Chapter 35
It was confirmed that Eliza’s singing possessed a faint healing ability.
It was incomplete for it to be considered divine authority, and too weak to be called holy power.
Nevertheless, the moment Gesle’s holy power acted as a medium for her singing, the wound Eliza had deliberately inflicted on herself again healed and disappeared in an instant.
She had warned him beforehand, but she had cut her palm with a knife before he could even stop her, causing Gesle to act as though he were about to faint, which made Eliza feel sorry.
After that, however, everything proceeded smoothly.
Gesle said he would help her with a noticeably exhausted expression.
“It is the most astonishing and inexplicable thing I have encountered in my decades as a priest.
Yet, an ability that responds to the Mother’s grace must also be the Mother’s will.
It is merely unfortunate that a foolish child cannot presume to comprehend Her great will.
I shall help you in whatever path you choose to walk from now on.”
From that day onward, Eliza began preparing in earnest to distribute Luo.
While regularly participating in the production of holy water, she also charged Luo with holy power with Gesle’s help.
Thanks to that, charged Luos were piled up and gleaming in her warehouse.
Eliza gazed at them with satisfaction as she gently stroked Helreos’s ring.
Helreos had probably never read anything like inheritance laws, but a successor who possessed this ring could issue promissory notes worth up to thirty percent of the inheritance they were scheduled to receive.
With this, Eliza easily purchased the stones that had merely been occupying space in a warehouse from the Sachsen family through a merchant guild that traded with the Waluer family.
Then, after paying the intermediate payment, she disguised the Sachsen mine that had become her property as an abandoned mine.
Of course, she used an alias as the owner.
‘At this level, there’s no way anyone will recognize it.’
The color of Luo, once it had turned transparent, remained unchanged even after all the holy power it had absorbed was completely depleted.
She was now ready to conceal the true nature of the goods.
Since she intended to limit the amount distributed, this was enough for the time being.
Eliza closed the warehouse door and thought about her next plan.
“Peep-”
“Are you feeling cooped up? It’s already noon.”
Eliza opened the door of the large birdcage placed in one corner of the room.
A blue bird came out from inside, shook its head, and stretched its wings wide.
Then, when Eliza opened the window, it flew outside.
After she began taking care of the bluebird, the bird would always go out for a walk around noon and return a couple of hours later.
If she did not let it out, it would cry noisily and pester her, so by now, she took it out for a walk every day.
After leaving the window open so that the bird could return at any time, Eliza sat at her desk.
Then she placed a piece of raw Luo no bigger than her fingernail before her and began weaving thread.
‘It was a good thing I learned how to tie knots.’
Hamel, the owner of the White Fox Inn, had better hand skills than she had expected.
He had taught Eli knotwork so that she could have something to do besides singing for coins, and it was quite beautiful.
Luo was an ore that emitted light on its own.
A necklace and ring with a gemstone that emitted different colors of light whenever light touched it set right in the center might have been crude, but they were bound to catch the eye.
“It doesn’t have to be grand from the beginning.”
Eliza sent that necklace, ring, and a fist-sized raw stone to the capital and entrusted them to an auction house.
Nancy, who carried out the task, concealed her identity without even considering collecting the payment.
And the world was turned upside down.
***
With a sharp whoosh, a spear soared high into the air.
The bird it had been aimed at twisted its body and flew away into the distance.
Leopold, who picked up the spear from where it had fallen, stared into the air with narrowed eyes.
‘Am I seeing things again?’
Lately, passing birds would suddenly appear vividly blue.
At that moment, fatigue began throbbing behind his eyes, making its presence known, and Leopold squeezed his eyes shut.
‘Well, it’s not strange in this condition.’
It felt as though a needle inside his head were stabbing behind his eyeballs.
Leopold swung his spear irritably.
When he drove the leg of the monster writhing on the ground into the earth, the monster stopped moving.
“Phew…….”
“You may return! Squad Leader!”
Leopold walked with his eyes closed, his steps staggering.
Just as he was busy trying to suppress the unpleasant sensation of his insides twisting, his body suddenly bumped into the figure in front of him.
“Walk straight.”
“What is it? Why again today?”
The person blocking Leopold’s path was Urhel.
Urhel looked him up and down before asking the soldier standing beside her for confirmation.
“Was I really told to hand this over to this bastard?”
“Yes, yes. That’s right.”
“This arrived yesterday, didn’t it?
How did it get to that bastard within a day?”
“I was only ordered to deliver it to the squad leader……. They told me to make good use of it and try to clear out Spider Swamp.”
The soldier nervously relayed exactly what he had been ordered to do.
Upon hearing that, Urhel’s and Leopold’s eyebrows twitched simultaneously.
“You’re handing this over to that bastard for such a trivial reason?”
“So you want me to go through another ordeal?”
Of course, the reasons for the two men being displeased were different.
Urhel did not like the fact that such a precious item was being handed over to Leopold, while Leopold found the order that moved him around at someone else’s whim bothersome.
Inside the box Urhel snatched from the soldier was Luo.
It had been exactly one year since Luo appeared.
The commotion that erupted when it was discovered that the item no one had believed in when it first appeared could actually absorb holy power was indescribable.
It amplified the holy power of those who possessed it, allowing them to use greater amounts of holy power, and even those who were not priests could utilize the holy power contained within the stone by striking it.
By now, no one doubted Luo.
There were countless people who wanted to carry the grace of God within their bodies, and the price of an item that even the temple could not monopolize had risen exponentially.
“What is that?”
“They say it’s a stone called Luo. Apparently, you can use holy power with this.”
“Holy power? How?”
“If you break it or strike it, it spreads into the surrounding area…….”
“So it’s disposable. Then isn’t it useless?”
Leopold casually waved his hand, and the soldier gave him a crisp salute before hurriedly leaving.
By now, Leopold’s reputation was spreading far and wide.
He fought excessively well, and no one could count the number of victories he had achieved alongside Urhel.
Within the Royal Army, opinions were evenly divided between those who believed he had enough merit to warrant a promotion and those who argued that he could not be promoted because he was a criminal.
Since he had yet to make a decisive contribution, Leopold remained a squad leader.
He had merely been given the minimum rank required to entrust him with missions, and the number of soldiers assigned to him could be counted on one hand.
“Ha! There’s no way your pathetic eye for value could recognize its worth.”
“Are you still here, Inquisitor?”
Leopold spoke sarcastically toward Urhel and deliberately grinned.
She particularly hated his smiling face.
“Ah, are you giving that to me? Well, it’s mine anyway, isn’t it? Hand it over?”
“I cannot understand this. It is an item far beyond what a bastard like you deserves.”
“What can I do if it’s an order? Even if you say you don’t need it, I still have to accept it, right?”
Leopold extended his hand toward Urhel and beckoned with his fingers.
However, when she showed no sign of moving, he shrugged and strode toward Urhel.
Then he abruptly brought his face close to Urhel’s hand and peered at the Luo she was holding.
“Get lost.”
Annoyed by the distance between them, Urhel swung her fist toward Leopold’s face.
Leopold dodged the punch and grabbed Urhel’s forearm.
He pulled her toward himself, but the blessing she had received from God was no weaker than Leopold’s strength.
“You smell like alcohol.”
“Has it only been a day or two?”
Their struggle of strength continued.
When Urhel irritably reached for the shaft of her halberd with her remaining hand, Leopold suddenly stepped back.
Leopold turned around and opened the canteen at his waist.
What was inside was strong liquor.
Because he had mixed in an anesthetic drug he had stolen from a medic, it tasted extremely bitter.
“Ha! To enter a sacred battle with such an attitude.”
“Did your sacred one over there tell you not to drink alcohol, too?
As far as I know, there’s nothing like that in the Scriptures.”
Leopold lightly shook the canteen toward the growling Urhel.
Then he deliberately drank its contents.
Urhel swung the axe blade toward him threateningly.
With a whoosh that cut through the air, the wind swept toward the tip of Leopold’s nose.
“You should refrain from such reckless words and behavior.”
“I’ve seen you for over a year, and you still don’t know me.”
“Do not forget that God is watching over you.”
Urhel glared at Leopold with blazing eyes, then tossed the Luo at him and turned away.
For an Inquisitor who had been traveling across the continent on a pilgrimage, Urhel had stayed in one place unusually long and was following the military’s rules in her own way.
If the higher-ups had decided that this raw stone was to be handed over to him, then although she was displeased, she judged that she had no grounds to interfere.
“Yeah. I’d like God to watch over me for a while.”
Leopold examined the Luo he had caught.
Even in its crude, unprocessed form, it held a mysterious light and proudly glittered.
‘It does look useless, but there’s something I want to test.’
