Let’s Start By Planting a Death Flag
So, this story begins with my dear father kidnapping a certain boy.
“Father, who is this? He’s a bit different from the toys I’ve seen so far?”
“He’s the son of an insolent bastard, I brought him to educate him a bit.”
I recognized at a glance who the boy was. A person with such an overwhelming presence is bound to be the protagonist of this world, after all.
“Then, can I play with him? I can educate him well now too.”
“Me too, me too!”
My younger siblings, who took after my father and had yellow sprouts, chirped greedily like baby birds with food right in front of them.
“For now, lock him up in the basement until he becomes a bit more obedient.”
The subordinates who received my father’s order grabbed the boy’s hair. He was in a state with restraints for large monsters on his arms and legs, and even a gag in his mouth.
But the aura emanating from the boy was tremendous, to the point where it was unbelievable that he was someone who had rolled into the jaws of death all alone. Even as he was being dragged to the underground prison, he glared fiercely at my family until the very end. At that murderous, piercing gaze, my legs went weak to the point of trembling.
“Oh, this toy will be fun.”
“I want to play with him quickly too.”
As I said earlier, I already knew who he was. It was Cassis Pedelian, the older brother of the female protagonist. Unlike my excited siblings chattering away, the thought filling my head right now was just one.
Wow. This is completely fucked.
In the end, this damn father planted a death flag on me.
I Don’t Like This Kind of Reincarnation
Of course, I didn’t know from the beginning that this place was the world inside a book. I died in a car accident during a fierce snowstorm in the middle of winter. I was struggling with my graduation thesis and heading home late from the library when a car skidded on the icy road and veered onto the sidewalk. Unfortunately, I happened to be passing right through that spot.
And just like that, I died and was reincarnated. Well, I’ll skip the tedious details of my previous life. It wasn’t all that interesting anyway. Besides, reminiscing about the past now wouldn’t help me in the slightest.
And the important thing here isn’t what kind of life I lived in my previous one, but how shitty the place I was reincarnated into was.
The beginning wasn’t so bad, surprisingly.
“This time it’s a girl. Since we have Asil as the eldest, this is perfect.”
The first voice I heard after being born was my mother’s, warm and affectionate. From what I gathered, she had wanted a daughter as the second child since she already had a son first.
Of course, the fact that I had died and been reborn gave me quite a shock, but I accepted reality pretty quickly. What else could I do? I was already dead, and no matter how much I wished for it, I couldn’t go back to how things were. Plus, I had always been fairly adaptable.
My new mother was an incredible beauty. With honey-sweet golden hair that seemed melted from pure gold and deep blue eyes like a lake, she was as beautiful as a princess from a fairy tale.
Wow, the man who snagged a beauty like this must be one lucky guy. My father was a total jackpot. I had a bit of a sucker for beauty streak, and even in my previous life, I preferred looking at pretty older sisters over handsome older brothers.
Moreover, my mother seemed to be of mixed race, possessing a perfect beauty that blended East and West. I marveled at her face every day.
“So, this is the child?”
But it turned out my father had an even more striking appearance than my mother.
“She looks a lot like you.”
The moment my eyes met the man with black hair and red eyes, I couldn’t help but be startled. He stood out in a different way from my mother.
Whether it was because his features were so sharply defined, or because the aura he exuded was somehow extraordinary, he left an incredibly intense impression that one wouldn’t forget after seeing him just once. He was quite handsome, but the atmosphere surrounding him was so overpowering that it almost overshadowed his refined looks.
“Yes, but her eyes are red like yours.”
My mother said with a clear, bright smile. At this point, I started to get excited about my own appearance. If I inherited genes from these two, wouldn’t it be natural for me to be quite the beauty?
“Roxana.”
However, the way my father looked down at me in my mother’s arms was somehow indifferent.
“This child’s name will be Roxana.”
He just named me and then left the room entirely. Come to think of it, this rotten father hadn’t visited me even once before my vision cleared up.
The gaze he had looking down at me now was so utterly dry that it was hard to believe he was looking at his daughter. To think such an unlikable person was my father.
“Roxana. My pretty baby.”
My mother seemed a little disappointed too, but she soon smiled as purely as ever and looked down at me.
“Grow up healthily and become a fine Agriche.”
At that very moment, a strange sense of déjà vu hit me. Agriche… It felt like a name I’d heard somewhere before.
By the way, seeing how even my father looks like that, did I get reincarnated abroad? The language they’re using doesn’t seem to be English, but since I can understand it naturally, it feels like I got some kind of reincarnator buff.
But drowsiness soon came over me, so I couldn’t ponder it for long. They say babies sleep a lot, and it’s true. Mmm. I fell into a deep sleep while receiving my mother’s gentle pats.
At that time, I had no idea. How vicious and horrific the Agriche family I belonged to was. And the fact that I had been reincarnated into an utterly absurd place.
Well, even if I had known, there probably wouldn’t have been anything I could do about it.
*** *** *** *** ***
I didn’t have just one older brother above me. It turned out that this world allowed polygamy or polyandry depending on an individual’s abilities.
My father had a total of four wives. Including me, the children born to my father so far numbered five. And among them, the only sibling who shared the same mother as me was one.
My brother, who was four years older than me, was named Asil.
“Xana, my cute little sister. Brother will definitely protect you.”
Unlike me, who had golden hair like my mother and red eyes like my father, Asil resembled my mother from head to toe. He was like a loyal, straightforward dog with a refreshing aura.
He was also a boy with a soft heart and a pure smile, which was unbecoming of someone raised in such a vicious household. From the time I was in the cradle, he would foolishly grin and spout such cheeky lines.
Even so, it was amusing to see him acting like a big brother and taking care of me when he was actually much younger than my real age. The reason I managed to adapt and survive in this damn house in my own way was largely due to Asil’s influence.
My family’s name was Agriche, and the family tradition of this house was quite unique.
To put it simply, the Agriche was a criminal family based in the underworld.
For example, they stole, committed fraud, smuggled drugs or poisons, and killed people when necessary, scraping by like that. Of course, the scale of that ‘scraping by’ was ridiculously large.
It wasn’t some mafia organization or anything, and I was dumbfounded. But what was even more absurd was the fact that children born into this family had to follow that tradition as well.
Up until now, the Agriche had maintained their lineage in that manner, and we too had to receive steady education from a young age to become true Agriche.
But as an ordinary person from South Korea, there was no way I could easily accept such a family tradition. No matter how quick my adaptability was, this was an exception.
Here, the only things we studied every day were things like how to handle weapons, poisons and drugs, stealth techniques, human vital points, and such.
It might have been okay if it was just memorization-based study, but I particularly lacked talent in the practical aspects.
“There’s not a single outstanding quality.”
My so-called father evaluated me mercilessly. I was eight years old at the time, and the number of times I’d seen this man’s face up until then was about that many. In short, we were a father-daughter pair with severely little affection between us.
My father, Land Agriche, was a man who had little interest in his children. Well, with his wives and children constantly increasing, there were now ten mothers in this house including mine, and the number of my siblings had reached sixteen. So it would be unreasonable to expect him to devote equal attention to all of them.
“If there was even one exceptional aspect, we could develop that further.”
I felt annoyed by the gaze that scanned me as if appraising merchandise. It was like he was looking at an object, not his daughter.
No, when did I ever say I wanted to work for this kind of household? I wanted to snap back at him out of displeasure, but since my mother and Asil had been earnestly pleading with me for the past few days, I stayed quiet.
My mother was standing beside me, somehow tensely on edge in a frightening way. Finally, after glancing at my face for a moment, my father spoke again.
“Still, there might be a use for her in another area.”
Having decided on my purpose, my father ordered that I receive a different education from then on. And so, what I began learning that day was…
Seduction techniques.
This is insane!
Well, of course, inheriting my beautiful mother’s looks, I was exceptionally pretty! But even so, in a normal household, who would teach something like this to an eight-year-old child? To think that the ‘other use’ he mentioned was this. Damn it all.
It seemed like they were planning to train me to later enchant targets to extract information or carry out assassinations. Teaching seduction techniques to a child like this—it was truly a repulsive family.
“Mother, I don’t want to learn this. Why do I have to study something like this? In case you’ve forgotten, I’m only eight years old now.”
“Xana, you can’t say things like that. You’re an Agriche. You have to study hard to become a fine member of the family later.”
Thinking back, there was a certain desperation in the way my mother gripped my shoulders tightly as she said that. I couldn’t overcome my mother’s pitiful gaze.
Moreover, this household had a very strict hierarchy, so defying the orders of the family head, my father, was simply unthinkable. It was filthy and despicable, but in the end, I couldn’t overturn the situation and had to receive the education as instructed.
But perhaps because I had no intention of putting in effort, my performance remained stagnant afterward. Then, my blood-related brother Asil was ‘disposed of.’
It happened when he was fifteen years old.
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