I Became the Villainess in an Anticlimactic Novel - Chapter 7

“Meliara.”

Someone tried to wake me up.

Still in the throes of sleep, I dismissed the voice, turning over.

“Mmm…”

“Meliara, open your eyes.”

But the voice sounded quite urgent.

“Are you sure it’s not that disease? Did you make a proper diagnosis?!”

An angry voice followed.

“For the princess, a simple motion sickness is correct.”

“Then why isn’t she opening her eyes?!”

I opened my eyes in the commotion.

As I squinted while my vision adjusted to the light, my field of vision slowly opened up, and saw people surrounding my bed.

“Meliara!”

It was none other than Linden, who had been making the loudest commotion since earlier. 

Linden, who had been angry at the middle-aged man in white who was next to him, came closer toward me.

“You’re awake?”

“What’s going on…”

I had been in a deep sleep for a long time… When I woke up, my voice was completely muffled.

“How are you feeling? Is it hard for you to breathe?”

“I’m fine though…”

I looked around at the people surrounding my bed, including Linden.

Linden, the mister who appeared to be a doctor, Kelber, Tanma, and Lecht.

This was a bolt out of the blue. Why was everyone watching me while I was sleeping?

I quickly brushed my fingers through my hair to untangle it and quickly felt around my face to check if there was any dry eye mucus or saliva.

Lecht stared intently at me, who was doing so. It was as if he were checking each and every action I took.

“Ahem. What’s going on?”

There must be a reason why everyone had come into the room of someone still sleeping and woken them up suddenly.

Linden sighed in relief when I cleared my throat and asked again.

“Haa… Don’t be too surprised and listen.”

I was already extremely surprised at my point of view when I woke up, with everyone staring at me, but I nodded without mentioning that part. Wouldn’t anything be less surprising that this situation? 

“There’s an epidemic going on in the village right now.”

“What…?”

I take back what I just said. 

There was something that was even more surprising.

***

“Thirty percent of the village has caught it? Isn’t that extremely serious?”

Listening to the story, the situation seemed very serious. 

Apparently the infectious disease that had spread in the village was transmitted through contact, and that the symptoms included age spots that spread across the skin and red spots that resembled hives. Whether it was a result of the skin being scorched internally, the failing of the respiratory tract came with it along with coughing up blood.

Fortunately, the mortality rate wasn’t that high, but even if that was the case, it wasn’t as if the mortality rate was zero. Furthermore, the symptoms were severe, which made the situation very complicated.

“Sorry. Since it’s you, I wanted to at least get you out first…”

Linden sighed, suppressing the furrowing of his brow.

“Huh? No, no.”

I quickly waved my hands.

“You need to keep the restrictions that you make. I don’t want to be the only one who gets a privilege either.”

Linden used his authority as a prince to quarantine the village. In any case, I roughly understood that it was a contagious disease that spread through contact, and that naturally we should try and prevent it from spreading any further.

It has been less than three days since the symptoms of the disease first began to appear, and in a village that was specifically on the outskirts with not much traffic coming in and out of the village. It seemed that we could prevent the disease from spreading to the capital if someone were infected here. 

The problem, however, was that the village was now sealed off, and that even we were now trapped within it.

“If I had known this would be the case, i would have passed through this place and stopped elsewhere.”

“You stopped because I got motion sickness anyway. If you had tried to go through this village, I would have just collapsed in the carriage.”

Linden still seemed to be feeling apologetic, so I smiled and reassured him.

“Besides, thanks to our brief stop here, you now know that there’s an epidemic here and you were able to deal with it, right? Then, it’s a relief instead.”

To be honest, I was also a little flustered, since this was something that had never been mentioned in the original novel. 

Since the original novel was rather inattentive to the parts of the story that weren’t a part of the love story between the two main leads. However, if this happened to be a major event, then it would’ve been treated as an arc, so at the same time, I was relieved that this wasn’t considered a major event.

Just then, Linden’s communicator rang.

“Sorry, I have to pick this up again.”

“Hurry up and go.”

Seeing him make another apologetic expression again, I smiled exaggeratedly and pushed his back.

“I can’t take up every busy person’s time.”

Although this was Linden, who was pretty much unknown to the public, and was the one who waited with bated breath in the struggle for power, he was still a prince anyway. The health and safety of the Empire’s people was at stake, so he was handling this case as the Chief Medical Officer.

After he left, I turned my head again to look at the city square.

The city square, which normally allowed you to witness the people’s daily lives and trivial matters, as well as the intricate patters on its floor, was now full of sick people. 

In order to minimize contact between the sick and the healthy, Linden decided to gather all the sick people together in one place.

Since it was such a small village, the number of hospital rooms in the clinic was limited, so Linden chose a wide open space instead. Thus, the present city square was full of people lying in bed with blankets, people who still seemed to be able to move, as well as people waiting for their family member’s recover just outside the square.

Just as the knights were about to 

Lecht entered my vision just as the knights were about to distribute the blankets they had brought to the people.

“What did the doctors say?”

“As expected, it’s hard for them to cure this with medicine.”

The answer that came from Lecht, who had gone to find out how to cure the disease, was still the same as when I had first heard.

“Did you at least find out the cause?”

“I do have a conjecture, but…”

Lecht looked around the square, his words trailing off.

“I’ll handle that on my own.”

That’s fair. What’s important right now isn’t what caused the disease but rather, how to end it instead.

When I nodded to indicate that I understood, Lecht looked at the blankets piled up in my arms and spoke again.

“Didn’t I tell you to rest? Were you running an errand again?”

“The whole village is suffering, so it’d feel too pretentious of me to sit alone in my room like that.”

“Aren’t you also sick?”

Ahaha… It’s just a little motion sickness… There are so many actual sick people around here.

I only got motion sickness that was a little more severe, so in Lecht’s eyes, I must seem like some weak little woman.

“The only way we can be on our way quickly again is if the situation also calms down quickly.”

The reason I was helping wasn’t because I was someone who possessed particularly good morals. Rather, it was more so that I found myself unable to sleep by myself properly in such a chaotic situation. 

“By the way, it’s a disease that even the doctors can’t cure…”

I switched topics before Lecht’s nagging could continue.

“Shouldn’t we naturally contact the temple then?”

On second thought, it was a little strange.

‘If it was a story about a disease that desperately needs the power of the temple, then it must have been mentioned at least once in the original novel.’

Though of course, I wasn’t familiar with every chapter, so there was a good chance that I missed it if it had been mentioned too lightly.

As I was wondering whether or not it had been mentioned or not, Lecht’s voice continued to sound out.

“Even if you don’t contact the temple…”

His gaze landed on me.

But this time again, the end of his sentence trailed off. He was a man who always said what he wanted to say, simply and clearly, so I was rather surprised that he blurted out his words and trailed off like that.

‘There are times when even he is unsure.’

As i looked at him with curiosity, his eyes that were making contact with mine also seemed to examine my face closely. It was as if he was hesitating whether to say something or not.

“What? Is there a way…”

“Damn it, you bastards!”

Just when I was about to ask if there was a way or not, a piercing voice sounded.

When I turned my head in surprise, I saw Linden, who wasn’t too far away, hurling a dimly lit communication device at the knight next to him and ruffling his hair violently.

I looked at him with round eyes.

Linden always had a gentle smile in front of others since he was a schemer who used his gentle face to his heart’s content. Such an appearance of him using such emotionally harsh words wasn’t a sight that could be seen very often.

“What’s the matter? What’s not working?”

I approached him and asked worriedly. It seemed like the situation was extremely bad for him to be so uncharacteristically angry.

“Oh, Meliara.”

He quickly rearranged his facial expression when he saw me and quickly curled his eyes into crescent moons and smiled. But after seeing him angry once already, I couldn’t just forget it that easily.

“What’s going on? Who you were talking to just now, wasn’t that the Imperial Palace?”

“Haa… It’s the Imperial Mage’s Tower. But those guys said they can’t send any support.”

Linden ruffled his unruly hair even more. There were more hairs that were undone than those tied up.

“Do they understand the severity of the situation?”

“I already explained to them. But they said that they couldn’t put manpower into trivial matters.”

“Trivial matters?” 

I turned my head to see the patients suffering and vomiting blood.

“Wuuu… Older brother, if you’re gone, what should I do…”

“I beg you… I beg you… Lord, please take me…”

People who cried out a mourning prayer for recover for their brothers, sisters, parents, children, lovers and the like. If this was a trivial matter, how severe would things have to get for it to be considered a serious matter?

“To think that they’d still play as politicians even to this very moment.”

The reason why the stance of the Mage’s Tower came out like that was simple. It was because it was Linden who had sent the request.

The Imperial Mage’s Tower, which had been serving the emperor from generation to generation, was naturally a strong pillar of support for the Crown Prince. 

Moreover, Linden was now strong enough to threaten the position of the current Tower Master. To the extent that more than half of the petty assassination attempts stemmed from the schemes of the Mage Tower.

“No matter how much they hate you, this is a matter of safety for the citizens of this empire.”

“It’s not like this is something that could affect the reputation of the Mages Tower or the popularity of my brother.”

“They’re seriously the worst.”

I clicked my tongue.

“Why don’t you contact them?”

“I don’t think they’ll listen. Did you forget that my engagement was broken up in a grand manner, so much so that the whole neighborhood knows?”

“Ah…”

As if he had forgotten after saying something, Linden looked at me.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to poke your sore spot like that…”

It was cute to see the appearance of those big eyes looking at me like that, so I laughed out loud.

“Forget it. Don’t worry about it.”

Whether his constant glancing was watching me, or watching my reaction, was rather ambiguous, but either way, it didn’t matter to me. Since it was a fact that the broken engagement didn’t hurt me at all.

“By the way, if the Mages Tower doesn’t work either…”

Although there was also another way for us, which was to ask the Imperial Palace for help, unfortunately, that was a difficult option for the both of us.

In any case, the Emperor was turning away from Linden in order to appear to support the Crown Prince, so Linden’s pride wouldn’t allow him to bow his head to him to ask for his help. I, too, was afraid to put a request in for the Emperor as the recent events had placed me in the Emperor’s bad books.

“Then there’s only the temple left… Should we go?”

It was the saintess and the priests rather than the Emperor who would be able to solve the situation anyway.

However, both I and Linden had been putting off contacting the temple until the very end.

“I think they’d rather me die from this plague when they hear what we have to say.”

It had been less than a month since I tried to poison their saintess.

“What sort of scary nonsense are you saying.”

“It’s true. From the temple’s point of view, I’m probably at the level of ‘First person they want to stab to death’?”

Linden tried to comfort me, but I just smiled awkwardly and scratched my cheek.

“There may be a few priests who put the safety of the people first, but even they would probably suspect that this is simply a ruse that I devised.”

Linden’s face became complicated at my answer. 

I clicked my tongue once again since it frustrated me that we couldn’t do this or that.

“Well, I’m not in any position to speak since I’ve done something to deserve it…”

A long sigh came out of me naturally.

“I hate how the Imperial Mages Tower and the Temple of the Sun God can act like this since they’ve basically got a monopoly on the hopes of the people…”

Huh…?

As I lamented over the Mage Tower’s power trip and the temple’s monopoly, I suddenly remembered an important fact.

“It’s not like there’s only one temple in the empire…”

“Huh?”

Not hearing my murmuring, Linden repeated his question again. 

I shouted excitedly at Linden.

“There isn’t only one faith in the empire!”

It felt as if a fog that had been muddling my thought process had finally been lifted. 

“What are you talking about…”

The eyes of Linden, who had been frowning, suddenly became as large as saucers.

“Meliara, you can’t possibly mean…!”

“That’s right! The Moon God!”

I had momentarily forgotten.

The fact that there are two gods in this world!