SIWALL 2

The moment he opened the door, Elliot almost went blind. Standing in front of the door was a breathtaking man with water-colored hair. Taking into account his 24 years of life as Lim Seongsik and his one week of life as Elliot Brown, he had never seen anyone so beautiful and ethereal.

‘A man… he is a man, right?’

Elliot swallowed hard. Even after encountering BL, his resolutely firm sexual orientation was swaying helplessly.

“Are you Mr. Elliot Brown?”

“Eh…? Ah, yes, yes. Th-that’s right.”

“It looks like I found the right place.”

The man, who looked like the incarnation of a fairy, smiled with his eyes crinkled as if he were relieved.

Gasp. Elliot grabbed his throbbing chest. For a moment, he felt an optical illusion as if tiny balls of light were bursting behind the fairy….

Wait.

Elliot narrowed his eyes. He looked the man in front of him up and down once more.

His pale blue hair, falling neatly down to his shoulders, had a smooth luster, and his eyes, gleaming golden depending on the angle, were radiating a brilliance greater than the Darlin amber brooch on his chest. Every time his delicate facial features, closely packed together on his flour-doll-like face, captured faint emotions from moment to moment, a certain holiness and sacredness could even be felt.

Elliot knew a person—no, a character—with these external traits.

Loran Pedet, the main uke of {I’ll Tame the Masked Grand Duke}.

The webtoon’s art style, which he had thought was incredible, didn’t even capture a quarter of this man’s actual beauty, and the original web novel’s description, which he had admired as graceful, merely proved the limitations of typography, but both seemed to have tried to clumsily explain the man right in front of him.

“Lo… Loran Pedet…?”

At Elliot’s calling of his name, the fairy glowed brightly and radiantly. Meaning he smiled.

“You know me after all.”

“Ah, yes, yes… You’re so famous….”

“I heard you drank yourself to death, but it seems you still have some sanity left.”

…Uh, pardon? Mr. Fairy, I’m sorry, but could you say that one more time?

∞ ∞ ∞

Loran Pedet was the youngest son of the Count Pedet family, having grown up receiving doting love since he was a child.

When he was little, he really looked like a baby angel into whom God had painstakingly blown His breath, so it is said he drew everyone’s admiration and deep emotion.

If you were to ask just how lovely and beautiful he was, the answer could be given by the fact that the Lantar Imperial Family paid an astronomical price to purchase the copyright for Loran’s portraits from age one to seven.

Loran’s portraits were reborn through the hands of imperial exclusive artists into paintings, poetry, murals, sculptures, tapestries, and more.

Loran was exceptionally beautiful, but above all, the core was that he was born with the same golden eyes as Lante, the primary deity of the Lantar Empire. This was received very sacredly as a religious symbol.

Most of the artworks featuring Loran as a muse belonged to the imperial family and temples. That meant the citizens of the Empire got to see Loran’s face every time they sought God.

Therefore, even now that he was grown, Loran was treated as a ‘sculpture of God.’ Because Loran lived there, the imperial capital of Vejon earned the prestigious title of ‘City Blessed by God.’

To the extent that there were even commoners who would bow down and offer tearful prayers upon seeing him walking down the street, I believe it has been sufficiently explained just how famous Loran was in the original story and in this empire.

And such a Loran was standing right in the middle of Elliot’s shabby, tiny house.

“Young Lord Tulion has talked about you. Of course, not the junior marquis side, but the second son side who walks around with his genitals mounted above his neck instead of a brain.”

“Th… geni….”

“You used to be El Black, right? The Flower That Bloomed at the End of a Sword? No, was it The Flower That Bloomed at the End of a Sword? The person who wrote that.”

Elliot nodded slowly, hoping he wouldn’t look too awkward.

“I’m sorry. The title was so trashy and it’s a dated novel, so I suppose it wasn’t worth keeping in my memory.”

Loran gave a pitiful smile and lightly tapped his forehead with his fingertips.

However, unlike his pathetic and pure face, the content of his words was harsh enough to make even a total stranger who had haphazardly hijacked Elliot’s body (Lim Seongsik, 24 years old, South Korea) feel a pang in his chest.

“Still, you had a knack for wielding a pen after all, so I heard you ghostwrite things like love letters. Is that right?”

At the awl-like words spat out by light pink, slender, and elegant lips, Elliot felt a slight dizziness. As he stumbled a bit and sat on the edge of the desk, Loran smiled.

“Judging by the looks of it, you seem to be living off chewing tree bark or something, but take my commission. I’ll pay you handsomely too.”

“Excuse me….”

“Instead, secrecy must be guaranteed. If you blab to anyone that you took on a commission from me, I will definitely kill you.”

“Loran, no, valued customer….”

“Of course, it’s a secret from Young Lord Tulion too. If I told that bastard who goes into heat 24 hours a day, every single woman in Vejon would find out.”

“Valued customer!”

Elliot clenched both fists tightly and straightened his body.

Perhaps a bit startled by the wriggling of a trivial commoner ghostwriter, Loran’s eyelashes fluttered and trembled. Even that appearance looked like a fairy’s wingbeats… No, get a grip, Elliot Lim Seongsik Brown!

He opened his eyes wide.

“Valued customer, is that commission by any chance….”

A sharp and keen aura settled over Elliot’s sharp, sensitive face.

“Is it a commission asking me to ghostwrite a love letter to be sent to Grand Duke Arzen Teron? Could it be that because of Grand Duke Teron, who currently ranks number one as the most popular man in the empire, you are so frustrated that you can’t even sleep well at night, sir?”

However, out of his mouth flowed the excessively polite honorifics of a Korean service worker automatically, smooth as silk.

Before he could be surprised by the discrepancy between his expression and tone of voice, Loran couldn’t hide his astonishment at the words Elliot spat out.

“H… How do you know that…!”

“You want to conquer Grand Duke Teron and turn him into your slave, and play with the Grand Duke’s body and mind every which way, right~?”

“Th-that’s accurate….”

Loran answered in spite of himself, and then he was seen flinching upon seeing the black cat on the bed. “Could he be a fortune-teller…?” Loran’s muttering could also be heard faintly.

“But unlike your fairy-like face, because you were doted on and raised however you pleased since you were young, speaking selfishly has become a habit for you~”

“Just now, that was an insult to me….”

“No matter how much education you received to speak prettily, because of your speaking habit of just prettily insulting people, I think you must have been stressed out too.”

Elliot made puppy-dog eyebrows and dragged out the end of his sentence. At that, Loran’s expression also softened a bit.

“W-well, that’s true. I tried my best, but my family and etiquette teachers always said, ‘Just speaking prettily doesn’t make it pretty speech.’ If you speak prettily, then it’s pretty speech, so what on earth is considered pretty speech?”

“Right. You must have been the most frustrated, so I’m truly sorry.”

“Yes… But why are you the one apologizing…?”

“Since you’ve always heard those kinds of things from those close to you, when you tried to write a letter to the Grand Duke yourself, was your speaking style something that concerned you?”

At Elliot’s polite, empathetic, and smiling conversational style that hit the core, Loran’s shoulders relaxed more than before. He gracefully brushed back his flowing hair and nodded.

“Yes, you’re right. Grand Duke Teron supposedly loathes rude people. Even if I don’t intend to, I might provoke the Grand Duke’s anger, so I couldn’t bring myself to write it. Meeting in person is out of the question even more so. Therefore, make use of that writing talent you uniquely possess.”

Loran added with a dazzling smile, as if bestowing grace.

“Now then, write a love letter to Grand Duke Arzen Teron.”

Elliot curved the corners of his mouth upward as gently as possible in response. Dark brown eyes behind thin glasses curved artificially.

“I am truly sorry, valued customer.”

He took a deep breath, and bowed 90 degrees at the waist, as if forcibly coughing up a fish bone stuck in his throat.

“I will decline that commission.”