WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS
Translator/Editor: Coughing Baby
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◈ I Returned as a God ◈
Chapter 91: You Call That an Answer? (4)
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Lee Eunyheui had entered the mansion a few days before me, on Count Rirent's referral.
I didn't bother asking how she'd figured out where my room was.
We ducked into a corner of the sprawling garden, one big enough to get lost in, and traded whispers there.
The second Lee Eunyheui saw me, her face went red and she started swearing.
I didn't even need to ask who she was cursing.
I tried to calm her down, worked up as she was.
"Even so, that kind of language is a bit..."
Seeing the murderous glare she shot me, I lost all confidence that I could talk her down.
I switched tactics instead.
"Getting mad's fine, but at least tell me what happened. I need something to work with here, whether I'm calming you down or getting mad along with you."
"It's..."
Lee Eunyheui let her body cool off and sighed, over and over.
She seemed unsure where to even start.
"That bitch. That woman, I mean the Faillia Duke's daughter, Rizu. Have you met her yet?"
"Haven't seen her in person yet."
"She's pretty."
"Wait, is this a taste thing for you?"
"It's not that! Even I think she's pretty, and I'm a woman!"
From the photo, she'd just looked like an ordinary woman from a wealthy family.
Lee Eunyheui pulled out a snack she'd been saving in her item window and ate as she talked.
"When I first saw her, I thought she was a different person. Pretty enough that I can't even understand how someone could take such a bad photo of her."
"Okay, got it, enough. What does her being pretty have to do with her being a bad person?"
By my own standards, Lee Eunyheui's personality wasn't exactly a pushover either.
Not fiery, exactly, but tough. Good survival instincts.
Unlike Choi Suhyun, but in her own way, she seemed like she'd survive if you dropped her in the middle of Siberia.
If Lee Eunyheui, who looked well-armored against most anything, was cursing like this, Lady Rizu had to be genuinely something else.
Having finished the snack, Lee Eunyheui held up three fingers.
"That woman, bad personality, selfish, moody, and bad hands too. Never mind the rest, that last one's the real problem. Yesterday there was this thing where her earrings got switched."
Annoying, sure, but a minor problem, easy enough to just bring the right ones back.
"She cut the maid's ear off right there on the spot."
What creeped Lee Eunyheui out even more was how the other staff reacted.
Not one of them thought that insane scene was strange at all.
Even the employee whose ear got cut off reacted the same way.
Meaning this kind of atrocity from Rizu wasn't a one-off.
Lee Eunyheui glanced at me to gauge my reaction.
The rest of what she told me about Rizu's misconduct was genuinely shocking.
According to another maid, there was barely a day that went by without screaming.
"Anyway, that's it. Selfish, rude, self-centered, and a princess who doesn't know a thing about the real world."
"Well... you're telling me all this, but since I haven't seen her myself, it doesn't really hit for me."
Not that I thought Lee Eunyheui was making things up or exaggerating.
I just didn't want to jump to conclusions before I'd seen and judged for myself.
"Oh, is that so?"
"What now? What's your problem."
"Never mind."
Lee Eunyheui crossed her arms and turned her body sideways.
Her personality was different from Eunyoung noona's, and dealing with her felt awkward somehow.
"I hate this world."
"Well, can't be helped, can it?"
"How can you just accept it that calmly?"
Lee Eunyheui frowned, saying she couldn't understand it.
A rigid caste society built on mana and raw power, this world felt cruelly harsh to someone like Lee Eunyheui, who'd lived through the modern world.
"People are equal."
"They're not equal."
"Did you defect from North Korea or something?"[1]
I'd been an ordinary Korean high schooler.
Well, up until I got pulled into another world, anyway.
Either way, I was your standard model student, the kind you could find in any school.
"Then how can you say something like that?"
"What's wrong with calling something unequal, unequal, when it is?"
"Rizu was born in some small village in Faillia territory. The reason she got to become the duke's daughter is because she's a Muel with a lot of mana. That doesn't give her the right to treat people however she wants."
"Why not?"
"If she hadn't been a Muel..."
"She'd have grown up ordinary, lived an ordinary life, and died, or gone to work for some other noble and gotten treated just as badly. So what? What you're describing is purely hypothetical. In reality, she's the Faillia Duke's daughter. She's got every right to do what she wants."
"Just because the Faillia Duke picked her out as a Muel?"
"That's reason enough."
Lee Eunyheui's fist trembled as she bit her lip.
It wasn't like I didn't understand how she felt.
"This world is like that."
"Is that a bad thing? People are all different from each other."
"You can't discriminate against someone just because they happen to be exceptional."
"That's your idealism talking. You know that, right?"
Her eyes went cold.
There was exactly one reason I liked Park Siyu.
Park Siyu and I carried similar burdens. And that guy actually had the resolve to back up his own convictions.
Lee Eunyheui?
Neither one thing nor the other.
"What can you even do?"
"What can I do, you ask. Want me to spell it out? You can't interfere with anything in this world. Not because you're an outsider. You just don't have the ability, and you don't have the power."
"Then you think you're some kind of person who does?"
"Do I look like that to you?"
Lee Eunyheui's mouth snapped shut like the words had gotten stuck in her throat.
Moonlight overhead lit up both of us.
I looked at Lee Eunyheui and smiled, bitter.
"Doesn't seem like it."
"Nothing changes whether it's Lady Rizu or someone else standing in that position."
"Then what am I supposed to do?"
"Why are you asking me that?"
At my counter-question, the tension went out of Lee Eunyheui's shoulders.
"Everyone finds their own answer."
There was no such thing as a wrong answer in this world.
What looked like a wrong answer could turn out to be the right one, given the right moment.
The answer I'd found for myself wasn't necessarily the right one for anyone else.
So it was better for everyone to find their own path.
"Look who's talking. So? Anything else I need to know?"
"Lady Rizu is pretty."
"I said not your taste!"
I had no idea why she kept repeating how pretty the woman was.
"It's not that! What I mean is, up until a few years ago, Lady Rizu apparently wasn't this pretty. Not many people have stayed at the mansion long enough to know the details, so it's hard to hear the full story."
"She wasn't pretty? What does that mean?"
"There aren't any childhood photos left, so I don't know exactly what she looked like. I told you about the photo thing, right? The real thing looks way prettier than the photo."
Wasn't it common enough for someone to look better in person than in a photo?
Lee Eunyheui thumped her chest, frustrated.
"That's what I'm saying! What if it's not that she looks better in person than in the photo, but that she actually got prettier? Like, plastic surgery or something."
"There's no way plastic surgery exists in this world."
"I mean it's basically that kind of feeling. I don't know when the photo we saw was taken, but there's a gap between the Rizu in the picture and the real Rizu. Oh, and."
Clouds swallowed the moonlight, and darkness closed in.
Half-hidden in the dark, Lee Eunyheui scratched the back of her neck and spoke.
"I don't know if it's just my imagination, but..."
"There's a smell of blood."
"Way stronger than what you'd smell around the mansion normally. Actually the smell coming off her is perfume, but how do I put it, that's the closest comparison I've got."
Lee Eunyheui watched my face carefully, like she was worried she'd sounded too abstract.
I glanced toward the mansion's windows, bright with light spilling out.
I'd felt something similar myself since I'd arrived at the mansion.
This mansion carried an old, stubborn smell of blood that hadn't faded in a long time.
"Yeah? Good to know, then. That's everything I've got to tell you."
"Nothing on the Faillia Duke?"
Honestly, what bothered me wasn't Lady Rizu, it was the Faillia Duke.
"Nothing special yet."
"Yet?"
"Yeah, I'm assigned to Lady Rizu. I don't know much about the Faillia Duke. Oh, about the duke's hobby. Seems like that part was actually true."
"Ugh. Anything besides that?"
"Just an ordinary father who dotes on his daughter. Doesn't really add up in my head, honestly, but that's about it."
Both of the Faillia Duke's daughters were adopted.
Not being blood-related didn't mean they weren't real daughters, but in noble society, the family name mattered more than blood, which was supposed to be the basic foundation of family.
Lee Eunyheui pointed at my eye while I stood there thinking in silence.
"By the way, I've been wanting to ask since the start. Why's your eye like that? Can't have gotten hurt in the meantime."
"Why do you think?"
"Ah. Guess you really hate it, huh."
"Would you like it if it were you?"
Just imagining a nearly hundred-year-old duke saying my face was his type made my skin crawl.
Lee Eunyheui nodded, saying she understood.
I changed into the prepared clothes and looked in the mirror.
"Been a while since I wore something like this."
The outfit brought back some seriously old memories.
I sensed movement beyond the door.
I fixed my tie, and just as I turned my head, there was a knock.
The door opened from inside.
"Morning."
A man in similar clothing waved his hand casually.
Green hair, a handsome young man.
Behind him stood a woman, head bowed, staring at the floor.
I closed the door and stepped out into the hallway without a fuss.
People filled every corner of the hallway and the mansion.
The atmosphere was noticeably different from what I'd seen at night.
"Cortclain Hiss. Just call me Hiss. You're Luin, right?"
"Heard about your eye from the head steward."
"The head steward?"
"Ifeseph. Sly old man."
"Ah, that guy."
"I'm not exactly a fan. Oh, if you were with the guard, you've probably never served another noble before, right?"
"First time."
Hiss's expression stiffened a little at my answer.
He hesitated, unsure what to say, then finally spoke after a long pause.
His carefully chosen answer was simple.
"You'll get used to it, it's easier that way."
I already had a rough idea what that "getting used to it" meant, from what Lee Eunyheui had told me the night before.
I didn't need Lee Eunyheui's explanation to know my mental fortitude wasn't so weak that something like that would rattle me.
Hiss and I arrived at the largest room, right in the center of the mansion.
At the ornate door, the staff member standing guard bowed their head slightly and knocked.
"Come in."
A soft, gentle voice answered from inside, and the door opened.
A huge sofa sat in one corner of the room, drenched in sunlight.
"Greetings to Lady Rizu, the duke's daughter. Good morning... actually, I can't quite say that."
Hiss's gaze landed on the staff member kneeling in front of Rizu.
Rizu kept her head held stiffly upright as she looked at Hiss and me.
She really is.
The moment I saw Lady Rizu's face, I understood exactly why Lee Eunyheui had made such a fuss about her being pretty.
Whoever took that photo should be fired.
Seen in person, Lady Rizu was stunningly beautiful.
Beautiful barely seemed like enough of a word to cover it.
Honestly, I could've marched up to whatever god made her, grabbed them by the collar, and demanded to know why they'd made a woman like this, and nobody would've blamed me.
Rizu raised a hand to her cheek and let out a short sigh.
"Tell me about it. I was actually in a good mood today, hearing a new escort was coming in."
Rizu leaned forward, tilting her teacup over the hand of the kneeling staff member.
[1] A common Korean rhetorical jab meaning "are you talking like a brainwashed communist," used to mock naive or dogmatic idealism about equality.
Footnotes:
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