Chapter 11
I stared at the dragon, dumbfounded.
“Now, now, Siwoo. Don’t look at me like that. I really did try to just watch without interfering, like—what was it called in your world? Ah, like watching a drama! But I just couldn’t stand it anymore.”
“What exactly couldn’t you stand?”
I was a little angry.
This was a problem I’d been agonizing over for years, and Lumiere was treating it like entertainment, blithely tossing out comments like that.
Lumiere was so far above me in rank that I couldn’t exactly say anything.
I was itching to sue for invasion of privacy.
“Now, Siwoo. You know what TS means, right?”
“I do. It’s exactly what happened to me.”
I had no idea how many people in this world, if any, were living with their sex changed like mine, but I knew I was a pretty fitting example.
“Right. Then, like the question I asked that girl earlier, should you, after being TS’d, love a woman from now on?”
“……I think so.”
Lumiere shook their head vehemently at my answer.
Was it just my imagination, or did the air around us stir?
“That’s the right answer for some people. It’s like that…… what do you call it? The argument over whether you pour the tea or the milk first when making milk tea. To borrow an expression from your original world……”
“Sweet-and-sour pork: sauce poured over or dipped?”
“You know your stuff. Basically, it depends on the person.”
It was kind of funny hearing a dragon use an expression like ‘depends on the person.’
Did that mean Lumiere didn’t count themself among those people?
Come to think of it, the dragon was in a woman’s form right now, too.
Maybe Lumiere had been TS’d into a woman, too, and maybe they liked men.
“Now, let’s say beings as high-ranking as us are watching you after you’ve been TS’d.”
I wish you wouldn’t watch me.
“When you used to be a man and now have a woman’s body, some of us would want you to fall in love with a woman, while others would want you to fall in love with a man.”
Why were they even debating that among themselves?
“Dragon-nim……”
“Lumiere-nim. You’re still so formal.”
“……Based on what you’ve said so far, I’d say you’re definitely in the latter group, Lumiere-nim.”
“Exactly! I want to see you become a true woman, and then end up beneath a man, crying out like a female and moaning, ‘M-my pussy’s being pounded, my womb’s throbbingggg!’”
……Without realizing it, I grabbed the back of my neck.
What the hell was this crazy woman talking about?
Who was being called a female?
I’d never, ever let myself end up on the bottom, moaning like that.
The problem was, I had no idea just how far the being in front of me could go with her powers.
Put bluntly, if Lumiere ordered me, ‘You’re a female now,’ I might actually become one.
“Aw, Siwoo. You look so scared. Don’t worry, I’m not going to make that happen on purpose.”
“Th-then, are you sure you’re not going to do anything to me?”
“I have to keep my hands off you. I may have the power to do it, but I’m an administrator, after all. Other than appearing once in a while to have a brief chat like this, I don’t have the right to interfere as I please.”
Well, that was a relief.
So what did that mean? As long as I kept my head on straight, I could just ignore this crazy dragon’s nonsense.
The question that had prompted Lumiere to appear had been a joke, too, so I needed to be more careful.
Should I implement a reverse ‘fence rule’—no, a ‘Yuria rule’ instead?
Lumiere smiled as she watched me ponder.
“Don’t worry. You’re a little unusual.”
“What do you mean, unusual?”
“It’s not that one person changed sex because of some event. Another person’s soul entered their body. That means the body and soul have to synchronize.”
Lumiere stepped closer and prodded my shoulder.
You shouldn’t touch my bad shoulder.
“Your shoulder hurts, doesn’t it?”
I silently rubbed my tingling arm.
It was numb. And it hurt.
Well, was it really numb?
From what Lumiere had just said, this wasn’t a symptom caused by a neurological disorder.
“If your soul doesn’t fully meld with your body, something in it is likely to malfunction.”
“Then, conversely, if I fully meld with Yuria’s body, it’ll be fixed.”
“Correct. So what exactly do you think it means to meld with it completely?”
Lumiere chuckled.
……My mind came up with the answer, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it out loud.
I’d rather just live half-disabled.
“Siwoo. Yuria, when she was alive—that is, the Yuria whose soul has now disappeared because she’s dead—was straight. You understand what I mean, right?”
Lumiere’s laughter sounded in my ear, then gradually faded into the distance.
Sway, sway.
The bushes began swaying in the breeze again.
A cold wind blew, brushing the wet strands of hair stuck to my cheek away from my face.
Time began to flow again.
“……Yuria?”
Derek’s voice came through again, too.
“Yuria, is something wrong? For a moment, I felt something strange and out of place. You’re sure everything’s all right?”
“Huh? Ah, no.”
What keen senses.
The fact that Derek had sensed something strange after Lumiere, the administrator of the stars, had visited proved his inner energy was no joke.
Anyway, when exactly had time stopped?
“I was just thinking about something. Where were you in the conversation?”
“What’s wrong? You suddenly changed your tone, too. Never mind. I was just curious, that’s all. Don’t worry about it.”
So the last question was still hanging there.
If Lumiere had appeared right after it and stopped time, then only a few seconds had passed for Derek, unlike for me.
In other words, the question of whether I loved women.
The answer should definitely have been yes, but……
Synchronization. The word Lumiere had used suddenly weighed on my mind.
If I had to guess, my body and soul wouldn’t finish synchronizing until I fully accepted that I was a woman and, like Yuria, loved a man.
What if I refused and never managed to synchronize?
For now, my body had a malfunction that caused a bit of trouble in my daily life, but I had no idea how it might change in the future.
I should’ve squeezed more information out of Lumiere.
That was why I couldn’t bring myself to answer yes right away.
Maybe it would be better to leave things ambiguous like I had earlier, make that vile TS fetishist—no, feminization fetishist—unable to resist showing up and meddling, and then find something out.
So,
“About the question you asked earlier.”
This wasn’t my honest answer. It was merely a strategic choice.
“……I’m not sure.”
*************
The people who served directly under nobles of considerable rank were usually lower-ranking nobles.
My family was a count’s house, so it wasn’t exactly low-ranking, but our liege was of such high status that it wasn’t strange for my father to work as the head butler and my mother as the head housekeeper.
If we served the Imperial Family instead of the Grand Ducal House, their positions would be on the same level as the chief chamberlain and the head lady-in-waiting.
Our family had considerable clout in the North and owned a fairly large domain, though I’d never visited it because I was always holed up at the Grand Ducal residence.
But it was still the North, so it was poor.
I’d grown up as the only daughter of this well-established count’s family. I’d been sickly, which was a problem, but I’d still received some education to prepare me to become the next female count.
……That was Yuria’s backstory.
I hadn’t received any of that basic noble education, so I’d pretended to have lost my memories and gotten by by reading the room and muddling through.
Fortunately, the essential skills for managing a domain weren’t that different from modern corporate management back on Earth. Only the methods and details had changed.
As someone who’d spent years working part-time at a bookstore in college and mastered a weighty compendium of CEOs’ pearls of wisdom, I found it easy enough to absorb.
“Now, as you can see, to significantly increase tax revenue, it’s better to distinguish between taxpayers and non-taxpayers so people can’t help but pay, rather than oppressively going around digging into residents’ incomes. And the tax system shouldn’t be a flat-rate system. It should be proportional to the income they report……”
“Oh, the way the Count’s family manages its domain really is on another level. This has been very helpful, my lady.”
Ah, this is what they call divide and rule.
The English pirates proved how useful it was.
Once we arrived at our destination, my work generally amounted to giving a few pointers and examples on how to run a domain.
Then we’d move on and do the same thing again.
Honestly, how many times had we done this already?
It was nice to live as Lady von Lloyd rather than as Maid Yuria for the first time in ages, but it wasn’t much fun.
Just chatting with Derek was the best.
Of course, ever since Lumiere came by, I’d been much more wary of the possibility that Yuria’s body would make me fall for a man—especially Derek.
Still, we’d been practically each other’s only friend for years. Without Derek, I felt lonely and out of sorts.
I wanted him to stay by my side forever.
……As a friend, that is.
While the noncombatants, including me, worked after arriving at a lord’s castle, the squad of knights led by Derek went around taking out monsters and investigating the area.
After they spent a few days on operations and returned, we’d move straight on to the next domain. That was the main schedule.
So I hardly ever got to see him.
We were together while traveling, but I rarely left the carriage.
Honestly, we were heading farther and farther north, and I was freezing to death.
The dresses I wore as a count’s daughter were longer and warmer than my maid uniform, but they still had their limits.
It was so bad that I called over a fire mage who felt like an older sister, since she could light a fire in my carriage, and kept her close.
The road to this domain had been the worst of all.
This was the northernmost domain in the Empire.
The White Mountains that enclosed the North formed an inverted V.
There was a domain at the very heart of the range, near where the two slopes met.
It had grown from a village where hunters once lived into a domain ruled by a baron, so we couldn’t very well skip it.
“It’s cold……”
After finishing my work and returning to my room, I dove straight under the covers.
Even with the fireplace turned up to its highest setting, the room was full of cold air.
Maybe I should introduce ondol and make it a specialty of our family’s domain.
Fortunately, as with most domains near the mountains, there was no shortage of furs, so at least the blankets were incredibly fluffy and warm.
Because of that, I didn’t notice someone had entered my room and grabbed my wrist until they had hold of it.
I’d probably been nodding off.
“Who—? Hup!”
“Shh, don’t scream, Yuria. It’s me, it’s me.”
Derek was covering my mouth with one hand so I wouldn’t scream, while holding my wrist and slowly helping me sit up.
“What…… what about the work you were doing? Why are you in my room?”
“There’s no time to explain. We have to leave now.”
Derek gently but firmly pulled on the wrist he was holding and dragged me out from under the covers.
Could monsters have launched a massive attack?