01.
This Life is With a Dragon
“Hey, hey, look over there. The Dragon’s Bride is passing by.”
Ugh, my ears are stinging.
“Is she the bride for this generation? Good for them. I heard she’s famous for being useless.”
“Well, that’s right. They say she couldn’t even awaken a single power since birth.”
My name is Calypso Aquasiadel.
I am a possessor who entered a mass-produced childcare novel, and a human cursed by time.
What do I mean?
I tried to change the original plot to live a good life, but I met a ruinous ending at the finish line.
I thought that was the end, but it means I’m a pathetic shifter who ended up repeating regressions instead.
This place is a childcare story titled <I Became the Terminally Ill Baby Daughter of the Black Panther Duke>.
Back when I was reading novels, there was a literal flood of various childcare stories.
<Black-Baby-Daughter> was one of them.
The beloved female lead. The doting brothers. Even the father who is cold at first but becomes a fool for his daughter.
It was a childcare novel where every single part was a cliché.
However, the important thing is that none of that applied to me.
‘Talk about an unfair system.’
In this novel, the female lead, a squirrel shifter, is adopted into a Black Panther family.
The story is about her being adopted as a child and developing a sweet relationship with the youngest son of the household—though unfortunately, the youngest son was the second male lead.
She receives plenty of love there and ultimately reaches a perfect happy ending with the male lead, who is a lion shifter and the Crown Prince.
The role of the character I possessed was the powerless youngest daughter of the ‘Killer Whale’ family, the final villains of this novel.
Unlike the original female lead, who could be loved just by being cute and adorable, this Killer Whale family was a world of the law of the jungle, where everything was decided by strength alone.
‘There was no family here who would fall head over heels for words like “Pa-pa?” or “Gwampa?”’
Above all, the head of the family isn’t a grandfather. It’s a grandmother.
As killer whales are naturally matriarchal animals, the strongest grandmothers of the family have taken the position of head every time.
The current head, my grandmother, has three sons.
I am the youngest granddaughter of the insignificant third son. Moreover, I had no abilities and was even frail.
I have three older brothers above me, and they were talented enough to catch the strict grandmother’s eye, but they ignored or disregarded me for being weak.
In the original story, I am designated as the ‘Dragon’s Bride,’ which is essentially a sacrificial offering that must die, but by the grandmother’s command, I am sent to the Black Panther family instead of to the dragon.
‘To be precise, I was offered as a sacrifice for an arranged marriage with the Black Panther family.’
My role was to be jealous of and harass the original female lead—who was loved despite being weak, unlike myself—only to be found out, kicked out, and die a terrible death in an accident.
And the original male lead and my fiancé—the Black Panther supporting character who was the female lead’s non-blood-related adopted brother—stood by and watched that accident happen.
‘I tried to change this as soon as I possessed the character, but…….’
To start with the conclusion, I failed spectacularly.
‘Let’s see, in the 1st round, I died trying to seduce the original male lead. In the 2nd round, I got scratched by a rusty nail and died of tetanus.’
The 3rd round was the one right before this, and although I made up for my failures and rose to become the leader of the Killer Whale family.
Absurdly, I got caught up in the original male lead’s scheme and met an annihilation ending where everyone died.
‘But that’s all over now.’
I have a vast amount of information and I won’t fail anymore.
‘In this round, I will definitely become the Dragon’s Bride!’
Therefore, I didn’t care at all about the whispering of the people I saw.
“Hmm, she’ll definitely die if she’s the Dragon’s Bride, but she’ll bring wealth to the family, so it’s a good thing. The family head disposed of a useless child, didn’t she?”
“It’s no different from being sold off.”
Rather…….
‘Talk more! Spread it far and wide that I am the Dragon’s Bride!’
In this world, the Dragon’s Bride refers to a young child offered to the Dragon Duke.
It was known that they must die, as it was an act to appease the dragon’s rage that occurs once every ten years.
Tracing this back, this country was founded with the help of a dragon, and that dragon married the first Emperor and gave birth to two children.
One was a regular shifter and became the Emperor, while the other gave up the throne himself after constantly going berserk because his dragon blood was too thick.
Instead, he became a Grand Duke, and his bloodline has been passed down for generations, becoming the current Dragon Duke.
“Anyway, it means she’s a lady who will die soon.”
“That’s right.”
“Tsk tsk, she’s probably barely past one year old since birth, it would have been better to just die. Rather than being chewed up by a dragon…….”
“Hey, then she wouldn’t be of any help to the family.”
Listening to all the whispering, I arrived at a large room.
The massive door opened before my eyes.
‘It’s been a while since I’ve been in this room too.’
The room I entered was an office, and a baby crib was placed on one side, looking out of place.
The servant who carried me set me down in the crib without a word.
Because it was a rough gesture that didn’t consider my situation, my butt stung a little from hitting the fence.
‘Ow, they should watch how they handle me.’
This family has no respect for babies whatsoever.
Survival of the fittest; literally, the strong take everything.
It was the same even for a baby. It was a structure of ‘only those who will survive shall survive.’
‘Today is the day I receive my name.’
Currently, I am 3 years old, exactly 24 months since birth.
All whale shifters in this world are recognized as members only after surviving two years from birth.
This was because whales have a very high probability of sudden death during the first one to two years after birth.
This world is a place where only shifters exist, and the land animal families and the underwater animal families were in conflict with each other.
All the main characters of the original story were land animals, and underwater animals were unconditionally the villains.
‘I remember how much they were cursed at in the comments for being “bad fish bastards.”’
The boss of those fish bastards was the person currently opening the door and striding in.
A wrinkled but majestic expression. A massive frame and pitch-black hair, with the tips of the hair being pure white as if artificially bleached.
My grandmother, Ocula Aquasiadel.
☆▪︎▪︎▪︎☆
