The Nerd Next Door Turned Out To Be The Magic Tower Master [Novel] Chapter 36

The diary did not continue much longer after that. Several new months passed, and even the year changed. One day, ‘Cecilia’ left a very brief entry.

[Year xxx. Month of Beginning, Day 1.
Now I know. The reason this dream, this memory began.
God has revealed it to me.
I will die in this life as well.]

Cecilia traced her fingertip over the final sentence, which had risen in bumps as though stained with tears. Was it her imagination that the messily blurred letters looked exactly like sobs?

She turned the page with an unsettled heart, but that was where the diary ended.

Cecilia closed the diary and furrowed her brow.

The strange dream Cecilia had, herself waking in Cecilia’s body, and the contents of the final entry.

Had ‘Cecilia’ truly been murdered? Had she come to occupy an empty body because Cecilia was already dead?

If so, the person who killed her and the one currently after her own life were likely the same. Perhaps, seeing ‘Cecilia’ walking around perfectly fine, they believed their crime had failed and were attempting it again.

If her guess was correct, only one problem remained.

“Who killed Cecilia?”

Stroking Charles — no, Resti — who had climbed onto her lap, she murmured the unanswered question.

The shocking diary, which had been hidden for a reason, was concealed back in its place.

She had thought this was a romance fantasy where she just had to pick a male lead and date him, but it turned out to be a hard-mode survival story where she could be murdered at any moment.

It was a horrifying reality, but she focused first on recovering her strength. She needed her body in shape whether she was going to catch the culprit or devise countermeasures.

According to Melanie, she had been unconscious and feverish for two whole days.

Cecilia forced herself to fill her stomach with thin soup and the like, and endured swallowing the bitter medicine Nox brought. Most of all, after bathing thoroughly in the holy power of the healing clerics, she managed to recover in less than four days.

“You should be able to take light walks now.”

And today, seven days after the accident.

Her physician, their face considerably brighter, finished the final examination.

Cecilia merely nodded calmly at the welcome news. Normally she would have dashed straight to the garden like a dog let out of the house for the first time in ages. But she shut herself in the study instead.

An isolated space.

Cecilia sat before a blank sheet of paper, tapping the desk with her pen nib.

Just before drowning, all the priorities in the plan she’d established had been overturned.

She had to find the person behind the accident first. And she needed to figure out a way to return to her original world as soon as possible.

For a moment, violet eyes like pansies that had gazed only at her beneath the great tree, white fingertips clinging desperately to a brief confession — such things came to mind, but she quickly shook her head.

‘Romance in a situation like this? Ridiculous.’

As long as she could be horrifically murdered at any time, escaping this world took priority.

‘But then, who’s behind the accident…’

Judging from both the diary and the incidents she’d personally experienced, there was clearly someone after ‘Cecilia’s’ life.

So who exactly was the culprit?

‘Cecilia’s family? Or the servants of the Weberdin estate?’

But they had no motive to kill ‘Cecilia.’

Their genuine concern for her was visible enough.

‘Then the people at the Holy Temple?’

Perhaps because of their upright image, in many novels clergy appear as hidden masterminds to create a twist, but they likewise lacked motive. As long as she bore the title of ‘Saintess,’ they had no reason to harm Cecilia.

Then only one group of candidates remained.

People who would find ‘Saintess’ Cecilia — the very face of the Holy Temple — an eyesore. The only group who would benefit from her disappearance.

‘So it is the Imperial House after all.’

Just as the Marquis suspected, it might be the work of ‘Dillanché,’ the Imperial House’s hands and feet. Or perhaps the Imperial House had sent someone directly.

Either way, there would be ‘someone’ who received orders and carried them out.

That ‘someone’ was probably a person who already knew Cecilia had visited the Holy Temple on the day of the glass window accident, and also knew about her secret outings.

…Wasn’t there only one such person?

‘Rien.’

Ridiculously, the beautiful face she’d tried so hard to shake off was once again scrambling her thoughts.

[Again, again please, just one more time, please say it.]

That image of him pleading with his ears flushed bright red was still so vivid.

Cecilia forcibly shook off the man’s expression, voice, and the rest. She retraced his actions from the most objective perspective possible.

Looking back, coincidentally, Rien had been in the same place during every accident. When her head nearly cracked against the glass window, when the axe-wielding lunatic appeared brazenly before her, even when she fell into the water.

Thinking about it, there was more than one or two suspicious points. The accidents had started happening after she met him.

Moreover, wasn’t it more plausible that the Magic Tower Master had come to the marquis’s estate to eliminate a candidate Saintess, rather than out of curiosity about holy power?

Cecilia set down her pen with a click and picked up the necklace lying in a corner of the table. The amber pendant had broken clean through, with only half barely clinging on.

It was the very necklace Rien had gifted her.

‘The magical traces that an archbishop or higher sensed might be related to this pendant.’

Her memory wasn’t entirely clear due to the urgency of the situation, but it seemed her holy power had returned and she’d gained footing at the same moment this pendant shattered.

‘That’ Rien, the culprit who threatened her life.

To conclude that definitively, doubts still remained.

Rien had even used time magic to try to save her. When she’d been threatened by thugs, he’d run to her desperately.

And for Rien to have approached her intentionally — in the first place, she had been the one to barge into his house, she had been the one to approach him and suggest they become friends.

Furthermore, Rien had come down to Weberdin territory several months after she’d possessed this body.

Which meant the timing didn’t match up with when the real Cecilia had been threatened with murder.

Most of all…

[Lady Cecilia.]

A voice always tinged with excitement.

[You’ve hurt your hand!]

Warm body heat pressing close with worry.

[This time I will protect you no matter what.]

A blind gaze.

[You don’t need to worry about anything, anything at all.]

The curving lips and the two cheeks flushing bright red — surely those hadn’t been lies. They couldn’t have been lies.

No, she wanted to believe they weren’t lies.

Just as she exhaled the anguish that felt ready to burst—

Knock knock.

A knock broke the silence. It was Melanie.

“Um, my lady. That person has come to visit you… What should I do?”

“That person?”

“Your etiquette teacher, my lady.”

Cecilia stiffened instantly. Of all times for him to visit now. She didn’t yet have the confidence to face him.

She was about to refuse when Melanie’s words came faster.

“Actually, he’s been coming every day since the day you collapsed. The Marquis wouldn’t allow it, so he went back empty-handed each time.”

‘Was he trying to confirm whether I’m alive, to check my condition?’

She bit her lip hard at the thought that suddenly arose.

Even hearing that he’d continued visiting made such suspicions pop up — should she really meet Rien?

After agonizing for a while, Cecilia reluctantly nodded.

“Could you show him to the parlor? I’ll come down right away.”

Brief avoidance couldn’t be the answer. It would be better to observe him with her own eyes instead.

Cecilia, having made her decision, rose.

And so, arriving before the parlor.

In the center of the room suffused with summer sunlight stood a man in a familiar robe.

“Lady Cecilia!”

Rien, spotting Cecilia in the doorway, strode toward her.

He lightly grasped her fingertips and poured out questions in a rush.

“Are, are you all right? Is there anywhere that hurts? Your body temperature seems a bit lower than before — surely there aren’t any aftereffects?”

Rien’s face, which she properly faced belatedly, was excessively pale. As though he had been the one lying ill in bed all this time, not her.

At the sight, Cecilia found herself a little taken aback.

Those trembling hands, those eyes that looked ready to cry at any moment.

‘Could it all be lies?’

She couldn’t tell whether the emotion that surged through her in that instant was betrayal, anger, or perhaps sadness.

But what remained in clear form was discomfort.

Cecilia slipped her hand from his grasp. Then, trying not to show her agitation, she forced the corners of her mouth upward.

“The Holy Temple sent many healing clerics, so I’m almost completely recovered now. I heard you kept visiting — you must have been very worried.”

“I was so anxious that you might not wake at all, and even though I knew that couldn’t happen, I became too uneasy… I know you still need rest, but I came selfishly anyway. I’m sorry.”

Rien apologized, his empty hands clenched tight into fists.

His sunken voice was thoroughly steeped in nervousness and anxiety.

So much so that she couldn’t think it was a lie.

‘Is it genuine?’

Had she perhaps misunderstood an innocent person? In truth, the only evidence that he was connected to the Imperial House or was the culprit trying to harm her was circumstantial, wasn’t it?

But…

Rien was still the prime suspect she’d narrowed down from an objective perspective.

Just as her confusion was mounting, Rien drew something from inside his robe.