The Transmigrated Side Character

"She knew exactly how the story was supposed to end.
She just hadn't accounted for becoming part of it."

When twenty-one-year-old Lily Cooper - devoted Otaku, history student, and devoted reader of every isekai story ever written - wakes up in the body of Miss Lily Harper, third daughter of a middling Regency lord, she does the only sensible thing: she finds the library.

What she finds there changes everything. Tucked between two unremarkable volumes is a slim novel - a novel about the very world she's fallen into - and on its first page, two progress bars.

Female Lead Affection: 0%.
Story Progress: 1%.

The good news: Lily has read this kind of story four hundred times. She knows exactly how it ends - with the beautiful Linda Ashworth capturing the cold, impossibly handsome, famously unsmiling Augustus Everett, son of a Duke, in a perfectly arranged Regency romance.

The bad news: Lily is not the heroine. She is a side character - four sentences, one ballroom scene, a minor plot device - whose entire narrative purpose is to make Linda shine brighter.

She can work with that.

Armed with a decade of webtoon wisdom, anime strategy guides, and the particular stubbornness of someone who has never been able to leave a story unfinished, Lily throws herself into the role: engineering garden encounters, chasing cats through fountains in a maid's uniform, accidentally dropping an entire curtain on herself in the hero's bedroom, and delivering tea to approximately every wrong room in Everett House.

What she does not plan for is Augustus Everett himself - precise, private, and utterly baffling - who notices everything she does, says almost nothing about it, and leaves a botanical guide in the library with three words inscribed inside: I have noticed.

The progress bar is supposed to measure his feelings for Linda.

It is not measuring his feelings for Linda.

The Transmigrated Side Character is a warmly funny, slow-burn Regency romance for everyone who ever rooted for the background character, wondered what the supporting cast was actually thinking, and believed that some stories are better when the person who was never supposed to matter most decides, quietly and with great conviction, that she does.