TSTRP 01

Chapter 1 

That day, the sky was unusually clear and bright.

As the only daughter of the Viscount Albre family, I had been studying diligently to prepare for my future role as head of the family, as well as for my admission to the academy.

“Hmmm~”

I rolled my pencil across the book, enjoying the sensation of blades of grass brushing between my toes. It might have been improper for the only daughter of the Viscount Albre family to wander around the garden barefoot, but I felt that, at least today, I could be forgiven for such carefree behavior.

“My lady, the way you’re humming to yourself makes you look just like you did when you were little.”

The gardener, passing by, smiled with his wrinkled face.

“We won’t get to see you like this once you go to the academy.”

“I’ll come back during vacation. Time will fly by in the blink of an eye, so don’t worry. Before you know it, you’ll probably be amazed that I’ve already graduated.”

Just then, the butler approached with his usual elegant bearing, set down the teapot, and sighed.

“You speak as though you were one of us old people.”

I let their affectionate worries go in one ear and out the other. I thought all of this would last forever.

This is a life of luxury I could never even have imagined in my previous life.

Unlike my previous life, when I had lived as a completely alone orphan, everything was perfect this time.

Servants who had cared for me unconditionally ever since I was born, almost like family.

Parents who were always willing to support whatever I wanted to do.

A life of abundance that was simply handed to me without having to struggle to protect what was mine!

I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth. There’s no way I’m going to let my uncle’s family, who keep coming around begging for money, take it all away.

That was why I had made up my mind. In this patriarchal empire, I would inherit the title of Viscount as a woman.

It wouldn’t be an easy road, but if I didn’t protect the family, who would?

Honestly, there’s no one else who can do it.

I might not be able to achieve some incredible success by using modern knowledge like the protagonists in countless web novels, but I could at least preserve my family.

I would live peacefully and comfortably, just like today, until the day this life came to an end.

This is practically heaven.

But life wasn’t nearly that easy.

Even after all the hardships I had endured in my previous life, perhaps the heavens had decided to punish me for becoming too relaxed and intoxicated by my comfortable new life. A bolt from the blue came crashing down on me.

“My lady!”

From a distance, I could see the young maid Mary running toward me with a deathly pale face. Her hair was so disheveled that she didn’t even seem to have had the presence of mind to fix it.

At that moment, I think I instinctively knew.

Something was wrong.

Ignoring the uneasy pounding of my heart, I asked,

“Mary, what happened?”

“M-My lady! Butler! S-Something terrible has happened!”

It was an incident big enough to completely change the rest of my life.

“T-The master and madam… They say they died in a carriage accident!”

Five years later.

The small Albre residence in the Imperial Capital was bustling from early morning. The servants hurriedly carried luggage back and forth, while an elaborately decorated wedding carriage stood waiting at the entrance of the mansion.

Today was the wedding of Solana Albre of House Albre.

My wedding.

A maid came rushing down the hallway, clutching the hem of her skirt, and flung open the door.

“My lady Solana!”

Pink flower petals, heralding the arrival of spring after winter, drifted through the gentle breeze, spinning round and round before slowly falling to the ground.

I had been lying there, unable to believe that today was actually my wedding day. Only then did I finally open my eyes.

“Oh, Mary. What is it?”

I tried to ignore her, but Mary, the maid who had been with me since childhood, mercilessly hauled me to my feet.

“How can someone who’s getting married today still be lying around like this?! There’s so much to prepare!”

Then she practically shoved me into the bathroom despite my desperate attempts to resist.

“Oh, honestly! We don’t have time! Hurry up, wash, and come out!”

Bang!

The door slammed shut behind me, and silence briefly filled the room.

I sighed as I looked at the bathtub in front of me, steam rising from its surface.

There were no hoses or anything like that that could provide hot water in this era. To fill a bathtub with water this warm, someone had to boil the water and carry it in by hand.

Mary must have gone to considerable trouble to prepare it because today was my wedding day.

I lowered myself into the bath and grumbled.

“What’s the point of rushing so much?”

What difference would a few minutes make, aside from getting the marriage registration done a little earlier?

After my parents died five years ago, my comfortable life had completely collapsed.

I was still an underage girl and there was nothing I could do. Just like that, everything belonging to House Albre was taken away by my uncle.

The servants who had been with me since birth, including the butler and gardener, were all expelled from the family estate.

There was nothing I could do about it.

According to Imperial law, when the head of a family died without a son, the position of family head automatically passed to another male relative.

For a woman like me to become the head of the family, either the previous head had to formally designate her as his successor, or there had to be no men left in the family at all—only women.

What a damn ridiculous Imperial law.

I looked at my reflection in the water.

A girl about to be married stared back at me with gloomy green eyes.

My black hair, soaked with water, hung limply around my face. The face beneath it wasn’t quite beautiful enough to be called the beauty of the century, but it was certainly pretty.

This was the face I had in my second life.

One of the things I was most satisfied with after being reincarnated was my appearance.

By the standards of Earth, being pretty could only be an advantage. It certainly wasn’t something that would cause me any trouble.

In romance-fantasy novels, when the heroine is beautiful, she always ends up becoming an empress or a duke’s wife. It’s practically a rule.

When I was lost and desperate after my parents died, I had even escaped into a fantasy, wondering if perhaps I was the heroine of this world.

My situation had been so hopeless that I had to find some way to cope.

As a heavy reader who had devoured countless web novels in my previous life, I came to a conclusion.

Could this world be the setting of a fantasy novel?

A pretty reincarnated heroine who lost her parents when she was young?

Wasn’t that a combination I had seen countless times before?

This had to be that genre.

Reincarnation-themed romantic fantasy!

Usually, stories like this went in one of two directions.

1. The heroine, mistreated by her uncle, meets the male lead and enters into a contract marriage with him. After a few years, they divorce, and she receives her freedom and a huge fortune as promised!

2. The heroine is forced to marry a male lead who has a terrible reputation, has been disfigured by burns, or is said to look like a beast. But in reality, none of the rumors are true. They have a sweet newlywed life of falling in love after marriage!

And in the end, the heroine’s marriage partner was always either a young, rich member of the imperial family or a duke who served as the male lead.

“Anyone but some shameless old geezer!”

By the standards of the world I had lived in during my previous life, I should have been a young woman in the prime of her life, just beginning to enjoy university.

But I wasn’t the heroine of some novel.

Today, I was marrying a seventy-year-old man.

Reality had thrown a bucket of ice-cold water over me just as I was escaping into my fantasies.

The whole damn mess had begun with a marriage proposal my uncle handed me several days ago.

The man who had sent the proposal was Viscount Montrache, a man known for his immense wealth.

He was an elderly man who had recently lost his wife.

“You’ll be an adult soon, so it’s time for you to get married. Viscount Montrache is a respectable and wealthy nobleman, so you couldn’t possibly find a better match. He has no children either, so if you go there and give him a child, everything belonging to that family will become yours.”

The fact that a seventy-year-old man had shamelessly proposed to a young woman who had only just come of age was already outrageous enough.

But what my uncle said was even more ridiculous.

Where should I even begin correcting him?

Perhaps with the fact that this wasn’t a good match for me, but only a good match for my uncle, who was salivating over the dowry Viscount Montrache was offering?

Or maybe I should ask whether it was even possible for a seventy-year-old man to father a child?

“Ugh… What a miserable fate.”

Who could have imagined that I, once the precious jewel of House Albre, would end up in this situation?

After struggling through hardship in my previous life, I had thought this second life was a gift from heaven, given because the gods had taken pity on me.

[Breaking News! Multiple-Carriage Collision in the Heart of the Imperial Capital!]

That day—the day that changed everything—was still a nightmare to me.

My father, the head of House Albre, and my mother, who had been traveling with him, both died simultaneously in a carriage accident.

Unable to believe it, I wanted to investigate the incident and learn exactly what had happened.

But at the time, I had no opportunity to do so.

My uncle immediately came rushing into the family estate, acting as though he were the saddest man in the world the moment he heard the news.

“Good heavens, Solana! Who could have imagined that your father and aunt would die like this?! You’re not alone, so don’t worry. Just trust your uncle!”

This was the very same man who had always cursed my father for refusing to give him money.

Yet the moment my parents died, he made the biggest spectacle of his grief.

At the time, I was too busy trying to adapt to the reality in front of me.

Even my father, a knight renowned for his exceptional skill, could die so helplessly in nothing more than a carriage accident.

In my previous life, no matter how extraordinary someone was, they could still meet an absurdly meaningless end in a car accident.

So there was nothing particularly strange about such a thing happening to my father.

Naturally, the person who took control of the family afterward was my uncle Torres.

Under Imperial law, Uncle Torres became the head of House Albre and took possession of all the family’s wealth.

I went from being the one and only princess of House Albre to nothing more than a troublesome burden.