Trapped at Home With the Male Leads

Chapter 1

I Was Reincarnated into a Novel Scheduled for Destruction

Three Weeks Earlier.

My situation could easily be described in just a few words. I had died after being hit by a car before reincarnating into a novel.

Normally, if one were to talk of reincarnation into a novel—or of taking over the body of a character—the listener’s mind would conjure an image of a noble lady leading a luxurious life, wearing extravagant dresses and surrounded by handsome men. And until recently, I had also lived a similar life—until recently being the operative words.

Although it mirrored nineteenth-century Europe with its industrial development and similar social stratification, this world was doomed for destruction. It would one day be taken out by a viral outbreak.

I had reincarnated into a cheesy apocalyptic survival romance novel called Love in a Ruined World. To top it off, I had been reincarnated as Cherry Sinclair, a bothersome side character who would die off after endangering the life of the second male lead.

I realized the truth in early spring, the year I turned nineteen. Three years ago, after losing my parents to an accident, I had been left alone in the world. However, I was not lonely. Thanks to my enormous inheritance, my solitude did not bother me.

Money is the best. You really can’t beat it!

I was not of noble rank, but I had been born as one of the bourgeoisie, a social class richer than even nobles. As a result, I was living quite happily.

No one will care if I spend my money lavishly and live in leisure like a scoundrel!

“Give me this one, and wrap that one up for me as well.”

That day, once again, I had been on a shopping spree at the shoe store. After shopping to my heart’s content, I’d flounced through the streets downtown with my nose in the air, humming a jaunty tune. My maid, Susanna, hobbled along after me, struggling with her arms full of shopping bags. It was admittedly a rather loud display and drew the attention of onlookers. I could hear the whispers of the various noble ladies as they recognized me.

“Isn’t that Miss Sinclair?”

“Who designed the dress she’s wearing today?”

“What a beautiful hat.”

Heh.

I tossed my hair over my shoulder and smiled in satisfaction. Regardless of my own social class, all the nobles admired me. It was a pleasant and exhilarating thing to realize. The newspapers ran headlines on me nearly every day, calling me an “immature heiress,” but that didn’t bother me. After all, I just thought of it as them taking a different sort of interest in me. Back then, I lived without a care in the world. I had no idea I was walking blindly toward a most difficult future.

“Miss, please wait a moment,” Susanna said, lifting the packages into the carriage.

There wasn’t enough room for luggage in my steam-powered car, so I stood off to the side, merely watching the process. Susanna struggled with the heavy boxes, which were filled to the brim with shoes.

She’s having a hard time...

After checking to see if anyone was watching, I hoisted all the boxes up into the carriage using just one hand.

“Wow... Miss Cherry, your strength is incredible,” Susanna said, clapping her hands as she watched. I shrugged in an offhand manner.

As she’d said, I was stronger than most people. However, I had not been born like this. As a child, my body had been weak, but a few years after taking some medicine my parents had procured for me, I had gained the strength I now possessed.

However, I was an upper-class lady, and such monstrous strength was not considered a virtue of women of that rank. I was still young and naive—not to mention desperate to become a noble myself—so I had kept my strength a secret.

“Huh?”

I had loaded all the luggage into the carriage and was about to get into the steam-powered car when a sudden chill drifted through the air.

Susanna noticed me pause, one foot on the car, and asked, “What’s wrong, Miss Cherry?”

“Nothing’s wrong. I just thought—”

Why do I feel so uneasy?

For a moment, I thought I had been surrounded by a peculiar feeling. I dismissed it as a figment of my imagination and was about to finish getting into the carriage. However, I lost my balance and toppled over.

Before I could react, my head slammed into the ground. I was in such shock I couldn’t even make a sound. Alarmed, Susanna gently helped me up. My head was pounding. I felt like my skull had been split in half, right down the middle, not unlike a log would be split by an axe. And like the rush of a blade through the grains of wood, memories flooded into my mind and washed over everything like a great wave. Vividly, memories came to me, feeling familiar yet strange. They were clear, as if they had been formed only yesterday.

What is all this?

And just like that, I understood what was happening.

I can’t believe it!

I was currently living my second life. To top it all off, the world I had reincarnated into was the one from a novel I had read in my previous life. It was known as Love in a Ruined World.

How is this so cliché?

“Life is full of crappy timing,” a heroine of some survival novel had once said.

“Miss Cherry, are you really all right?”

“I’m fine.”

Although I was not fine in the slightest, I finally stepped into the carriage with Susanna’s help, my head still aching. Leaning back, I began to think.

The novel that I had remembered thanks to hitting my head earlier was called Love in a Ruined World, and it was an apocalyptic survival romance.

Also shortened to LIARW, the novel centered around the heroine, Aurora. After the end of the world, Aurora worked to gather the male protagonists of the story and form a survival team to search for a cure. There were all sorts of survivors, each group with their own encampment. The larger the camp, the more powerful it was. Furthermore, Aurora worked to capture these camps, one by one, to establish her power.

However, there was just one problem.

The story had been discontinued.

It had come to an abrupt halt, without even a clear explanation about the outbreak.

Some things were clear: There was a scientist with the talent to develop a cure, and he met the heroine and her companions, but only after two years had passed. After that, they would find out that Eden, the heroine’s older brother, had the antibodies for the virus.

Damn it.

That wasn’t all. In the original novel, Cherry had not done much. All she had done was complain about being neglected. In the end, while raising a fuss, she had met her demise by being bitten to death by an infected monster, damn it all.

“Miss Cherry, are you crying?”

Susanna, sitting in the seat beside me, handed me a handkerchief. Her face was filled with alarm.

I leaned my head against the seat as tears quietly ran down my face and replied, “No, I’m just sweating profusely.”

“Pardon?” Susanna asked, taken aback.

I accepted the handkerchief from her and wiped the tears sliding down my cheek.

That’s right. I’m not sad, I convinced myself. These are not tears.

Why had I reincarnated into Love in a Ruined World, of all novels, after being given the chance?

Why the apocalypse, of all things? F*ck. Why is this happening to me?

* * *

Benton, the capital of the kingdom of Graydon.

The Sinclair family’s townhouse, located near the center of the capital, had a flamboyant exterior. The white walls of the building were inlaid with golden statues, flaunting the family’s wealth. On the roof, there was an overflow of lavender. From a glance, it was easy to tell that the owner of the house had preferred glamour to harmony.

The largest room was found on the third floor, having a built-in closet to add to its size. Inside the room, on the table, there always sat a triple-tiered tray, stacked with desserts. Scented candles burned bright, day and night, and filled the room with the soft scent of flowers. Next to the table, there was a bed covered in golden embellishments, and atop the coverlet was where I had made my nest.

Immediately after coming home, I had collapsed into bed, not even bothering to eat. I chose simply to lay there. I wanted to deny this unbelievable reality. Even in a world with COVID-19 ravaging the planet, I’d managed never to need to take a PCR test. I had been thanking my lucky stars for my good fortune... only to unexpectedly die in a car accident. Not only that, but I’d been reincarnated into the world of a novel and seemed fated to die by a different world-ending virus. My life’s difficulty level had jumped exponentially.

This is the reason I never caught COVID-19 in the past... Something much worse had been in store for me!

“Even if I knew that the world would end tomorrow, I would still plant my apple tree.”

Wasn’t there a famous saying like that?

However, in this world, Cherry Sinclair had only lost her family a short while ago and had no other loved ones. I would probably have zero interest in something like an apple tree if I were in the same situation in my original world. I had followed my parents across the globe as they worked, and as a result, I had never built close friendships. I didn’t even have any cousins.

Oh. Well, there is Harrison.

Harrison Howard. He was the lawyer of the Sinclair family, and though we weren’t blood siblings, I had grown up with him and considered him as an older brother. I hadn’t spent that much time with the servants of the Sinclair family. I was really only close to my maid Susanna.

I continued to lay there, wallowing with tears dripping down my face, until Susanna came into my room.

“Miss Cherry. Here are the newspapers you requested.”

She held out a stack of papers from previous days. I got up, rubbing my eyes, and took the bundle from her.

“Thank you.”

I immediately scanned through them. After looking through various papers for quite some time, I finally found the article I had been searching for.

Exclusive: An Analysis of Cherry Sinclair’s Spending Habits! To what extent will the immature heiress indulge?

Wait, this isn’t it.

The article contained an analysis of my spending habits, including the dress I had been wearing. Whenever my clothing or accessories appeared in newspapers or magazines, the design in question would often end up becoming extremely popular.

Regardless of how much they disapprove of me, no one can look away.

I shook my head and directed my gaze to the article underneath it.

Large-scale Funeral Held by Marquis Kasey! Family spokesperson reveals the deceased as former servants of the household, sick with infectious disease!

This was it. There was something happening in the Kasey family, and it matched the memories from my past life.

I can’t believe this. So the memories of my past life are real?

The Kasey’s suspicious experiments were the catalyst for the tragedy that occurred in the novel. With the support of the marquis, alchemists had run several unethical experiments. However, their testing would result in the spread of a monumentally destructive virus, leading the marquis to attempt to cover up the truth. In the novel, the world had come to an end exactly three months after this article had been printed.

I quickly checked the date it had been published, only to see that two months had already passed.

“What the f*ck?”

Doomsday was merely twenty-one days away. There was less than a month of time left.

“Damn it, twenty-one days’ time isn’t enough!”

I reached up, sliding my hands into my hair, tearing at the strands as I stared at the paper.