IBGF 3

It was the name of my current life, recalled only after dozens of minutes of desperate effort.

Once I managed to pull the name out, I thought I’d feel refreshed—my foot. The moment the name came to mind, a chain reaction of questions popped up one after another.

The name Louis de France is given to French royalty. That meant I, too, was one of the French royals carrying this name. Yet, as far as I knew, there was no such royal with this name in the 17th or 18th centuries of France.

Seeing that I lived in a so-so mansion, was I from some shabby collateral branch? No, even then, that didn’t make sense. If I were truly an impoverished, ruined royal, there’s no way I’d have multiple servants trailing after me.

Just how many historical sources had I poured over under that demonic professor? Especially if the current era really was the 17th to 18th centuries, this was right in my field of expertise. It was practically impossible for a royal bearing the name Louis de France to exist without me even knowing of their existence.

The only reasonable deduction to make was that it was because I was a royal who left no mark in history. Right. In a case like that, it made total sense. No matter how many massive historical archives I’d rummaged through and written papers on every imaginable topic, there was no way I could know about someone who never made it into the records.

Yet, even thinking that way, questions remained. What on earth had to happen for a royal not to leave even their name in the records? Even stillborn babies in the royal family had all their records preserved. Did it make any sense that records of me, about to turn twelve years old, didn’t exist anywhere?

If only I could fully recover the memories of this body, it felt like all these questions would be resolved, but unfortunately, they hovered right on the tip of my tongue without surfacing.

Should I just grab any random servant and ask? That didn’t seem like a very good idea. If I was someone born with a secret identity, there was a chance even the surrounding servants didn’t know who I really was. My memories were already uncertain; if I carelessly slipped my tongue and created a spark of trouble, I’d be the only one losing out.

I needed to figure out the situation while keeping as low a profile as possible. The very first thing to do was to find out what year it currently was. Thankfully, they should be using the Gregorian calendar by now, so I could pinpoint the exact year.

“Pardon? You’re asking what year it is?”

The maid who had brought in a snack tilted her head at my out-of-the-blue question. While people might occasionally get confused about what day of the month it was, they rarely mistook the year. However, rather than looking suspicious, the maid gazed at me with a strange look of pity.

“It is 1767.” “1767? As expected, it really is the 18th century.”

Even though the maid’s gaze bothered me a little bit, it didn’t give me any real emotional reaction right now. The important thing was that my prediction had been correct.

France in the 18th century. 1767. There were still over 20 years left before the French Revolution broke out in 1789. And it wasn’t just the Revolution. The American Revolutionary War, which would break out in 1775, hadn’t even begun.

With this much time to spare, there was more than enough time to prepare for the days ahead. Even at the tender age of twelve, I was still of royal lineage. If I made the most of this background and my knowledge, there was practically nothing I couldn’t achieve.

Being a petty scrap of a royal who couldn’t even be found in history books was actually better. It meant I could naturally dodge the ending where my head got chopped off by the guillotine for being some arrogant bigwig.

Even just listing the facts floating around in my head, opportunities to rake in astronomical amounts of money were overflowing. With just a bit of plotting behind the scenes, I could become a super-conglomerate that would slap future Rockefellers back and forth.

“Young Master, are you alright? You’re not feeling unwell, are you? Should I inform the Master?” “The Master?”

Seeing me grinning like an idiot must have made me look genuinely out of my mind, as the maid anxiously checked my complexion.

“You look especially unwell today. I should report this to Master Lavoisier.” “Lavoisier?”

At the incredibly familiar name, my mind—busily drawing up future plans—snapped fully awake.

“Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier? Ah, no. If it’s ’67, you mean Jean-Antoine Lavoisier, right?” “Of course I’m reporting to the Master, not Young Master Laurent. You need to produce results to be recognized as a member of the Academy of Sciences. That’s why you’re so busy writing papers. It’s hard for us to even see your face.”

It only made me ashamed of my past self from just a few minutes ago, who had thought nothing could surprise him anymore. In truth, I could easily guess that I was under someone’s care. I just never, in my wildest dreams, imagined that the target would be Lavoisier.

Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier. This man was an absolute titan.

And for good reason—even in modern times, he was revered as one of the greatest chemists in history. Many even commemorated his achievements—establishing chemistry as an independent discipline and essentially founding modern chemistry—as the Chemical Revolution.

While he was the scientist of the era, he was at the same time a tax farmer collecting Paris tolls. Because of this, hated by the common people, he would meet a tragic end on the guillotine during the Reign of Terror after the Revolution.

But that was a future thirty years away. Right now, his father, rather than his promising young son, was the representative figure of the family.

Lavoisier’s father worked as a legal counsel for the prestigious Parlement of Paris. One could say he was a figure backed by the authority of the class known as the nobles of the robe (noblesse de robe).

Along with the blood nobility and the nobles of the sword (noblesse d’épée) who became nobles through military service, these robe nobles were a clear, privileged class classified under the Second Estate in the Estates-General.

With someone holding this kind of background as a guardian, I truly had nothing to fear anymore.

“Hey, as for the Young Master’s father, I’ll…” “Yes, yes. Say whatever you think is appropriate and head out now.”

After somehow shooing away the maid—who looked at me as if doubting my sanity—I cheered and paced around the room.

Could things in the world really turn out this well? Having rolled around in hell-difficulty in my past life, was this God’s consideration to let me enjoy life on easy mode this time?

At this rate, I felt like I could genuinely repent for my past life of living as an atheist. Whether that God was the Christian God or Buddha, a surge of religious devotion welled up inside me.

And if that merciful God really had lowered the difficulty setting of my life, there was a foolproof way to check it easily.

Checking once more that there was no one outside the door, I muttered in a low voice.

“Status window.”

The moment I spat out those textbook words, like a lie, right before my eyes appeared… absolutely nothing.

Even though I knew no one was watching, a level of embarrassment I couldn’t control rose up.

Still, it was too early to give up.

“Status.”

The room remained sheer, unbroken silence.

After that, I tried even portmanteaus like ‘stat window’, but the window I so desperately wished for never popped up.

Tch. Was I not going to get a completely free-ride progression after all? Ah, wait—this was France. Being foolish enough to use Korean or English, of course it wouldn’t pop up.

With a fervent wish once more, I muttered with a pronunciation as if rolling butter in my mouth.

“Statut.”

I tried combining all sorts of words—Korean, French, English, and even Latin—to summon a window, but God was heartless. My prayers went unanswered.

It was a good thing there was no one around, or anyone watching would have taken me for a madman muttering to himself in multiple languages.

Well, it couldn’t be helped. Status windows rarely appeared in historical fiction anyway.

Wasn’t the true charm of historical fiction utilizing future knowledge to resolve events, even without receiving some cheat ability like that? I had confidence in my knowledge, so I should just be satisfied with my current situation and not be overly greedy.

Sitting at the desk, I simply jotted down my future plans. Of course, since someone might see them, I didn’t do something stupid like writing them in French or English. If I wrote them in Hangul, even if someone else saw it, no one in the world could read it except me. The Hangul used back in the Joseon era would be vastly different from 21st-century Hangul anyway, so there was zero chance of a slip-up.

How many hours had passed while sorting out various things like that?

“…?”

Before I knew it, the outside had grown dark, and the house was strangely quiet. Feeling hungry, it seemed like it was already time for dinner, yet there was no sign of anyone coming to call me.

“Was I so focused that I missed them calling me?”

I got up and walked outside, but the interior of the mansion remained deathly quiet. All the lights were turned off, casting an eerie, somewhat chilling atmosphere.

“Hey! Is anyone there?”

Just during the day, several people had been bustling around the house—something was definitely wrong here. It felt as though there wasn’t a single living soul walking around the house besides me.

The moment I felt that—

Bam! A powerful impact struck the back of my head.

Tasting the hard floor with my face, I finally realized that my body had fallen forward. I tried to get up, but strength wouldn’t enter my limbs, and my senses were fading away.

At the same time, a heat akin to burning my spine with fire raced across my entire body.

The fading consciousness and this burning, hot sensation were feelings I had tasted once before.

I remembered.

That time when I lay sprawled on the ground like trash sent for disposal after being hit by a hit-and-run vehicle. A ground stained bright crimson, and a consciousness rapidly vanishing in proportion to it.

This was undoubtedly the sensation of death, which I had experienced once already.

Are you kidding me?

Today was the very day I had miraculously reincarnated after dying an unfair death without achieving a single thing. And yet, not even a single day would pass before I died like this again, without even knowing why?

I couldn’t die like this.

This was a life miraculously restarted as royalty—I couldn’t just let it slip away like—

Struggling desperately, I suddenly realized a single truth.

The reason I was a royal yet left no records, the reason I didn’t even know of my own existence. It was because I would die so absurdly that I wouldn’t even make it onto the stage of history.

I should have considered the possibility of assassination much sooner. No, wait—even if I had considered it, who could have expected to get shanked and killed on the very day of my reincarnation?

Easy mode, my ass. I had gone ahead and planted flags on myself like an idiot.

“What the damn…”

Because of the fresh blood rising up my throat, I couldn’t even finish a satisfying curse.

Ironically, the scene was not all that different from my first death, when I was hit and killed in a hit-and-run.

Thus, harboring an uncontainable sense of unfairness, rage, and despair, Louis-Christian de France lost his life once more.