Celebrity Lady - Chapter 2

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Celebrity Lady
Episode 2
* * *
The celebrity everyone’s talking about: Juliet Karenina.
Born to a Korean mother and a British father.
With beauty befitting the title of “universal beauty,” she made a dazzling debut as a child actress in Hollywood around age six.
Through various subsequent works, she achieved the remarkable feat of winning three consecutive Golden Globe Awards—Best Actress in Drama, Film, and Musical—establishing herself as a formidable actress.
But that wasn’t all. Leveraging her distinct sensibility and fashion sense, she successfully launched her personal brand, Blanc De Juliet, by around age twenty-one.
Juliet Karenina’s existence itself is the brand’s value.
As Blanc De Juliet’s revenues climbed ever higher, she was reestablished as a businesswoman with annual sales in the hundreds of billions, and at twenty-four, she was selected as one of the world’s ten most influential young billionaires by the New York Times.
[If someone wishes to speak of a perfect life, let them lift their eyes and behold Juliet Karenina. —John Edgerton, Director of the film Celebrity Lady]
[Is there anything in this world she cannot have exactly as she wishes? —Claire Collins, exclusive promotional model for Blanc De Juliet]
Her life, receiving the attention and admiration of people worldwide, their envy and jealousy, their love and longing, was perfect from birth—untouched by a single failure.
Hers was a life to which the phrase “smooth sailing” applied with uncanny precision.
Until yesterday, that is.
“What the…….”
Wait. Proper words, kind words.
Given how much I stood in the public eye, Mother had taught me to be careful with my words.
“Sorry, Mom.”
But I couldn’t help it. This situation was impossible to endure without cursing.
I gazed into the mirror, kneading my puffy cheeks with my fingers, pushing them this way and that.
“Oh, she’s a cute pig.”
……Yeah, right.
At best, this face resembled a well-fed, premium-grade pork pig destined for the dinner table rather than an adorable pet.
The brilliant auburn hair and mysterious golden eyes, the luminous, milk-white skin all carried considerable aristocratic refinement—and nothing more.
The face itself, sprawling like the Manchurian plains, was so vast that features, however assertively they declared themselves, proved utterly useless, and below stretched loose jowls that concealed the very boundary between chin and neck.
Who knew how much I’d been eating, but even in a loose A-line dress, my back and belly were so compressed I could scarcely breathe.
The astonishing fact was that this appearance looked no older than a middle-schooler.
But what was even more astonishing than that…….
“Calm down, Juliet.”
This chubby girl was none other than me—Juliet Karenina.
“Under five-foot-three and weighing eighty? Maybe ninety? Or even pushing a hundred?”
I pinched the mountain of flesh that was my belly and released it, muttering to myself.
Whether eighty, ninety, or a hundred, I’d never been this heavy before, so it was hard to judge exactly.
“I don’t know about anything else, but this is severe obesity. Not just for looks—it’s a health emergency. Honestly, a heart attack from high blood pressure tomorrow wouldn’t surprise me in the least.”
Like some stranger of a doctor delivering a diagnosis, I offered advice to the girl in the mirror with a bitter expression.
Even so, my heart wouldn’t calm.
A stranger—what am I talking about.
“But this…….”
I gripped the ornate edge of the expensive mirror and felt tears pricking my eyes. The despair was beyond words.
“……Me.”
I had opened my eyes in this nightmarish situation exactly eight hours ago.
* * *
Until I woke in this body, I had been in Korea.
“I wanted to show you Juliet Karenina not as an actress on screen, but simply as one human being, living her life.”
God, my retirement declaration really killed. It was genius.
After my retirement announcement sent countless fans worldwide reeling into shock, I reinvented myself as a YouTuber documenting my everyday life with my mother in her native land.
The trend now is all about YouTubers, after all.
[JulietTV reaches ten million subscribers in one month of launch]
[Juliet Karenina—how long will her influence endure?]
[Global celebrity Juliet Karenina… two hundred million followers on social media.]
[Juliet Karenina commanding two billion per sponsored post on social media? Still proving she’s a force to be reckoned with.]
Every video I uploaded hit a baseline of one hundred million views, and within a month of launch, JulietTV had achieved ten million subscribers. I was just beginning my second act in Korea when it happened.
That day too, the moment I posted on social media, I began searching through thousands of comments streaming in for comments from “Pig Rubette.”
The user rubette_pig, with such an odd ID to begin with, seemed like someone whose judgment was a bit questionable.
The last comment I’d seen from them had been deeply unsettling.
I’d asked my manager to investigate “Pig Rubette’s” identity, troubled by what I’d read, and then fallen asleep—that was my last memory.
“Miss! You’re awake!”
When I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was a young girl sitting by my bed, nodding off.
Having risen to fame from a very young age, I’d endured all manner of rumors, death threats, and dangers to my life that ordinary people could scarcely imagine.
So at first I thought, ‘Is this a kidnapping?’ and tried to keep calm.
“What do you want?”
Money, obviously, even if I didn’t ask.
So essentially, it was a question about exactly how much they intended to demand.
“……Pardon?”
But the girl, instead of stating the kidnappers’ demands, looked at me as if I were mad.
The elderly man with a white, bushy beard whom the girl had brought along seemed equally baffled.
The Physician, as he was called, asked me several questions before offering a bewildering diagnosis and then left.
“It appears the shock has caused you to lose your memory.”
Not only had they kidnapped someone soundly asleep, but now they were treating me as though I had amnesia. At first, I was confused about how much money they thought they could extort with such an elaborate performance.
But after conversing with the girl several times, I became certain. This wasn’t an ordinary kidnapping—it was something far more surreal.
“So you’re saying my name is……Rubetria or something? Not Juliet Karenina?”
“Miss…….”
“A mirror. Can I see a mirror? Actually, let me look myself.”
I caught sight of my fingers, swollen and puffy as fish cake, but even then, I refused to believe it until I could see it with my own eyes.
Things like this belonged in movies, not in the life of someone living peacefully in the twenty-first century.
“Shit!”
But reality was merciless. This was no dream—somewhere between sleep and waking, I had become a complete stranger.
This woman, apparently, had fallen into a pond and lost consciousness, and had only just regained awareness.
But there was more to the problem than that.
If I’d somehow swapped bodies with a fat woman living somewhere on Earth—admittedly an absurdly unrealistic scenario—I might have been able to accept it.
After all, body-swap fantasy films featuring people suddenly trading places have always been a staple across cultures and eras.
But…….
“Wait—what? Decarde?”
“Yes, miss. You are the only daughter of the Diolus Duchy, one of the four great dukedoms of the Decarde Empire, born to Leonard Diolus, the Eighth Duke. You are Her Highness Rubetria Diolus.”
Rebecca, the maid who served this body, had repeated those same words perhaps twenty times by now, but showed no sign of impatience.
It seemed Rebecca genuinely believed this plump girl had truly lost her memory, and appeared to feel sympathy for her plight.
In truth, I deserved sympathy given my situation.
This place…….
It didn’t seem to be Earth!
Having lived as a public figure and studied history diligently to avoid being called vapid, I could say with certainty:
Decarde Empire? Never heard of it.
It was a country completely unknown to me, one that had never existed in any Western history I’d learned from past to present.
“So you don’t know. Korea.”
“Korea?”
“UK, USA. What else?”
“Pardon?”
Even if someone lived among the most remote tribes, they couldn’t fail to know of England or America.
Since the very fact of inhabiting another body was already so surreal, accepting that this place wasn’t the world I knew wasn’t difficult.
Of course, accepting something and processing the shock are entirely different matters.
I sat motionless on the bed for a very long time, wishing ‘this must be a nightmare,’ and Rebecca patiently remained at my side.
“If she’s awake, she’s awake. Why do we have to show our faces in her room?”
“Come on, Lilia. She may be a mess, but we still need to keep up appearances. If we don’t show, it reflects badly on us.”
And the “first” unwelcome visitors I met in this place appeared when I could no longer deny that this was reality, not a dream.
“What, did you think people would care if you pulled a suicide stunt? You really are something else.”
A girl who looked to be thirteen or fourteen, with blonde hair and golden eyes, strikingly beautiful, started right in with hostility the moment she entered.
“Surprising you woke up. If I looked like that—all bloated and disgusting—I would’ve just stayed dead.”
A boy of similar age dragged a chair across the floor as if it were his own room and sat down, speaking with casual cruelty.
The two children radiated clear animosity. They resembled each other so distinctly that you didn’t need an introduction to know they were siblings.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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