Became the Owner of a Poor Estate
Chapter 4
The juice bottle she had been holding was tossed onto the bed.
It was a rough, forceful touch, much like when she had been stripped to be thrown into the bathtub.
“I’ll do it! I can do it myself!”
She shouted urgently, but it was no use.
The nanny stripped off the jeans and T-shirt with practiced speed, then frowned upon discovering the panties and bra.
“Where on earth did you get such scandalous things!”
However, as Donghee resisted with her entire body, the nanny gave up on removing the underwear. Instead, Donghee was forced into a dress draped in layers of lace.
The dress looked like something a princess from a fairy tale would wear, and while pretty, it was incredibly heavy, likely due to the sheer volume of lace. She hadn’t even taken a few steps before the weight of the dress felt like it was crushing her shoulders.
“Aren’t there any other clothes? This is so uncomfortable.”
“Something else? Truly?”
Was that really such a shocking thing to say?
The nanny repeated the same question several times as if she couldn’t believe her ears. Her sparse eyebrows migrating toward the center of her forehead was quite a sight.
Donghee nodded as she touched the dress, which flared out in all directions like an umbrella.
When she was a child, she had dreamed of wearing dresses like this, but those days were long gone.
She had a quest to scout the territory; she couldn’t go around in such cumbersome clothing.
The nanny observed Donghee intently before bringing out a dress from the dressing room that looked relatively simple.
The navy-blue dress looked much neater and more comfortable than the one she was currently wearing. It didn’t flare out like an umbrella, nor was it dripping with lace that looked like sea foam.
“I like this one.”
As Donghee showed her approval, the nanny sighed and began changing her clothes again. Even with the simpler design, the structure made it impossible to put on alone, so Donghee had to accept help once more.
“You mustn’t take back your words later.”
“I won’t.”
“By the way, My Lord, why have you been using such formal speech since this morning?”
“Pardon?”
—Ding! Basic Quest!
Please give a name to the Nanny, the person who loves Chloe Grace more than anyone else in the world. Upon completion, the active areas will increase.
Despite the blue status window floating right before her eyes, the nanny didn’t show a hint of surprise.
Donghee was now certain that the status window was only visible to her.
“Emma?”
Donghee blurted out the first name that came to mind. The nanny made a face like she’d swallowed a toad and asked,
“Where are you looking?”
The nanny stared at Donghee strangely, as she was looking at thin air and talking nonsense while the nanny stood right in front of her.
—This name is already in use.
Dammit, I knew it.
Then…
“Thelma?”
Just as she was debating whether to call her ‘Hey-you’ if this failed too—
—The nanny’s name has been registered.
“Yes? Do you need something?”
The nanny asked in a tender voice as she smoothed out Donghee’s dress. Thelma’s touch as she checked every corner of the garment was meticulous and gentle.
Regardless of the nanny’s actions, the status window continued to change its text.
—Quest complete. Active areas will increase.
Please choose only one of the following locations to activate.
- The Convenience Store where you only brought back expired food.
- The Meat Restaurant where you spent all day scrubbing grease off grills.
- The Car Wash where you washed cars until your arms felt like they were falling off.
Looking at the list of active areas that felt somewhat mocking, Donghee chose option 1 without much hesitation.
The Convenience Store had the widest variety of goods and plenty of food.
“Number one!”
Donghee whispered in a tiny voice, barely audible to the nanny. She worried the status window might not hear her if she spoke too softly, but it responded immediately.
—You have selected ‘The Convenience Store where you only brought back expired food’ as an active area.
The locations User Chloe Grace can travel to have increased to two: your moldy basement studio and the Convenience Store where you only brought back expired food. Congratulations.
Even as she received the congratulations, she felt a bit uneasy.
Donghee waved away the blue status window with her palm and beamed at Thelma.
“Thelma, I like this dress. No, I do like it.”
She wasn’t used to speaking down to someone older than her. However, Thelma seemed much more at ease, her expression brighter than before.
“It seems a bit too plain. Would you like to wear some accessories before you go?”
Thelma grandly brought over a jewelry box and flipped the lid open.
Donghee’s heart throbbed with anticipation. In her life, she had never owned even a silver ring, let alone a gold one.
And now, jewels!
However, there was far more empty space than jewelry inside the modest box.
“Is this all?”
“You barely managed to scrape even this much together.”
A necklace with a round red ruby, a small pearl necklace, and a gold necklace with a diamond the size of a pea were all there was.
There were no rings, no bracelets, no brooches.
She had expected much since she was a Lord, but it seemed the description of being ‘dirt poor’ hadn’t been an exaggeration.
“It would be a jackpot if a jewelry store opened up as an active area.”
It was just as Donghee muttered this while looking at the mostly empty jewelry box.
The blue quest window floated up before her eyes without warning.
—Ding! Special Quest!
Please raise the territory residents’ favorability toward the User to 1.
Upon success, one location of your choice will be designated as an active area.
Favorability 1? Isn’t that too easy?
It was an excessively simple quest for a reward like activating a jewelry store.
Thinking it would be a piece of cake, just as the status window had suggested, she was grinning when—flash!—the screen changed.
—Current favorability of the territory residents toward Chloe Grace is -189,500.
“Ah, hell! What is this?!”
“See, that’s why I asked why you insisted on wearing that dress.”
Thelma grumbled, assuming the reason for Donghee’s outburst was the navy dress she had changed into.
“It’s not because of the clothes. I was just thinking about something else.”
At Donghee’s excuse, Thelma gave her a suspicious look for a moment before dusting off the front of the dress and standing up.
“I will go check if the carriage is ready. But you really do like that dress, right?”
Thelma still looked skeptical.
Perhaps unable to let go of her lingering regret, she still had the bundle of lace Donghee had discarded draped over her arm.
“Yeah. I love it.”
Who would wear clothes with lace hanging all the way down to their armpits?
Donghee shook her head as she glanced at the dress that looked like it would bury her in lace.
Chloe, the owner of this body, might have been beautiful, but her fashion sense was clearly atrocious.
After Thelma left the room, Donghee made sure the door was closed and decided to summon the status window again.
“Status window, open!”
But it remained quiet with no change. Donghee tried calling it again.
“Open! Status window!”
“Open sesame, status window!”
The air before her remained transparent. There wasn’t even a slight tremor in the air, let alone any sign of the status window appearing.
“Would you blue window open please?”
“Please open, status window.”
“Sesame perilla blue status window.”
From short English to polite phrases, she tried everything, but there was no response.
“Just how am I supposed to do this?”
Muttering to herself, she turned her gaze to the gray front door that occupied a section of the wall like a framed picture.
“Should I try going there first?”
After checking the bedroom door once more, Donghee approached the front door.
To think that approaching a shabby, pathetic front door would make her heart race like this. Life truly was unpredictable.
Maybe she still hadn’t woken up from the dream. With that vague thought, Donghee pressed the passcode for the door again.
Beep, beep, beep, beep.
Perhaps because the surroundings were so quiet, the sound of the buttons being pressed felt unusually loud. Donghee looked around nervously like a criminal before grabbing the door handle.
The moment her hand touched the cold metal, the reality that this wasn’t a dream sank in.
Fear and excitement tangled together in a complex mess.
“Whew…”
With a deep sigh, she pulled the handle, and the moldy basement studio revealed itself.
With every step, the soft fabric brushed against her ankles.
Standing in the middle of her basement studio wearing a navy dress that reached down to her ankles felt incredibly surreal.
Regardless, confirming the newly activated area was the priority.
“Let’s go.”
Leaving behind the front door connected to the dirt-poor territory, Donghee grabbed the handle of the door leading outside.
—Would you like to move to the active area?
Finally, the status window appeared before her eyes.
“Yes!”
She answered instantly, fearing it might disappear again the moment she saw the question.
—Moving to the active area: ‘The Convenience Store where you only brought back expired food.’
Alright!
She could finally go out through the front door.
When her only wish was to roll around in her room all day, she never wanted to go outside, but the feeling was different now that she literally couldn’t leave.
Donghee’s lips were parched; she moistened her lower lip with her tongue and pushed the front door with all her might.
“Huh?”
The first thing to appear should have been the stairs leading to the ground level.
However, it was bright as day outside the front door. It was a sensation similar to when she first opened her eyes on the other side.
“If I go up the stairs, will I die?”
It looked like the stairway to heaven that appeared in movies or dramas.
The top was shrouded in thick fog, making it difficult to see what lay beyond the steps.
Donghee hesitated for a moment before stepping onto the stairs with determination. Her long, flowing skirt got caught under her feet, so she grabbed it with both hands and hiked it up.
As she drew closer to the fog, her heart began to race faster.
She stopped with one step remaining, but all she could see was still the thick, white mist.
“This is a bit scary.”
Donghee’s voice trembled as she looked into the vast unknown.
“Whew…”
The moment she took a deep breath and stepped onto the final stair, the fog that had been blocking her path split wide to the left and right like a miracle.
And as if space itself had been warped, the Convenience Store where she used to work every day stood just ten meters away from the stairs.
Normally, it was a distance that required at least ten minutes of non-stop walking.
“Something really has happened.”
The path from the front door to the convenience store was hazy and blurred, as if filled with mist.
Suddenly, a surge of fear hit her.
She felt as if she might never come back out if she walked into that fog-filled place.
She hadn’t realized that taking a single step could be this difficult.
As Donghee stood there unable to move, the status window reappeared with a ding!
—You’re quite the coward, aren’t you? Do not worry. No other living beings exist in this space besides the User.
“Nobody’s here? What about the other people? Have they all disappeared? Has the world really ended?”
