21. In Search Of The Saintess

For more than a week I lay flat on my back, unable to budge, but the Imperial physician Seraphina had brought in looked after me around the clock, so I made it past death’s door in one piece.

“I am off.”

Once she’d confirmed I was improving, Seraphina left, and the physician went with her.

Off to where, exactly?

I only heard about it later, but apparently her coming back to House Arne in the first place had been her own unilateral move, made without Imperial permission.

That’s straight-up desertion.

The Empire had probably been turned upside down over it. Of course it had. A sitting Knight Commander had vanished without notice.

What in the world possessed her?

Getting at the why of it looked like it would take quite a while. In any case, our state had improved a fair bit.

Eve, who’d been flickering on the brink of going out, gradually sharpened from a haze back into focus and made a full recovery.¹

Elli came to my sickbed every single day and burst into tears every single time, so we agreed by mutual consent not to see each other again until I was discharged.

Sorry, but there’s no helping it.

Changing out bedding soaked through with her tears after every visit was a chore for the servants, and a chore for me too, lying there.

Leo, apart from the very first day, didn’t really come by, and I wasn’t particularly hurt by that.

While I lay there, I replayed the fight with the Fallen Hero — Arne VII from the Trial of Arms in my head, dozens of times.

Not satisfied.

The more I went back over it, the angrier I got at myself. The fact that I was this game’s grizzled veteran had settled into some corner of my heart and made me complacent. Would I have survived if Eve hadn’t been there? There was a very high probability I would have died.

High probability my ass — I’d have straight-up croaked.

To restate: I’d definitely have died.

So I spent my days alternating between self-feedback sessions like this and idle chatter with Eve.

“Suhan: Just as I thought — there’s not a single mote of mana in this body.”

The air we breathe contains all sorts of components. Oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen and so on, and every one of them affects the human body when we breathe it in. That part wasn’t much different in this other world, but there was one thing that was different.

“But even right now, while I’m talking and exhaling, mana is moving in and out of my body.”

This otherworld had an element called mana. Its concentration in the air varied from region to region, but it was everywhere, and anywhere. And yet I couldn’t feel it, and there was a clear cause for that.

“The Curse of Eternal Snow I purged earlier? You only catch that one from long exposure to the chill of the Eternalfrost Blossom, which blooms in the Northern Sea, at the continent’s far northern edge.”

It was the first curse I’d set out to purge once I realized the state of this body, because it was the most lethal thing wearing Arden down.

“Luckily, the purge worked, so the chill that was eating away at the body is gone.”

Eve nodded as though she already knew. As if I were giving a presentation, I checked her reaction before tapping my chest.

“But the Erosion of the Abyss you just mentioned — that one’s lodged right here in Arden’s heart.”

The Erosion of the Abyss was a curse you could catch, at a very, very low probability, from being hit by a high-tier demon’s dark sorcery. That’s how hardcore the conditions were just for catching it.

“There’s no way to deal with this one right now.”

Getting rid of it meant slamming holy magic stronger than the curse itself directly into my heart, but across the entire continent, the people capable of that kind of holy magic wouldn’t even add up to three.

“Yeah. A long, long time ago, I paid a Saintess an absolute fortune to purge it.”

When you play games, it’s sometimes more efficient to take a hit than to dodge every single attack the enemy throws. It’s the so-called “trade-blows” strategy: give up flesh, take bone, just avoid the fatal blow. That was how I’d unluckily caught the Erosion of the Abyss and gotten dragged within an inch of character deletion… but anyway, that’s why I’d gone straight off to find a Saintess to break the curse.

— Oh dear, you poor little lamb. You’re writhing in the agony of the Abyss, I see.

A halo shone behind the Saintess’s head, and the pupils of her eyes glittered like stars. That wasn’t a figure of speech, either. There were literal little star shapes drawn inside her pupils.

— By the Goddess’s authority, it shall be washed away as if it had never been.

She laid her hand on my forehead and a warm light came pouring out. The curse icon on my status window started to flicker and fade, and I let the sight reassure me. At last, I believed, I was being freed from this miserable debuff.

But then, with the treatment about fifty percent done…

Plonk.

The Saintess lifted her hand from my forehead, and just like that, the icon that had been fading flared back up, vigorously pumping out purple light.

— On the basic course, this is going to be quite impossible. You’ll need to add the ‘Premium Purification Package’ if we’re to root it out properly.

I doubted my own ears. I just couldn’t believe the word “package” had come out of the Saintess’s mouth. And while I sat there gaping, she added an explanation in a very brisk, businesslike patter.

— As you can see, this is a Tier-1 curse. The holy water consumption is three times the base. And on top of that, it’s the weekend, so you know there’s a ‘holiday surcharge,’ yes? Plus a 10% Cathedral Construction Fund donation on top of that, plus my labor and service fee, totaling…

Her mental math went faster than fingers could have hit a calculator, and she beamed.

— That’ll be an additional 5,000 gold pieces. Up front, of course.

In the end, I had no choice but to bite the bullet and pay. The moment payment was confirmed, the Saintess put her benevolent smile back on and resumed the treatment.

— Without sufficient sincerity in your wish for salvation, miracles do not occur, you see.

After that, now that she knew I was a player with money to throw around, she deliberately refused to heal me completely, dragging it out and bleeding my wallet dry every chance she got.

Eve listened to my story with her mouth hanging open, as if she couldn’t believe it.

“Who knows.”

Materialism was the same in this otherworld too. Money was a very important factor in getting by, fair enough, but the future Saintess was too much by any standard, to the point that even a loan-shark scumbag would suck his teeth and go, that’s a bit much.

Yet money-hungry character aside, her skill was beyond all doubt on its own merits. I fixed Eve with a serious look.

“Personality aside, she’s a genius, no question. In the future, there wasn’t another Saintess anywhere near her level.”

Among players, if you asked who was the absolute top NPC bar none, nine out of ten would name the Saintess.

— Brown waist-length hair that swishes when she moves, eyes that hold purity and maturity at the same time… aaah, I love you, Saintess.

Of course, most of the players who picked her as the best were doing so for other reasons, not on performance grounds.

In any case, the future Saintess rose all the way to the position of Pope, which meant it wasn’t just her sheer holy power. Her political savvy was no joke either.

“The Saintess lives in Orbis, the theocracy the Pope rules.² As luck would have it, that country and the Empire are at each other’s throats.”

She was being raised in a country hostile to the Empire.

“The Empire won’t allow a visit, and on top of that, Orbis isn’t letting outsiders in these days. Which is to say, there’s absolutely no chance of seeing her right now.”

Once she’d put the situation together, Eve asked again with a serious expression.

I gave a shrug. Just as Eve had said, right now it was impossible.

And then I threw off my blanket.

“To get the curse purged, where else.”

“I meant the Saintess of this era.”

The title of “the best” wasn’t her exclusive property. The river flows on, and the eras change. The way today’s top idol becomes a legend with the passage of time, the history of Saintesses has its own peak figures who reigned over their respective eras.

“Elli!”

Today was the day I was being discharged from this bed, though what kind of “discharge” you can call it when the body’s nowhere near fine, I couldn’t say.

“Yes!”

In the distance, I could see Elli wheeling a wheelchair toward me, and with her help I groaned my way up into it.

I pulled out a single book I’d been carrying close to my chest and showed it to her.

A History of House Arne.

Rattle, rattle.

The sound of the wheelchair’s wheels rolling over the cold stone floor echoed through the underground corridor.

Elli, pushing from behind, asked in a worried voice.

“Will you really be all right?”

Her eyes were fixed on the bandaged shoulder and leg I hadn’t yet been able to unwrap.

“I said I’m fine. What’s there to worry about with you right here beside me?”
“…But I can’t actually do anything to help you.”
“Aw, that’s not true.”

After that short reply I fixed my eyes forward. At the end of the long, dark corridor I could see a huge arched entryway that felt steeped in stillness, and as we drew closer, a plaque labeled Silent Hall greeted us.

The plaque wasn’t the only thing that greeted us. Valerian, our rival in the succession contest, was here too.

“What a sorry sight.”
“Even looking like a mummy, I can still crawl out here. That counts for something, doesn’t it?”

Elli must have remembered the incident in the herb storeroom, because the moment her eyes met Valerian’s, she flinched and tried desperately to hide behind my back.

“But where’s Brother Lucius? I don’t see him anywhere.”

At my question, Valerian’s brow scrunched up hard.

— Creeeeak.

The massive arched doors, firmly shut until now, split open to either side with a spine-chilling groan, and from within, the smell of musty paper and a strange fragrance that tickled the nose came wafting out at us.

“Lucius isn’t coming.”

Someone came plodding out of the darkness. The owner of the voice was a girl with a young face, wearing a conical hat pulled down low, one that looked far bigger than my entire head.

“They say the psychological shock from failing the Trial of Arms was too much for him — he’s locked himself in his room.”

The girl opened her mouth wide in a “haaauwm~” yawn and wiped away the tears that had gathered at the corners of her eyes. Then, dragging along a staff as tall as she was, she shuffled right up to my nose, lifted the brim of her hat a touch, and met my eyes.

I was reflected in the purple of her pupils.

“Oh? You’ve lasted a good while longer than I figured. I thought you’d be dead ages ago.”

It was a greeting that was practically a curse, but I just laughed and shot back.

“It’s an honor to meet you while I’m still alive, Lady Rose.”

The girl tilted her head, and then she snickered.

“To think you know me.”
“How could I not? Not recognizing the examiner of the Trial of Wisdom and the keeper of the house’s records archive — that would be a crime worth dying for!”

I’d heard about her from Seraphina. She’d held an important office in the house for a very, very long time. In short, this was a figure I needed to be on at least somewhat-good terms with.

“Open the door, and be quick about it.”

Valerian, who’d been listening to our exchange, snapped impatiently.

“Still as rude as ever. You must get it from that father of yours.”

But Rose didn’t bat an eye. In fact, before Valerian could fire back, she gave her staff a single twirl and struck the floor with it, thump.

— KU-KU-KU-KOOOM!

In the next instant, the ground shook. The corridor’s solid stone floor rippled like a wave, and in the blink of an eye it swallowed us into the deep darkness of the Silent Hall.

“Y-Young Master!”

When the wheelchair tipped at the sudden shaking, Elli shrieked and threw her arms around me, and thanks to her I was spared from rolling out onto the floor.

Before I knew it, our surroundings had turned pitch black.

— Flash!

In the darkness, a sudden flood of light burst out and lit up the space brilliantly.

“Wooow.”

The sight before our eyes called to mind a giant’s study. Gigantic old tomes that easily stood more than three meters tall lay open, spread out like beasts with their maws thrown wide, and over those open pages, magical portals in every color of the rainbow shimmered and rippled.

The girl, who at some point had floated up into the air on a broomstick, looked down at us and spoke.

“I am Rose, keeper of the records archive of House Arne.”

She looked down at me, grinned, and winked.

“Welcome, you brats, to the Trial of Wisdom.”