I Thought I Was the Monster Duke's Fake Tranquilizer - Chapter 2
Luciana. Lucy’s realization had come yesterday evening.
“K-Kagh, koff!”
“I told you not to wolf it down, you worthless thing!”
She had been starved for three days straight. When she finally received a piece of moldy bread and began devouring it frantically, it caught in her throat.
She thought she was about to suffocate and die…
But along with the flash of her life before her eyes, the memories of her past life came rushing back.
‘…I’m screwed.’
Thanks to that, she understood. Exactly where she had ended up.
〈The Last Dragon’s Bride〉 was the sorrowful love story of the last remaining dragon incarnation and the female lead.
To sum it up in a single line…
‘…It was a train wreck of a novel where both the male lead and female lead got dragged through hell and back before it ended.’
The male lead was the sole dragon incarnation in the story, and he suffered for a long time, unable to find the mate who could purify him.
Then, he meets Sepina at the temple and is freed from his torment. Believing her to be his mate, he spends the night with her, but…
‘…It’s all a lie, actually.’
As is common in romance fantasy novels, the temple in this world was half the villain.
Sepina’s power to purify the male lead was, in truth…
“What? Choked on your bread?”
“Be careful! Do you know how hard it is to replace you if you drop dead?”
“They say bearers of holy power aren’t born easily these days!”
…the result of squeezing and siphoning the holy power from countless children, Lucy included.
‘Rena the month before last. John last month. Cecil last week…’
Lucy cast a bitter gaze toward the empty cells around her.
Soon, fragments of her possessed body’s memories seeped in.
In those memories, those cells had held other “expendables” who, like her, had been dragged here and then vanished.
Purifying a dragon incarnation required that much holy power.
And so the temple abducted any child who possessed even a trace of holy power, using them as fodder for Sepina. Eventually, they even…
‘…Stole the true mate.’
When a mate came of age, a wound called a stigmata would appear on their body.
It was a scar in the shape of a dragon’s wing, and though the location varied with each mate, this particular mate’s stigmata had the misfortune of appearing somewhere far too visible.
‘…The back of her hand, wasn’t it?’
Because of that, the high priest of the temple, happening to pass by, found the mate before the male lead could.
He spotted the freshly manifested stigmata on the back of the mate’s hand as she drew water from a well.
Dragged here by force, she was imprisoned in the underground dungeon like Lucy, where she suffered and waited for the male lead to rescue her… until…
‘…Her stigmata was cut out and she died.’
Once Sepina had carved the stigmata from the mate’s body and grafted it onto her own, she began passing herself off as the mate in earnest.
‘…But even after that, she couldn’t perform a true purification, and eventually the deception was exposed.’
And the male lead, unable to overcome the rampage, brought about the world’s destruction…
…was the dark premise, and yet.
‘There were an obscene number of scenes of Sepina and the male lead doing that practically every other day.’
The very concept that an incarnation could only be purified through physical contact was, from the start, a setting of 19, by 19, and for 19.
The comment section devolved into daily warfare over it.
Who was the true female lead — Sepina, who went all the way with the male lead, or the mate, who never even got to properly meet him?
‘It was really entertaining to watch that chaos unfold.’
Now that it had become her own reality, it was nothing but utterly miserable.
“What on earth is the problem?”
She had met a miserable, untimely death in her past life too, and now she’d been given a new one, only for it to look like this.
‘If they were going to do this, they could have at least made me some background extra young lady passing by.’
But no. It had to be expendable fodder like this.
The name Luciana didn’t even appear in the original work.
She was probably just some insignificant speck of a character, destined to have her holy power sucked dry by Sepina before dying.
And she was supposed to accept that fate…
‘…Like hell I am!’
There was one more thing she couldn’t stand besides.
“Ugh, it’s burning up!”
Every time Sepina used her holy power to purify the male lead, heat would flare up in Lucy’s own body as well.
It was clear that the duke was here right now.
‘When the other children were still alive, I didn’t feel it this intensely.’
Now that they were all dead, it seemed the recoil from the holy power usage was pouring solely onto her.
Her hand burned hot, and a wave of heat shot through her.
‘I never wanted to know about someone else’s bedroom affairs!’
