The regressed villainess attends the academy (Original Fiction)

A full moon shone through the curtains of a second-story window, casting shadows on the face of a pale girl, perhaps six or seven years old. She sat at an engraved, wooden desk with her hands folded, head hanging low, her long, dark hair covering her face.

It was impossible to see her expression, but her posture managed to convey uncharacteristic sombreness. Together with the darkness of the room and the late hour, far past the bedtime of someone her age, it painted an eerie, almost ghostly picture.

For a long time, she sat silently, barely breathing. If not for the occasional twitching of a thumb or forefinger, she might've appeared asleep. When the moon had traveled across the sky, the shadows shifting to reveal dark, bar-like structures behind the gauzy curtain, she slowly raised her head.

Staring at the silvery orb outside her window, the light reflected on her eyes. They were unusual, not an ordinary color, but crimson, almost the color of blood. If that weren’t unsettling enough, her sclera were pitch black, the same color as her pupils.

“I’m not dreaming…”

The words were spoken in a hazy tone. Her voice was childlike and innocent, not at all what her appearance would suggest. Her entire day had passed like this, locked in her room without a single visitor. If not for the occasional murmur and footsteps inside the house, it might’ve seemed entirely abandoned.

Extending a hand, she wrapped her fingers around one of the iron bars, spaced tightly enough that not even someone as thin and frail as she could escape. She felt the gauze and the cold metal underneath, running her fingers up and down. The sensation was as real as any she’d ever experienced.

When she’d awoken in her bed this morning, her memories had been a blur. She didn’t know where she was, or even who. After rattling the doorknob and finding it locked, and finding no way out of the room, she’d taken a seat first on the bed, then the table. She knew panicking wouldn’t do any good.

When an hour passed, she felt calmness return to her, soothing away her worries. Rather than her imprisonment, her first priority was to sort out the mess inside her head. Her memories were fragmented and disjointed like recalling a dream after waking. With little else to do, she set to assembling them, fitting them together like puzzle pieces.

At first, she couldn’t make heads nor tails of the picture forming before her eyes. Or maybe it was more accurate to say she couldn’t process it. That was no surprise, given her first memory before waking up in this lonely room was of her own death.

Unconsciously, she rested a hand against her abdomen. The more she thought about it, the clearer it became. Even now, she could feel the phantom pain, see the red blood soaking through her dress.

A long, silvery blade had pieced her from front to back, the tip exiting near her spine. It was engraved with flowing lines, glowing with a vibrant blue light. It seemed to be humming, emitting a mysterious kind of energy. When it came into contact with her own substantial magic power, it was like water meeting flame. She was doused, rendered helpless and mortal like any other person.

In the vision, with her hands around the blade, the edge cutting into her palms, she raised her head, looking into the eyes of the man gripping its ivory handle. Ice-cold as his expression was, it was impossible to ignore his handsome face—one she was very familiar with. 

Moments after their eyes met, the man opened his mouth, speaking in a low voice.

“This is the consequence of your own actions, Morrigan.”

Even now, she had no way of refuting him. He was right.

He waited, almost as if expecting her to say something. When she didn’t, he clenched his teeth, wrenching his grip. A tremendous power surged upward from the sword’s pommel, traveling up the handle and along the flowing blue lines on the blade.

It washed over her with the destructive power of a tidal wave. Her body seemed to disintegrate before her very eyes, turning into a dark, murky substance that dried into ash, crumbling before being blown away by the wind.

Initially, his eyes were filled with resolve. However, when life drained from her face, her skin turning gray and flaking, he shut his eyes tightly, clearly unwilling to watch her die.

That was how she met her end—in silence. There was nothing further to be said. Too much had happened for words to have any purpose. The pain disappeared, then everything went dark. And after an indeterminate period of time… she woke up here.

When the last echoes of that memory faded, staring out of the window before evening’s arrival, things snapped into place inside her mind. It was like one domino knocked over, starting a chain reaction. From the moment of her death, back through the years until now.

She hadn’t moved from her seat at the desk, watching the sunset, then the moon’s rise.

“Did I really… return?”

With a glassy look in her red eyes, she absentmindedly touched her lips, running her nails across them. It didn’t make any sense. Even at her strongest, she never had the ability to turn back time.

In fact, the manipulation of time had long since been judged impossible. Merlin himself, the most powerful archmage ever, wrote a treatise on the subject, one of his few surviving manuscripts. His commentaries were very explicit, ironically judging the study to be a waste of time.

‘And yet…’

Morrigan’s thoughts churned, coming up with one theory after another to explain her situation, and discarding each in turn. Mind or illusion magic, or a combination of both was most likely. However, her understanding of both disciplines was respectable, and she’d recognize it if she saw it, even with her power diminished.

After a period of furious thinking, she sighed and stood, the legs of her chair scraping the floor. Stiff after prolonged sitting, she stretched her arms above her head. For now, getting some sleep seemed like the best idea. There was no point in speculating with so little information. Besides, after waking up so early, combined with the day’s ups and downs, she was mentally exhausted.

Walking over to her bed and dropping face-first onto the pillows and blankets, she closed her eyes. If it were anyone else, they’d be unable to relax in this kind of environment, cooped up like a bird in a cage. However, compared to everything she’d lived through, this was nothing.

Besides, this room, though a distant memory at this point, wasn’t exactly unfamiliar to her.

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