Chapter 1
Chapter 1
Whoosh.
A chill wind crept in through the window cracks, making me shiver. Outside, a fierce snow storm raged. I sat up from bed and turned to look at the mirror hanging on the wall. Reflected back was a girl in her late teens, with soft chestnut-brown hair, a youthful and charming face, and eyes the same shade as her hair.
‘I can’t believe this is happening to me.’
One day, I opened my eyes and found myself inside a novel I had once read. The story was called [The Doomed Tyrant Loved Sunflowers], often shortened to [DoomSun].
It was a tragic romance between the dying, exiled imperial prince, Theodor, and the female lead, Annie. I stared quietly at the girl in the mirror.
From the moment I’d arrived in this body, my eyes had been swollen and red—clearly from hours of crying.
‘It makes sense, though.’
The girl I had become was named Rosalyn. One of the teachers who taught Theodor in his youth. But she was killed by him not long after.
And her crime: failing to awaken his power.
***
The Cursed Prince.
Blood of a Demon.
These were the names Theodor was given in the story.
And the reasons were clear.
‘Unlike the other royals who awakened early, he couldn’t.’
In DoomSun, awakening was a key worldbuilding element. Awakening referred to the process of blooming and activating one’s internal mana. For apprentice mages at the tower, it was a basic milestone, achievable with a bit of effort.
But for royalty, awakening was something else entirely. Royal awakenings manifested as pristine white mana which was pure, flawless, and imbued with ancient power.
In the empire, which prized bloodlines to an almost fanatical degree, such pure mana was both proof of noble heritage and a marker of privilege separating royals from commoners.
Most royal children awakened naturally around ages three to four, like a rite of passage. Those who didn’t were deemed unworthy, ignored, and cast aside even among their own kind. Cases like that were nearly nonexistent in the empire’s centuries-long history.
And yet Theodor, the crown prince and protagonist, failed to awaken. The emperor, who had high hopes for his firstborn, was deeply disappointed and never sought him out again after he turned four.
A few years later, the empress died. The emperor remarried swiftly and had new children. All of them awakened without issue, and Theodor was instantly removed from the line of succession.
Branded a disgrace, the emperor banished Theodor to the frigid northern province, locking him away in a tower within the remote Siphoc Palace at just ten years old.
I walked to the window, recalling the grim backstory I’d read. The snowstorm outside was violent. Through it, I could see the tall eastern tower of the palace looming in the distance.
The stormy weather made the tower look all the more bleak and ominous; exactly as it had been described in the novel. At the very top, a single small window flickered faintly with light.
Suddenly, the novel’s first line echoed in my mind.
[“For nine years, the light in the tower of Siphoc Palace never went out.”]
After being imprisoned at age ten, Theodor spent the next nine years there until his coming-of-age ceremony, obsessed with achieving awakening. He desperately wanted to be acknowledged by the father who had abandoned him. Awakening was his only hope of escaping his pitiful existence.
He worked tirelessly, sleeplessly, trying every method possible, summoning mages from the tower to teach and assist him. But nothing worked. As the years went on, frustration turned into anger, and anger into cruelty.
Eventually, he blamed his failed awakenings on his instructors’ incompetence and began killing them. One by one. He continued doing this relentlessly until he met Annie, the heroine.
The mage tower resented the senseless loss of talent, but they couldn’t refuse his orders. Despite being shunned, Theodor was still a prince, born of the emperor’s blood. So, in the end, they started sending only weak apprentices who became sacrificial lambs, really.
And one of those offerings was the very person I had become: the young apprentice mage, Rosalyn. A character so minor, she didn’t even get a name in the novel.
‘The fact that Theodor killed his teachers was only mentioned in a single line.’
It was merely background, an anecdote illustrating how savage he’d become during those nine years.
‘Of all people, I had to end up in the body of a doomed extra.’
I looked at Rosalyn’s reflection again. The black robe hung awkwardly on a thin, frail frame. The muscular body I’d built over years of training in my past life was gone without a trace.
The robe looked brand new, suggesting she had just joined the mage tower. Probably only just started learning to manipulate mana. I tried to imagine Rosalyn’s life. She was a girl whose name didn’t even make it into the story.
She must’ve entered the mage tower full of hope and ambition, dreaming of becoming a great magician. But the moment she was assigned to this place, that dream would’ve shattered. In the end, she likely gave up everything, sat in silence, crying until her eyes swelled shut, helplessly waiting to die.
Just like my own eyes were now.
Suddenly, I remembered the dream I once had. Before all this, I’d been a gym trainer, on the verge of opening my own studio.
That dream is gone now. In fact, it was out of reach.
‘But more importantly, I need to survive this.’
I didn’t want to die like this, pointlessly. Thankfully, this was a world I knew, straight out of the novel I’d read. And I knew how Theodor eventually awakened. It was Annie, the female lead, who triggered it. Later in the story, it’s revealed that Theodor’s body was different from others. There was a hidden secret in his bloodline.
But the method to awaken him posed a serious problem.
Only Annie could do it.
Because it required deep, intense physical intimacy.
When Annie, a golden-haired ray of sunshine, first appeared at the palace after Theodor’s coming-of-age at nineteen, he was instantly captivated by her warmth. She was a stark contrast to the cold, dreary world he had known.
She comforted him gently, and in that moment of salvation, he fell for her. They spent a night together. And that was when his dormant pure mana finally bloomed. From then on, he believed Annie was his literal salvation.
But that wasn’t the end.
‘She, too, ends up dying at his hands after enduring a twisted obsession.’
After awakening, Theodor realized that the more physical contact he had with Annie, the more powerful his mana became. So he decided to possess her completely. When she tried to run, he kidnapped her. However, as he was obsessed, he tormented her.
Eventually, he succumbed to a mana frenzy, becoming terminally ill. Driven mad by the power, he swore never to let her go. In the end, he killed her with his own hands, clutching her corpse, smiling as if he had finally claimed her.
Then, consumed by his own mana, he died.
A twisted story, isn’t it?
Well, this was a notoriously tragic adult dark fantasy. Famous, in part, for that catastrophic ending. If I foolishly tried to awaken Theodor the same way Annie did, I might suffer the same fate.
Right now, Theodor is eighteen. Just one year before the novel’s beginning, and at the peak of his cruelty. Even in a dark fantasy, seducing someone like him out of the blue…
‘That’s not something I’m good at.’
I splashed cold water on my face to reduce the swelling around my eyes.
‘There must be another way.’
The mana frenzy in the middle of the story happened because of Theodor’s unique constitution. If I could use that well…
Knock knock.
Just then, someone knocked on the door. When I opened it, a man in black stood there.
“Have you finished unpacking? His Highness would like to see you now.”
It was the first time I would meet Theodor since becoming Rosalyn.
