The Nerd Next Door Turned Out To Be The Magic Tower Master [Novel] Chapter 1

A deep night, untouched by even a handful of moonlight.

A woman hitched up her slipping shawl and readjusted her grip on the old lantern. Its feeble beam was hardly enough to illuminate the darkened corridor, but that didn’t matter.

Her destination wasn’t far.

Just beside the man’s bedroom, standing before a door that had always been firmly locked, the woman pressed a hand to her pounding chest.

Calm down.

She had confirmed that the man was fast asleep. She’d even gone out of her way to prepare strong liquor for the occasion.

All to find out what this “secret” was that her lover was so determined to hide.

And yet, now that the truth lay right before her, why did her mind drift to a fairy tale she’d vaguely read as a child?

Bluebeard’s wife, who couldn’t resist her curiosity and came face to face with a terrible truth.

She was certain she’d clicked her tongue at that woman’s foolishness. But only now, finding herself in the very same position, did she begin to understand why the wife had to open the forbidden door.

Because the faint bitterness that always trailed behind the man’s sweetness had, before she knew it, filled her mouth completely — stinging her tongue until it was impossible to ignore, impossible to swallow down……

Even knowing that what lay beyond the door was neither heaven nor utopia, she ultimately had no choice but to open it.

And so, like Bluebeard’s foolish and honest wife, the woman seized the door handle and finally set foot in the forbidden place.

Creeeak.

Beyond the door that opened with an eerie groan, the room was empty. Not a single piece of furniture — yet the walls were packed from end to end with palm-sized somethings. A deeply strange room.

As she stepped further inside, the lantern’s light reached the walls.

In that moment, the woman stopped breathing.

[I’d rather you didn’t go in that room. It’s not tidied up, you see.]

Once, when she’d grabbed the handle of this firmly shut door, he had dissuaded her in a casual voice. But she vividly remembered the unease his eyes couldn’t quite conceal.

At the time, she’d brushed it off — assuming it was a room full of risqué books or traces of a former lover……

The woman stared at the wall in blank stupefaction, forgetting even to blink.

Photographs of “Cecilia” taken during a visit to the temple. Childhood images of “Cecilia” from the local territory newspaper. Slanted articles praising “Cecilia” as the saintess of the age. And paintings capturing “Cecilia” in her everyday life — paintings whose very existence defied explanation.

What in the world is all this……

The moment her eyes met those of “herself,” beaming in a white dress, Cecilia staggered backward.

Thud.

Her back struck something solid. Her amber eyes, flickering like a candle in the wind, traveled stiffly upward.

“……What are you doing in here.”

Somber, sunken eyes were gazing quietly down at her.

“……Rien.”

Sweat seeped through her clenched fists.

Disbelief, anger, betrayal — or maybe fear. She couldn’t tell which.

The voice she barely managed to force out trembled wretchedly.

“What… is all of this?”

The only reason she didn’t scream or hurl obscenities was that she believed — even if just by a sliver — that this man, who was out of his mind but genuinely kind at heart, might have some understandable reason.

The man’s eyes reddened almost instantly, as though he were the one who wanted to cry, and he pried his lips apart with effort.

“I — I told you not to come in here……”

At those words, Cecilia’s brow finally twisted in fury.

You should’ve said it’s because the room is full of my photos — the product of full-blown stalking — you son of a bitch.

The woman had been, on the whole, rather unlucky.

Starting from when she botched the national college entrance exam and ended up enrolled in an unfamiliar department she’d applied to as a safety pick. Then there was how she’d only attended school diligently to make up for it, only to somehow find herself a graduate student. And finally, being isekai’d on the eve of graduation.

When she first opened her eyes in this other world, she thought she’d been transported back to historical Europe.

Then she quickly recognized that modern science made such a thing impossible, and wondered whether she’d finally cracked under the pressure.

She was a graduate student, after all.

It was an eminently plausible explanation.

But no matter how long she waited, she never snapped to her senses thanks to medication, nor woke from a long, terrible dream. If anything, the sense of reality only thickened.

Only then did she finally formulate a third hypothesis.

Don’t tell me this is one of those… book transmigrations.

She had been an avid reader of web novels where the protagonist transmigrated into an unfamiliar world. The exploits of characters who escaped reality and ran rampant in another world had given her — crushed as she was by grad school life — tremendous catharsis.

But still……

I never once said I wanted to be a transmigration protagonist!

And it wasn’t even at the start of grad school — it was after she’d weathered every trial and tribulation, finished her graduation thesis, passed her graduation exams, and cleared her defense. That was when the transmigration hit.

Goddammit, give me back my diploma!

She’d never been hit by a truck of reincarnation. She’d never obsessed over a specific character in a book. She’d never left a comment saying “I could do better than the protagonist!” Not once!

It was, truly, the height of injustice.

Three months of trying everything under the sun, unable to let go of an academic career that had barely grown five centimeters before being severed clean off.

The woman — no, “Cecilia Weberdin”—finally declared her surrender.

It’ll work out somehow.

In the middle of a garden bursting with the scent of flowers, Cecilia crumpled the paper bearing her failed Plans A, B, and C, tossed it aside, and slumped boneless into an iron chair.

Heedless of what churned inside her, she stared vacantly up at the achingly clear sky. A cautious voice interjected from across the table.

“Um, my lady. Shall I bring you some tea?”

Melanie, the maid with her curly hair pinned up high, was reading her mistress’s mood.

“An Ameri— no, peppermint tea would be nice.”

What a godforsaken world, not even an iced Americano to be had.

A surge of resentment welled up at this wretched world that couldn’t even get beverages right, but Cecilia forced herself to think as positively as she could.

Right. At least it wasn’t the inside of some sci-fi novel crawling with alien lifeforms. There was one sun, a day lasted twenty-four hours, and humans sat atop the food chain.

Whether they were truly the same Homo sapiens as her, or a bipedal species that merely looked identical, was anyone’s guess, but……

Who knew? Maybe if she just drifted along like this, some higher-dimensional being — vaguely godlike — would pop up one day and say, “Oops, my mistake!” and send her back to her original world. Or maybe a doctor would greet her with, “You’ve finally woken from your coma!” right there in the twenty-first century.

Above all, whether by graduation or transmigration, the fact remains that I’ve escaped grad school!

Goodbye, hellish grad school life. Goodbye, even more hellish professor. Forget the repeated experiments and the hand-processed data — I’m off to greener pastures.

Laughing like someone who’d lost her mind, Cecilia resolved to sweep away every last worry and care she’d been bottling up.

All right. From here on out, it’s Plan D.

Cecilia pressed down hard on the blank page as she wrote out Plan D.

<Since things have come to this, enjoy myself until a way back appears.>

For example — romance, or romance, or, you know, romance.

If this really was a book transmigration, then whatever role the original “Cecilia” had played, she herself had effectively become a protagonist.

Even if Cecilia was nothing more than Passing Extra A, the moment someone transmigrated into her, she became a lead.

Besides, given the backdrop of being a marquis’s daughter, the genre was most likely romance fantasy. In that case, wouldn’t the plot only start moving once she began a romance?

So I’m going to date someone!

Absolutely not because she was lonely, or to satisfy personal desires, or to make up for not meeting any men during her long grad school years.

But even this final plan had one major obstacle.

You need a partner to have a romance.

“As if some decent encounter is just going to happen out here in the sticks……”

She was on the verge of crumpling Plan D and hurling it away too.

A tickling sensation at her ankle made Cecilia flinch and look down.

“A cat?”

A bundle of snow-white fur — no, a cat — was swishing its luxurious tail at her feet.

I never heard anything about a cat being kept in the garden.

Then again, the marquis estate’s garden wasn’t the kind of place a stray cat could easily wander into. And judging by the impeccably groomed fur and the gold necklace around its neck, this was clearly no stray to begin with.

“Where on earth did you come from?”

Cecilia, more of a cat person than a dog person, carefully extended her hand.

But before her fingers could so much as touch the necklace, the cat crouched slightly, sprang onto Cecilia’s arm as if pouncing on prey, and landed back on the ground.

“Wh-what?!”

By the time she realized what had happened, it was already over.

Robbed of her sapphire bracelet, Cecilia gaped down at the tiny bandit.

The cat, pupils contracted to slits, held the glittering bracelet in its mouth.

I’d heard the expression “cat burglar” before, but I never expected to actually meet a cat that steals.

Truly, this other world was a terrifying place.

But the cat, oblivious to — or unconcerned with — her indignation, flicked its tail cheerfully and turned to leave.

“Wait!”

Cecilia scrambled awkwardly to her feet and followed the cat as it sauntered off at its leisure.

Neither particularly fast nor particularly slow, the cat moved at a pace she could just barely keep up with. She chased after it blindly.

Leaving the stone path, cutting haphazardly across the garden, and passing a large broadleaf tree, she came upon the wall encircling the estate.

The cat paused, glanced back at her as if to check she was still following, then slipped through a round hole at the base of the wall and vanished.

There was a gap in the wall here?

The hole, which looked deliberately made, was large enough for one small person to squeeze through.

Just like that someone from Wonderland, chasing a rabbit with a pocket watch.

Not that she’d plummet endlessly downward or encounter a cake that made her grow, even if she went through.

Snapping out of her idle daydream, Cecilia willingly crouched down. Adventure aside, the price of the stolen bracelet was far too steep to just give up and turn back.

Well, it wasn’t as though that was “Cecilia’s” only expensive piece of jewelry.

But the habits and memories of her former commoner life were impossible to shake. She squeezed through the hole with effort.

“Wow, good thing I stopped eating those macarons.”

She was brushing the dirt and grass off her skirt and straightening up when—

Instead of a rabbit with a watch, she found herself face to face with someone large, draped in a pitch-black robe.