Chapter 99
“Regret-ruin-obsession? What’s that? I’ve never heard of it before?”
Aurora, encountering an unfamiliar word, tilted her head.
“It’s a friend to readers drowning in dopamine, the kind that turns your brain to stone.”
Regret, ruin, obsession.
Or the genre known as 4-drone.
If you compare it to food, it’s Yupgi tteokbokki.
Spicy and stimulating, it’s fun while you’re eating it, but after you eat it, you spend the whole day stuck in the bathroom.
You regret eating it for no reason, and yet it’s so addictive you want it again next time.
A friend to readers like me.
“That’s not weird, is it?”
“You’ll like it once you try it.”
In this modern age, where content and stimulation pour down like a torrential rain, it’s a genre compressed to the brim with dopamine just to survive.
In a place like this, where there’s not much in the way of entertainment, its effect would be doubled.
“Who is the target readership for this novel?”
“Basically, it’s the ladies and noblewomen of high society. They share what they write with one another. Of course, it’d be nice if it turned out well enough for other people to read too.”
“Understood.”
The basic readership was the ladies of society. For immersion, the protagonist ought to be female.
Then naturally, the one to take on the regret and ruin would be the male lead.
If they want a bad boy, that works out perfectly.
“The key to a regret-ruin-obsession story lies in emotional change. For the characters, and ultimately for the readers who read that story as well.”
“In what way?”
“Take a close look.”
I started writing.
“To begin with, you drag the heroine all the way down to rock bottom. The heroine pours affection and devotion into the male lead, but the man ignores it and tramples it underfoot.”
“If it’s a romance, can you really be that cold from the start? What if the readers get angry and stop reading?”
“How about kidnapping?”
“That’s just another form of love, you know.”
I shook my head.
Why should I care whether this person had some weird fetish or not? I wasn’t their parent, and I wasn’t their lover either.
They’d manage on their own.
“Of course, at first the readers will explode in outrage. Their chests will feel tight, like they’ve swallowed a sweet potato.”
“Then isn’t that a problem?”
“But that anger is the key. It’s the driving force that makes them keep reading.”
Aurora tilted her head, looking completely unable to understand.
“If you’re angry, why do you keep reading?”
“Let’s say Aether hit your older sister and ran off. How do you think you’d feel?”
“I’d be furious. I’d chase him down right now and hit him twice as hard.”
“But then His Majesty says Aether’s conduct is a problem and strips him of his position. How about now?”
“Oh, just imagining it is blissful. It feels like a hundred-year-old case of indigestion has finally cleared up.”
“This is exactly the same.”
I kept writing.
“Readers project themselves onto the pitiful heroine and grind their teeth at the male lead. If they don’t see for themselves when that bastard will finally cry tears of blood, they won’t be able to rest easy. It’s a structure that eventually repays tightly bottled patience with a rush of pleasure.”
“Oooh...”
At my explanation, Aurora’s eyes lit up as she let out a small gasp of admiration.
“The heroine can no longer bear the torment and finally casts aside all lingering attachments and turns away. At that point, the male lead finally realizes his feelings and weeps tears of blood, but by then it’s already too late. From there, the male lead’s regret and ruin, and his obsession with the heroine, begin.”
“I think I get what kind of feeling this is.”
Fortunately, as a princess who had completed higher education, she seemed to have a good head on her shoulders.
“Then, since I’ve laid out the rough framework for you, would you like to try writing it yourself?”
“Okay.”
Aurora began writing with complete confidence.
After some time had passed, she handed me a stack of papers.
“I’m done. Read it once.”
“Understood.”
Did she actually write it properly this time?
I began reading with full concentration. As expected, thanks to my speed reading, it didn’t even take ten minutes to finish.
My impression was:
“What is this? Why do both the heroine and the male lead die? And why is kidnapping in here too?”
Sure enough, it was a noir piece with not even a trace of romance, and it was suspiciously meticulous in its execution.
“The man loves the heroine so much that he kidnaps her, the heroine can’t stand it and escapes only to get into trouble, and the male lead regrets it too late and kills himself. How’s that—perfect, right?”
“What about the obsession?”
“If he chases her all the way to the underworld, isn’t that obsession? It seems incredibly romantic to me.”
I covered my eyes with my hand. My head was pounding.
I couldn’t even begin to guess where it had gone wrong.
“Why? Is this not it?”
“If you release this as is, a revolution will break out and they’ll drag Your Highness to the guillotine.”
“Come on, no way. That bad?”
“Yes.”
At least the guillotine would be a mercy.
If I were a reader, I’d have burned the book at the stake too.
“I did work hard on it, though...”
Aurora wore a gloomy expression.
I let out a long sigh.
Right, this was also partly my fault for moving ahead too far. It was probably a genre she’d never encountered before.
She still had far too little exposure to it. In that case, I had no choice but to help her.
“Then let me write one as a reference.”
“Really? You can write novels too?”
“I’ve only ever scribbled as a hobby; I’ve never properly written one. It’s literally just for reference, so don’t expect too much.”
***
“Wow... What is this?”
The study was filled with the frantic sound of scratching paper.
Aurora stood at his side, watching Leon write with her mouth agape.
Aurora already knew Leon was capable, even for a slave.
She had never seen his abilities with her own eyes, but she could roughly guess from Aether’s testimony and the occasional reports that reached her ears.
Even so, she had thought, ‘Well, he’s still just a slave.’ Literally, just a slave.
But the scene unfolding before her far surpassed Aurora’s expectations.
-scritch-scritch-scritch!
Leon’s right arm left a blur so faint it was hard to make out its shape.
The hand gripping the quill raced across the paper at a madman’s speed.
At first glance, it looked as if he were possessed, furiously scribbling nonsense.
It almost looked as if he were waving his arm around aimlessly in the air.
But wherever the pen tip passed, letters were unquestionably being written.
A neat hand that was easy to read, if not especially elegant.
Characters that devoured the blank space like a storm.
Before the ink had even dried, the entire page was filled with writing. The once-white paper now brimmed with black letters.
The pages that had become manuscripts were stacked neatly on one side of the table.
A feat that surpassed magic itself.
Aurora was so stunned she had forgotten she was even holding her breath.
Then.
-clack.
Leon set down the quill.
The sound that had been slicing through the air came to an abrupt stop.
He had finished the last page.
Loosening his stiff wrist, Leon organized the manuscript and pushed it over to Aurora.
“For now, I’ve only pulled out the prologue and the opening portion. As I said before, it’s merely for reference.”
“Huh? Already? Uh... okay. Good work.”
Aurora accepted the manuscript with a dazed expression.
<The Terminally Ill Young Lady Declares Divorce.>
A title like that.
It was quite different from the novels Aurora had encountered.
If it were the romance fiction that was popular in imperial society, it would usually be dressed up in poetic, elegant metaphors.
But this one shoved the whole sentence at you raw, and it had no elegance whatsoever.
Aurora, who had been inwardly looking forward to it, swallowed a faint sigh.
‘Right, what kind of literary depth could a book written by a slave possibly have?’
Without any real expectations, she turned the first page with a light heart.
And it took less than five minutes for that prejudice to be shattered to pieces.
-rustle. rustle.
The pace of the opening was breathtakingly steep.
The heroine of the work was Isabella, a young lady from an ordinary baron’s family who had entered into a political marriage with the grand duke.
Though she was a noble, she never looked down on those beneath her.
She did even the unpleasant chores herself and earned the loyalty of her retainers.
The model lady, forged from virtue and patience.
By contrast, her counterpart, the grand duke, was a tyrannical brute.
Violence was routine, he harassed maids, and he was an irredeemable piece of trash who ignored Isabella’s unwavering devotion to him.
The contrast between such extreme people made the reader’s emotions boil over in an instant.
Every time Isabella silently endured the grand duke’s contempt and let it fester inside her, Aurora’s pale cheeks flushed red with uncontrollable fury.
It was strange how deeply she found herself empathizing.
‘Why is she just taking this kind of treatment? She should be slapping him and walking out right now!’
But Isabella never resented that grand duke. She never got angry, not once.
Instead, she blamed herself for being insufficient. She firmly believed that if she just kept trying, someday the grand duke would notice her.
But heaven did not even allow her the luxury of waiting in uncertainty.
[“Unfortunately... the time you have left is just a little over a year, young lady.”]
A doctor’s death sentence.
It was a small illness that could have been cured if treated in time.
But afraid of troubling others, she had even ignored the fact that her body was rotting away inside.
As a result, Isabella was condemned to a terminal illness. She had only one year left to live.
[‘What on earth have I been struggling so desperately for all this time?’]
Isabella mocked her own life.
She lost the meaning of life.
Isabella decided to spend the little time she had left living for herself.
She boldly declared a divorce from the grand duke who had always given her grief.
And that was the end of the novel.
…….
Silence fell over the study.
Aurora’s gaze lost its place and drifted aimlessly through the air.
She was gripping the paper so tightly she didn’t even notice it crumpling.
As if denying reality, she flipped over the last sheet again and again and even checked the back, but, naturally, there was no continuation.
“I, is this the end? What comes next?”
“I did say I only wrote the prologue and the opening section.”
Leon rose from his seat and stretched.
“How is it? I’ve never really written in earnest before, so I don’t know whether it turned out well.”
“You... haven’t written before?”
Aurora looked back and forth between the manuscript and Leon, utterly dazed.
It felt like her mind was being bleached white.
To Aurora, a slave was such a lowly status that they wouldn’t even get the chance to hold a pen, let alone receive a proper literary education.
Of course, Leon was a special case and had received at least a minimal education from the princess, but even so, the result before her far exceeded the bounds of common sense.
A terrifying pull that dragged the princess, who had devoured countless books, straight into the text.
A development style she had never seen before, and even the deft control of emotional highs and lows that wrung a person’s heart.
‘A mere slave, scribbling casually, and he’s this good...?’
Compared to this, what she had written was nothing but a crude mass of type.
It was embarrassing.
“You, what on earth are you really? Are you really a slave? You weren’t locked in some basement writing novels your whole life or something, were you?”
“If that were the case, I wouldn’t have had to fight the Imperial Knights, and I wouldn’t have ended up captured like this.”
A thoroughly matter-of-fact answer.
Aurora’s hand trembled with shock and delight.
“This has to go out into the world right now.”
There were some issues with logic and accuracy, but those were trivial matters.
It was just fun.
More overwhelmingly fun than any other novel.
It was too good to keep to herself.
Aurora sprang to her feet.
She shook the summon bell on the table as if she meant to break it.
-ding! ding! ding!
No sooner had the irritated chime sounded than the door flew open and the head maid in charge of the princess’s palace rushed in, panting and flustered.
“Y-yes, Your Highness!”
“Take this manuscript at once and have it copied perfectly. Not a single letter, not a single comma may be omitted. By tomorrow morning.”
“B-by tomorrow morning? But it’s already late at night and everyone is asleep right now. Wouldn’t it be better to do it tomorrow—”
“Are you not listening to me? The salon is being held tomorrow at noon. We have to hand it out to all the guests. Stop making excuses and start working immediately. Right now.”
“A-at once, Your Highness!”
At Aurora’s thunderous command, the head maid went pale, clutching the manuscript to her chest as she hurried out as if she were being thrown out.
Aurora could no longer restrain the thrilling smile spreading across her lips.
“This is huge!”
She could tell for sure.
With this, it would more than suffice to set a new benchmark in the world of novels.