OCDRF 01

Chapter 1

Deserving to Be Loved

My lifelong dream had been to open my own hospital without taking on any debt.

The biggest obstacle to making that dream a reality wasn’t a license, residency experience, or academic qualifications.

It was simply money.

Without money, what was the point of opening a hospital? I couldn’t even live a decent human life.

Capitalism in modern society was making people sick.

‘Even if it’s psychiatry and the initial costs are relatively low, I really don’t want to go into debt.’

Why couldn’t some money just fall out of the sky?

And then it did.

A flowerpot.

Before I knew it, I had possessed the body of a noble young lady.

If I had to sum up public opinion of Young Lady Servan del Liviat, whose body I had possessed, in one sentence, it would be this:

The worst spoiled noble lady on earth.

Even though she was a noble lady, her violent temperament made her impossible for anyone to handle.

Young Lady Liviat Falls into Winter Lake and Fights for Her Life.

Rumors circulate that it was a suicide attempt brought on by despair over her troubled relationship with her fiancé, Grand Duke Benhardt. (Continued.)

I clutched my aching head as I read the weekly newspaper headline.

It seemed that I had possessed the young lady’s body after Liviat fell into the lake.

‘Which means the original owner of this body was already dead.’

And she had died attempting suicide.

Who would try to die by jumping into a lake in the middle of winter?

Thanks to that, I had been suffering from a terrible cold ever since I possessed her body.

That left me with one unavoidable question.

“Who rescued Liviat after she jumped into the lake?”

“Are you referring to His Grace, Grand Duke Benhardt del Rovenhive?”

“Gasp!”

Startled by the voice, I crumpled the weekly newspaper in my hands.

Betty, the maid of the household who remained completely unfazed by the notorious reputation of her mistress, stuck her face into the room.

How could someone move so silently?

“Betty, you weren’t an assassin before becoming a maid, were you?”

“You have quite an imagination.”

I could read the look of pity she gave me as Betty smiled sweetly.

How could she remain so calm in front of a mistress who was infamous for being a spoiled brat?

Still, thanks to the talkative Betty, I had managed to avoid the worst possible situation of having nothing to say since possessing this body.

I calmed my startled nerves and asked with a composed expression,

“Did the Grand Duke really save me?”

“Yes. It seems he was passing by the area, saw you, and rescued you.”

“Did anyone actually see him rescue me?”

“No. I believe there weren’t any witnesses because it was so late. Still, he is your fiancé, after all.”

………………A fiancé who was going to kill me, that was.

It was bad enough that I had been transmigrated into this world, but of all things, I had possessed the body of an extra noble lady who was destined to die.

‘At least I’m not the female protagonist.’

The Saintess, the heroine of this novel, was endlessly tormented by the Grand Duke’s obsession.

To make matters worse, even the male lead, a Holy Knight who had once been her lover, eventually turned into a fanatic and offered the heroine as a sacrifice to an evil god.

The ending was the destruction of the Empire.

There was a reason this novel was notorious for being so bleak.

‘Let’s break off the engagement with the Grand Duke and run away.’

If I broke off the engagement early enough, I might be able to live freely.

“How much money would I need to live in another country?”

“Hmm. I’m not sure, but I imagine you’d need a great deal of money to buy a new identity. It would probably be pocket change to His Grace, the Grand Duke, though.”

The Grand Duke was rumored to be even richer than the Emperor.

On the surface, he operated a legitimate merchant guild, while behind the scenes, he ran an illegal guild that sold information.

Whatever else might be said about him, I genuinely envied him for having so much money.

“Even so, I’m against you marrying His Grace, the Grand Duke.”

“Why? If we’re only considering his qualifications, he’s the best possible match.”

“The way he looks at you is so cold. It’s as though he’s about to kill you.”

“Betty, how about opening a fortune-telling shop?”

My impression of the Grand Duke, as someone who had read the original novel, was crystal clear.

A cold-blooded man without a shred of compassion.

Who could possibly change the controlling tendencies of a villainous Grand Duke whom even the Saintess, the heroine of the original novel, had failed to reform?

As a psychiatrist, I could say this with certainty:

People couldn’t simply be fixed and reused.

Fortunately, there was still plenty of time before the original story properly began.

“Betty, I’m sorry, but I’d like to be alone for a little while and sort out my thoughts.”

“You’ve become much more mature since you fell ill, Young Lady.”

“I nearly died. It made me reflect on my entire life.”

Once I was alone, I took out Liviat’s diary, which I had found in the room.

“I have no choice but to read it.”

Until then, I had hesitated to read it because of my ethical principles as a doctor.

Was it really acceptable to pry into someone else’s innermost thoughts without permission?

But I couldn’t continue living without knowing anything.

“What kind of person was she to make such an extreme choice as suicide?”

In the original novel, she had tormented the heroine several times before being executed at the guillotine, so there had been no way to know what was going on inside her.

I slowly opened the diary.

There was only one sentence written on the very first page.

I should never have been born.

I had become a psychiatrist, but I hadn’t been born with a silver spoon in my mouth.

In fact, I had grown up in an orphanage.

I thought that if I became someone another person needed, the emptiness inside me would disappear.

So I studied with everything I had.

After learning all sorts of theories, I had eventually accepted that life was about carefully tending to that emptiness and learning to live with it.

‘There’s nothing I can do about the things I never had.’

Things that were taken for granted by others had simply never existed for me from the beginning.

“What does it feel like to always have your parents by your side?”

Young Lady Liviat had grown up in circumstances completely opposite to mine.

She had loving parents and had been raised in an environment where she could achieve whatever goal she set for herself.

And yet, she seemed to believe she had nothing.

I heard that I might be marrying Baron Weport. Mother and Father must be trying to marry me off as quickly as possible because I’m such a nuisance.

I had thought Young Lady Liviat had fallen in love with the Grand Duke at first sight.

I had heard that she went wherever the Grand Duke went and did anything she could to gain his attention.

Somehow, she had even managed to become engaged to the Grand Duke.

It was already common knowledge that she obsessively collected objects that had been touched by the Grand Duke.

‘Most of all, I saw it myself.’

The first thing I did after possessing her body was dispose of her precious collection, including things like handkerchiefs the Grand Duke had used to wipe his sweat.

But the truth was different.

The young lady had only pretended to like the Grand Duke in order to avoid a political marriage.

At first, her love had been an act.

Before long, however, it had become genuine.

I can’t take my eyes off him. How wonderful would it be if those eyes that have no interest in anyone were to turn toward me? I can’t stop these feelings anymore.

Perhaps her unrequited love had been an escape route for someone who found the life of a noble young lady suffocating.

Noble young ladies in this world were expected to be obedient and compliant.

But it seemed that ever since she was young, she had preferred running around outside to sitting quietly in a salon.

As she grew older, her nerves became increasingly frayed, and every little thing she did became a subject of ridicule.

The diary of the young lady who had been called a spoiled brat was filled with loneliness.

“She must have needed someone who would love her just as she was.”

Perhaps that was why she had fallen in love with the Grand Duke, a man everyone else feared.

There was no noble who could disregard or mock the Grand Duke.

From the outside, he must have seemed like a free and powerful person.

Of course, from a psychiatrist’s perspective, someone who tried to control everything was also highly likely to have some kind of emotional deficiency.

I swallowed my bitterness and turned to the next page of the diary.

The joy of becoming the fiancé of the Grand Duke I had loved unrequitedly did not last long.

Everyone mocks me, saying that I’m not worthy of him. Because I’m inadequate, even my father has become a laughingstock.

His Grace, the Grand Duke, seems to find me, his fiancée, bothersome.

Liviat mocked herself for not being loved by the Grand Duke.

Even though that didn’t make her a worthless person.

I had learned this while studying psychiatry.

Human loneliness might take on countless different forms, but all of it carried one common desire.

“I wonder if she would still have died if I had listened to her story.”

The desire to speak.

If only someone had sincerely listened to the troubles you carried inside.

I wrote a letter to the young lady on a blank page of her diary.

Young Lady, one of the symptoms of an anxiety disorder is hypervigilance. This occurs when the pituitary gland…………….

I stopped there for a moment.

I crossed out everything I had written and started again.

Everyone was born imperfect and stumbled their way through life.

So.

………………You don’t have to blame yourself. You’ve worked hard enough.

The magical diary, whose pages expanded as necessary, contained enough space for thirty volumes.

One day.

Two days.

A week.

After I finished reading the entire diary, one suspicion came to mind.

Had the young lady really jumped into the lake intending to commit suicide?