A lone girl mopped the floor of a convenience store. That had been the whole shape of her life — poverty and illness, grey water in a bucket, a store that never closed. Then, on one pessimistic night, her life ended abruptly.
She was reborn into a new world. In the new world she faced the same cruel fate.
She scoffed at the beautiful weather. Out in a field beyond the walls, Lithia the Knife sat quietly with the sun on her face. Inside the opulent city, she picked the pockets of the rich to survive. She smiled about it, proudly. A villain — that was what she was, and she said so out loud.
Still smirking, she stared at her decaying hand and waited for death. Her illness was a curse. It rotted her body a little further with every seizure.
A formal portrait of the Grand Duke of the Herman Duchy hung where anyone could see it: Hercio Herman. His son had suffered from the same strange illness. A cure was developed in the end, but it came too late for the son, and the duchy fell into ruin.
The duchy's people fell with it, into debt and into despair.
She walked, and as she walked she mused on the unpredictability of fate. The cure existed. The cure was controlled by a vassal family, and it was impossibly expensive, and that was the joke of it. She screamed at the injustice of a world where the poor simply had to die. She knew her time was nearly up.
A hooded figure gave her the prognosis without softening it. Prepare for death.
She lashed out in denial, even though she knew it was true. Then, with a sad smile, she decided to go back to her hometown.
She arrived to find her childhood home in ruins. A warm memory surfaced there — her mother's embrace, her own laughter in her mother's arms. She asked herself quietly about the people she had loved, and where they had gone. She realised there was no one left at her side.
After the orphanage she had ended up alone on the streets. That was the whole of it.
"What an amazing view," she said, looking at the wreckage of her past.
A sudden noise made her turn around, startled. She recognised the woman standing there. Aunt Eve. They stared at one another, both shocked, after so many years.
Eve knelt and rummaged through a chest while she explained that she had stayed behind to tend the cemetery. Someone had to.
"The women in the north are strong," Eve said cheerfully, and slid a box across the floor.
It held Monica's belongings — her mother's things. Lithia laughed bitterly at the sight of them and found herself remembering the cruel head of the orphanage instead.
She lifted out a pendant that glowed faintly in her palm and chided her aunt for never selling it. Then she looked closer at the gem, and recognised the ore it was cut from.
A satisfied glint came into her eyes.
It was still worth a lot.
There was a letter in the box as well. She turned it over, wondering what it could be about, and read it quietly where she sat.
"What does the letter say?" her aunt asked.
Lithia forced a smile. "Just a birthday letter. From Mother."
She made an excuse about needing fresh air and left the room abruptly. The door clicked shut behind her, and she stood against it, panting, her breath coming wrong.
Her eyes widened in sheer horror as she read what the letter actually said.
The paper glowed as it gave up her real name, and the name went through her like a blade. She crushed the letter in her fist, whispering about the betrayal of it. A truth out of the past, held back from her for a lifetime, and she had been utterly deceived.
It revealed her true identity. She was the granddaughter of Hercio Herman.
Crying, she screamed that she would never forgive her mother's deception. Then her breath caught. She clutched her chest, gasping. Her bandaged hands trembled once and she fell.
The seizure took her down again.
She lay shaking, understanding at last that she had been kidnapped, and then abandoned. Crying, she asked why her life had to be so awful. Betrayal moved through her like the poison in her blood, and she whispered that it hurt.
Her fist clenched, and she cursed the Hermans with everything she had left.
A memory surfaced of a younger Lithia collapsing without warning, a child folding onto the ground. She had believed that her mother was her only family in the world. But that woman had actually been an unrelated criminal.
She remembered dying from the shock of that betrayal.
And instead of staying dead, she had regressed eight years.
Lithia the Knife. Now she found herself a child once more.
"Reincarnation and regression," she said sarcastically. "What a talent."
Her childhood town was painfully familiar, every crooked fence of it. She approached the house she had once shared with her mother. Her mother came out to greet her, smiling, and Lithia looked at her and saw only a swindler.
She pretended to be happy. She was afraid, underneath it, that her miserable life would simply repeat itself, beat for beat. She remembered the illness that was going to come back too. The congenital disease was unavoidable — she knew that much. But this time she had knowledge, and six years to prepare.
She would use the chance for revenge. That was her first thought, and it burned.
No. Her path forward had to be different from that.
She glared as her kidnapper picked up her things and calmly headed off to work. She waved goodbye and silently cursed the traitor's back all the way down the lane.
Then she turned around. Her first step was finding the necklace.
She searched the house from one end to the other, planning her escape to the duchy as she went, and when the lid gave under her fingers with a click she smirked. She had it. She opened the box and looked at what was inside.
The necklace glowed against the lining. She admired it for a moment — her instincts were as sharp as they had ever been — and then she hid the box carefully back where she had found it.
She explained the whole escape plan afterwards to her bear, Seesan, in a low voice.
She worried, though. A necklace on its own might not be enough to sway the Hermans, who were not a family known for sentiment. She remembered her grandfather's cruel refusal to save her.
The Herman Duchy had been built on military might and on money. And the Grand Duke's son, Theodore Herman, was the greatest swordsman in the empire.