Chapter 7
02. He Had Become a Completely Different Man
A week had passed since the day Leandros disappeared.
As soon as Lee Yeorae returned home that day, she searched the closet first. The long, fancy clothes and cape he had been wearing when he first appeared were gone without a trace.
The photos on her phone were the same.
It was as if those files had never existed in the first place.
Yeorae wanted to believe that she had simply dreamed for a week, and that a person named Leandros had never existed at all.
But the bruise on her cheek remained for several days afterward.
And so did her swollen lips from their long kiss…
After staring blankly ahead for a while, Yeorae packed her bag and stood up. Her friends, who had been talking in the classroom, looked at her.
“You’re not having dinner with us? Don’t you have the evening free today?”
“I’m going to the library near my house to work on an assignment. Taking the subway during rush hour is exhausting.”
“Oh.”
“Call us later.”
At the farewell, Yeorae raised her hand to show she understood.
Ever since Leandros disappeared, it felt as if half of her body had become numb.
Her reflection in the rattling subway window looked like someone who had suffered a terrible accident and lost her soul.
Eventually, Yeorae arrived at the library near her home. She put on her headphones and began searching for books related to her assignment, cutting herself off from the world.
Then, while walking between the bookshelves, a certain book suddenly caught her eye.
That is…
It was strange.
The book was placed much higher than her height and its cover was not particularly noticeable.
Yet it looked like a shining key to the truth.
Before she realized it, her hand was already reaching for it as if she had been enchanted.
A romance novel? Usually these books have a summary on the back cover.
But the back cover, decorated with a blue sea, was completely empty.
Unable to resist her curiosity, Yeorae opened the book.
Then only a few seconds later, she closed it again.
…What did I just see?
Her heart seemed to stop.
As the song lyrics flowing through her headphones echoed in her ears, it felt as if her consciousness was slowly separating from her body.
The hand holding the book trembled slightly.
She could not believe the five-letter name printed on the white page.
Leandros
No.
That couldn’t be right.
She missed him so much that her eyes must have created an illusion.
Yeorae shook away the image of him in her mind and hurriedly opened the book again.
But it was not an illusion.
Leandros Julian Therion Etsina
The man’s unbelievably long full name was clearly printed in black ink, as if it were mocking all of her doubts.
What? A movie? A European period drama?
Thinking about how she had misunderstood everything, a hollow laugh escaped her.
It came from here…
She stood beneath the dark shadow of the bookshelf for a long time before finally forcing herself to walk away.
Her legs felt weak as she staggered forward.
The moment she picked up that book, her destination had already been decided.
Yeorae walked straight to the front desk and dropped the thick book with the blue cover onto it.
“I’d like to borrow this book.”
Leandros.
Now I need to learn who you really are.
The Song of the Sea and the Skylark.
A romance fantasy novel nearly one thousand pages long.
Every name and place Leandros had mentioned was inside it.
The Levatein Empire.
The Duke Etsina Family.
Emperor Veros.
Everything fit together like pieces of a perfectly completed puzzle.
Just as Yeorae had expected, Leandros was indeed the male lead.
However, the story was not told from his point of view.
Like most romance novels, the person who led the story was the female protagonist.
His destined partner was Lilyansius Eden, the daughter of a wealthy merchant.
“……”
Yeorae closed the book at the scene of Leandros and Lilyanne’s first meeting.
A hollow laugh escaped her lips.
I fell in love with a man made of words…
She felt so pathetic she could hardly bear it.
At the same time, the thought of him returning to his world and someday loving another woman made her chest ache.
No.
Wait.
Another woman?
If she thought about it carefully, the “other woman” was not Lilyanne.
It was Lee Yeorae herself.
Leandros had been created for Lilyanne from the very beginning.
Being with Lilyanne was the purpose of his existence.
It was the reason he had been born into the story.
Damn it. Why did it have to be a romance novel? Couldn’t it have been any other genre?
Yeorae silently blamed the author she had never even seen and opened the book again.
Then she noticed something unexpected.
Leandros was thirty years old.
Thirty…
Compared to the twenty-year-old Leandros she knew, it felt impossibly far away.
During those years, he went to war one more time.
While he was away on the battlefield, his father died.
His twin brother nearly ruined the family.
Leandros suffered a terrible trauma and severe insomnia because of an unexpected incident during the war.
After enduring all of that and finally returning home alive, he discovered that his family was already half destroyed.
Lilyanne was twenty-four years old, the same age as Yeorae.
She was bright, cheerful, and full of energy.
A warm ray of summer sunlight who could heal Leandros’s wounds.
Leandros and Lilyanne started with a poor first impression of each other.
But little by little, they discovered new sides of one another and slowly fell in love.
By the time Yeorae reached their wedding in the final chapter, she felt like an unwilling guest forced to attend.
She wanted to cry.
No.
Before she could even think that, she was already crying.
She turned on her phone and searched for the author’s name.
But this was the author’s first novel, so almost nothing was known about them.
Yeorae tried to put the book away because it hurt too much.
Yet in the end, she opened the first page once more.
The reason was simple.
Leandros.
She just wanted to see his name one more time.
Lilyanne.
Leandros.
Lilyanne.
Leandros.
Those two names spun around inside Yeorae’s head for days like a wheel.
Whenever she tried to forget them, they returned.
Again and again.
After finishing her studying at the library, Yeorae was walking home through an alley when she kept glancing behind her.
…What is this?
For some reason, she felt like someone was following her.
That can’t be right. It’s still bright outside.
A bad feeling crept over her.
But she had already come too far to take another route.
A chill ran down her spine.
Yeorae removed her headphones and quickened her pace.
Then, just before going down a set of stairs, she finally realized who had been following her and let out a relieved sigh.
“Unni? What are you doing here?”
Yeonju slowly stepped out from behind a nearby building.
She did not smell like alcohol.
Even so, her eyes looked strangely unfocused.
“U-Unni…?”
The moment their eyes met, an even stronger feeling of unease rose inside Yeorae.
Yeonju glared at her younger sister.
Then her whole body began trembling.
Suddenly, she screamed as if coughing up blood.
“You told Mom everything, didn’t you? About me coming to see you that day!”
“What? You show up out of nowhere and start talking nonsense?!”
“Then why is Mom threatening to lock me up in a psychiatric ward?!”
“Are you stupid? You went into treatment for alcohol addiction, came out, and started drinking again! That’s why!”
Anger exploded inside Yeorae as well, and she shouted back.
Yeonju stared at her with half-empty eyes.
Tears began running down her face as she slowly stepped closer.
“You think I’m pathetic, don’t you? You probably wish I would just die.”
“What?”
Every instinct inside Yeorae screamed that something was wrong.
She stepped backward and gripped her headphones tightly as if they were a weapon.
“What are you doing? Don’t come any closer! I’ll scream!”
“That look. The way you look down on me like you know everything. Do you know how crazy that makes me? Hasn’t anyone ever told you that those eyes of yours drive people mad?”
Right now, Yeonju looked like a bomb about to explode.
She had been like this back when they were in middle school too.
If Yeorae touched her even slightly, she had no idea what kind of monster Yeonju might become.
Wrapping her arms around herself, Yeorae struggled to breathe.
“S-Stop. I told you not to come any closer.”
“Yeah, Yeorae. Do you think I wanted to become like this? You… you know nothing. You don’t know anything at all!”
Yeonju suddenly grabbed both of her shoulders and violently shook her back and forth.
Ugh…
The coffee Yeorae had drunk earlier felt like it was about to come back up.
The world spun before her eyes.
Like a small boat being tossed by rough waves, her body swayed helplessly.
She tried to steady herself.
But strangely enough, it felt as if her body was floating high into the sky.
“…Unni?”
What happened?
As she fell down the stairs, Yeorae blinked blankly.
My God.
It was the first time in her life she had ever seen such shock on Yeonju’s face.
Even on the day she had hit Yeorae’s head hard enough to make it bleed when they were sixteen, Yeonju had remained calm.
Then the backpack pressed against her back, and she felt the hard book inside it.
Her head was spinning, but it did not hurt.
The only thing she felt was an overwhelming wave of sleepiness that she could not stop.
