The Saint’s Manual for Redemption - Chapter 107

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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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Chapter 107
“What happened with Swallen Plain? Has there been any talk of returning it?”
If the Saint had acted unilaterally, the Imperial Palace would never have remained silent. Protests would have come immediately, and the reassignment of Swallen Plain would naturally have been completely nullified.
Yet the Imperial Palace had willingly accepted the excommunication—no matter how he turned it over in his mind, nothing added up.
The Priest shook his head carefully, gauging the Archbishop’s mood.
“There has been no such request.”
The Archbishop’s face hardened. They would accept the excommunication but hand Swallen Plain over to the Temple as agreed? That made no sense.
It meant there was another transaction between the Imperial Palace and the Saint that he knew nothing about.
“Bring me the Second Prince’s Excommunication Edict at once!”
His voice shook the study with the force of his fury.
Moments later, the Archbishop snatched the edict the Priest had hurried to retrieve and began scanning it rapidly.
His eyes came to a halt at the section listing the grounds.
Grounds: Violation of Divine Authority
(The crime of placing the Imperial Palace’s agent within the Temple and installing Surveillance Magical Tools in the Saint’s Chamber to monitor the representative of God)
The Archbishop’s hands began to tremble visibly.
The Surveillance Magical Tools—this was the first he’d heard of it. And Ciela had not breathed a single word of this to him.
Just days ago, she had stood before him with an unbothered face, speaking of signing Indulgences and the Religious Order’s revival.
She had smiled as though they shared the same ambitions, then turned around and completed separate negotiations with the Emperor while finalizing the Second Prince’s excommunication.
Only now did the Archbishop realize what he had overlooked.
The Saint had promised to sign the Indulgences—she had never promised not to excommunicate the Second Prince.
The crime of attempted murder of the Saint would be forgiven through the Indulgences, but a separate offense of Violation of Divine Authority would be newly applied to justify his excommunication.
His grip on the edict tightened.
“This damnable…”
The oath that escaped him in a low voice quickly gave way to fury.
“We needed the Second Prince to remain! Only then would the First Prince continue to depend on us! This was not the time to cast him out!”
If the rival disappeared from the succession struggle, the First Prince would have far less reason to lean on the Religious Order’s support. Their value lay in the threat itself—the need to be needed.
The Archbishop had intended to make the First Prince the next Emperor.
But that strategy worked best so long as the Second Prince remained a viable competitor. The First Prince had to remain perpetually insecure, forever dependent on the Religious Order’s backing and influence.
And then Ciela had shattered that delicate balance in one stroke.
Worse still was the fact that the Imperial Palace had accepted it. While he’d been blind to the truth, the board itself had shifted beneath him. Crumpling the edict in his fist, the Archbishop could contain himself no longer and let out a roar of rage.
At the same moment.
Ciela was sitting calmly in her chamber, reading documents, when she suddenly flicked her ear.
“Is someone cursing me?”
Meanwhile, Arden had learned of the Second Prince’s excommunication only belatedly.
“The Second Prince was excommunicated…?”
His gaze drifted slowly in the direction of the Saint’s Chamber. His clear blue eyes narrowed to thin slits.
He certainly hadn’t heard that news from Ciela.
Arden stood in silence for a moment, staring toward the end of the corridor where the Saint’s Chamber lay.
Ciela had a secret he didn’t know about. And that fact troubled him far more than it should.
***
Not long after the Second Prince’s excommunication turned the Holy Sanctuary upside down, a letter arrived from Croen Duchy.
But it wasn’t just a letter that came.
“What is this?”
“An engagement gift from His Grace the Duke of Croen, sent to Your Highness.”
I took the box that Rilet offered with careful hesitation and opened the lid—and found myself at a loss for words.
I’d expected perhaps aquamarine or topaz, the sorts of stones I’d mentioned, but the ring resting on black velvet was in an entirely different category from what I’d imagined.
“…Surely not.”
Each time it caught the light, a deep, rich blue flashed brilliantly across its surface. Even I, with no particular expertise in gems, could see this was no ordinary piece.
“Yes, Your Highness. It appears to be a blue diamond, by every measure.”
In this world, too, diamonds commanded high prices, and among them, naturally occurring blue diamonds were jewels of extraordinary rarity.
Even high-ranking nobles who possessed one in their family treasuries would treat it as a heirloom to be passed down through generations.
I managed to close my mouth before it fell open completely.
Wait—a contract engagement, and he sends something like this?
Had I drastically underestimated the Duke’s wealth? Royal-born or not, could a Duke really send something like this to a contract engagement partner? I hastily unfolded the accompanying letter. And after reading just a few lines, I went rigid again.
The ring was left to me by my mother, God rest her soul.
I reflexively shut the box.
This is insane. The blue diamond alone was overwhelming, but now it’s a family heirloom.
I found myself pushing the ring box away as if I’d just been handed a bomb. Good heavens—was I really supposed to use someone else’s mother’s keepsake as a mere contract engagement token?
Of course, based on all the romance novels I’d read, the moment such an object was presented as the symbol of a contract engagement, the ending was essentially already written.
‘This ring is the only keepsake my mother left me.’
‘Is it really all right for me to accept something so precious?’
‘Think of it as a token of trust for our arrangement.’
And then there would be all manner of complications, until the provisional contract became real, and later when one party tried to return the ring citing divorce or broken engagement, the man’s side would absolutely refuse to take it back.
It was a textbook Romance Fantasy Novel cliché.
The problem was that I had no intention of becoming the protagonist of that cliché.
I cracked the box open again and stared at the ring.
……It was undeniably beautiful.
But beautiful was beautiful, and a duke was a duke.
With Croen, I could envision an alliance at most—nothing beyond that. Our temperaments were too far apart to begin with.
My ideal for a thousand years had been Valente.
It was a preference that hadn’t changed even after dying and being reborn, jumping five hundred years ahead—so why would it suddenly shift just because a contract engagement partner had appeared?
Come to think of it, if we’re talking about looks alone, Arden actually came far closer to my taste, bearing such a striking resemblance to Valente as he did.
He would have been perfect if his personality were just a touch less dim-witted and hapless.
If only he weren’t that suspicious sort who smiled with that face as though peering straight through one’s secrets, who carried surveillance magical tools of unknown origin without a care, and who caught criminals before I could even order an investigation.
I turned my gaze back to the duke’s letter. Once I’d passed the part about the engagement ring, the main matter began.
Your resourcefulness impressed me once again.
My eyebrows rose involuntarily.
Resourcefulness? For what?
As I continued reading the letter, I soon understood what he meant.
The duke was referring to my excommunication of the Second Prince.
More precisely, he meant how I’d granted an indulgence for the attempted murder of the Saint, secured Swallen Plain as a temple domain, and yet used the separate charge of violating divine authority to ultimately excommunicate the Second Prince.
I narrowed my eyes as I held the letter.
The duke knew. He knew the Second Prince wouldn’t have been excommunicated by the attempted murder alone.
He was willing to make the Second Prince his enemy, all to shake my hand. He must have been thoroughly terrified of the arch-demon Raum sleeping beneath the sanctuary.
Well, if someone asked whether you’d rather fight an arch-demon or the Second Prince, the answer was obvious—the Second Prince. At least fists work against the Second Prince.
I tapped my fingers against the edge of the letter.
“Hm.”
How could I tell the duke that the Emperor had planted Prakti near him as a spy?
‘Your Grace, the Emperor knows of our engagement contract—in fact, he’s ordered me to be your watchdog. There’s apparently an imperial spy lurking nearby, so wouldn’t it be wise to thoroughly purge the people around you?’
If I sent a letter like that, the Emperor’s spy would know I was a double agent before I could even identify Prakti. The letter could easily be intercepted.
I rested my chin in my palm and spent a long time studying the ring and letter alternately.
Then a thought struck me. Did the duke truly not know there was an imperial agent in his midst?

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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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