Chapter 16
“Please take this too.”
“That’s far too much for the amount I paid.”
“Goodness, I’d feel even more ashamed accepting money from the person who saved my son’s life.”
It was only natural that I reacted awkwardly to such excessive kindness.
That was because I had received far more than I had paid for.
“Then I’ll accept it just this once.”
“That’s not something you get to decide, Priest.”
‘This is ridiculous.’
Their answer was so firm that I realized there was no point arguing further.
Yet it wasn’t as though I couldn’t understand how they felt.
Most of the soldiers whose lives had been spared after nearly dying were their sons, husbands, or fathers. They might also have been neighbors or friends.
Given that, it was only natural for the market merchants to be favorably disposed toward me.
‘If I add a little to the truth, I paid four copper coins for enough ingredients to last half a month.’
I looked down at the baskets in both hands.
The baskets were filled to the brim with the merchants’ goodwill; from grain to vegetables and fruit, it would have been faster to look for something they didn’t contain.
If there hadn’t been a limit to how much I could carry, I might have ended up taking away far more than this.
‘And they even gave me meat I can’t eat.’
I looked at the sizable chunk of meat taking up one side of a basket.
I considered returning the meat, at least, but soon changed my mind when I thought of Priest Malja.
Priest Malja was only a girl of fifteen or so.
Since she was still at an age when she was growing rapidly, a balanced diet was important.
‘I can’t stop the kid from eating meat just because I don’t.’
Remembering that monks fed meat to their child novices, I gripped the baskets firmly.
I returned to the church only after sweating under the excessive load.
“Did you buy all this?”
As I entered the living quarters, Priest Malja’s eyes widened.
“The merchants gave it to me out of goodwill. It’s something to be grateful for.”
“Wow, there’s so much.”
Priest Malja fussed, circling the baskets.
She had good reason to.
The baskets were packed with all kinds of ingredients, and some were piled high enough to block my view.
“Oh, come to think of it, did the workers eat the stew?”
I asked after belatedly remembering while setting down the load.
“Yes! They must have been hungry, because they cleaned it all out.”
“..That’s a relief.”
In more ways than one.
The most significant part was probably that not a bit of that porridge remained.
“Let’s move the ingredients first.”
It was just as I was about to lift the basket, pretending nothing was wrong.
Bang-!
A heavy boom rang out from beyond the building.
It sounded as though something large had toppled over.
Judging by the direction, it had definitely come from the chapel.
“Could you organize the ingredients for now? I’ll go check the chapel.”
“Ah, yes!”
The chapel was in the building right next to the living quarters.
The buildings were practically attached, but they were separate structures, so I had to go outside.
When I opened the door and entered the chapel, the first thing I saw was a haze of dust.
‘Hmm.’
A whole commotion had already taken place inside.
In the middle of the floor lay a statue of the goddess, clutching a bouquet to its chest, toppled over.
No, it wasn’t simply toppled over.
It had broken cleanly in two around the waist and was sprawled across the floor.
And beneath the wreckage, I could see a person’s legs.
“Are you all right?”
I hurried over once I realized what had happened.
At that, the workers who had been frozen around it turned to look at me, their faces drained of color.
“W-We have committed a sin deserving death! Priest!”
“..?”
Their reaction was strange.
But this wasn’t the time to ask why.
“Let’s rescue the person who’s trapped first.”
I headed straight for the fallen statue.
The stone statue was only about 1.6 meters tall, but since it was made of stone, even half of it looked quite heavy.
But the workers nearby only exchanged anxious glances and made no move.
“What are you doing?”
Urging them made no difference.
A few cautiously approached, but when they reached the broken statue, they couldn’t bring themselves to extend their hands.
“Lift it and move it immediately.”
“Th-That’s..”
“There’s a person trapped beneath it.”
Irritation colored my voice, but they still hesitated.
Whatever the reason, I couldn’t stand by and leave things as they were.
‘Power of Bless.’
I cast a buff on myself.
As a brilliant light enveloped my body, strength surged into my muscles in an instant.
It was a physical enhancement buff whose efficiency was poor unless one was a close-combat Awakened, so I almost never used it normally.
But a statue broken in two should be something I could lift somehow.
“Hngh!”
I grabbed the upper half of the goddess statue lying on the floor.
Could it have weighed roughly a hundred kilograms?
It might even have been more.
If it hadn’t been broken in two, it would have been far too heavy for me to even attempt lifting alone.
Borrowing the buff’s strength, I barely lifted the chunk of stone and pushed it aside.
Thud-
When the stone hit the floor, dust rose again.
Only then was the worker trapped beneath fully revealed.
“Ugh..”
Their waist was bent to a grotesque degree.
Perhaps because they had been pinned, they seemed unable to breathe properly, and their complexion looked poor.
‘Heal.’
But as long as they weren’t dead, I was confident I could save them.
Light blossomed from my fingertip and sank into the patient’s body.
Creak-crack-
Their twisted waist returned to its proper position, followed by a series of sounds as their broken bones set back into place.
Their body, grotesquely misaligned, quickly regained its original form.
Only after confirming that even their precarious, near-breaking breaths had become calm did I withdraw my hand.
Afterward, I turned to the workers around me.
Their faces were still rigid.
“Let’s hear the reason.”
The gentle expression I usually wore when pretending to be a priest was nowhere to be seen.
When I looked at them with cold eyes, the workers’ shoulders hunched.
It took some time to get an answer.
One worker, after hesitating for a long while, opened their mouth in resignation.
And after hearing the explanation all the way through.
“..So.”
I was speechless for a while, too dumbfounded to say anything.
“You mean that after knocking over and breaking the goddess statue, you couldn’t touch the person because you were afraid that disturbing it would bring divine punishment?”
No one could answer.
Some even lowered their heads.
It was hard to hide my feeling that they were pathetic.
No matter how strong religion’s influence was here, I had never imagined they would be unable to touch a person dying right before their eyes simply because of one broken statue.
“..Do you see that statue as Lady Iris?”
The workers looked puzzled.
They gazed at the broken goddess statue as though the answer were obvious.
Their expressions seemed to say that they didn’t understand why I was asking whether Iris’s statue looked like Iris herself.
“Don’t tell me you’ve been worshiping a lump of stone rather than a god all this time?”
Only then did some of their eyes widen, as though they had understood my meaning.
“And do you really think Lady Iris is the sort of person who would grow angry just because a single stone statue modeled after her was broken?”
Truthfully, I didn’t know.
But if the very being who tolerated even my impersonation were to get angry over something as trivial as a statue being broken, it wouldn’t make sense.
Even if she did get angry, lightning would have struck me first.
“If anything, worrying about the statue first while a person was dying would be the true insult to Lady Iris.”
The workers’ expressions hardened further.
“You don’t seem in any state of mind to continue working, so go home for today.”
I glanced at the worker lying on the floor.
“Take them with you and let them rest as well. The treatment is finished, but it would be best for them to take it easy for the rest of today.”
“..Yes, Priest.”
“And I won’t hold you responsible for this incident, either. Don’t worry needlessly.”
Only then did a faint hint of relief appear on the workers’ faces.
But perhaps that relief did not make them forget their fear, because they bowed their heads several times while supporting their injured companion and hurried out of the chapel.
“…”
Once everyone had left, the chapel became quiet as if by magic.
All that remained in the spot where the dust had settled was the broken goddess statue.
I dropped onto a pew in the chapel and met the statue’s gaze.
Straight ahead, a statue of Iris, severed below the waist, lay fallen with a bouquet clutched to its chest.
Perhaps their reaction had been only natural.
This was a world where religion’s power was extraordinarily strong, after all.
If anything, I might have been the strange one for lifting and tossing aside a statue without a second thought.
‘Tsk, even so, someone was dying.’
I couldn’t even manage a hollow laugh when I recalled how they had been unable to reach out despite their companion dying.
“It’s so absurd I can’t even laugh.”
It was at that moment.
-I know, right.
An unfamiliar voice chimed in from the empty chapel.
“Am I hallucinating?”
As I tilted my head, wondering if I was hallucinating at a voice that couldn’t possibly be heard, that same voice spoke once more.
-Of course not.
‘It must be a hallucination.’
The speech pattern was one I had seen several times in the Gallery, and it instead convinced me that this was a hallucination, so I used Purification on myself.
‘Purification.’
-Puhahaha!
But the voice was still ringing in my ears.