Abandoned Maid of the Grand Duke - Chapter 1
One day, I woke up to find myself as an abandoned maid in a grand ducal family.
It wasn’t that I was slapped and kicked out overnight—it meant that I had woken up inside a novel where I played the role of a discarded maid.
Now, is this novel some sort of great biography? Of course not. <His Majesty the Emperor Started to Obsess Over Me> is a 240,000-word romance fantasy novel that’s neither more nor less than what it should be. Given that, there’s nothing much to say about its content. Just from the trendy, sentence-long title, you get the gist. It’s predictably cliché.
The novel is about a maid from the renowned Kaltblüter family in the empire, who has an affair with the Grand Duke, avoiding the Grand Duchess’s notice, and ends up pregnant at the same time as the Grand Duchess. Upon learning this, the Grand Duchess threatens the maid’s life, and the maid, abandoned by the Grand Duke, flees the mansion to protect the child in her womb. The child born from this is the tragic female lead, Lilian Kaltblüter.
Ha, the name is so carelessly chosen. The author probably just looked up ‘country’ for the surname and ‘flower’ for the name on wikipedia. Not that it matters. Who cares if the female lead’s name is Lily or Azalea at this point?
Later, the grown-up Lilian returns to the grand ducal family to reclaim her status. Along the way, she meets the Grand Duke’s son, a paladin, and the Imperial Crown Prince, receiving their attention and love, thus becoming the true female lead of the romance fantasy.
Of course, this includes a subtle sense of taboo with the Grand Duke’s son, who might be her sibling, and also a forbidden tension with the ascetic holy knight. But ultimately, she ends up with the perfect, power-driven Imperial Crown Prince.
Really. It’s a typical mass-produced romance fantasy novel sprinkled with MSG, so to speak.
“Julie, what are you doing! Get up already!”
The problem here is that I’m not that female lead. Not the female lead, not even a supporting villainess, not even a small-time extra.
I woke up as ‘that’ abandoned maid who irresponsibly ended up pregnant by fooling around with the Grand Duke and then got chased out, gave birth by the roadside, and was killed by an assassin hired by the Grand Duchess.
“Julie? Are you really okay?”
At first, I couldn’t grasp the situation. When I opened my eyes, I was in a different world, and pinching my cheek to see if it was a dream confirmed it was reality. Back then, I was too confused to distinguish anything and thought I had just fallen into a parallel world.
But what could I do? Humans are adaptive creatures. After living like that for about two years, I reached a point where I couldn’t tell if this place was a dream… or if the novel I had read was a dream.
“Hello, Julie. It’s been a very long while.”
When I went to clean the main mansion and encountered a smiling young boy, I was struck by a dizzying realization as if hit on the back of my head with a blunt object.
Ernst Kaltblüter, the biological father of the female lead Lilian, the source of all trials and tribulations, and a self-proclaimed adulterer of this otherworld.
Ladies and gentlemen, that charming young boy you see 500 meters ahead will one day grow up to be a complete scoundrel.
Not only will he cheat on his pregnant wife with a maid, but he will also pretend not to know that the maid he fooled around with is pregnant, using illness as an excuse to leave the stage and vanish.
‘But the bigger problem is…’
The maid who fooled around with that bastard, despite having a legitimate wife…
…is me.
Feeling nauseated by the morally unacceptable standards that modern people can’t tolerate, I rubbed my forehead.
Oh my god, in the novel, the focus was so much on the female lead that the abandoned maid and her unfaithful father were merely tragic background characters.
Details? Who cares. As long as the bottom part gets attached without any fabric in between, what more reason do you need?
But when it comes to my situation, it’s different. Even if the ending were good, it wouldn’t matter. My role is to collapse on the street, give birth, and eventually get stabbed to death in the end.
I hate it, I absolutely hate it.
I could tolerate being the protagonist, a supporting character, a villain, or even an extra with no significance. But being an unfaithful woman who can’t even gain readers’ sympathy and ends up getting killed? No way in hell.
And that’s not all. It’s not like I’ll enjoy wealth and luxury in my old age as the female lead’s mother, nor am I the Grand Duke’s one and only first love.
Frankly, I questioned it the entire time I was reading the original.
Why did the Grand Duke cheat in the first place? Considering his reputation as a war hero who ended a civil war, he didn’t seem like a trashy person. So why did he abandon a pregnant woman?
If that was the case, he shouldn’t have cheated in the first place. What did those innocent women do to deserve this? This setting makes no sense at all.
In short, it was inconsistent. So the conclusion is obvious. Either the author wrote a terribly illogical plot, or that guy is a world-class scoundrel.
Wait, how many times have I called him a scoundrel by now?
