Chapter 1 - Remilia's POV

“Remilia Rose Graupner! …I cannot have the likes of you as my future queen. In the name of Dauphin Williard Ark Klaisen, I break this engagement!”

Williard glared at me sharply as he announced loudly that he was breaking the trust I thought we had nurtured for ten years of engagement. There was a tinge of contempt lurking in his tone.

People, people, people didn’t even believe me. No matter how much I pleaded that I had done no such thing and that I didn’t remember any proof of it, they wouldn’t listen to me. They didn’t believe me until the very end that I would never do such a thing, and that it was some kind of mistake. …I thought we were building a solid relationship of trust.

My eyes went black with despair, and all the blood in my body drained from my veins. With a faint levitating sensation, my consciousness ceased there.

My clarity and consciousness returned. Ah, a weight on my body that I hadn’t felt in a long time. Yes, it was in my knowledge. I guess this was what gravity was all about.

I was almost bewildered by the fact that it had been almost 11 years since I owned a body that did what I wanted it to do. However, there was no way to show my ineptitude; I was engaged to the crown prince, and the renowned lady ‘Duchess Remilia Rose Graupner’ would not make such a blunder.

One day, …Emi suddenly appeared in me. When I was a child, when I was still just me, I caught a cold and developed a high fever, and without warning, I… woke up and abruptly lost the freedom of my body.

This was in Emi’s knowledge. I guess the phenomenon of possession would most closely describe this.

At first I was very angry. I was so angry that my body had been taken away from me and that a complete stranger was living, controlling my body, and talking to me as me. If anyone can just watch it happen and not feel anger at being unable to do anything about it, he or she is beyond saintly or is a colossal fool.

I was so angry that my dignity, which should not have been taken away from me, was forcibly taken away from me. I could not speak or move freely from within the body that was mine, and I could only watch as something that had taken over me as my body looked, talked and moved by someone who wasn’t me. I was cursing childishly in a voice that no one could hear. I couldn’t do anything but bawl.

After a few days, I became a little calmer and had more time to observe the person that had taken my body. It was also the result of having arrived at the conclusion that I would take it back.

The one who got inside my body seemed to be stunned for a few days while being struck by the effects of the high fever, but by the time I was calm, my physical condition had recovered a little. The other person seemed to be quite confused, and there were many things that my young mind could not understand at the time.

I pieced together what I had vaguely learned, and I realized that what was moving my body now was the spirit of a woman named ‘Emi,’ an older woman who had lived in a different world from this one, and who had died once and awakened in my body when she came to.

Emi seemed to be very much unmoved by her former life, and my anger at Emi was lost as her grief-stricken thoughts flowed into my mind; “I want to go home,” “Mom, Dad, Sis,” “I’m scared of being alone in a strange world,” and so on, without any lies.

It might also be because I heard a concerned voice saying, “This is bad for Remilia, the real owner of this body… and I wonder what Remilia is doing now in the first place.”

I cursed God and the Devil for this tyranny.

After I started to hear Emi’s voice in my mind. I found that I could remember ‘Emi’s memories’ with the same awareness that I could recall my own memories.

Emi’s memories were very sweet and warm, full of happy thoughts that I, as a young girl, had never known. Emi had often wished she could see her family again and again. I had to call my parents “Mother,” and “Father,” and my room was much bigger than Emi’s.

I never knew what it felt like to love a family, and they never loved me. My mother and father would sometimes go a day without seeing me. I don’t even remember saying a word to them when I was finally independent.

When Emi started to use my body, I was angry that my body was taken away from me, but I didn’t feel ‘sad’ like Emi did. I could only see and hear my own body, …but if we were to switch positions? Emi loved her family and would have felt very upset that she could only watch them and not speak to them in her own language.

I learned about love by recalling Emi’s memories. In Emi’s memories, I saw a lot of tools that I didn’t understand and customs and culture that I didn’t know, but I gradually understood their meaning by looking into Emi’s memories and knowledge.

The memories spun from Emi’s point of view were as if they were my own experiences. The memories of each person’s in her life were so rich, vivid, and lovely that I felt as if I had been cherished and brought up by them.