Reborn as the Psycho Villainess Who Ate Her Slave Beasts' Contracts

You could not know what was hidden inside a place simply by arriving in it. So of course there were monsters. Of course there were ancient tombs, or ruins, or whatever it turned out to be. That was not evidence of anything except that this world was strange, which she had already known.

It proved nothing about whether the old woman was telling the truth.

Elara let her gaze drift.

Elara had gotten old too, if you looked at her. Elara remembered — hazily, the way you remember something that happened while you were half-asleep — that when she had first come into this body, it had been seventeen, maybe. Something like that. She could not be certain. The memory of those first weeks was blurred at the edges, unreliable, the kind of thing you could not fully trust.

Sometimes she still thought she was twenty-five, sitting behind a desk in an office somewhere, signing documents that actually mattered.

Then she remembered being seventeen.

Then something else.

She did the arithmetic without much enthusiasm. She should be twenty-four or twenty-five now, in terms of the body’s age. Add another three years on top of that, and she was probably around twenty-eight. Maybe. She was not sure. She had stopped celebrating her birthday a long time ago, and after everything — the wars, the throne, the years of fighting and rebuilding — most of the records had been lost or buried or simply forgotten in the chaos.

And if you did not remember your own birthday, and your family did not remember it either, how were you supposed to know? Official documents. That was the answer, normally.

Except that official documents for someone of noble or royal blood were handled carefully. Selectively. The kind of information kept close — birthday, bloodline, parentage — that was known only to the parents, recorded in private documents that Elara no longer had. Her mother was dead. The woman who had replaced her had her own reasons to change things, to shift dates, to quietly rewrite whatever needed rewriting. And the emperor — well.

The records that did exist did not all agree with each other.

So she genuinely did not know when her birthday was.