Trials and Tribulations of My Next Life as a Noblewoman: Volume 3 Part 1 (eBook)

Kamihara (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
250 Seiten
J-Novel Heart (Verlag)
978-1-7183-2570-8 (ISBN)

Infos

After being lost in an otherworldly space occupied by murderous ghosts, Karen feels like she's done with surprises. But the hits just keep on coming, and each one feels like a snowball on top of the next: Six reveals his true identity, Karen's brother Arno throws his support behind the imperial princess, and, to cap it all off, a sudden invitation arrives from the emperor himself to attend his most prestigious of parties. Can Karen navigate a path to safety and still make time to win the heart of the new Conrad family kitten, Charlot?

Textauszug

1: The Mage Sixtus

I didn’t stop to observe every single detail, but based on what I saw from the doorway, the general design of the room and all the furniture was identical. That made my mind go completely blank. Because of course it did. Ordinarily, the door should have opened to a corridor or a different room. How could anyone possibly expect to walk into a room of the same size, with the same furniture, and decorated down to the same wallpaper?

I stood there with my hand on the doorknob, frozen for a time.

I’m scared. Maybe even too scared to move.

“What is going on...?”

I had no answer to my question, but the idea of turning back was even more terrifying. I knew that the corpse in the previous room wouldn’t move from its place, but the image of it rising to its feet filled me with worry. I felt a scream rising from the pit of my stomach, but I shoved my terror from my mind as best I could and took a step into the new room. I stood at the corner of it, my eyes on the door at the opposite wall, a mere ten steps away.

I walked toward it with such trepidation it was almost laughable, taking in my surroundings through something of a dull mental haze. It wasn’t that I wanted to see it again, but I at least wanted to know if it was still there, unmoving and slumped over the desk. I wanted to reassure myself that the only odd thing about the situation was the room itself, and so I reluctantly took it all in.

And as if to laugh at my show of confidence, fate saw fit to alert me to something out of the ordinary. I heard a sharp intake of air and did not immediately realize that it was my own gasp. It turned out the second room I’d entered was not an entire replica of the first; this was good. The difference, however, brought me no joy.

Gone was the corpse strewn across the room’s desk. Instead, someone sat slumped against the far wall. I could not make out their features with their head slumped, but the clothes made me think it was a male. The reason it was so difficult to tell was that the body had reached a point beyond such simple judgments. Its skin was black like charcoal and it clung to the bone, making for unnaturally thin limbs. Speaking to the thing was useless; I was staring at another corpse.

How long did I stand there, frozen in place, I wonder? It might have been a minute, or ten, or even just mere seconds. All I knew was that the only sounds in the room were those of my own breathing and the gentle rustle of my clothes. When I focused my ears to listen for more, I heard none of the birds that should have been chirping outside, no wind against the windows, and no shaking of leaves in the trees.

A feeling crept upon me then. It was an instinctive understanding that this was a place outside of the world I knew, and in it there existed only silence and death. And when the understanding hit me, I ran.

Why? Well, isn’t it obvious?

I didn’t want to be there even a second longer.

“This sucks,” I whispered to myself. “This sucks, this sucks, this sucks!”

Somebody. Anybody. Just tell me this is all a dream. I don’t even care if it’s some weirdo bad taste theme park. It can be whatever it wants, just get me out of here...!

I felt myself sweating even though it wasn’t even hot. All I had to do was turn the doorknob to escape the room, but for a moment my fingertips trembled at the thought. Still, I held my panic at bay and opened the door at the far end of the room, only to once again find myself in the same room.

The difference this time? There was no body against the wall; instead, there was an unnatural bulge hidden under the covers of the bed. I lacked the courage necessary to check what lay under them, and so I hurried to the door and flew into the next room.

In the fourth room, I saw a face. It belonged to a woman, lying on the ground with her arms crossed, staring up at the ceiling. She did not wear the pajamas of the corpse from room number one, nor the male garb of the corpse in room number two, but instead was draped in a peach-colored dress. There were no eyes in the sunken darkness of her eye sockets, only gaping black holes. But just like the other corpses I’d seen, her skin was black and stretched taut across her skeleton.

That was when a most unsettling thought hit me. If this woman had died in her sleep, and her skin still remained (dried out though it was...), then I still would have seen eyelids. Based on the eye sockets that remained instead, one had to surmise that the woman had died with her eyes open.

The realization was enough to give me another rash of goose bumps.

There was something surreal about the whole thing. Perhaps it was the lack of anything one might call a scent. The air was thick with dust, but there were no foul odors to speak of. If I’d smelled anything like a dead body, I would have broken down on the spot—reduced to nothing more than a mess of tears, rolled up into a ball on the floor.

Now that I had come this far, however, I was at least able to determine that the corpses that occupied the previous rooms all belonged to different people. Not that it made a difference. I passed quickly through into room five, which was a mess. Someone had trashed it, and their corpse was now just a period at the end of their tantrum.

I found a chair in the center of room six. A rope hung from the open beams up by the ceiling, at the end of which was a noose. Until this point in my life, I had never considered what might happen to a hanged corpse if it were simply abandoned over an inordinate amount of time. Now, however, I could say with great confidence that I would do everything in my power to stop anyone who even considered hanging themselves. Once was enough; I could not bring myself to look at the corpse and its horribly long and distorted neck a second time. And while everything had long since dried up, the floor was nonetheless covered in human filth and viscera.

Room seven proved the most difficult to traverse, and I wanted out even more than I had the first room I’d arrived in. There were two corpses in it, and judging by their outfits they belonged to a man and a woman. The woman lay upon the twisted sheets of the bed, which were dyed a reddish black. Near her body, on the floor, lay a dagger. That alone would have been bearable, but the man had died in front of the door, effectively blocking it.

I was momentarily tempted to turn back, but I refused to confront the hanging corpse a second time. I felt that to do so would break my spirit entirely. It did not take long for me to make up my mind, though taking the man’s corpse by its clothes and dragging it clear of the door gave me the creeps. I broke out in a sweat all over again, my mind a jumble of competing impulses. I wanted to flee, to burst into tears, and to scream.

“I’m over this.”

I spoke the words aloud, but my body refused to listen. I gritted my teeth as I took the room’s doorknob in hand. I steeled myself for what might lie ahead and the horror that might await me within. I stepped into room number eight, my eyes scanning for what awaited me.

That was when I heard a voice from behind me.

“You came.”

The room should have been empty, but I knew I’d heard it—a male voice, and one I did not recognize. Before I could think more about it, however, I was pushed in the back and fell hard on the carpet. I hurried to my feet and spun around, only to find that the door was gone.

The door I had just passed through had vanished.

No way. How is that possible? I hate this.

There was no door to a potential room number nine either. There were no doors at all.

I’m trapped.

“No, no, no, no, no.”

There’s no corpse in this room. There were corpses in all the other rooms, but there’s no dead body in here!

It was at that moment that I lost the ability to hold back the rushing waters of dread, fear, and panic pounding against the dam of my heart. I made my way to the window, desperate for options, but with my legs now turned to jelly it was a slow, lumbering gait. I pounded on the glass again and again, screaming for someone to get me out. It was only when my throat ached from all the shrieking that something dawned on me.

I had realized earlier that there was no sound in this place, but only now did I notice that the scene outside the window was frozen. The sky, the trees, all of it was eerily still. The room I was in appeared to be on the second floor, and when I looked down I saw eight black, wavering shadows. They were blurry and unclear, but I could see that all of them had their eyes open. They turned their eyes upward to where I was.

They turned their eyes on me.

It’s likely that I screamed when it happened. I leaped away from the window with everything I had and rolled up into a ball. These were circumstances that I did not understand, but my brain refused to stop pushing the most likely truth upon me.

“No,” I uttered. “No, no, no...”

But try as I might to stop the pieces from coming together, there they were. It was a hunch that had crept closer with each room I passed, but I had held it at bay, knowing that to accept its truth would be to lose myself to despair. It was in the clothes the corpses wore. Clothes that changed with each room. The...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 26.9.2025
• Reihe/Serie: The Trials and Tribulations of My Next Life as a Noblewoman
• Illustrationen: Kamihara
• Übersetzer: Kamihara
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Fantasy
• Schlagworte: female protagonist • Intrigue • light mystery • Light Novel • Nobility • Reincarnation • Romance
• ISBN-10: 1-7183-2570-3 / 1718325703
• ISBN-13: 978-1-7183-2570-8 / 9781718325708