Chapter 1 - Chapter 1

Translator: Nox

My Nerdy Neighbor Is the Master of the Magic Tower - Chapter 1My Nerdy Neighbor Is the Master of the Magic TowerChapter 1

A deep night where not even a sliver of moonlight could reach.

Adjusting her slipping shawl, a woman readjusted her grip on an old lantern. The beam of light was too faint to properly illuminate the darkened hallway, but it didn't matter.

Her destination wasn't far away.

Standing before a firmly locked door right next to a man's bedroom, the woman smoothed down her pounding chest.

‘Calm down.’

She had confirmed that the man was sound asleep. Had she not intentionally prepared a strong liquor for this very purpose?

All to discover what ‘secret’ her lover was trying so desperately to hide until the very end.

Yet, at this moment with the truth before her eyes, why did she keep recalling the fairy tale she had vaguely read as a child?

Bluebeard's wife, who, unable to overcome her curiosity, faced a gruesome truth.

She was certain she had once clicked her tongue at the woman's foolishness. It was only after finding herself in the same situation as that wife that she felt she understood why she had to open the forbidden door.

The faint bitterness that followed the sweetness the man gave had already filled her mouth, making her tongue ache so much it was unbearable to ignore or swallow….

Even knowing that what lay behind the door was by no means heaven or utopia, she had no choice but to open it in the end.

And so, like Bluebeard's foolish and honest wife, the woman gripped the doorknob and finally stepped into the forbidden place.

Creak.

The space beyond the door opened with an eerie sound and was completely empty. A very strange room with not a single piece of furniture, yet the walls were packed with palm-sized ‘somethings.’

As she stepped inside, the lantern light reached the walls.

In that moment, the woman stopped breathing.

「It would be better not to enter this room. It hasn't been tidied up.」

Once, when she had gripped the handle of this firmly closed door, he had discouraged her with a nonchalant voice. However, she clearly remembered his eyes, which couldn't hide his unease.

At the time, she had brushed it off, thinking it was a room containing lewd books or traces of a former lover….

The woman faced the wall in utter despair, forgetting even to blink.

Photos of ‘Cecilia’ taken when she visited the Temple, the young ‘Cecilia’ featured in the estate newspaper, biased articles praising ‘Cecilia’ as the Saintess of this age, and even paintings capturing a daily ‘Cecilia’ that she couldn't fathom why they existed.

‘What on earth is this….’

The moment she locked eyes with ‘herself’ smiling brightly in a white dress, Cecilia took a stumbling step back.

Thump.

Her back hit something solid. Her amber eyes, flickering like a lamp in the wind, stiffly looked upward.

“…What are you doing here.”

Gloomily sunken eyes were quietly looking down at her.

“…Lien.”

Sweat soaked into her clenched palms.

Was it bewilderment, anger, or a sense of betrayal? Or perhaps it was fear.

The voice she barely squeezed out trembled miserably.

“Just what is all this?”

The reason she didn't scream or hurl insults was that she believed, even if his mind was questionable, a man with such a kind nature must have a reason she could understand, even if only a little.

The man, whose eyes grew red as if he were the one who wanted to cry, laboriously parted his lips.

“I, I told you not to enter here….”

At the man's words, Cecilia's brow finally furrowed deeply.

You should have said it's because it's a room full of my photos, the product of your stalking, you son of a bitch.

*

*

*

The woman was generally of the unlucky sort.

From failing the CSAT and entering an unfamiliar department she applied for as a safety, to becoming a graduate student simply because she attended school diligently to make up for it, and even being possessed into another world just before graduation.

When she first woke up in this other world, she thought she had time-traveled to past Europe.

And soon after, realizing it was a feat impossible by modern science, she thought she had finally gone insane.

Because she was, after all, a graduate student.

It was a very plausible reason.

However, no matter how long she waited, she never woke up due to medication or from a long pipe dream. Rather, her sense of reality only deepened.

Only then did she barely establish a third hypothesis.

‘Could it be that this is that book possession thing?’

She had often read web novels where the protagonist is possessed into an unfamiliar world. The exploits of protagonists who escape reality and dominate in another world had given her, worn out by graduate school life, a great sense of catharsis.

But still….

‘I never once thought I wanted to be the protagonist of a possession story!’

Furthermore, it wasn't even the beginning of graduate school; to be possessed at the point where she had barely overcome all the adversity and hardship, finished her graduation thesis, the graduation exam, and even the defense.

Fuck, give me back my diploma!

She hadn't been hit by a reincarnation truck, nor was she obsessed with a specific character in a book, and she had never left a comment like ‘I could do better than the protagonist!’

It was truly an unfair situation.

For three months she tried everything, unable to let go of the academic thread that had barely lengthened by 5cm before snapping completely.

The woman, no, ‘Cecilia Weberdin,’ finally declared her surrender.

‘Things will work out somehow.’

In the middle of a garden brimming with the scent of flowers, Cecilia, having crumpled and thrown away papers listing failed Plans A, B, and C, slumped powerlessly into a metal chair.

As she stared blankly up at the sky, which was blindingly clear despite her mood, a cautious voice intervened from across her.

“Um, My Lady. Shall I bring some tea?”

Melanie, a maid with her curly hair tied up high, was gauging her master's mood.

“An Ame—no, peppermint tea would be good.”

‘A hellish world without even an Iced Americano.’

A sudden surge of resentment flared up at this wretched world that was wrong even down to its beverages, but Cecilia tried her best to think positively nonetheless.

Right, at least she wasn't inside a sci-fi novel full of strange lifeforms. There was only one sun, a day was 24 hours, and humans reigned over the ecosystem as the top predators.

Whether they were actually Homo sapiens like her, or just bipedal different species that looked the same, she couldn't know….

Who knows. If she just lived aimlessly like this, one day a high-dimensional being like a god might say, “Oops, I made a mistake!” and send her back to her original world, or a doctor might say, “You've finally woken up from your coma!” and welcome her back to 21st-century society.

‘Above all, the fact remains that whether it was graduation or possession, I escaped graduate school!’

Goodbye, dog-like graduate school life. Goodbye to the even more wretched professor. Forgetting the repeated experiments and manual data, she was now leaving for the secular world and its cycles.

Cecilia, letting out a laugh like a person who had lost her mind, decided to completely shake off her pent-up anxieties and worries.

‘Then from now on, I'm going with Plan D.’

Cecilia firmly wrote down Plan D on the remaining blank sheet of paper.

<Since things have turned out this way, enjoy yourself until a way to return appears.>

For example, romance, or romance, or rather, romance.

If this really was a book possession, then no matter what her role was in the original work, she had effectively become a protagonist-level character.

‘Even if Cecilia was just passing Extra A, from the moment someone possessed her, she became a lead.’

Besides, given her background as a Marquis's daughter, the genre was highly likely to be romance fantasy. If so, wouldn't a romance have to start for the plot to progress?

‘Therefore, I shall have a romance!’

It was absolutely not because she was lonely or to satisfy her private desires, nor was it to soothe the grudge of not being able to meet a man during her long graduate school years.

However, there was one major obstacle to this final plan.

‘There has to be a partner to have a romance.’

“There's no way a decent encounter would happen in this backwater….”

It was just as she was about to crumple and toss away Plan D as well.

Cecilia flinched and looked down at a sensation tickling her ankle.

“A cat?”

A snow-white ball of fur—no, a cat—was swaying its fluffy tail at her feet.

‘I never heard anything about keeping a cat in the garden.’

Then again, the Marquis's garden wasn't structured in a way that a stray cat could easily enter. Looking at its well-groomed fur and the gold necklace around its neck, it didn't even seem like a stray cat in the first place.

“Where on earth did you come from?”

Cecilia, who was more of a cat person than a dog person, cautiously reached out her hand.

However, before her hand could even reach the necklace, the cat, lowering its posture slightly as if hunting, leapt onto Cecilia's arm and then landed.

“Wha—What?!”

By the time she realized it, the deed was done.

Cecilia, whose sapphire bracelet had been snatched, looked down at the little robber in vain.

The cat, its pupils narrowed sharply, was holding the glittering bracelet in its mouth.

‘I've heard the term cat burglar, but I never thought I'd meet a cat that actually commits burglary.’

It was truly a terrifying other world.

But the cat, whether it knew her resentful heart or not, turned around while swaying its tail.

“Wait!”

Cecilia stood up awkwardly, following the cat as it leisurely left its spot.

She followed blindly behind the cat, which moved at a speed that was neither quick nor slow.

After leaving the stone path and cutting across the garden at random, passing a large broad-leaved tree, the wall surrounding the mansion appeared.

The cat seemed to stop for a moment and look back at her following, then vanished into a round hole at the bottom of the wall.

‘Was there a dog-hole here?’

The dog-hole, which looked like it had been made intentionally, was large enough for a small person to pass through.

‘It's just like someone from Wonderland chasing a rabbit with a watch.’

Even if she passed through that hole, things like falling endlessly downward or cakes that made her grow wouldn't appear, though.

Cecilia, fantasizing pointlessly, willingly lowered her body. Setting aside her sense of adventure, the price of the snatched bracelet was too high to give up and turn back.

Well, it wasn't as if that was the only expensive piece of jewelry ‘Cecilia’ had.

She, who hadn't at all discarded the memories and habits of her commoner days when she was swayed by capital, laboriously passed through the hole.

“Wow, it's a good thing I didn't eat any more macarons.”

It was the moment she straightened her back after brushing off the dirt and grass from her dress skirts.

Instead of a rabbit with a watch, she immediately came face to face with someone large, draped in a pitch-black robe.

[Serial] My Nerd Neighbor Is the Magic Tower Master