Rozemyne

Rozemyne (ローゼマイン Roozemain) is the new protagonist of Ascendance of a Bookworm after Myne’s purported death at the end of Part 2 Volume 4.

She is baptised as the daughter of Karstedt and Elvira, and later adopted by Sylvester and Florencia as an archduke candidate of Ehrenfest. Currently, she serves as the High Bishop of Ehrenfest’s temple and is a student at the Royal Academy.

Rozemyne has golden eyes and silky, midnight-blue hair that is unusually glossy. Her skin is quite pale due to spending her childhood bedridden by fevers. According to Karstedt, she has “a pretty face” and will “no doubt grow up to be a true beauty.” Due to her illness, she is small enough to pass as several years younger than her true age; as of Part 4 Volume 1, she is about 125 cm (4'1") tall.

She wears her hair in complex braids secured by hair pomades, usually with a decorative flower ornament. Her outfits are tailored by the Gilberta Company, typically using fabrics that match the divine colour of the current season.

Rozemyne cares deeply about her friends and loved ones, and she will act without hesitation to protect them from danger. However, she draws a clear distinction between those she feels responsible for and those she is indifferent to. Because she's strongly averse towards suffering and shows concern to others regardless of social status, she has a reputation for being compassionate and is often scolded for being “too soft”.

In addition, Rozemyne has a soft spot for younger siblings, like Kamil and Charlotte. She tries her hardest to look good in front of them, enjoys their praise and admiration, and is extremely protective towards them.

In private, Rozemyne still shows Myne’s carefree and lively personality. Although she learns how to conceal her emotions and act gracefully in the manner expected of a noble of her status, her candid nature occasionally still shines through. She has been reprimanded on several occasions for speaking too openly to high-status nobles, and she is aware that she is not very socially adept.

Deeply influenced by her experience as an apprentice merchant, Rozemyne prefers to be independent and self-sufficient. She believes that even nobles should not be above earning their own money, and insists on personally covering all her expenses. She also believes in providing fair compensation for anything of value, including products, services, and knowledge. Karstedt reflects that while she looks like a child, she has “the rational mind of an adult”. She has proven to be exceedingly competent when needed and capable of learning quickly.

Despite her mature outlook, she often rushes headlong into new situations without thinking, which can cause a wide range of unpredictable outcomes. She tends to lose her temper and her sense of perspective when her books or her loved ones are at stake.

Rozemyne is a false persona devised by Sylvester, Ferdinand, and Karstedt to allow her to become a noble for her own protection. Using a magic contract, Sylvester changed Myne’s name and forced her lower city family to swear to treat her as a stranger. Her old identity, Myne, is legally dead.

Originally, Sylvester suggested that Rozemyne be baptized as the daughter of Karstedt's late third wife, Rozemary, who, like Rozemyne, had an unusually high amount of mana. According to this story, Rozemyne was hidden in the Ehrenfest Temple in secret to protect her from the power struggle between Karstedt's first two wives and his third wife after Rozemary’s death.

However, Elvira immediately saw through this story. She pointed out that introducing Rozemyne as Rozemary’s daughter would reginite the familial conflict. Instead, she agreed to baptize Rozemyne as her own true daughter as a favor to Ferdinand. In private, Cornelius is told the original cover story: that Rozemyne is Rozemary’s daughter.

Rozemyne’s prior absence from the nobility was excused by the fact that nobles don't typically announce their children until their baptism. She was re-baptized the next summer and formally announced to the nobility, then immediately adopted by Sylvester as the daughter of the archduke.

To justify the baptism, Rozemyne’s offical age is one year younger than Myne’s. This also helped to explain her small size, since the slow growth caused by the Devouring makes her look at least two years younger than girls her age.

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Rozemyne continues to employ her existing attendants from her time as an apprentice shrine maiden, as well as her guard knight Damuel. She also gains additional guards and retainers to her service, as expected for a noble of her status.

 See Retainers of Rozemyne 

Spoiler from Part 4 Volume 6
 * Blessings: Rozemyne has shown great proficiency with a variety of blessings, and can invoke multiple gods at once. She occasionally gives blessings unintentionally by praying and singing religious songs. She successfully improvised a blessing that did not follow the exact wording of an established prayer.
 * Enhancement Magic: In order to compensate for her muscle atrophy resulted from prolonged hibernation in Jureve, Rozemyne learned enhancement magic with the help of Ferdinand's magic tools. By practicing with Bonifatius, she eventually became proficient enough to selectively enhance part of her body.
 * Highbeast: Rozemyne's highbeast Lessy is designed to be drivable. She can increase or decrease its size at will, allowing her to carry several passengers and their luggage together when necessary. She's also protected from most external harm when she is inside. It is modeled after a Red Panda, but also bears a resemblance to the foul-smelling and vicious grun.
 * Mana Affinities: Rozemyne possesses all seven elemental affinities, a rare occurrence normally found only in royalty and the archduke candidates of greater duchies.
 * Mana Capacity: Rozemyne has an extremely high mana capacity even by archduke candidate standards. At the young age of 7, she has already surpassed every other noble in Ehrenfest - including the Aub - except for Ferdinand. None of her peers come close when she enrolled in the Royal Academy.
 * Magecraft: Due to her own extensive reading and brewing practices under Ferdinand's strict guidance, Rozemyne's knowledge and skills in magic circles and potion brewing far exceeds her peers. Her cooking experiences as a commoner also gives her a significant advantage in ingredients preparation, especially when compared against fellow nobles that never did any manual labor in their life thus far.

Spoiler from Part 4 Volume 7
 * Embroidery: Despite her dislike of it, Rozemyne is actually decently skilled in embroidery for someone her age.
 * Language: Rozemyne is very skilled in anything to do with language. She is able to easily read several ancient dialects that even other high-ranking nobles can barely decipher. She's also very good at taking complicated texts and abridging them into simpler language suited for a specific target audience. An example of this is her series of children's bibles.
 * Math: Thanks to her studies as Urano, Rozemyne is very good at math. Her method of doing written arithmetic makes her unique in Ehrenfest, where most people use an abacus. She can also calculate large numbers in her head well enough to put even some merchants to shame.
 * Music: Due to Ferdinand and Rosina's extensive training, Rozemyne's skill in playing harspiel is way above her peers. She has a good ear for music and near-perfect pitch, allowing her to recreate many of the songs she heard as Urano.
 * Negotiation: Thanks to her experience as an apprentice merchant, Rozemyne is a very skilled negotiator, capable of getting terms in her favor even when negotiating against people with higher authority. She's also perceptive in people's true desires, allowing her to win people over and motivate them to act in her bidding.
 * Tactics: While not being a combatant herself, Rozemyne is capable of coming up with unconventional battle tactics on the fly to win against overwhelming odds, as shown during the treasure stealing ditter match with Dunkelfelger.
 * Teaching: In both the temple orphanage and the children's playroom in the Archduke's Castle, Rozemyne demonstrated great skill in teaching others and organizing study schedules. She is also a fast learner, able to keep up with Ferdinand’s demanding expectations.
 * Social Perception: According to Ferdinand Rozemyne is very skilled at noticing small gestures and movements and from them deducing the desires and reading the moods of conversation partners. This can be a very powerful tool for a noble, but unfortunately she lacks the social awareness to fully make use of this skill, since she often makes decisions on the spot without properly considering the respective stations of the people involved, their wider enviroment and the full consequences her actions might entail. Though if she manages the get all this under control he prognosticates her becoming a "powerful weapon" one day.


 * When suggesting ideas for her new name as a noble, she suggests "MyneTwo"(マインツー), "NewMyne"(ニューマイン) and "RedMyne"(レッドマイン).
 * Rozemyne is a portmanteau of Rozemary and Myne, designed to be long enough for a noble’s name, not too similar to Myne, but close enough that any accidental slips can be easily explained away.
 * Urano's father died young and she grew up mostly without a father figure in life, but Rozemyne has multiple father figures watching over her, namely Gunther, Benno, Ferdinand, Karstedt, and Sylvester.
 * Each Rozemyne's guardians have their own unique ways of "punishing" Rozemyne when they're exasperated with her antics:
 * Benno: drill her head with his fist
 * Ferdinand: pinch her cheeks
 * The first time Rozemyne was confronted with a noble's toilet and the slime within it, she ended up screaming in fear. For quite some time after she refused to visit the toilet alone at night.
 * Rozemyne is actually nearly a year older than Wilfried. However, due to her fake baptism, he is considered her “older brother” by a season.
 * Age is a complicated subject for Rozemyne, who has four different ages depending on the criteria:
 * Her chronological age as Myne, counted since she was born in Gunther's family.
 * Her official age as Rozemyne, which is one year younger than her chronological age.
 * Her biological age as Rozemyne, which is technically two years lower than her chronological age and one year lower than her official noble age, due to spending two years in a Jureve, which completely halted her growth.
 * Her mental age, which includes her 22 years as Urano, her five years as the original Myne, and all the years following that, except for the two years spent unconscious in her jureve.
 * Rozemyne was only ever beat Ferdinand in Reversi the first time they played and has only lost to him ever since. Though this is exactly what she anticipated would happen, which is why she went all-out on him despite him being a beginner.
 * She is the 3rd most popular light novel female character from 2020.
 * She enjoys that the atmosphere at the Royal Academy is a more relaxed, allowing her to act more like family with Cornelius, without any adults scolding them right away.
 * Rozemyne's favorite tea is teegabt and ergey at a ratio of 2:1 with plenty of grauvache milk.
 * Rozemyne's preferred massage oil after baths changes with her mood.
 * Despite having enough language proficiency to decipher ancient texts, Rozemyne struggles to understand the euphemisms used in noble love stories. She likens those to Indian Movies where crowds will rush in and start dancing all of a sudden, finds them interesting in the beginning but soon just skips them when reading, making it more difficult for her to understand them.
 * Since Yurgenschmidt doesn't have the concept of deformed, cute or abstract style drawing, Rozemyne's drawings are mostly viewed as horrendous. This is often exaggerated and parodied upon in the bonus manga.
 * This also extends to her highbeast Lessy, which is universally frowned upon as a "ridiculous grun" despite originally intended to be cute, though there are a few (mainly female) nobles who do appreciate Lessys cuteness, like Brigitte.
 * Though this is purely a matter of style, since the one time when she drew a picture of the king and queen of the gods without any styling, it earned astonished praise from Wilma.
 * Rozemyne shares the same great-grandfather (Previous Count Leisegang) with her retainers Cornelius, Hartmut, Leonore, Traugott, and Brunhilde.