Please Don’t Die, My Lady

Prologue: You

There is a thought I’ve always had since arriving in this cursed world.

What if I’m just dreaming?

Or maybe, I’ve woken up from a dream.

A young man who lived a mundane and uneventful life dreams of becoming the daughter of a fallen noble family.

The daughter of a fallen noble family wakes up from a dream where she lived the mundane and uneventful life of a young man.

Is it the person dreaming of the butterfly, or the butterfly waking up from the person’s dream?

The Butterfly Dream.

Or to put it crudely, a goddamn dream.

Either way, it made more sense than the notion that I, someone living a perfectly normal life, ended up reincarnated into some shitty alternate world.

And it even gave me a glimmer of hope.

After all, I’m just a pitiful human being. Crossing worlds might be far beyond my reach, but waking up from a dream? That’s something I can do.

Moreover, I already know how to do it.

There’s only one way to wake up from a nightmare.

I stopped my train of thought for a moment and lifted my head.

The capital, the Central Academy.

The grand entrance of His Gracious Majesty the Emperor’s display hall loomed with majestic splendor.

Never before had I felt such gratitude towards that accursed emperor.

He had created this wretched institution, a festering blight of society, which bound nobles and talented commoners to the heart of the empire, isolating them completely from the world for years.

Thanks to that, I had made up my mind.

Unlike her—who kept dragging herself through a hellish life simply because she was afraid of dying—I would do things differently.

This academy will be my final stop.

One year from now, before this day comes again, I will die.

I will wake up from this dream and return to my reality.

So, this much is acceptable, isn’t it? Daughter of a noble family.

As always, my mind was calm.

That’s good news.

At least it’s not a rejection.