The Saint’s Manual for Redemption - Chapter 6

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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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Episode 6
Wagon wheel ruts marked the narrow, winding stone path—old traces where the wheels had long since stopped. Whether they were left by villagers fleeing the plague, or by priests who had come to this place, there was no way to tell.
Despite the bright afternoon, the village seemed strangely emptied of people. There were no sounds of human conversation, not even the cries of livestock.
“The streets are empty, but I can definitely sense someone inside the houses……”
Arden muttered this with a frown, his hand resting on the hilt of his sword.
When he knocked lightly on a door, a faint tremor echoed from within, but no one answered.
The presence inside stopped moving.
“It seems clear enough that this village has patients.”
I pointed at the window with my finger.
Through a gap in the curtains that hung slightly ajar, I could make out the vague shape of a face watching us.
Sunken cheeks, skin darkened as though bruised, shoulders wasted to bone, eyes with whites shot red in fear and trembling.
By any measure, the face of someone afflicted.
After circling the entire village, I sensed people in each house, yet no one came out or responded to our knocks.
Each person’s condition would differ, so to cure the plague we would need to meet the villagers face to face—yet they refused to cooperate.
Usually, when a priest comes who can heal the plague that escorts people straight to God’s embrace, don’t they welcome them with open arms?
‘Could the Temple have paid them off?’
Yet I couldn’t shake my concern about the ten priests who had either come to this village or left it only to die.
The Temple hadn’t revealed to me beforehand that I would receive a divine revelation at this Coming of Age Ceremony, so there was no reason for the Temple to sacrifice as many as ten talented people and allow this village to remain a breeding ground for plague.
Had the Temple given up hope after witnessing countless priests sent here fail to cure the disease—indeed, losing their own lives or contracting the illness before returning?
Thinking of the ten priests who had come before, another worry gnawed at me.
“Arden.”
When I called his name, he turned from his sharp-eyed survey of the village to face me. I asked him directly.
“Do you happen to know how much Divine Power those priests dispatched to this village possessed?”
Arden frowned slightly as he searched his memory, then answered after a moment’s pause.
“At first, they sent lower-ranking priests, but once they realized the situation was grave, they began dispatching priests of higher rank.”
Looking at the Temple’s current state, I couldn’t be certain that those higher-ranking priests actually possessed Divine Power. Yet there was no shortage of methods to use it even without having it.
“Then, did they take Sacred Objects with them?”
At my repeated question, interest and suspicion flickered in Arden’s eyes as he studied me.
“Most ordinary people wouldn’t know of Sacred Objects’ existence……How much do you know?”
He was cautious, I’d give him that. Did he think I was a spy sent from some heretical sect?
“Did I mention that I’m from the Temple Orphanage? I’ve been conscripted to clean the Temple four times a week and have done most of its odd jobs. So even when you don’t want to listen, you hear things—the environment ensures you pick up quite a lot.”
It was a well-known fact that those raised in the Temple Orphanage, with lives inseparable from the Temple since childhood, entered their Coming of Age years and made a Lifelong Vow at notably high rates.
Of course, orphans lacked backing, so climbing to high positions was as difficult as threading a needle.
To be clear, I knew of Sacred Objects’ existence and uses not because I was from the orphanage, but because it was I who had originally put them to such practical use.
I had taken Sacred Objects that the Temple had merely displayed to make their humble sanctuary look respectable, handed them to priests without Divine Power, and expanded the Temple’s administrative reach.
Thanks to that, work that should have taken five priests ten days was completed by ten priests in five—and our Temple’s influence grew far more rapidly.
My smooth deception satisfied him, and Arden’s suspicion eased. He scratched the back of his head with a somewhat embarrassed expression and answered willingly.
“It’s true they took Sacred Objects. The principle is that priests with Divine Power are dispatched only to the Capital and surrounding areas; everywhere else, we dispatch Sacred Objects instead.”
There is no disease that Divine Power cannot cure.
Even if the priest himself did not possess Divine Power, a healing Sacred Object suited to the disease’s severity would be more than sufficient to cure it.
It was unthinkable that high-grade Sacred Objects wouldn’t have been sent to a village where nearly ten priests had died. And if they truly hadn’t been sent, there would certainly be a reason.
And besides, if the illness required the use of such high-grade Sacred Objects, the villagers here wouldn’t have endured it this long.
“What Sacred Objects did they take?”
“I don’t know even that much. The information available to the Holy Knight Order is limited……”
That’s why information is power. With puzzle pieces missing so badly, there was no way to complete the picture immediately.
“Please, help us……!”
At the desperate, childlike voice, I reflexively turned my head.
It was a child.
A thin frame, perhaps seven years old. Eyes streaked with red, tears welling up thickly.
The child’s lips trembled as they reached toward me with shaking hands.
“Our village is wrong……! Everyone’s become wrong……! Please, please listen to me……!”
A woman burst through the open doorway. Her hair was disheveled and her eyes were bloodshot like the child’s.
Without a word, she seized the child’s arm and yanked them back forcefully.
“Mother, no, wait……! Maybe those people, ugh!”
The woman clamped her hand over the child’s mouth to silence their resistance and dragged them back toward the house—a gesture so callous it made one doubt whether she was their true parent.
The child’s cough was muffled by her hand, but dark blood seeping through the gaps between her fingers and dripping down her palm could not be stopped.
Hemoptysis, bloodshot eyes, darkened complexion, a wasted body—the child’s current state displayed the classic symptoms of the plague I had just witnessed.
The moment the door slammed shut, I rushed forward and began pounding on it.
“I’ve been sent from the Temple! Please, open the door! I can cure your daughter’s illness!”
I struck the door hard enough that my knuckles ached, but only silence answered from within.
Click—
The sound of a bolt sliding home answered in her stead.
I lowered my fist from the door slowly, muttering under my breath.
“…That’s strange.”
A sense of wrongness, fierce and insistent, crawled up my spine. Like a single twisted puzzle piece thrown into place, undoing the entire picture.
“What troubles you, sir?”
At Arden’s question, I drew a deep breath and explained the source of the disquiet gnawing at me.
“Usually, when a child falls ill, a parent will cling to even the faintest glimmer of hope—begging for treatment, pleading for help with their life on the line. But that woman’s demeanor just now… it wasn’t that at all.”
“It wasn’t the attitude of an ordinary parent with a suffering child.”
Arden tapped the door lightly, knuckle-tap-tap, and picked up my thought with natural ease.
“We seem to share the same source of unease. If you wish to know for certain, we could force the door open.”
I stopped him as he reached for the handle, clearly intent on breaking it down.
“If we confront them by force, we’ll only deepen the villagers’ wariness. The fact that they avoid us despite knowing we’ve been sent by the Temple—there must be a reason for that.”
The Temple had sent priests to this village ten times before.
And the wariness in that woman’s eyes just moments ago was no vague hostility toward strangers—it had looked far closer to fear.
Was it fear of ‘outsiders’ themselves, or fear of the situation that ‘outsiders have entered the village’?
To understand that, I first needed to know what those ten priests sent before us had done here, and why—despite deploying ten of them—the plague still hadn’t been contained.
“Let’s find someone in the village who’s willing to speak with us. We need to learn what happened here before we arrived.”
I gestured for him to follow, and Arden turned without hesitation, falling into step behind me.
Then—
“Get out of here!”
A rough, unpolished stone flew at us from deeper within the village, hurled along with the shout.
The rock bounced across the wagon’s wheel tracks with a sharp crack.
“God has abandoned our village!”
It was an old man, bent with age and crowned with white hair, who had thrown the stone.
He bore the same sickly pallor as the villagers we’d seen. His trembling hands pointed at us as bloodshot eyes, crimson with infection, wept tears of blood.
“Caritas has forsaken us…!”

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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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