Necromancer Academy’s Genius Summoner - Chapter 164

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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Summoning Genius of the Necromancer School — Episode 164
“What in the world…?”
Lrete stared at the Sacred Flame that Simon had conjured, her expression one of utter disbelief. Then she stammered out her words.
“That’s it! You’ve finally developed faith in the great Goddess! All those passages from the Sacred Scriptures have borne fruit!”
“I don’t think that’s it.”
“Then what’s that blooming in your left hand? It’s proof that your faith has been fulfilled!”
Simon replied with a flat expression.
“The Goddess is a liar.”
“What, what? You bastard! Did you just—”
Whoosh!
Yet the Sacred Flame hovering over Simon’s left hand blazed even brighter and more radiant. Seeing this, Lrete’s mouth fell open in shock.
“Proof enough.”
Simon grinned wickedly.
“At least for me, Sacred Flame doesn’t come from faith in a deity.”
“That’s impossible!”
She clutched at her hair in anguish. Sacred Flame came from the Goddess—there could be no exceptions. Lrete felt the entire tower of faith she’d built collapsing beneath her.
At that moment, Simon asked with an embarrassed smile.
“So how do I turn this off?”
……
The girl, who had been burying her head in her knees in distress, slowly lifted her gaze.
“You ask for permission from the Goddess. ‘Thank you, great one, for lending me this divine power. I shall return to being an ordinary mortal now,’ or something like that.”
“Is that so?”
Simon attempted it exactly as Lrete had suggested.
‘This won’t work.’
Next, he tried the previous method: asking himself—not a deity—for permission to stop wielding the power. But it failed.
‘That’s not it. Something feels slightly different about this.’
Simon pondered for a moment, then changed his approach.
‘Actually, it’s normal for me not to use Sacred Flame.’
Poof!
The moment he thought that, the Sacred Flame in his palm vanished like a lie.
“Oh.”
Lrete’s eyes lit up.
“Did the Goddess hear your prayer?”
“No, it’s more like self-hypnosis. I just thought ‘I can’t use Sacred Flame,’ and it went out.”
Shiver.
Her kneeling form trembled like a aspen leaf. Sensing the danger, Simon tried to back away, but she moved faster.
Her face flushed crimson, she let out a wild cry and tackled him, pinning him to the grass in one fluid motion.
“You little bastard! You’re doing this on purpose, aren’t you?”
Flash!
A gleaming white Holy Spear materialized in her raised hand.
“Did you think I wouldn’t see through you? You’re trying to shatter my faith—me, the top student of Ephnel! Not a chance! Who put you up to this?”
“…What are you talking about? I haven’t lied once during this entire lesson.”
Simon spoke with unwavering conviction.
“My mother’s life is at stake—why would I lie? I’m more serious right now than I’ve ever been. If I needed to stop you, I’d do it after I get the materials from the Tree of Life. What good would shaking you up do me here and now?”
……
She bit her lip, trembling violently. Finally, she withdrew from Simon and sat down on the grass.
“Sigh.”
It was a sigh heavy with profound anguish.
“Lrete.”
“Wait.”
She reached out her hand and spoke.
“Please give me some time to think.”
“…Huh? Yes.”
Twenty minutes passed as she asked for time to collect her thoughts.
Worried, Simon asked again.
“If this is too much, we can stop here for today?”
“No.”
She lifted her head.
“…I was foolish.”
“Hm?”
“I simply haven’t yet grasped the Goddess’s grand design. What seems like perfect cause and effect to Her divine eyes appears distorted through my limited vision, clouded by insufficient cultivation. How shameful—my faith wavering over such a trivial matter. My arrogance as Ephnel’s senior scholar may have caused me to overlook something fundamental.”
Simon stifled a hollow laugh internally. It sounded like pure self-rationalization, but he decided to let it pass.
“Then, shall we move on?”
Next, Lrete drilled Simon until he could activate and deactivate Sacred Flame at will. She explained the precise mechanics of how Sacred Flame was generated and had him practice feeling its flow.
“Everything begins with sensing Mana.”
Whether Sacred Flame or Dark Element, the foundation was Mana.
If a Necromancer used an organ called a ‘Core’ within their body to refine Mana into the power of darkness,
a Priest felt as though their entire body was a Core. The moment Mana flowed out of the body and into the world, it lost its color and became Sacred Flame.
“Focus your mind a bit more.”
Of course, mindlessly expelling Mana was useless. To transform Mana into Sacred Flame required mentally overwhelming conviction—a conviction so absolute it bordered on brainwashing.
That ‘faith’ Lrete kept emphasizing. For Simon, firmly recognizing that he could wield Sacred Flame was the switch that ignited it.
‘……Now I understand why Ephnel has so many fanatics.’
In a way, Sacred Flame existed in the realm of madness. One had to recognize oneself as possessing a power one did not yet have.
If it didn’t exist but I believed it did, then it existed. If it did exist but I doubted it, then it didn’t.
Such fervent, fanatical faith—so close to brainwashing. Simon found himself wondering if religion itself wasn’t the system Sacred Flame users had devised to sustain that exact faith.
All complicated thinking is stripped away. Only ‘God’—something absolute, perfect, and infinitely good—remains. After that, everything becomes clear.
If one built faith upon that foundation and made it the base for awakening Sacred Flame, then the user could summon it freely.
Of course, if that faith wavered, one might crumble endlessly, like Francesca.
“Lrete.”
During a brief rest, Lrete—who had been reading the Sacred Scriptures to renew her faith—answered in her characteristically cynical voice.
“What is it.”
“In the ordinary course of things, how do Priests in the Sacred Federation learn to use Sacred Flame?”
She lifted her head.
“It is authority granted by the Goddess. There is no path but cultivation of faith.”
According to Lrete, every town in the Sacred Federation has a Monastery. When a child turns seven, they must visit the Monastery and undergo a mandatory test of ‘Holy Aptitude.’
Children who score above the threshold become obligated to become believers in the Goddess. They receive theological education at the Monastery for set hours each day and gradually deepen their faith in the divine.
“However, only an extremely small number can ascend from laity to the priesthood. To become a Priest, one must survive the 19 Ordeals.”
“What are those?”
Listening to Lrete’s account, it was indeed actual suffering.
Carrying a heavy Cross on pilgrimage, fasting for three months straight, passing through a thicket of thorns naked, sustained only by faith, walking into fire—merely hearing of such things made one’s skin crawl.
“Did you go through all of that yourself?”
“Of course.”
She answered with unmistakable pride, folding her arms across her chest.
“Only after completing every single one of those ordeals does one earn the right to enter the Holy Sanctum.”
The Holy Sanctum is the final, nineteenth Ordeal. One had to endure an entire week trapped inside a chamber where Sacred Flame flowed without end.
“……Why is everything on your side so inhumane and brutal?”
At Simon’s words, accompanied by a slow shake of his head, she snorted derisively.
“This is what faith and belief truly are. You people just dirty your hands a bit, conjure up this thing called a Core, and any dog or cow can set themselves up as a Necromancer. We exist on an entirely different level.”
“Fair enough. But what happens to an ordinary person if they’re exposed to that much Sacred Flame?”
“Small quantities of Sacred Flame can mend wounds, certainly. But a full week of exposure is different. Sacred Flame is a foreign element to an ordinary body. If they can’t endure it, they die, plain and simple.”
“……That’s insane.”
Through this brutal ordeal, a kind of ‘Mutation’ occurs in the human body, and those with extremely heightened Holy Aptitude are born. These are the ones who receive baptism and become Priests.
Those who give up midway are told their faith remains insufficient and must return to lay status, beginning from the first Ordeal again. And those who endure the full week but undergo no Mutation, falling short of the Holy Aptitude threshold, become ‘Clerics.’
“I’ve never heard of a Cleric before.”
“They’re just…… ahem, administrative staff at Cathedrals and Monasteries. They can use Sacred Flame, but nothing like we Priests can do.”
The Sacred Federation was a society of rigid hierarchy.
Commoner. Believer. Cleric. Priest.
Lower ranks must show absolute obedience to higher ranks.
Certainly, the Dark Alliance is also divided into commoners and nobility, but the distinction between ranks wasn’t nearly so stringent.
Even among commoners, soldiers, merchants, and Necromancers often wielded greater social authority than many nobles. At Kizen, skill and year of study mattered more than rank.
The difference was that the Dark Alliance inherited rank hereditarily, while the Sacred Federation began with everyone as a commoner, and rank changed based on the position one earned through trial.
“Certainly, if I’m going to properly pose as a novice Priest, I should study the culture of the Sacred Federation too.”
Lrete nodded at Simon’s words.
“Exactly. If you can wield Sacred Flame but don’t know what a Cleric is, the Heresy Inquisitors will grow suspicious.”
“Listening to your explanation, one question does occur to me.”
“What is it.”
“You said Sacred Flame comes from faith in the Goddess. But isn’t it really determined not by faith itself, but by the ‘Holy Aptitude’ you’re born with?”
Lrete immediately growled.
“Oh, really! If we’re going to split hairs like that, among Ephnel’s Priests with similar Holy Aptitude scores! Some rise to Bishop while others remain ordinary Priests their whole lives! How do you explain that?”
“It depends on one’s personal effort and competence in wielding Sacred Flame.”
“It’s faith! The difference is faith!”
She shouted.
“The stronger your faith and devotion to the goddess, the more Sacred power you can wield and the better you can control it! This isn’t something your petty objections can shake—it’s a fact proven by centuries of history, damn it!”
By that logic, shouldn’t the upper echelons of the Sacred Federation be free of people taking private gain or accepting bribes? Yet they hardly seemed to be paragons of integrity.
But Simon swallowed the retort, sensing that one more word would tip them into a real fight.
‘… All right, Lrete has her own values.’
She’d seen and learned things during her life so far. It only made sense that pushing back against her convictions simply because they differed from his own would breed resistance.
“That concludes our break.”
Lrete placed her hands on her knees and resumed her serious expression.
“I’ll admit it grudgingly, but your level of Sacred power is not inferior to the Priests who’ve passed through the Holy Sanctum. So we’ll move directly to the foundational curriculum—the level that novice monks you’ll be impersonating are learning.”
“That’s exactly what I was waiting for.”
Simon’s eyes gleamed. Lrete rummaged through her pack and spread out a series of textbooks she’d used directly in Ephnel.
“All sacred schools, including Ephnel, teach a total of nine subjects.”
Blessing Studies.
Holy Force Mechanics.
Healing Studies.
Holy Spirit Studies.
Protection Studies.
Divine Numerology.
Holy Combat.
Dark Defense Studies.
Mass Class.
She picked up a nearby twig and began writing letters on the ground. Watching this, Simon’s pupils dilated.
It was content he’d never heard before, yet why did it feel so familiar?
“Ephnel’s three essential subjects—students abbreviate them as the Three Essential Subjects. And below that are the Four Auxiliary Subjects.”
Simon let out a soft chuckle, and Lrete’s brow furrowed.
“What are you snickering about now? It’s irritating.”
“No, it’s just… I’m thinking that people really do end up in the same place no matter where they go.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Just moments ago, he’d heard talk of ordeals and the Holy Sanctum—concepts so culturally foreign they’d made him acutely aware of the distance between worlds. Yet now, looking at it this way, it all felt remarkably intimate.
Curse Magic and Blessing Studies, Dark Reversal Magic and Holy Force Mechanics, Martial Arts and Holy Combat—there were so many contrasting yet strangely parallel subjects.
“Why do you keep laughing!”
At Lrete’s indignant protest, Simon broke into a full smile.
“I’m just wondering what it would’ve been like if I’d gone to Ephnel instead of Kizen.”
“… That’s insane talk.”
Lrete pouted, but Simon paid no mind.
His heart was pounding.
Since he’d ended up learning Sacred power from Ephnel’s top student, he might as well do it properly.
“So which subject will you teach me first?”
His body itched with anticipation; he couldn’t contain it.
Show me what you’ve got to teach.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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