Chapter 14
The bell rang.
When study time ended, it was time for worship again.
The evening chapel showed a different face from the morning one.
The western sun streamed through the stained glass, spilling across the stone pillars and floor and painting them in a riot of colors.
The psalms being chanted were somehow more melodic, evoking a mercy that seemed to forgive and embrace everything.
If morning worship was a destructive apparatus that shattered the self with sound and darkness bordering on violence, then evening worship was an apparatus of appeasement, gently tightening around wounded souls like cotton wool.
—Impressive.
This meticulously calculated performance.
Even with its long history, could they really have refined it this much?
The Church was deeper than I had expected.
When worship ended, everyone left the chapel in silence.
No one spoke; only the rustling of robes and footsteps echoed through the stone corridors.
Philip and I returned to our room in silence, then lay down on our beds.
Soon, Philip began breathing softly in his sleep.
It was no wonder. He'd been on his feet since before dawn and had eaten only one meager meal.
After checking once more that Philip was asleep, I used magic to heal my exhausted body.
I didn't neglect my daily mana training, either.
I quietly circulated my mana, as if to drive the lingering effects of worship from my body.
The next morning.
It was hard to tell if it could even be called morning yet.
Once again, the bell rang to signal wake-up.
After morning worship, the day's tasks were assigned.
I was continuing to clean the library today.
I dusted the shelves as I'd been taught yesterday.
The priest was there today, too.
He had a book open on a lectern and was writing something beside it.
As I cleaned, I approached the priest and opened my mouth as though the words had slipped out before I could stop them.
"T-together... the path... of light... we shall... walk?"
The priest turned around.
"Ah, I'm sorry for looking without permission. I saw the letters I learned yesterday—"
The priest's eyes widened.
"Could it be... you read this?"
He pointed to a passage in the book.
I nodded without a word.
"...Perhaps you truly are illuminated by God—by God's light."
The priest let out a breath and took a book from the shelf.
He opened it and set it gently on an empty lectern.
"Try reading this."
He said that and looked at me.
"O Lord. We... praise? you..."
I read it haltingly on purpose.
"Lord. Did you pour so much light into this small vessel?"
The priest murmured in awe.
—Did I overdo it?
No, he probably wouldn't have let me see the books otherwise.
Even if I'd learned the letters, all I knew was how they sounded.
I picked out unfamiliar words and guessed their meanings from context.
I wouldn't be here much longer.
I crammed as many words into my head as I could.
Starting the next day, study time moved from a corner of the courtyard to the scriptorium.
In the frigid stone scriptorium, I sat before a wax tablet.
Each time I pressed the stylus into the wax, its hard, cold surface was scraped away ever so slightly.
It felt less like writing and more like carving.
"Don't hold the stylus too flat. Move it as though light were streaming down from heaven, with a prayer in your heart."
Johan spoke solemnly, watching my hand closely.
The stylus caught in the wax, and my line wavered slightly.
"Again. This time, make the line straighter, as if reaching heaven."
If the line wavered even a little, Johan quickly smoothed the wax with a spatula.
I took a deep breath and lifted my head.
I quietly composed myself.
"I told you not to look away... but very well. This is what it means to give form to the words of the Lord."
With Johan's permission, I looked around.
Beside me, an experienced monk carved the letters one by one.
He wasn't writing as though gliding a ballpoint pen across the page.
He seemed to put his whole body into each motion: setting down the nib, drawing it, then stopping.
By the window a little farther away, in the choicest seat where the light poured in brightest, sat an illuminator.
Rather than writing, he used his brush to apply tiny flecks of gold leaf, fixing them in place with glue.
The blue of lapis lazuli and the vivid red extracted from insects transformed the book into a jewel beneath his hands.
Elsewhere, a monk carefully shaved away a mistake with a knife.
His expression was utterly serious, as if he were performing surgery. A mistake wasn't erased; it was the pain of cutting away flesh.
"Letters don't fall from heaven. They crawl across the earth, costing us our lives, and only then does a single character take root on this tablet."
Johan's solemn voice rang out.
Their work wasn't simply recording information; it was prayer itself.
Every moment was offered up as a sacrifice to God.
If I so much as mentioned movable-type printing here, I could be hauled before the Inquisition for blasphemy against God.
The priest had let a child like me see precious books.
And they weren't merely precious; to them, books were sacred.
—So I'd earned that much trust.
I quietly smirked to myself.
◇
Several days passed, and I went to work in the library again today.
Today, I wasn't cleaning the library; I was helping the priest.
The priest copied the text onto parchment, consulting the wax tablet in front of him.
At the end of each line, he paused and quietly waited for me.
Carefully, I sprinkled fine sand over the letters the priest had just written.
I waited for the sand to absorb the ink and dry, then tilted the parchment and tapped it to shake off the excess.
Finally, I brushed away the remaining grains with a bird's feather.
The priest continued writing.
It seemed to be a theological debate.
I brought to bear every word I'd picked up lately, desperately following the meaning and trying to understand the content.
I couldn't grasp the debate in detail, but I did learn something.
The Grace faction, which considers all healing magic to be divine grace, seemed to be dominant in the Church.
However, it seemed that fundamentalists, who regarded Light Magic as supreme, had been gaining influence lately.
—My magic was Life Magic.
I'd have to watch out for the fundamentalists.
The priest himself could use Holy Magic, and judging by the text, there was no doubt this temple belonged to the Grace faction.
Chris could use Light Magic, but they came from this temple.
Apparently, not everyone who used Light Magic was a fundamentalist.
In any case, it was a big deal to learn about the factions before going to the cathedral.
If the Church wasn't monolithic, then its factions must be vying for power internally.
In other words, by gently guiding the flow of that power, I could move a vast organization like the Church.
I turned strategies over in my mind, wondering how to conduct myself at the cathedral.
Just then, the quiet library door opened.
Chris, back from the cathedral, appeared.
They came in slowly, walked over to me, and told me:
"I've arranged an audience with the bishop. We're going to the cathedral tomorrow afternoon."