Chương 1: "A New Leash on Life"

Arthur's party had traversed the icy tundra, beating monsters along the way, before finally reaching a small castle carved out of glacier. Normally, such an entrance would be guarded by monsters or minions of the floor boss, but the courtyard beyond the gate was eerily silent. Arthur halted a few steps from the barely-opened door. He checked the frozen hall.

"Why is it so quiet?" he muttered to himself. He frowned, uneasy. He took a step forward and carefully pushed the heavy door. The iron hinges groaned, and a blast of cold air escaped from within. Inside was a grand hall of ice pillars and a vaulted ceiling. The polished floor stretched out before them, entirely empty. Stepping inside, Arthur kept his sword at the ready. Serena and Eryndis fell into positions beside him, while Liana followed behind them with her staff raised.

At the far end of the hall was a raised platform. On it sat a throne of ice, and sitting on it was a woman. Even at a distance, Arthur knew who she was. Her reputation was passed from mouth to mouth with the kind of relish people reserved for scandal. Celestia Von Reingarde. Rumors, sweet and poisonous alike, clung to her like perfume. They say she bought slaves to climb the tower. That she threatened merchant businesses until they folded into her hands.

And that she treated her peers like dirt beneath her heel, and did so with a smile. He had never expected to meet her here. She was breathtaking in a way that felt almost offensive in this place of ice and death. Golden hair fell in a smooth cascade over her shoulders, too perfect to belong in the tower. Pale skin, composed expression, and those eyes… sharp crimson. A white-haired maid stood beside the throne, and she looked out of place in the same way Celestia did.

Celestia held an ornate porcelain teacup, steam curled up to her lips. She sipped. Slowly. Despite their confusion, Arthur and his party drew closer, and only then did Celestia's gaze turn towards them. For a brief moment, Arthur became painfully aware of how small he felt beneath her eyes. The maid stepped forward immediately, she took the teacup from Celestia's hand with both hands, while the latter did not look away from Arthur as the cup left her fingers. Celestia stood from the throne.

She grabbed an extremely expensive-looking spear that was leaning against the side of the throne. She flipped the weapon through the air without any strain and angled it downward, the tip hovering just above the floor. Arthur's party tensed as one. Serena's fingers tightened around her sword hilt. Liana shifted her footing. Eryndis' gaze narrowed further, the elf's calm turning watchful. Arthur stayed still.

"Excuse me, Celestia…? What's going on here? What happened to the floor boss?" he asked. She did not answer immediately. Instead, the spear tilted slightly in her grip, not threatening yet, but implying the inevitability of it. When Celestia finally spoke, it was an order.

"Fight me," she said. Her gaze remained fixed on Arthur, sharp and unflinching. Arthur's grip tightened around his sword.

'What was happening right now?' Baffled by this turn of events, he couldn't help but question the situation. This wasn't Arthur's first encounter with the notorious noblewoman of The Empire. * Her own life had been a straight path with no bumps. Born with a diamond spoon in her mouth, her parents' names were behind every door before she even reached for the handle. After graduation, she used her family name to immediately land a high-level management position that most people her age could only dream of.

The job was less about her impeccable skills and more about her family name, but she never questioned the arrangement. Her days in the office were predictable: meetings began when she stepped through the door and ended the moment she closed her notebook.

"Rewrite this," she would say, sliding a folder across her polished desk without opening it.

"Make it perfect. I expect it this evening." She would snap her fingers at her secretaries while walking past.

"Coffee. Use that new brand from Cali. And put in a call to accounting; I want their quarterly numbers before lunch." Any mistake was corrected with two words: "Fix it." She never bothered with explanations. And yet, even with all the money in the world, she found herself facing something she had never expected: emptiness. Every milestone that others celebrated felt unremarkable. Promotions were meaningless when they were guaranteed. To distract herself, she searched for new hobbies.

For a while, she found herself drawn to gacha games, lured by the promise of rare rewards. She spent far too much money rolling for digital figures, the rush of chance filling her evenings but the thrill disappeared as quickly as it came. After all, all she needed to do was pour more money in to solve the problem. In that boredom, she found something else: webnovels. At first, they were nothing more than another distraction, something to skim while lying in bed after work.

But soon, she realized they offered more than she had expected. Unlike the polished books on bookstore shelves, webnovels had no filter. They came from anyone willing to write, whether or not they could, and within them she found ideas far stranger and more human than what she was used to reading. There were hidden gems buried under the endless lists of titles, obscure stories where authors dared to write about grief, betrayal, and ruin without softening the blow.

These works struck her as more authentic than the carefully crafted happy endings she had grown to dislike. There, in those raw, unpolished chapters, she found something closer to the genuinity she had always wanted to see. The unpredictability of webnovels gave her a sense of discovery, a feeling she rarely experienced in her own life. Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit. But trends, as always, began to shift.

More and more authors abandoned unique ideas in favor of what sold best. Romance-driven fantasies, shallow action stories, and formulaic plots increasingly filled the updates page. Writers who had once dared to experiment now wrote only what they thought would earn them views and income. They disgusted her. The very medium that had once offered her something real was being eroded by the same forces that shaped every other industry.

To her, it was yet another reminder that happiness was cheap, and the pursuit of it ruined everything. Whenever a story fell into predictable patterns, she gave it the lowest rating she could and left behind a scathing review. She wanted the author to know why their work was unworthy. The more she read, the more mediocrity she recognized, and the thinner her patience wore until her only outlet was criticism. To her, that kind of writing was cowardice.

It avoided the raw honesty of stories and replaced it with artificial highs that never lasted. It was after one such late-night that everything changed. She left the office with her phone in hand, sliding into the driver's seat of her imported sedan. The engine roared to life, and the car rolled forward through the slick city streets. Her phone dinged. She normally kept it on silent, so the sound was a curiosity. Her eyes fixed on the screen as she tapped it open, revealing an email notification.

—Congratulations, you've been chosen. She barely noticed the vehicle speeding through the intersection from the side. BANG. The crash came with a violent crunch of metal, her body slamming hard against the airbags as glass shattered around her. She tasted blood immediately. Voices erupted outside. Something hot was leaking into the air.

'W-what happened?' She tried to make sense of things, but her thoughts were scattered like the broken glass across the road. She could hear someone was already shouting.

"Hey! Call an ambulance!" She could still vividly recall what her last thoughts were before the darkness swallowed her whole. —'Ah… I must look hideous bleeding out right now…' * Her first morning in this world had been chaos. She had woken beneath a canopy of silks, sweating from a fever, her limbs trembling, and the next moment, worried voices surrounded her bed. An unknown man and woman had nearly torn the room apart in their panic, shouting for the doctor, saying that their daughter had finally woken up.

Promptly after their declaration, a man in a white coat arrived. He checked her pulse and temperature before finally declaring it was nothing more than a passing illness. Still, the strangers did not calm.

"Celestia, my darling, are you certain you feel well enough to be up?" the woman asked, hovering near her bed.

"You gave us such a fright when you collapsed. I've already instructed the doctors to prepare more medicine, just in case."

"She still looks pale," the man agreed immediately, though his gaze softened the moment it landed on her.

"Perhaps you should rest a little longer, hmm? No need to strain yourself." The woman still wore a fearful look as she held Celestia's hands.

"We can have the doctor return tomorrow. I will not take any chances." She watched the woman fuss over her blankets for the third time in an hour, smoothing a crease that did not exist. The man hovered at the bedside, his brow still creased with worry even after the doctor had gone, as though the verdict of passing illness wasn't quite enough to convince him. It was only when her fever receded later and her thoughts were a bit clearer that she fully understood what had happened.

She had been transmigrated into the body of a young woman named Celestia, and these two strangers fussing over her were, by all accounts, this body's parents. The word sat strangely in her mind. In her previous life, her parents had been distant, they were people who equated provision with love and saw no reason to elaborate further.

Meanwhile, while they didn't know, these two had fussed over a daughter who was no longer their daughter, and had shown her more genuine concern in a single morning than she had received in twenty-six years. It felt heartwarming, but then, worry pricked at her. What if the parents of this body realized their daughter had changed? What if her mannerisms slipped, if she said something out of place? But her worries, it turned out, were entirely unfounded. Her new parents were doting to the point of blindness.

They offered gifts without being asked, hovered over her health, and reassured her at every turn. Far from suspicion, they seemed almost eager to indulge her every whim. Once she had fully recovered, wanting to know more about this world, she went to the manor's library. There, she found records of a tower's appearance five years ago. It had seemed coincidental at first, but upon further reading, too many things lined up perfectly. She was inside the novel she had once ridiculed: Tower of the End.

This had angered her. It was the particular, bone-deep irritation of a critic who had torn a story apart in a review and then found herself cast into it without her consent. She closed the book she was holding and hurled it at the window. The book struck the glass with a dull, unsatisfying thud and dropped to the floor. She stared at it for a moment. The window, irritatingly, remained intact. A soft knock at the library door interrupted her thoughts.

"My Lady." A maid stepped inside and dipped into a neat curtsy.

"Your afternoon tea has been prepared in your room." She left without a word and the book remained where it had fallen. And so, here she was now, lifting the porcelain cup to her lips and letting the warm tea spread slowly across her tongue. Her room was quiet except for the faint rustle of servants in the hall. Only days had passed since she'd opened her eyes in this body, and already the household bent to her whims.

She stared out the window and tried recalling the novel; she roughly knew its plot, its character arcs, and its many, many flaws. By the time her cup was empty, she had arrived at no satisfying conclusions. Only questions she didn't yet have answers to.

"Make-up," she said, setting the cup down.

"Yes, My Lady," her maid replied immediately, bowing her head before fetching the box of powders and brushes. She settled into the cushioned chair before the large mirror, framed in carved silver, its surface clear enough to reflect every detail, and studied her new face the way an artist would examine a canvas. Platinum-blonde hair spilled down her back in a smooth cascade. Her lips were pale. Her expression, even at rest, carried a sharpness that seemed to put anyone who met her gaze on the back foot.

But most strikingly, she saw this noble family's most famous trait looking back at her from the glass. Enchanting red eyes. She lifted her chin slightly. The face was, by any objective measure, extraordinary. Her name in this body was Celestia von Reingarde. Generic, almost painfully so. In the webnovel, Celestia's role had been comically pitiful. She was remembered for petty cruelty; she bullied one of the female heroines.

And Arthur, ever the gentleman, intervened at the perfect moment, scolded Celestia in public, and gained the heroine's admiration. That single scene was the spark that set off their entire romance subplot. Celestia, meanwhile, after a few more scenes to highlight the newfound connection between Arthur and his floozy, slowly faded into irrelevance. A villainess of convenience, used only to be discarded. Having her make-up done now, she tapped one finger against the polished armrest.

'If that's the case, then I don't really have to do anything, right?' she thought to herself.

'Let Arthur climb the damn tower and save the world. I'll just stay out of the way, live quietly, and watch this circus from a distance.' The idea soothed her. Why force herself into the mess of Arthur's miracles and harems? The plot could move on without her interference. She had no desire to stand in the spotlight if it meant being trampled by clichés. But just as she leaned back, a sound like static crackled in her mind. A sharp, artificial voice blared as though spoken directly into her skull. [Warning! Story Relevance: 3/100.] [Warning! Existence will be erased when Story Relevance reaches 0/100.] Her eyes widened.

"What the f–"