Looking back with a clear head, it was almost painful to admit how simple minded the original Wensley had been about one thing.
He honestly believed Princess Mirielle had left him because he was weak.
Not because he was twisted.
Not because he was possessive or suffocating.
In his mind, the only problem was weakness.
Inside his head, the reasoning ran in a straight, childish line that felt cruel and perfectly logical at the same time. If I become strong enough, Mirielle will look at me differently. If I climb high enough, she will turn around and come back. Power fixes everything.
That thought was the first seed.
The way he chose to water it was forbidden magic.
Once that power bled into his veins, everything slipped out of control. A broken, naive young man suddenly carried strength that did not belong to him and that he had no idea how to restrain. Anyone with even a bit of common sense could have guessed how it would end.
Reality just followed the path laid out in front of it.
In the end, he personally proved every ugly rumor people had attached to his name.
No one cared about his explanations. Every time he tried to speak, his words were twisted around and thrown back in his face. Finally, he made a decision that only someone already half mad and half desperate would make.
Fine. If you insist that I am that monster, then I will become exactly what you are so eager to see.
From that moment, he walked step by step into the part they had written for him.
People called him greedy, so he began taking whatever he could reach.
They called him cruel, so he responded with cruelty.
They whispered that he would surely become a demon one day, so he went and opened the door to hell with his own hands.
In order to punish a demon, he first turned himself into one.
He found he could silence the mouths that spread rumors. He could kill witnesses, destroy enemies, and burn the places where people had once laughed at him.
What he could not kill were the rumors themselves.
Stories linger long after bodies have gone quiet.
So, one step at a time, he sent himself into a kind of eternal damnation that he could not climb back out of.
...
Now that the current Wensley held both the original boy's memories and the player's understanding of Citrus Crown, the picture in front of him was painfully clear.
Wensley Fauce had not started his life as a monster.
He had been proud, stubborn, and possessive to the point of suffocation. That much was true. Even so, he had not been the depraved villain the nobles claimed he was.
Reputations did not collapse in a single night.
They changed the way a pot slowly comes to a boil. The temperature rises little by little, and by the time the frog inside realizes something is wrong, it is already too late to jump out.
There had been a misunderstanding in one place, and an eyewitness in another who spoke only half of what they saw. A bored person added a little detail to make the story livelier. Then someone else repeated it with their own small twist.
Piece by piece, exaggeration by exaggeration, the image of Wensley decayed in the eyes of Carmella's nobility. From there, the rot spread outward. It moved from palace to city, from city to the towns and fields beyond, layer after layer.
By the time anyone bothered to measure how bad his reputation had become, it was already beyond saving.
Back then, the original Wensley had not simply given up.
He tried to push back.
He tried to fix things.
He made an effort to behave properly and to show people that he was not the depraved beast they described.
Those efforts were doomed before they even began.
Once the world decided a person was bad, every action that person took was filtered through that conclusion.
If he spoke, it meant he was scheming.
If he remained silent, it meant he was plotting.
If he helped someone, it meant he was trying to cover something worse.
If he refused to help, it meant he was exposing his cruelty at last.
Every direction he moved became proof against him.
His fall into darkness was not a sudden drop from a cliff, it was a slow and weary drowning. He struggled against the current, he fought to keep his head above water, and he tried again and again to pull himself back toward the light.
In the end, with no strength, no allies, and not a single person willing to believe him, the weight of those cold, stubborn rumors dragged him down.
Mirielle's rejection at the banquet had only been the last straw thrown onto a burden that was already broken.
The back of the camel had snapped long before that moment ever arrived.
...
There was still another wound, though, another memory that had left a permanent scar on the original Wensley's heart.
No matter how low House Fauce had sunk, its origin was undeniable.
They were heirs of saints.
Long ago, the Fauce family were the direct descendants of the Goddess of Dawnglow. She had established the Church of Dawnglow through them. For generations, the head of House Fauce carried the blood of the Blessed Angel and served as saint, leading the entire Dawnglow Church and standing at the center of the Dawnglow Holy See.
By the time Wensley's grandfather took the title, that line had withered. No new saints appeared. The family lost its authority within the church, then lost its influence, and eventually lost its place entirely.
Because of what the Holy See labeled a mistake, House Fauce was stripped of its position and expelled.
The goddess had built the Dawnglow Church through her chosen descendants.
Then the church had used the goddess's name as a reason to drive those same descendants out.
If you wrote that into a fantasy novel and posted it online, people would complain that the irony was too on the nose.
If you thought logically, even a ruined House Fauce should not have collapsed to this extent. They still possessed the relics and treasures left behind by generations of saintesses. Those sacred artifacts were the kind of things any church would guard with its life.
The relics alone should have been enough to keep the family from starving.
But on the night Wensley's parents died, people from the Holy See arrived.
He remembered that day in sharp detail.
Dark clouds pressed down so low that it felt as if they were going to crush the rooftops. Heavy rain turned the courtyard into a pool of muddy water. Standing at the gates of House Fauce was the Cardinal Archbishop of the Church of Dawnglow, surrounded by a column of church knights in full armor.
Metal clinked with each step. Cloaks snapped and whipped in the storm. Their arrival smothered the entire courtyard under a heavy, suffocating presence.
They were not there to offer sympathy.
They came like wolves that had finally smelled blood on a wounded deer.
Strictly speaking, after being expelled from the Dawnglow Holy See, House Fauce should never have had any dealings with the church again.
Yet that night, after Wensley's parents passed away, the church suddenly announced that House Fauce had been illegally occupying church property for three generations. They demanded the return of every relic and sacred treasure left behind by the Goddess of Dawnglow and the saintesses of the past.
Those things, they said, belonged to the Holy See, not to a minor viscount's household.
The memory replayed in his mind as if it had happened yesterday.
Candle flames flickered against yellow, peeling walls. The smell of incense mixed awkwardly with the raw scent of death. A small Wensley stood next to the bodies of his parents, his thin body trembling while his eyes seemed strangely empty.
He was young, grieving, and completely lost. The two people who should have protected him and led him forward had disappeared in a single night. In front of him stretched only a road lined with contempt and loneliness.
He had no idea how he was meant to keep walking.
Then he heard the footsteps.
They were heavy and regular, striking the ground in perfect unison.
He stumbled to the door and pushed it open.
Outside, a rank of Dawnglow knights stood in shining armor that reflected even the dim light through the rain. Behind them stood a man dressed in crimson robes, leaning on a jeweled staff, with a crystal Holy Cross glittering on his hand.
The difference in height, in presence, in power, pressed on the boy until it almost hurt.
Lightning ripped across the sky and turned the world white for a single breath. In that brief flash, the shadows of the cardinal and the knights stretched long over the muddy yard and spilled over the small silhouette of Wensley, making him look like some twisted creature pinned beneath their feet.
"Search the premises," the cardinal said in a flat voice. "Do not leave a single corner unchecked."
There was no introduction, no word of comfort, and not even the simplest acknowledgement that two bodies lay in the house.
The knights pushed past Wensley without hesitation. Mud and dirty water splashed up onto his clothes.
All he could do was watch.
These were men who had once stood before the statue of the Goddess of Dawnglow and vowed to protect the weak and to fight for all living beings. Now they forced open door after door and swept through House Fauce like a swarm of locusts. Cabinets splintered. Chests broke open. Locked boxes were smashed and emptied.
Holy relics that his family had honored for generations were wrapped up and carried away as if they were plunder taken from a conquered enemy.
A few knights even approached his parents' bodies and reached down, clearly intending to search the dead.
"Stop!" Young Wensley shouted. His voice cracked, and tears blurred his vision as he threw himself at the nearest knight, arms wrapping around a leg that might as well have been a stone pillar.
The knight kicked him aside without even breaking stride.
His small body hit the wall. Pain exploded across his back and drove the air from his lungs. He tried to push himself up, but his limbs trembled and refused to listen. All he could do was lie there and watch while his body shook.
"You… you opportunistic robbers…!"
The words scraped out of his throat like broken glass.
"Robbers?" The cardinal glanced down at him with a mild smile and a slight curve of his lips. "Young thief, you should be grateful for the Holy See's mercy."
"Your family has hoarded Dawnglow property without permission for three generations. Out of respect for the Goddess and the saints of the ages, we will only reclaim what belongs to us and we will not press charges. That is already more mercy than you deserve."
That night, Wensley watched while the Dawnglow Church stripped House Fauce bare.
They ransacked his home.
They violated the peace of his parents' bodies.
They took every heirloom, every relic, every last item of value the family had carried for generations.
Then they left, cloaks snapping in the storm, arms loaded with sacred treasures.
The house they left behind looked like the shell of something that had already died.
The boy lay on the cold floor with bruises blooming under his skin and his vision swimming. Tears covered his face. His parents lay unmoving beside him, no longer able to stand between him and the world.
From that night on, his name rotted faster than ever.
Rumors spread across the capital that Wensley Fauce was a fraud and a liar who claimed false divine blood.
He became a fake descendant of the goddess.
He became a thief who had stolen from the church.
Now, as the current Wensley replayed those memories, something twisted hard inside his chest.
He did not only feel sympathy for the original owner of this body.
He felt grief and anger for himself, for the version of him that had walked this path alone and shattered.
He could not stop a question from rising in his mind.
Were all these horrifying stories about Wensley Fauce simply the result of lazy writing in the world's script? Or was something much deeper hiding underneath them?
Someone had clearly put in serious effort to stain his name.
The problem was why.
Who would go to so much trouble to craft such detailed, wide reaching lies about a poor and powerless noble who lived on the edge of the capital?
The Dawnglow Holy See?
They had already taken every relic and treasure. They had already struck his family when it was already down and dying.
What else could they possibly want?
If someone truly guided those rumors from behind the scenes, then the speed and scale at which they spread proved at least one thing. The hand that moved them belonged to someone with real authority.
Someone high enough to sway the opinion of an entire kingdom.
So why would a person in that position waste time on a small bug like Wensley Fauce?
The cost did not match any clear reward.
He had no money. He had no influence. He had no allies and no territory anyone would covet.
In the larger picture, his existence was barely more than that of an ant.
Why, then, did someone not only want to crush the ant, but also grind its remains into the ground until they vanished completely?
What did they actually gain by destroying the life and reputation of one penniless, orphaned man?
Wensley stared up at the ceiling, his thoughts circling without landing.
He did not have an answer. But one conclusion was slowly taking shape.
His death in Citrus Crown might not be just the tragic and deserved ending of a cliche villain.
Someone, somewhere, had wanted Wensley Fauce erased long before the story ever learned to call him a demon.