspaper?
I tilted my head, but no particular anecdote came to mind.
Come to think of it, after undergoing various experiments at the hands of that crazy scientist, strange things would occasionally happen to me.
In short, sometimes I would experience déjà vu, feeling as though I had seen a scene before even though I was looking at it for the first time.
Yes, things like information about how the man in front of me had eventually come to follow the Ruler of Blue like an older brother would naturally pop into my head.
“I-I finished them all….”
Lost in thought, I carefully handed him the densely filled answer sheet.
“You’ve already finished?”
He took my answer sheet with an expression that showed little expectation and skimmed through it.
Then he frowned.
“You solved all of this?”
“Yes….”
“In that short amount of time?”
He stroked his chin while sharply examining my answer sheet.
Was there really any room for suspicion when he had been watching me the entire time?
“Yes, I’m kind of a genius, you know.”
As I said earlier, the questions felt like things I’d seen somewhere before, so there was no need to think deeply about them. My hand simply moved on its own, as if I already knew the answers, and I wrote them down one after another.
He carefully examined my answer sheet before giving a slight nod.
“Good. I’m quite a genius myself. Though your appearance is a little disappointing for someone who is supposed to be my daughter….”
What’s wrong with my appearance!
Objectively speaking, I’m perfectly cute.
“Well, you’ve passed, more or less.”
At that moment, I suddenly thought,
‘Shouldn’t I have gotten the answers wrong?’
At the same time, satisfaction finally appeared on his face, which had been crooked into a constant scowl.
“Good. Welcome to becoming the daughter of this great me.”
“H-Haha….”
My goal had been to be adopted into an ordinary, harmonious family….
“Yes….”
A time bomb had just met another time bomb.
Were we going to compete to see which one exploded first?
“I will adopt this child.”
Duke Shacol Aubrey declared proudly.
So, to explain why I, an orphan who had returned to the past but had nothing except this body, ended up taking an interview to become the stand-in daughter of such a great duke….
We have to go back three months first.
That was the day I died and came back to life.
