The Villain Princess Rewrites Her Fate

The Golden Shard

Whoa. Lovf watched the minstrel with admiration: That's Peak Legend Tier for you! A bigshot two whole tiers above Chester really does know how to talk!

Preach, big bro! You clearly know your child psychology! And honestly, this stunt of Chester's would be hard to take even for me, a twenty-something with two living parents and a healthy, cheerful disposition. Considering Lovfrida is only a five-year-old baby, I'd say you went easy on him. A man like this just plain needs a scolding!

Disappointingly, the minstrel seemed to understand that too much is as bad as too little, and said nothing more to Chester after that. With him and Chester silent, Laila and Gene dared not speak either, and the whole mage tower fell quiet, only the minstrel's light humming to be heard, threaded with the twang-twang-twang of plucked strings.

After who knew how long, the minstrel straightened up. The array at his feet gave off a soft glimmering light, strikingly bright in the dark tower top. This array was untold times more complex than the one the Floating City had used to test Lovf's aptitude last time; one glance was enough to dazzle the eyes, and in the densest places you couldn't even tell the lines apart.

"Done." the minstrel said, his expression a touch more serious now. He beckoned to Lovf. "Little Highness, come. Laila, and my lord guard captain Gene, I must ask you both to step outside for a moment."

Laila and Gene gave a small start of surprise, and the minstrel waved them off: "Go on, go on. It's not as if I'm going to eat your King. I have some conjectures, and if they turn out true, everyone present would likely have to travel to the Central Capital to sign a confidentiality pact. You certainly don't want to sign one, so it's better you wait outside."

Gene cast his gaze toward Chester, and seeing him give a slight nod, drew Laila out with him.

The minstrel withdrew from the array, leaving Lovf, who had walked in, standing alone at the center of that vast and intricate magic circle.

"Chester, since you're staying, this is the moment you tell your daughter: don't be afraid." The minstrel turned his head helplessly toward the incorrigible father beside him.

Given the sheer scale of this magic array, Lovf really was a scared little kid, and at those words she looked haltingly toward Chester.

Chester held her gaze for a long, long time, so long that Lovf started to fidget, wanting the minstrel to just start the array already yet not daring to look away, before he squeezed a few words through his stiff expression: "He will not harm you."

Lovf: I know he won't harm me. What I'm afraid of right now is you harming me.

The minstrel too was left speechless by that attitude. Knowing no kinder words could be squeezed out of the man, he shook his head in resignation, gathered the lute into his arms, and swept the strings.

The array blazed with a pillar of bright blue light. The ripples of magic it stirred spread out to blanket everything, silver-bright, as though the Milky Way had spilled into the pitch-black top of the mage tower.

The crystals on the floor lit ring by ring, ribbons of light-lines leaping up, flickering and shifting in color, spiraling upward around Lovf like a coiling dragon of light.

Yet within that gorgeous spectacle, every single thread of light was exactly the same thickness, exactly, exactly like the inability to resonate the array had detected last time.

Through such brilliant blue flame, the galaxy overhead, Lovf could not see the expressions of Chester and the minstrel outside the array. But presumably they were not good.

Ah well. Beyond saving. Being a scholar is a fine life. At least now she knew her dad wasn't as much of a bastard as he looked.

Lovf was hanging her head, dispirited, and when she came back to herself she found the array's intricate patterns had already burned themselves out. The galaxy of stars in the air and the pale blue dragon of light on the ground were both gone; the mage tower had returned to pitch darkness, and only the eight-pointed star at the array's outermost ring still shimmered with a faint blue glow.

Wearing an expression of "knew it," she looked toward Chester and the minstrel and, rather soul-lost, started to walk in their direction.

At least this time I didn't break down. I can still walk back to my room on my own. she thought, finding what sweetness she could in the bitterness, and looked up straight into the eyes of Minstrel Lute and Chester: eyes of extreme shock, shocked so far past shock that their faces could no longer form a shocked expression.

Lovf: ...?

"Your Highness..." The minstrel opened his mouth, his voice actually trembling, "Might Your Highness please not move."

A... A Legend Tier just used honorifics on me...

He had frightened her. She blinked, and as if suddenly grasping something, lowered her head to look at her own chest. Perhaps it was the array's effect: she saw that her body had turned somewhat translucent. There at her chest, a finger-length shard of gold hung suspended, like light and phantom in one.

A shard...

Lovf raised her head to look at her own father and the minstrel, and under the minstrel's especially agitated gaze, a gaze mixing shock, nostalgia, pain, gratitude, joyful surprise, and a great heap of emotions too tangled to name, a strange thought suddenly came to her: Why is it broken?

I was in one piece when I transmigrated.

She realized something and twisted around to look behind her. But Chester reacted first, lunging over like lightning to clamp a hand over her eyes. Lovf saw nothing but golden light before she was pressed down into his arms, his hand still over her eyes, and she could feel his body trembling faintly with tension.

The array went dark.

Three people stood in the pitch-black mage tower, silent for a time.

The minstrel waved a hand and hung three light bulbs in the air.

"I will report this matter to the Godkin, His Venerable Majesty, and to the Central Capital. Please keep it secret. You understand."

The minstrel turned to Chester as he said it. His expression was serious. Very serious.

"I will. I understand."

Chester was serious too. Very serious.

Lovf felt entirely innocent. "I only saw golden light. I didn't see anything else." And her heavy-handed father had body-slammed her so hard it hurt.

"It is best that you saw nothing." the minstrel told her gently. He conjured a flower from somewhere and bent down to offer it to her: "Your Highness's constitution is rather special, which affects what the array can measure. But you are absolutely not incapable of becoming a power-wielder. Rest assured, your aptitude is excellent. As for the specifics, give me a few days to study it and I will write you a booklet to guide you through the basics."

Lovf: Draft your lies first, brother. If it's just a constitution that skews array results, why did Chester cover my eyes? I'm not actually stupid, okay?

But she wasn't stupid, so she didn't ask that question. Recalling the confidentiality pact the minstrel had mentioned, she decided Chester's eye-covering had been very considerate of him.

Suddenly remembering that when Chester tackled her, he took the fall on his own back first..

Cannot figure Chester out.

The minstrel's flower smells so nice.

The minstrel thought for a moment, then asked Lovf gently: "Has anything strange ever happened around you? Could you tell us about it?"

Lovf pondered.

It did seem that in her past life, unlucky-lucky things used to happen around her.

Very coincidental things.

The first was a traffic accident.

Her mother was holding her, still very small, on a coach home to their family's town. In the oncoming lanes, a truck hauling steel swerved hard to dodge a car reversing on the expressway, hit the guardrail, and half a truckload of steel rods snapped through the canopy and flew at seventy or eighty kilometers per hour into the oncoming lane, straight into the coach they were riding. It skewered the coach like a hedgehog.

No one was hurt.

Not one person had so much as a scrape.

If Lovf alone had come through unscathed, you could still call it coincidence and luck. But a dozen-plus steel rods had pierced the vehicle top to bottom without impaling a single person, the fuel tank untouched, and everyone sat stunned until police from the nearest city arrived half an hour later to rescue them. Those steel rods might as well have deliberately threaded themselves around every occupied seat.

Lovf found this very hard to explain as coincidence.

Extremely coincidental.

Afterward, Lovf's mother took her to a temple to give thanks, where the senior monk caught hold of them and declared the child blessed with a great destiny, that she had warded off calamity for others, but that before coming of age she would meet many misfortunes and might easily die you...

Nothing came after "die you." The senior monk's face turned puzzled; he studied Lovf for a long while with an odd look in his eyes, but refused to say anything more.

Lovf told her childhood best friend about it, and the friend even teased her, asking if she'd warded off calamity for that whole busload. A few days later, that friend got caught climbing a tree, fell in her panic, and right in front of Lovf struck the back of her head on a rock, head-first, without leaving so much as a small dent.

The hospital produced a huge pile of elaborate force analyses to demonstrate to the friend's family exactly how luckily she had landed on a spot of perfectly even force distribution to escape unharmed, so elaborate the family suspected even the doctors didn't believe it, and they turned right around and delivered a heap of thank-you gifts to Lovf's home.

A coincidence impossible to believe was coincidence.

As she grew older, Lovf stopped running into such things much. She was no jinx, after all; live an honest life and you don't meet danger every day. True, there were times playing cards or mahjong when she drew unbelievable god-tier hands, or aced a test by guessing every answer, but those could still just barely pass as ordinary coincidence.

And then, later, Lovf got bitten by a banded krait.

The moral of that story, for Lovf, was: don't play with snakes when you're feeling satisfied with life.

Come to think of it, during that stretch in the countryside, she couldn't recall getting a single bug bite...

But none of this was anything she could say out loud to the minstrel and Chester.

Lovf hesitated, and shook her head after all.

The minstrel gave her a long, deep look, a look that made Lovf feel her secret had been seen straight through. But he said nothing, only nodded and smiled at her: "Understood. If Your Highness ever notices strange things happening around you, do tell me, hm?"

He bent down, gathered Lovf up, and pushed out through the door, announcing to the frantically pacing Laila and Gene outside the fact that Lovf had aptitude. Then he handed the little princess over to the two of them as they burst into excited cheers.

"Little Highness, I must be going." he said softly to Lovf.

Lovf blinked, a little curious. It was Laila, holding her, who spoke first: "Won't you stay a few more days?"

"Can't, I'm afraid. The holiday ends tomorrow, and I have some pressing matters to report to my lord." The minstrel smiled, put away his ancient lute, and conjured a whole armful of flowers from somewhere, stuffing them into Lovf's arms.

"Little Lovf, Chester loves you." he said to her softly. "But he has been through a great deal, and he is too young besides; he cannot properly feel or understand the tenderness and fragility of life's beginnings. If you are unhappy, tell him so."

He had finally dropped the honorifics. Lovf felt relief through her whole body; being addressed with honorifics by a world-ending bigshot of this caliber felt like it was shaving years off her life.

The minstrel turned and bade Chester a dashing farewell, then left ahead of them all. Right up to the moment he rounded the corner of the wall he used no special power whatsoever. And here Lovf had assumed he would teleport or something.

"Take the princess back." With the minstrel gone, Chester turned and instructed Laila.

Fine. Chester is still this same block of ice. Lovf sighed, missing her dad terribly, lamenting that with so many normal fathers in the world, how had Lovfrida drawn this one.

"...Regarding your teacher. Come find me tomorrow afternoon." Chester looked at his daughter for a long moment, forced out that second half of a sentence, then turned and left in the other direction.

Lovf: What? What did he say?

She shot an incredulous look at Laila, who was holding her, received from the black-haired beauty one radiant, told-you-so arch of the eyebrow, and flopped back down against Laila's shoulder in continued disbelief.

The minstrel's little speech actually worked?! Chester has turned over a new leaf? Is she finally about to grind father-daughter affection points according to normal plot logic??!