Prologue
A short distance from the glamorous ball venue, an adorable girl stood in a quiet garden as her raven hair fluttered in the breeze.
“Clearing an otome game isn’t simple at all… But well, it should all end with this. The last one on the list is…Luke Klein, the son of Duke Klein.”
When such shocking words spilled forth from this girl’s lips, a pure white light painted over Amelia’s vision.
🍓🍓🍓
✦ ✦ ✦
“—YOU aren’t worthy of this!”
The next thing Amelia knew, the raven-haired girl standing before her eyes tore off Amelia’s necklace by force. Pain stung the skin around her neck with the relentless motion, but what stood out more was the dizziness in her head that rendered her immobile—her tongue couldn’t form words as she wished.
A woman of noble birth with features remarkably similar to the girl spat, “The crux of the matter is, I will not allow you to make your debut in high society, Amelia. Accordingly, you will not attend the ball tonight either.” Without another word, she turned on her heel and strutted away.
After the woman, the girl, as well as their entourage of maids, vacated the area, Amelia was left all on her lonesome.
A building in the background was so desolate that it was almost unthinkable that it was a royal palace, with a deserted garden that barely even had any flowers.
It was a familiar sight to Amelia. A sigh spilled from her lips. “Time has reset again, huh?”
This was the fourth reset. It was the fifth time that her necklace, a memento of her mother, had been snatched away from her.
With yet another sigh, she wearily sat down on the cobblestone paving and rubbed her neck, which was still tingling with pain.
Amelia was born as the Glaisharle Kingdom’s fourth princess. However, after the death of her mother, the king’s fifth consort, she had been practically confined within these grounds that were titled the Fifth Palace, unable to leave at her will. The daughter of the fifth consort didn’t hold any significant inherent value. When the fifth consort was still alive, a number of servants, including maids, had served at the palace. Alas, merely a single person remained to this day.
The lack of servants, combined with the fact that the gates were always locked shut, meant that, naturally, meals wouldn’t be automatically served on her table either. Only the bare minimum of food and necessities was delivered approximately once a month. The supplies were all abysmal in both quantity and quality, but at the very least, they meant she wouldn’t die on the spot, which was the one saving grace.
After the passing of the fifth consort, the fourth consort had become Amelia’s guardian, but likely, it hadn’t been by choice. Once in a blue moon, she would come, bringing her daughter Prisca—the fifth princess—to give Amelia a piece of her mind, then march away right after. The woman’s disdain was evident to Amelia, but it wasn’t that the fourth consort actively held hatred for her. To be more precise, the woman was likely neglecting Amelia because she couldn’t care less about the girl.
Amelia’s world had been tiny. For years, she hadn’t interacted with anyone besides her only servant, the fourth consort, Prisca, who visited once in a while, and the gatekeepers. If the current timeline was consistent with all the previous time loops, it should be just before the ball where Amelia would make her debut in high society at sixteen, but there was a much more pressing concern at the moment.
“Her next target…is Lord Luke,” Amelia whispered.
As that truth sank in, Amelia’s shoulders trembled minutely. Whoever Prisca set her sights on would fall for the girl without exception.
After all, that was how this world was designed—it was how the world of an otome game worked.
🍓🍓🍓