The Genius Perfumer of the Fallen Cult - Chapter 2

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Team. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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The Genius Perfumer of the Fallen Religious Order Episode 2

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Prim’s eyes flew wide open at the coldness of the marble floor she felt against her back and the back of her head.

“—Gasp!”

Her stopped breath suddenly returned all at once, and everything felt sharply sensitive as if razor-edged.

The musty staleness of the dusty air in the old, worn temple, the scent of early summer’s slightly warmed sunlight, and the fragrance of young green shoots sprouting from the distant forest all came rushing at her simultaneously.

Yet nowhere among them could she sense the fragrance she had created last.

Each and every one of the fragrance materials she had personally selected, and even the lingering scent they had produced together, were clearly vivid in her memory, but at this moment she could feel none of it.

The Inquisitors who had come to arrest her were nowhere to be seen either.

Only the dry coldness of the ancient marble against her back, the aridness without a drop of blood or perfume, awakened her.

Varin had shown her two paths, and she had chosen.

She had achieved what she desired.

Without needing to look in a mirror to confirm, she could clearly feel it. That she had returned to when she was barely ten years old.

“Ah.”

Her own childish voice felt very strange.

Though she had never run once since being cursed instead of Rozien, she was certain this must be how it would feel to finally stop after running for a long time.

Looking down at her younger body, her heart suddenly began beating fast and violently, bringing an agitation she had never wanted.

As if she had truly become a child again, she felt incomprehensibly sorrowful, difficult, tired, and exhausted.

All the strength seemed to drain from her body, as if she couldn’t move at all. Prim collapsed back down as if falling.

“Just rest a little…”

She had endlessly created and sold fragrances while coveting only wealth and glory to escape this poverty and deprivation, exploiting her friend for a long time by using his guilt.

She had regretted only after losing him, and now that she had finally returned, she would stop such things and live a little more leisurely…

— Hey hey? No, no, no! Get a grip! You still have thirty million petals worth of road ahead! Time is precious, and you’re talking about resting!

Prim paused her thoughts for a moment.

Was it a hallucination?

— Oh, how heartless. You’ve already forgotten my voice? After I even let you defy time itself!

Prim sat up again. Now that her body had become about ten years old, the low altar was perfectly at eye level.

The dried flower bouquet placed on the altar was trembling.

It had been placed there by the Marseria Priest who tended this temple as an offering to the god, and while it might have been only somewhat wilted at first, it had completely dried up while he was busy caring for the children.

That completely dried flower bouquet trembled and emitted a faint light. The completely discolored petals crumbled to powder.

Prim recalled that voice. It would be harder to forget the voice of someone she had conversed with until the moment of death.

But back then it had clearly been like dozens of bells ringing simultaneously, or like running fingers across an instrument with a hundred strings, yet now…

“…Varin?”

— That’s right, it’s me! Me, Varin!

As she recognized him, a violent reaction burst forth and the flower bouquet half-crumbled.

Varin’s voice now sounded like an impatient sparrow chirping.

Prim blinked her eyes. The flower bouquet shook again.

— Haha, you must be surprised! Anyway, you don’t have time to rest here!

The words of gods are called divine oracles. Just before death, she had certainly thought it was a divine oracle. A divine oracle rippling with radiant scenery, sounds, and miracles.

But now there was only one trembling old flower bouquet. A flower bouquet quivering on the crumbling altar of a shadowy temple… Varin, noticing Prim’s gaze as she contemplated this gap, shrieked.

— The power I gained from the fragrance you gave me is now in the disappeared future! Now that you’ve returned to the past as you chose, that power I gained in the future has also disappeared!

“Ah, so that’s how it is.”

Varin looked at Prim, who remained chillingly calm even immediately after traveling back in time, and cried out.

— Listen carefully, because I’m squeezing out the leftover scraps of power from sending you back and the scent of this flower bouquet to convey these words. You must become a Perfuma Eteria again.

At the word “again,” Prim replied matter-of-factly.

“Varin, I was never a Perfuma Eteria before either.”

Only the continent’s greatest perfumers who passed three trials, received the blessings of the Twelve Gods, and gained recognition from the Emperor and the High Priest could bear the name ‘Perfuma Eteria’. It was a name permitted to only twelve people in the Empire.

This examination was held once every ten years, and when she was fifteen, her circumstances were too tight to participate, and she couldn’t participate in the exam when she was twenty-five. She had died and returned to the past before she could even take the test.

— No, you were already as good as a Perfuma Eteria! You created a fragrance that made me use the Heaven-Defying Art. If not you, who else could be called the continent’s greatest perfumer? It’s something no one else has ever done!

Prim quietly listened to Varin’s words. Not so much from agreement as from lacking the will to disagree.

She no longer desired money or glory.

In the past, her fragrances had fattened the gods and brought their blessings.

Those miracles and blessings had sharpened the swords of knights fighting against magical beasts and made her as wealthy as a star in the sky.

All that time, she had worn only clothes as soft and beautiful as angel feathers, never once setting foot on the ground herself.

Then she had gained an unexpected extra life. Though she planned to help Rozien enjoy the wealth and glory he should rightfully have had, that was all.

Since she had created a fragrance that made a god use the Heaven-Defying Art as Varin said, it no longer mattered what others thought, whether they acknowledged it or not.

As if reading her thoughts, the flower bouquet trembled and the remaining dried petals crumbled away.

— Oh, my little lily of the valley! That’s a ridiculous thought. You must create another fragrance like the one you offered to me.

“I remember the perfume formula, so I can just…”

— That fragrance won’t work anymore! It must be a new fragrance. A scent that never existed before, a fragrance that even the gods have never smelled even once. If you don’t create such a fragrance and offer it to me before the day you died…

“…?”

— …

“Varin?”

At that moment, all the petals turned to powder and fell, and Varin’s voice cut off abruptly.

Prim blinked and stared at the flower bouquet with only hard stems remaining, then called the god’s name again.

“Varin…?”

A few hard stems rattled, then even the linen string that had bound the bouquet rotted and fell, causing the stems to scatter with a thud. Dusty particles rose in clouds.

Prim blinked in confusion.

The god had disappeared mid-sentence.

It even seemed like he was trying to give some important warning or information, but the completely crumbled flower bouquet was silent.

The flower bouquet trembled one last time desperately, just the dry stems, then stopped.

‘What happens if I don’t offer the fragrance by the deadline?’

How could she continue the story, how could she hear this divine oracle again?

‘I’m squeezing out the leftover scraps of power from sending you back and the scent of this flower bouquet to convey these words.’

Varin had said that.

If it were a flower bouquet with harmonious and well-balanced fragrance, could Varin speak for longer?

Prim turned her head to look outside the old temple.

Early summer sunlight was streaming in through the half-open door. Prim looked down at her legs, specifically at her feet.

Prim raised her head again and looked outside. The warmed air of early summer was waiting for her.

Prim suddenly muttered.

“Life is still a thorny path.”

Her life becoming a ‘thorny path’ had happened when she was even younger than this.

Prim and Rozien, two orphans isolated from the world, had met on the streets. Rozien was like a stray dog with hair red as blood like that of magical beasts, hidden under old, worn burlap sack, and she probably looked similar—like a wretched beast.

The two leaned against each other like using each other as coats, lacking even the strength to be wary.

Their parents had abandoned them, the food they barely managed to scavenge disappeared the moment they put it in their mouths, and the money they pickpocketed was stolen again by others, but each other never disappeared or was taken away.

So to protect each other, for their one and only family they never thought they’d have, they could do anything.

Like pushing Rozien away at the moment when they were caught up in a Back Alley dispute and about to be hit by an unidentified curse while fleeing.

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