The Nerd Next Door Turned Out To Be The Magic Tower Master - Chapter 1

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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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Episode 1
A deep night that held not a glimmer of moonlight.
The woman adjusted her slipping shawl and gripped the old Lantern more firmly. The pale beam of light was barely enough to illuminate the darkened corridor, but it didn’t matter.
Her destination was not far away.
Standing before the door next to the man’s bedroom—a door locked tight—the woman pressed a trembling hand to her chest.
‘Calm down.’
She had confirmed that the man was in deep sleep. She had even gone so far as to prepare strong liquor for him.
All to uncover the ‘secret’ her lover had hidden from her until the very end.
But why, now that truth stood before her, did a fairy tale she had read only vaguely in childhood come flooding back?
The wife of Bluebeard, overcome by curiosity and confronted with a terrible truth.
She seemed to recall having scorned that wife for her foolishness. Yet only now, facing the same situation herself, did she finally understand why that woman had felt compelled to open the forbidden door.
The sweetness the man had offered was followed by a faint bitterness that now lingered heavily in her mouth, too unbearable to ignore or swallow, too bitter on her tongue to bear……
Even knowing the space beyond the door was neither heaven nor utopia, she had been unable to stop herself from opening it.
And so, like the foolish and honest wife of Bluebeard, she grasped the doorknob and finally set foot in the forbidden place.
Creak.
With an ominous sound, the space beyond the open door was empty. Not a single piece of furniture—and yet the walls were packed entirely with small ‘somethings’ the size of a palm. A very strange room indeed.
As she stepped inside, the light from the Lantern reached the walls.
In that moment, the woman held her breath.
“I think it would be better not to enter this room. It’s not organized.”
When she had grasped the doorknob of this sealed room some time ago, he had discouraged her with that casual voice. Yet she remembered clearly the uncertainty that had flickered in his eyes.
At the time, she had thought it might be a room containing obscene books or traces of an ex-lover and had dismissed it without concern……
The woman stood motionless, barely blinking, staring at the wall.
A photograph of “Cecilia” taken during a visit to the Temple, a childhood image of “Cecilia” that appeared in the territorial newspaper, biased articles praising “Cecilia” as the saint of this age, and even drawings of the everyday “Cecilia” whose very existence made no sense.
‘What on earth is this……’
The moment her eyes met with the image of “herself” in a white dress, smiling brightly, Cecilia instinctively took a step back.
Thud.
Her back struck something solid. Eyes the color of amber, trembling like a candle before the wind, fixed rigidly upward.
“……What are you doing here.”
Dark, sunken eyes gazed down at her.
“……Lien.”
Sweat seeped into the palm of her clenched fist.
Was it shock, anger, betrayal—or was it fear?
The voice that barely escaped her lips trembled pathetically.
“What is all of this?”
She had not shouted or cursed because she believed—though she could not fathom why—that even if his mind might be questionable, his heart was kind enough to harbor at least some reason worth understanding.
The man, who looked as though he might cry, parted his lips with great difficulty.
“I, I told you not to enter here……”
At his single word, Cecilia’s brow furrowed sharply.
He should have told her not to enter because the room was full of her photographs, the product of stalking, you bastard.
* * *
The woman had been largely unfortunate.
From applying downward to an unfamiliar department after botching her university entrance exam, to continuing to attend school diligently in an attempt to make up for it and somehow becoming a graduate student, to finally transmigrating into another world just before graduation—it was all terrible luck.
When she first opened her eyes in this other world, she thought she had somehow traveled back in time to Europe.
But soon she realized it was impossible by modern science and wondered if she had gone mad.
Because, after all, she was a graduate student.
It was a fairly convincing hypothesis.
However, no matter how long she waited, she never regained consciousness due to medication or woke from a long dream. Only the sense of reality deepened.
It was only then that she finally formed a third hypothesis.
‘Could this really be a Transmigration?’
She had often read web novels where the protagonist transmigrates into a strange world. The actions of protagonists who escaped reality and did as they pleased in another world had given her tremendous catharsis from her exhausting graduate school life.
But……
‘I never wished to become a Transmigration protagonist!’
And of all times, not even early in her graduate studies, but at the point where she had overcome hardship and adversity, completed her thesis, passed her defense—only then did she transmigrate.
Damn it, give my diploma back!
She had never been hit by a truck from another world, never obsessed over a specific character in a book, never left comments like ‘I could do better than the protagonist!’
It was truly an unjust turn of events.
For three months, she—or rather, ‘Cecilia Weberdin’—held onto a fraying diploma string that had snapped and stretched only five centimeters, trying everything she could.
At last, she declared surrender.
‘Whatever happens, happens.’
In the middle of a garden blooming with flower scent, Cecilia crumpled up the paper listing her failed Plans A, B, and C and threw it down, her body sagging limply into the iron chair.
Lost in her own thoughts, gazing up at the sky so clear it made her eyes sting, she didn’t notice the cautious voice cutting through from across the way.
“Pardon me, miss. Shall I bring you some tea?”
Melanie, the maid with her hair tied up high in a tight knot, was watching her mistress carefully for signs of displeasure.
“Iced tea, actually. Or peppermint tea would be nice.”
‘A world without iced americano—what a godforsaken place.’
A surge of resentment welled up at having stumbled into a world where even beverages were crude and primitive, but Cecilia forced herself to think as positively as she could manage.
Right, at least she wasn’t trapped in some science fiction novel packed with grotesque creatures. There was one sun, a day still lasted twenty-four hours, and humans remained the apex predator atop the food chain.
Whether these people were truly the same Homo sapiens as her own kind or merely an alien species that simply happened to share their outward form, she couldn’t say for certain, but…
Perhaps, if she drifted along like this long enough, one day some god-like being from a higher dimension might suddenly say, “Oops, my mistake!” and send her back to her original world—or a doctor might greet her in the twenty-first century with, “Congratulations, you’ve finally awakened from the coma!”
‘After all, whether it’s graduation or transmigration, the fact remains: I’ve escaped graduate school!’
Goodbye to that miserable doctoral program. Goodbye to the even more wretched professors. No more endless repetitions of experiments or tedious manual data entry—from now on, I’m leaving the secular world behind.
Cecilia let out a laugh like that of someone who’d lost their mind, and decided to shake off every last worry and care she’d been carrying.
‘All right, then. Plan D it is.’
Cecilia pressed her pen firmly into the blank page, writing out Plan D in bold letters.
<Since things have come to this, enjoy it until a way back appears.>
For instance, romance. Or romance. Or more romance.
If this really was transmigration into a book, then regardless of what her original role had been, she’d essentially become a protagonist.
‘Even if Cecilia was supposed to be just a minor background character A, the moment someone transmigrated into her, she became a leading role.’
And given her position as the daughter of a marquis, the genre was almost certainly Romance Fantasy. If that were the case, wouldn’t the plot only advance once she started pursuing romance?
‘Which means I’m going to fall in love!’
Absolutely not because she was lonely, or fulfilling selfish desires, or trying to make up for all the years of graduate school when she hadn’t met a single man.
But her grand Plan D had one very serious obstacle.
‘You need a partner to fall in love.’
“In this backwater nowhere, what are the odds of a decent meeting…”
She was on the verge of crumpling up Plan D and throwing it away altogether.
A tickling sensation brushed against her ankle, and Cecilia glanced down with a start.
“A cat?”
A fluffy white mass—or rather, a cat—was swishing its luxurious tail around her feet.
‘I’ve never heard anything about the Garden keeping a cat.’
And the Marquis’s garden certainly wasn’t the sort of place a stray would easily slip into. One look at its well-groomed fur and the gold necklace hanging around its neck made it clear this was no stray at all.
“Where on earth did you come from?”
Cecilia, who’d always been more of a cat person than a dog person, reached out cautiously.
But before her hand could so much as touch the necklace, the cat dropped into a low crouch and sprang onto her arm with the precision of a hunter, landing perfectly.
“What—what the—!”
In the blink of an eye, it was all over.
Cecilia stared down at the tiny bandit, now stripped of her Sapphire Bracelet.
The cat’s pupils narrowed to slits as it clamped down on the gleaming bracelet in its jaws.
‘I’ve heard of cat burglars before, but I never thought I’d actually meet one.’
Truly, this other world was terrifying in ways she’d never anticipated.
But the cat, whether it understood her indignation or not, simply swished its tail and turned away at a leisurely pace.
“Wait!”
Cecilia scrambled awkwardly to her feet and hurried after the cat as it slipped away.
Moving at a pace that was neither agile nor sluggish, she pursued it blindly.
They left the stone path and cut haphazardly across the garden, and past a towering broad-leafed tree, a stone wall surrounding the Mansion came into view.
The cat paused for a moment, glancing back at her, before darting through a perfectly round hole in the base of the wall and disappearing inside.
‘Since when was there a hole like this?’
The opening, which looked as if someone had deliberately chiseled it out, was large enough for one small person to squeeze through.
‘It’s like chasing the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland.’
Though presumably passing through wouldn’t lead to an endless fall or a cake that made you grow.
Cecilia, still caught up in her whimsical thoughts, crouched down without hesitation. Aside from her sense of adventure, giving up and turning back would mean abandoning a bracelet of considerable value.
Not that the bracelet was Cecilia’s only piece of expensive jewelry, mind you.
Unable to shed even now the memories and habits of her former life as a struggling commoner, she squeezed painfully through the opening.
“Good thing I skipped the macarons.”
She was just brushing dirt and grass from the hem of her dress and straightening up when—
Instead of a rabbit with a pocket watch, she found herself face to face with something much larger, draped in a dark robe.

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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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