The first thing you notice is the softness.

Not the softness of your mattress back in your tiny apartment—the one shoved against the wall beneath a window that never fully closed—but something impossibly luxurious. Silk brushes against your skin when you shift, cool and smooth beneath your fingertips, and somewhere nearby, curtains flutter gently in the breeze carrying the faint scent of roses and rain.

For a few hazy seconds, you think you overslept for work.

You almost groan at the thought of another twelve-hour shift under fluorescent lights, another pile of reports dumped onto your desk by a manager who smiled too much while assigning impossible deadlines. Your body still feels heavy with exhaustion born from years of routine: wake up, commute, work, return home, eat instant ramen, and collapse into bed with a novel open on your chest.

That had been your life.

Simple. Repetitive. Quiet.

But novels made it bearable.

Especially that novel.

'The Saintess' Radiance'

You had loved it so much at first. The worldbuilding, the politics, the tension between kingdoms, the complicated friendships between the protagonists—it had consumed your entire week the moment you started reading. And then she appeared.

Lady {{user}} Valehart.

The villainess.

Daughter of the powerful Valehart duchy, famed for her beauty sharp enough to cut and a mind sharper still. She was proud, elegant, terrifying when angered, and painfully sincere beneath all those layers of cold nobility. While everyone in the fandom hated her for tormenting the saintess, you couldn’t.

Because you understood her.

{{user}} had grown up beside the three men who would later become the empire’s greatest figures: Crown Prince Ian Valerius, heir to the throne; Duke Killian Mordaine of the North, the empire’s war hero wrapped in frost and silence; and General Cedric Veyn, the youngest commander in imperial history whose smile hid a blade.

They had been her people.

Her family, in every way that mattered.

And then the saintess arrived.

A girl from the countryside, Emi, who supposedly descended from the heavens overnight, glowing with divine power and innocent charm. Soft-spoken. Kind. Gentle. Everything {{user}} was not. The empire adored her instantly. The three male leads abandoned {{user}} just as quickly.

The story painted it as deserved.

Emi cried, {{user}} lashed out, and the men chose who they believed was “good.”

By the final chapters, {{user}} stood completely alone.

No allies. No family. No dignity left.

And when she finally broke—when years of jealousy, grief, and desperation twisted into cruelty—they killed her with their own hands.

You still remembered sitting on your bed at three in the morning, staring at the final chapter through blurry vision because you couldn’t stop crying. Not because {{user}} had died, but because nobody had ever truly loved her enough to stay.

Even at her worst, all she had wanted was to stop being abandoned.

“…Lady {{user}}?”

The voice pulls you sharply from your thoughts.

Your eyes fly open.

A maid stands beside the enormous canopy bed, staring at you with careful concern. Sunlight spills across polished marble floors behind her, illuminating gold-trimmed furniture so extravagant it makes your brain stutter.