Chapter 278
Translator: yun
“I am Rusbella Shy Elrose.” (1)
Her soft voice chattered. That was where that sense of discord came from.
“I am also Ashley Rosé.”
The gold swirling in the air around her formed letters in the air. As she reverted to formal speech, she played with the swirling gold.
“I am also the one responsible for placing your soul in my body.”
The words ‘Shy Elrose’ danced in the air before merging with ‘Ashley Rosé’. Our eyes met at the same time.
“Didn’t you find it strange?”
“…..”
“The way you could remember every letter from the novel. Could you consider that normal?”
Just then, from her whispers, I recalled the diary’s voice from my dreams that had been engraved on my mind ever since. It was the same voice I was hearing now.
“Ashley, what do you think I am?”
“The diary…”
I took a step back.
“Am I simply just the diary?”
But my body was no longer listening to me.
“Then why do I look like you?”
In the blink of an eye, her purple eyes turned gold again. Within her golden pupils, a swirl of gold looked close to bursting out of her eyes.
“That book is my life.”
The shell of gold that entrapped Rusbella broke into shards before dissolving into air like tissue in water.
pαndα---noνɐ1,сoМ “You are a soul of another world that had taken my place in that body and in the process fused with my soul. While I was summoning you and shattering your soul into pieces, you had entered my body and I was forced to leave a part of my soul behind. The reason why you had no memories of this life before you were seven was because you had two souls residing in that body. Do you understand what I just said?”
Gale, resulting from her surge in divinity, swept through her hair.
“Ashley, I’ve given you hints every time we met.”
The hair that was of the exact colour as mine and the face that was, though beautiful, only slightly different from mine. Her face was younger, gentler and though it was not starkly different, it was enough for us to give off different impressions.
It was only then did I realise what was lingering on the tip of my tongue. The hallucinations and the dreams I experienced were due to the effect of her power on me. She had the same appearance as the diary and the Power of the Lord allowed one to manipulate other people’s minds. And she had used her powers on me.
“The novel that you are so familiar with, the <Light of Rusbella> is the memory of my life that I had left for you.”
“… But I really have read that book before.”
Was it because she was me and I was her?
“Well. Don’t you think that thinking the memories were from a novel would be easier for someone who had just reincarnated, or to be exact, travelled across dimensions, to believe at first glance? Right, you must have decided that it was better off thinking it was a novel you had read in your previous life.
“No. No!”
No. The novel existed. There was no way that could be true. It couldn’t not exist. There was no way it couldn’t have existed. I shook my head frantically. There was no way. It couldn’t be true. Before I realised it, I yanked on the hem of her skirt.
“I died! I died, came to life and then…”
“I have died countless times. Just like you. No, you cannot even imagine the number of times I have.”
She smiled soullessly before saying she had forgotten how many times she had regressed as from some point on, she had gotten too lazy to count.
“In order to escape the endless regressions, I had split my soul, placed a portion in my body and another in the diary. You had gradually come to believe that you had reincarnated as Ashley Rosé as a result. To the point you thought that your fate was your own.”
“…..”
“And when I was transfering my soul, I made sure to leave only the memories of my deaths in that diary.”
Smirking, she leaned down towards me before narrowing the distance between our faces.
“How was it, experiencing the fate set out for me?”
A smile bloomed on the face that was more mature and beautiful than mine like a flower.
“You were in agony, weren’t you? The fact that you were drowning in misfortune all because of your dirty, ugly fate? I understand.”
If she had looked as pitiful as a single white flower before, with her hair pushed back, she looked more lively and boisterous.
“What a waste. The deaths and the parts of my soul I had abandoned.”
She raised her hand and placed it on the diary.
“I am an abandoned one. Pieces and fragments of despair. I have no name.”
The reason why she had no name was because Rusbella had abandoned her.
“The Empire had birthed two monsters, Castor Dje and Ashley Rosé.”
I could feel my chin shuddering.
Rusbella smiled suspiciously. At last, she was revealing the truth of this world. And she was doing it with such an explosive amount of light. When I opened my eyes again after the gold had spread over me, I found myself standing in an unfamiliar space.
Actually, it was a familiar space but it had a rather unfamiliar atmosphere. I was in a cradle room. The humid air, every face plastered with despair, a birth that no one could give blessings for. Because the mother herself rejected the child.
“Get rid of it.”
“But, my queen, it is your child.”
It was my nanny, who looked much younger than she was now, who responded.
“… She was born healthy.”
She pleaded. However, after pleading for a while, the nanny who was holding the infant finally sank her head in face of Auresia’s chilling expression.
“Go kill her off somewhere else.”
“…..”
“Please. Even if she is to live, she would be living in misfortune. She would never be able to breathe if she is to live…”
At the sound of Auresia’s gasp, the nanny paused in her step momentarily. The nanny had been with the mother since she was young. In a moment’s time, for the women she had cared for like a daughter and the child who had just been born and was now gasping for air, she had decided.
That was how ‘Ashley Rosé’s’ first death in this world occurred, helplessly and simply.
“I awakened that day.”
I looked around in a hurry but Rusbella was nowhere to be seen.
“I awakened as soon as I was born but at the same time I was cursed. The curse of endless regressions.”
She sounded as though she was scoffing at the situation. In the meantime, the space around me morphed and I found myself in someplace new. It was a vast wasteland. I knew instinctively that this was the area near the borders Rusbella was talking about.
“I didn’t have any big reason to run to the border. It’s just that if I remained in the palace, everyone would try to kill me.”
There was something one would only realise after regressing. Regressing did not ensure that the same people would say the same thing.
Take a broken vase as an example. The vase would always end up breaking, there could be various causes behind it–be it falling when someone walked past it or accidentally brushing against it. I noticed that this process was not entirely the same. Just as I regressed when I died, so did Rusbella.
But this was where we differed. Whenever she died, she always returned to the moment she was born.
“The more you die, the stronger you become. That is the Power of the Lord…”
Rusbella whispered. She had gradually grown stronger. And the way she went about it was by dying. No one had taught her how to survive so she learned how to all by herself.
“I instinctively believed that I had a mission.”
Her gut was telling her that she had a mission and because of it, she had repeatedly died and came back to life for it. Finally, she had found the answer in the western territories of the Empire. There was a record left in the Temple of Death that had not burned along with the rest of the temple and she had miraculously discovered it.
“I had read the records in the Temple of Death. What I am. And what kind of curse it was.”
After getting discovered by the patrols, she died and regressed. This time, she chose to remain in the palace.
“My life hadn’t changed but I believed that there was a need. For my life.”
She had died countless times in the palace and each time she did, she wrote it down in a diary. Every time she regressed, her entries had been erased but one day, she noticed that a record had been left. No, a record that only she could read. Before she knew it, she understood that the diary had become her artefact.
“My god, this is my first artefact!”
And finally, Rusbella, no, ‘Ashley Rosé’ met Castor.
Their lives did not always proceed in parallel to each other. The emperor’s powerful successor and the abandoned princess, the golden Central Palace and the shabby palace in the western corner. They met one day as their unchanging surroundings repeated.
“The interrogation for your treason shall begin now, princess.”
Under the order of the emperor, the Crown Prince had come to kill Auresia’s blood, the abandoned princess.
“We didn’t recognise each other. We were good at hiding our own powers since we had grown that powerful.”
The bloodless encounter between man and woman ended in the worst way possible.
“The daughter of the 8th Queen, Auresia, Ashley Rosé Auresia Kaltanias. As a young man of this Empire, for the sake of this Empire, I will question you of your sin in communicating with the forbidden Templars of Chaos.
When I raised my head, a familiar sight unfolded. On the 10th Day of the Month of Habermia, the sight of Castor killing all the maids and eventually even ‘Ashley Rosé.’
The only difference now was that ‘Ashley Rosé’ was not crying at the sight of her dying maids.
She humbly accepted all their deaths. As if she was familiar with such a sight, ‘Ashley Rosé’ calmly shut her eyes before the sword that finally struck her. Castor had flinched at the sight but he could not take back the blade that had already struck her.
Upon their first meeting, she died instantly.
“I didn’t exactly resent him. Because there had already been so many people that killed me before so he wasn’t that special to me.”
‘It’s just that,’ Rusbella muttered.
“It was only then did I find out that I had died before him countless times before.”
“It’s no fun doing this again.”
On the 10th Day of the Month of Habermia. The only difference now was Castor who wiped his sword clean with a white cloth before mumbling. Just then, ‘Ashley Rosé’ raised her head.
“The fact that he was just like me. The fact that he was regressing just like me. And the fact that he remembers everything I’ve gone through as well.”
Goosebumps dotted my skin for a moment. Just then, I could feel Rusbella’s joy, exuberance and a strange feeling of happiness from her voice.
“I knew. That my mission was to get rid of that man.”
I could tell, from her voice, that wherever Rusbella was, she was smiling.
“I did whatever I could afterwards.”
“Whatever you could…?”
“I would die after using the desert princess and sometimes I even used Rebecca Eileen. Before long, I learned that he was not the type of person to be swayed by love so I changed my tactics. By the way… the reason why I decided to change my tactics was because he was much stronger than I thought.”
The space showing the Terena Palace dissipated into light. The orbs of light gathered and filled my surroundings before I found myself someplace else.
A little girl crossed the vast wasteland. She was the ‘Ashley Rosé’ who died before coming back to life.
“I will destroy the Empire along with him.”
T/N:
(1): Just note here that the author provided a romanisation of Rusbella’s and Ashley’s name as ‘Luzbella shy Aelrose’ and ‘Ashely Roze’. But for continuity’s sake, I’ll be sticking to the above!
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