MTLNOVEL Chapter 1
Chapter 1: Calibration Error
"Ah, fu—"
That was the first thing the female lead said.
After seeing my face.
* * *
Swoosh.
As I lightly sliced the venison steak with a well-sharpened knife...
Drip!
The thin sauce mixed with the meat juices and flowed down.
"Wow, the aroma of the meat is incredible... This would be perfect with some radish kimchi."
"Pardon?!"
Hearing my muttering, the butler, Noich, twitched his eyebrow and asked.
I casually spoke to Noich, who had already turned into an old man with gray hair.
"Noich."
"Yes, please speak, Your Grace."
"Should we try growing some radishes and cabbages?"
"What now... Ah, as you wish."
Hmm, that probably wouldn’t work.
No matter what.
Honestly, I’d love to round up all the servants in the grand duchy and throw a kimchi-making party, but...
Swoosh.
'Neither radishes, cabbages, nor young radish greens would grow here.'
And for good reason—this was the northernmost part of the empire, the Duchy of Axen.
A barren land where, except for summer, the harsh cold persisted all year long, and the piercing winds felt like they could slice through human skin.
As the Grand Duke of the North, ruling over this wasteland...
"Haa. Chew~"
I couldn't let go of my worries even while eating. Of course...
"What are you looking at?"
"A-Apologies..."
Even the servants who kept sneaking glances at me during my refined meal were part of my great concerns.
After all, this was roughly how the Northern Grand Duke, Johan Kraubitz, looked.
* * *
Vroooom.
Early at dawn, while I was driving...
Swipe! Swipe!
The damn girl sitting next to me, who was on her third attempt at college entrance exams, was rapidly flipping through her smartphone screen.
"Hey, Kim Jihyun."
"What?"
"Ever thought about memorizing English vocabulary during this long drive?"
"What’s with you? Chill the hell out."
Should I smack her? Seriously?
Just because she was born my mom’s daughter, she was using me as her personal chauffeur.
Had she already forgotten that I secretly slipped her 200,000 won last month so she wouldn’t feel discouraged?
Haa.
But still, if she was actually studying instead of slacking off, I guess that was enough.
I casually glanced at her phone screen.
And there, on the screen...
I saw a man in a black fur cloak, with his chest and stomach completely exposed, and a woman in his arms looking conflicted.
Swipe.
Then, the screen quickly switched to a wall of text.
She was reading a web novel.
"Ah, fu—"
"What? Why?"
My sister flinched, as if she felt guilty.
I needed to uncover the identity of this questionable piece of media with its bizarre cover.
"What are you reading? What's the title?"
"You don’t need to know."
"You wanna start walking everywhere from tomorrow?"
"...Got Ensnared by the Duke."
"What? I can't hear you."
"Got Ensnared by the Beastly... Northern Grand Duke..."
"...…"
The title alone was absurd.
Setting aside the ever-present Northern Grand Duke trope...
The female lead pretending she had no choice while falling for a beastly man made me seriously question her sanity.
The only reason I read that primitive web novel was definitely not because I was curious about the so-called beastly nature of the Northern Grand Duke, but because I wanted to understand the psychological state of my exam-struggling sister. Seriously.
"Move aside—"
That was the rude remark he threw at our first meeting.
……>
Hmph.
Five free chapters?
That’s stingy.
I wasn’t about to keep staring at a cover featuring a half-naked dude, so I decided to judge the novel’s quality within those five chapters.
'The male lead is a crazy bastard, the female lead pretends to hate it but blushes when she sees his abs during sword training...'
Absolute bullshit.
In the end, my review of the novel was perfectly summed up in the comments I left.
The comment I posted after reading chapter 1 was...
And the comment I left after dropping it at chapter 5...
ㄴ Complaining about romance in a romance fantasy? What a lunatic.
That about summed it up.
In other words, I had practically no connection to this novel.
If anyone were to get reincarnated into that story, it should have been my sister, Kim Jihyun—preferably as a monster that gets killed off in chapter 2.
However...
For some reason, the transcendent entity in charge of reincarnation seemed to have botched their aim.
Because they fired the reincarnation beam in a completely wrong direction.
"Argh! Fuck!"
I vaguely remember feeling something like that when I first got hit by the beam.
A god-awful sensation, like my entire body was melting and twisting...
And then, the nauseating feeling of squeezing into the body of the novel's five-year-old male lead.
To make matters worse, this young heir of the Northern Grand Duchy was nowhere near the beastly figure described in the novel—he was pathetically weak.
Which is why...
It took me about twelve years just to become a functioning person again.
'Haa.'
The past twelve years of relentlessly training this frail body flashed before my eyes.
And then...
- [Ding!]
I recalled the status window that had appeared right after my reincarnation.
- "Oh! A system window!"
- [Ah, please calm down. I'm only appearing this one time and won’t be back.]
- "?"
- [This isn't a hunter novel, it's a romance fantasy, so status windows aren’t a thing here.]
- [Besides, people really hate it when I show up, so I’m planning to disappear for good.]
- "What kind of nonsense? Then why did you show up at all?"
At the disgruntled question from my five-year-old self, the system responded immediately.
- [Look in the mirror.]
- "Huh?"
I rushed to check my reflection.
- "AARGH! FUCK!"
And instinctively fell backward.
Because what I saw in the mirror was something... utterly alien.
- [Yes. Ahem. That’s how it is.]
- "What do you mean, 'that’s how it is'? What the hell happened to my face?"
- [Ahem. Well, you see, we’re handling a huge workload...]
- [And there was an error during the synchronization process when reincarnating your face.]
- [To put it simply, your face got rendered like a low-resolution, pixelated blur...]
- [And we just kind of... patched it up as best we could.]
Okay, enough explanation—
- "Hey, you’re gonna fix this, right?"
- [Good luck!]
Leaving only those words behind, the status window disappeared.
For a mere five-year-old, it was an unbearably cruel fate.
‘And in the end, I ended up like this.’
Twelve years had passed in this godforsaken frozen wasteland, filled with all sorts of hardships.
When I turned ten, the previous Grand Duke and my mother said—
- “Beyond the northern strait, they say a mysterious herb grows.”
- “Your mother and I shall go find it.”
And with that, they set sail and never returned.
I decided to believe that they either found the herb and it was so mysterious they decided to stay, or they got carried away and embarked on a world tour.
Yet, whenever I found myself speaking to them in my head, I couldn't help but look up at the sky.
I remembered how, a year after their disappearance, I set up an ancestral table for them.
Butler Noich, seeing this, recoiled in shock and asked, “Are you performing some kind of voodoo ritual?”
So I stopped.
Haa.
Replaying these bitter memories of my life,
Whoooosh!
I stood at the peak of the northern mountains, where the icy winds howled.
This had been my solitary refuge ever since childhood (either at five years old or twenty-nine).
From then on, I had been coming up here with a sword, swinging it around for years.
Anyone who saw me wielding a sword at five years old would have frowned.
I had seen a lot, so I had clumsily tried to imitate sword techniques.
With my short child’s arms swinging a sword, it must have looked ridiculous.
And my thin arms, unable to bear the weight of a longsword, were always swollen.
Even so, I was hopeful.
Starting sword training earlier than others was definitely an advantage.
‘Time is the only thing I have.’
In reality, I had excellent teachers to guide me in swordsmanship.
After all, how could the Northern Grand Duchy not have knights?
So, I wielded my sword every day, using time as my weapon.
And when I hit a wall, I sought out Victor, the Knight Commander, and learned various things.
- “Uh… Your Grace, why do you always rub your lower abdomen?”
- “Ah, this would be an easy problem to fix if I could just form a dantian.”
- “What? A dant… what?”
Victor was a loyal and highly skilled knight.
Some even wondered why a knight of his caliber remained in this harsh Grand Duchy.
That was how remarkable of a mentor he was.
Sching!
I drew my longsword and began repeating the Eagle Stance Victor had taught me.
And then—
Saaaah.
With arms strengthened by mana, I slashed down fiercely.
Whooooosh!
Though the longsword cut nothing, the sword wind it created overturned the barren land.
If someone saw this, they’d probably make a fuss about how a mere seventeen-year-old Grand Duke had already reached a master’s level.
However—
‘I’ll never catch up to the geniuses.’
I knew all too well that reality was different.
In this world, noble brats start wielding tiny wooden swords when they’re barely toddlers.
They start swinging swords blindly, without even forming a sense of self, let alone learning proper swordsmanship.
Unlike me, who had the clear goal of surviving by learning the sword, they swung it aimlessly.
And yet, among them, "geniuses" always emerged.
Even without any purpose, some of them displayed an awe-inspiring level of talent.
I remembered what they were like as snot-nosed kids.
When noble families held gatherings, it was almost customary for scuffles to break out among us.
And I, with the advantage of an adult’s experience, would beat them senseless.
- “This is the hierarchy, you little shit.”
Since the author had already spoiled the novel’s ending in the prologue, I had no choice but to beat those kids into submission and instill fear.
‘Ah, they were so easy back then.’
Yeah, I used to be the boss among those noble brats.
But now—
‘If I met them today, could I still win?’
I wasn’t so sure anymore.
Though they wouldn’t reach their peak abilities until much later, by now, they were surely beginning to mature.
Throb.
Thinking about those disgustingly talented bastards, I clutched my chest.
‘Not this crap again.’
It seemed my mana heart was acting up again, just because I had used a bit of mana.
Ending my brief training session, I returned to the Grand Duchy.
From the unfortunate sword in the hands of an unworthy master...
A faint blue smoke was rising.
* * *
“Oh? What a surprise.”
When I came down to the Grand Duchy for lunch, I was greeted by a familiar face.
It was the imperial envoy from the Prohatska Empire.
Since childhood, I had called him "Letter Uncle."
“It has been a while, Grand Duke Johan Kraubitz.”
“A letter? Since you're here, why don’t you have a meal first?”
“Thank you, Your Grace. I appreciate the offer, but…”
Casually—
Letter Uncle glanced down at his hand.
In it was a scroll wrapped in red seals.
“Ah, an imperial decree.”
It seemed a direct order from the Emperor had arrived.
I immediately knelt to hear the Emperor’s words.
Ahem. Ahem.
Letter Uncle cleared his throat, roughened by Axen’s frigid air, before reading the decree.
For a moment, I considered handing him a lozenge.
“Hear ye, Johan Kraubitz, ruler of the Duchy of Axen.
We commend your efforts in tirelessly defending the northern lands of the empire.
Your dedication in safeguarding your fief ensures the continued peace and stability of the empire.”
This guy...
Starting off with flattery like this was making me uneasy.
Whatever order he was about to give, he clearly needed to butter me up first.
“…Thus, in my wisdom, I have deemed it necessary to find you a suitable match,
To fill the barren Duchy of Axen with love and warmth.
Therefore,
By the decree of Freud Pontiac, Emperor of the Prohatska Empire,
Johan Kraubitz, Grand Duke of Axen, shall take as his bride
Erina Trotsky, daughter of Count Trotsky.”
Schff.
Keeping my head bowed, I accepted the imperial decree from Letter Uncle.
And then—
“I accept the decree.”
I accepted it without hesitation.
Throb.
My damaged mana heart trembled once more.
I knew.
Even though I had only read up to chapter 5 of the novel, I knew exactly what choices Johan Kraubitz needed to make to survive.
According to the prologue, I had no other options.
In short, the Northern Grand Duke needed the female lead, Erina Trotsky.
Because she possessed something that the broken Grand Duke absolutely required.
Though, later on, the Northern Grand Duke would regret treating Erina Trotsky coldly and roll around in agony over it…
‘I’d roll over a hundred times if I have to.’
I was willing to endure anything to survive.
And then—
“I am relieved. Shall you meet your future duchess right away?”
Apparently, Erina Trotsky had already arrived—much sooner than expected.
Gulp.
Facing the primitive betrothal customs of this world, I found myself getting a little nervous.