21. In Search Of The Saintess

For more than a week I lay flat on my back, unable to budge. The Imperial physician Seraphina had brought in tended to me around the clock, though, which was the only reason I clawed my way back from death’s door in one piece.

“I’m off.”

Once she’d satisfied herself that I was on the mend, Seraphina left, taking the physician with her.

Off to where, exactly?

I only got the answer later. Her trip back to House Arne in the first place, it turned out, had been a solo move on her part, pulled off without Imperial permission.

That’s straight-up desertion.

The Empire had probably been turned upside down over it. A sitting Knight Commander vanishing without a word? Of course it had.

What in the world possessed her?

Prying the why out of that one, by the look of things, was going to take a good while.

Either way, our condition had improved a fair bit.

Eve, who’d been flickering on the verge of guttering out entirely, slowly sharpened back into focus and made a full recovery.¹

Elli came to my sickbed every single day, and every single time she burst into tears, so by mutual agreement we settled that she’d keep away until I was discharged.

Sorry, but it can’t be helped.

Wringing out bedding soaked through with her tears after every visit was a chore for the maids, and no picnic for me either, lying in it.

Leo, after that first day, barely showed his face. Not that it particularly stung.

Flat on my back, I replayed the fight against the Fallen Hero — Arne VII from the Trial of Arms in my head, dozens of times over.

Not good enough.

The more I went back over it, the angrier I got at myself.

Somewhere along the way, the fact that I was this game’s grizzled veteran had settled into a corner of my chest and made me cocky.

If Eve hadn’t been there, would I even have survived?

The odds I’d have died were sky-high.

Sky-high, nothing. I’d have flat-out croaked.

Let me restate that: I’d have died, no question.

And so my days went by, alternating between self-review sessions like this and idle chatter with Eve.

“Just as I thought. There’s not a single speck of mana in this body.”

The air we breathe is a cocktail of all kinds of things. Oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and the rest of them, every one acting on the human body each time we draw breath. That part was much the same in this other world, but for one thing that was different.

“But even now, as I sit here talking and breathing out, mana is flowing in and out of my body.”

This otherworld had an element called mana. Its concentration in the air rose and fell from one region to the next, but it was everywhere, and anywhere. And yet there was a clear reason I couldn’t feel a trace of it.

“The Curse of Eternal Snow I purged earlier — that’s a curse you can only pick up from prolonged exposure to the chill of the Eternalfrost Blossom, which blooms in the Northern Sea, at the continent’s far north.”

It had been the first curse I went after once I grasped what shape this body was in, because it was the deadliest thing grinding Arden down.

“Luckily, the purge took, and the chill that had been gnawing at the body is gone.”

Eve nodded as if she’d known all along. Like a presenter working a room, I checked her reaction before tapping my chest twice with a finger.

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

The Erosion of the Abyss was a curse you could contract, at a vanishingly low chance, from taking a hit of dark sorcery off a high-tier demon. That was how brutal the conditions for catching it were in the first place.

“There’s no dealing with this one right now.”

The only way to be rid of the Erosion of the Abyss was to drive holy magic stronger than the curse itself straight into my heart. And across the entire continent, you couldn’t have scraped together even three people capable of holy magic on that level.

“Yeah. A long, long time ago, I paid an absolute fortune to a Saintess and had her purge it for me.”

When you play games, sometimes it’s flat-out more efficient to eat a hit than to dodge every last one of the enemy’s attacks. The trade-blows strategy, as it’s called: give up flesh to take bone, just don’t catch the killing blow. That was how I’d had the rotten luck to pick up the Erosion of the Abyss and get dragged to within an inch of character deletion… but anyway, that’s why I’d gone straight off to find a Saintess to break it.

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

A halo glowed behind the Saintess’s head, and her pupils sparkled like stars. And “sparkled like stars” was no figure of speech; there were literal little star shapes drawn inside her pupils.

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

When she laid her hand on my forehead, warm light came spilling out. The curse icon on my status window flickered and started to fade. I let the sight lull me, sure I was finally being freed from this miserable debuff.

But this was right when the treatment hit about fifty percent.

Plonk.

The Saintess lifted her hand from my forehead. And just like that, the icon that had been fading flared right back to life, pumping out purple light with renewed vigor.

— 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. There was no believing the word “package” had just come out of a Saintess’s mouth. While I sat there gaping, she tacked on an explanation in a brisk, businesslike patter.

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

Her mental arithmetic outran anything her fingers could have managed on 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 grit my teeth and pay. The instant the payment cleared, the Saintess slipped her benevolent smile back on and picked the treatment up where she’d left off.

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

After that, once she’d worked out that I was a player with money to burn, the Saintess deliberately left the job half-finished, dragging it out and bleeding my wallet dry at every opportunity.

As she listened to my story, Eve’s mouth fell open like she couldn’t believe it.

“Who knows.”

Materialism was alive and well in this otherworld too. That money counted for a great deal in getting by was fair enough, but the future Saintess went too far by any measure. So far that even a loan-shark scumbag would suck his teeth and mutter, that’s a bit much.

That said, money-grubbing streak aside, her skill stood beyond all doubt on its own merits. I fixed Eve with a serious look.

“Personality aside, the fact that she’s a genius is rock-solid. There was no other Saintess on her level anywhere in the future.”

Among players, ask who the single greatest NPC was, bar none, and nine out of ten would name the Saintess.

— Brown hair down to her waist that sways when she moves, eyes that hold innocence and maturity all at once… aah, I love you, Saintess.

Of course, most of the players who crowned her the best were doing it for other reasons, nothing to do with performance.

At any rate, the future Saintess climbed all the way to the seat of Pope. Which meant raw holy power wasn’t the whole of it; her political instincts were no joke either.

“The Saintess lives in Orbis, the theocracy the Pope rules.² And as luck would have it, that country’s at daggers drawn with the Empire.”

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

“The Empire won’t sign off on a visit, and on top of that, present-day Orbis is in one of its closed periods, barring all outsiders, which is to say there’s not a chance in the world of seeing her right now.”

Once she’d assembled the picture, Eve asked again, her expression serious.

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

And then I threw off the blanket draped over me.

“To get the curse purged, where else.”

“That’s the Saintess of this era I’m talking about.”

The title of “the best” was never hers alone. The river flows on; the eras turn.

Just as today’s top idol becomes a legend with the passing years, the line of Saintesses had its own towering figures, each reigning over her own age.

“Elli!”

Today was the day I’d be discharged from this bed. Though what you could call a “discharge,” with the body nowhere near fine, was beyond me.

“Yes!”

In the distance, I spotted Elli wheeling a chair toward me. With her help, I hauled myself up into it with a groan.

I drew out the single book I’d been keeping close to my chest and held it up to her.

A History of House Arne.

Rattle, rattle.

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

From behind the chair, Elli spoke up in a worried voice.

“Will you really be all right?”

Elli’s eyes were fixed on the bandaged shoulder and leg I still hadn’t been able to unwrap.

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

With that short reply, I turned my eyes forward. At the end of the long, dark corridor stood a huge arched entryway that seemed steeped in stillness. As we drew nearer, a plaque reading Silent Hall greeted us.

And the plaque wasn’t the only thing that greeted us.

Valerian, our rival in the race for succession, was standing right there.

“What a sorry sight.”
“You’ll grant me this much, that I can crawl out even looking like a mummy, won’t you?”

Elli, pushing the chair behind me, must have remembered the herb-storeroom incident; the instant her eyes met Valerian’s, she flinched and scrambled to hide behind my back.

“But I don’t see Brother Lucius anywhere?”

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

— Creeeeak.

The massive arched doors that had stood firmly shut split apart to either side with a spine-chilling groan. Out of the gap wafted the smell of musty paper, tangled with a strange fragrance that tickled the nose.

“Lucius isn’t coming.”

Someone came plodding out of the darkness. The owner of the voice was a girl with a youthful face, a conical hat tugged down low over it, the thing bigger than my whole head.

“Word is the mental shock of failing the Trial of Arms was too much for him, so he’s shut himself up in his room.”

The girl cracked her mouth wide in a “haaauwm~” yawn and wiped away the tears pooled at the corners of her eyes. Then, dragging a staff as tall as she was, she shuffled right up under my nose, tipped the brim of her hat back a touch, and met my eyes.

I was reflected in the purple of the girl’s pupils.

“You’ve hung on a good while longer than I figured? I’d have bet on you being dead well before now.”

It was a greeting that all but doubled as a curse, but I just laughed and fired back.

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

The girl tilted her head, then snickered.

“So you know who I am.”
“How could I not? Failing to recognize the examiner of the Trial of Wisdom and the keeper of the house’s records archive — now that would be a crime worth dying for!”

I’d heard about her from Seraphina. She’d held an important post in the house for a very, very long time. In short, she was someone I needed to stay on at least halfway-decent terms with.

“Just open the door already.”

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

“Rude as ever. Must come from taking after that father of yours.”

But Rose didn’t so much as blink. If anything, before Valerian could get a word in, she gave her staff a single twirl and brought it down against the floor with a thump.

— KU-KU-KU-KOOOM!

The next instant, the ground heaved. The corridor’s solid stone floor rippled like water, and in the blink of an eye it swallowed us down into the deep dark of the Silent Hall.

“Y-Young Master!”

When the chair pitched at the sudden lurch, Elli shrieked and threw her arms around me. Thanks to her, I was spared a tumble out of it and onto the floor.

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

— Flash!

Out of the darkness, a sudden flood of light burst forth and lit the place up brilliantly.

“Wooow.”

The sight in front of us called to mind a giant’s study. Gigantic old tomes, easily more than three meters tall, lay sprawled open like beasts with their maws thrown wide. And across those open pages, magic portals in every color of the rainbow shimmered and rippled.

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

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

Rose looked down at me, grinned, and winked.

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