Chapter 24. The Saint’s Repayment
I wish I can get a cold beer… It’s quite boring living as a corpse. I can’t feel anything, which made it feel like I was in a permanent dream. I sat down on my chair and took out a book from the vault. Now, time for some read…
“Snore…”
Is Necro snoring already? He falls asleep quick… I punched the wall facing his room several times, closed my book, and went outside. The first floor was quite loud as well, so I guess I’m forced to go to the stables.
“This is nice.”
Excluding the occasional sound of the horses, it was actually pretty quiet here. I could see the moon up above as well, through the hole in the ceiling. I checked the haystack for any horse dung, and lay down on it. Now, I’ll go back to my reading session…
“Ah! Found you! So you were here after all.”
The saint approached me with a smile on her face.
“I found you. I thought you escaped again and got scared, you know?”
“Necro snores too loudly.”
“Aha.”
I stood back up.
“What do you need?”
“Mm… Well…”
The saint seemed to think of something for a second, then brightened up the moment she thought of something.
“Pop quiz! Annyeong, hak! Sei, nyo! Oo?”
“……”
What was this idiot going on about?
“What quiz?”
“Annyeong, hak! Sei, nyo! Oo?”
The words that I heard, and the meanings that I understood from it, were completely different. This must be thanks to Xenoglossy. Annyeong meant hi in Korean. Hak must be a part of the work wisaeng-hak, meaning hygiene. Sei meant holy? Ah, must be せい(聖). Nyo is 女(にょ), so sei and nyo together would mean saint. In other words.
<Hello, Jin. Saint, OO?>
She thought of quite an interesting wordplay.
“Hello.”
<Go to hell.>(Hell, Lo (to))
The saint made a disappointed face when I told her the translation.
“That last part is supposed to be hai, isn’t it? Because there are two circles.”
She must’ve wanted to hear me say her name. All the more reason not to say it.
“Let’s try again. はい(hi), hi(hello), 海(sea)’s high hai(shark)!”
They were all pronounced as ‘hai’.
“You mean hai(害, harmful)…”
“Just say my name already! Morto hai! It’s simple! Might as well read it as Motto high (very high)!”
I didn’t see the worth in saying her name.
“It’s a fake name though.”
“It’s a name given by god.”
Necro was talking about that. Because wizards couldn’t reveal their true name, they needed to use names that god gave them.
“And your real name?”
“Why don’t you try guessing?”
“Heisenberg?”
“Wrong~”
If it’s a German name…
“Hailey? Hilda? Heidi?”
“9! 9!! 9!!!”
Wordplay on nein(no)…
“Whatever. What did you really come here for anyway? To watch me? I’m not going to run you know.”
“I came here to heal you. You got an injury on your back didn’t you?”
She seemed to be talking about the injuries I got from the waiting room.
“It’s fine. It’s not anything big. Plus, I don’t get favors from cultists.”
The saint seemed confused.
“Um… Did you just call me a cultist?”
“Don’t try to deny it. It even said it in the books? ‘Healing magic can be cast by anyone once they form a contract with god, but in order to use it well, one must acquire proper medical knowledge.’”
This was because one could only heal after recognizing the problem in the injury. There were tens of thousands of spells under a single category of healing magic. Injuries don’t get healed just by muttering some spells. Life was more complicated than that.
“I can’t let someone who isn’t even a doctor to handle my body. Go away, fake.”
I looked at the saint suspiciously on purpose. While pointing to a certain sentence in a book highlighted in red.
[There are lucky cases where a patient does get healed, but more often than not the patient would die because of a wrong usage of healing magic. Always be careful of unlicensed healers.]
My life is on stake. I have to be careful. Well, I was already dead, but still.
“Ah, I was wondering about what you were worried about.”
The saint walked over to me with a smile on her face.
“Just get over here already. I’m going to jump you if you don’t? Do you really want there to be violence involved?”
I didn’t think I’d be sentenced to death even in a different world.
“Come at me, psycho.”
I raised my two hands like a bear and began to walk around the saint threateningly.
“I couldn’t get my license because I came from a different world, but I managed to get a proper education as a medical student in college. Isn’t that enough?”
“Liar. You said you were a high schooler.”
“Early admissions.”
“So you aren’t even a high schooler then. Liar.”
The saint stepped back with a “kuh”. I sent out the final blow.
“A wizard who isn’t even a doctor trying to heal people by praying or something? Must be quite a sight. Do you need to sacrifice a pig’s head or something?”
“I’ve never seen an idiot who talks about stuff like that other than you, Mr. Murderer.”
“The one who says ‘yes’ to a person who offers to heal with magic with the idiot here. You can get scammed quite easily.”
“You believe in the existence of magic, but you don’t trust in my healing magic itself?”
“I have trust issues.”
“Just get healed already.”
Tap.
The saint disappeared from view. Physical enhancement? I tried to run immediately, but got tackled from behind.
“Stay down. It’ll just take a second.”
The saint whispered this into my ear while she held me down.
“It’ll only hurt the first time. Don’t worry, I’ll be nice.”
Uaaah!
The saint whose body had been enhanced by magic wasn’t something that could be beaten by human means. In the end, I gave up and decided to lay down on the floor.
“Do what you want.”
I had pulled out the knives in my back, but didn’t seal it up yet. She must be trying to fix that up now.
“I’ll start now?”
The saint began to mutter her spell whilst she sat on my back. I could hear a pleasant whisper in my ear while my back began to warm up. I was sweating quite a bit from the heat.
How light.
I used my eyes to take a look at the saint. She was whispering a few words under her breath with her eyes closed. She must be praying about now. ASMR white magic… It isn’t too bad, I suppose.
I modified my view a little bit again.
I could see white mana flowing out of the saint’s body. I became mesmerized by the sight for a slight second, then returned to my senses after hearing something.
Shf. Shfshf.
“…What are you doing?”
Shf.
The saint was drawing something on my arm after she had finished using healing magic. I thought she was drawing a magic circle at first, but she was just doodling.
“This left arm has a black dragon sealed insi…”
“You!”
I tore off the leech off of my back. The saint blew back onto the haystack.
“You can draw on your sketchbook.”
“Ever heard of charms?”
“Never saw or heard of a charm that resembled anything like this.”
I waved the saint away like I was waving away a fly.
“Now, now. Just leave already. I’m thankful for healing me, but it’s time for children to sleep now. It’d be troublesome if you got shorter than you already are from a lack of sleep. After all, I’d have to use a microscope to see you if you get smaller than you are already.”
The saint didn’t budge.
“I refuse.”
“Damn it!”
The girl just refused to move from her spot. I tried to move her by hand, but my hand ended up hurting because of the holy flame. I gave up and decided to ignore her and read. The saint approached me when she saw this.
“Studying magic again? You can’t even use mana though.”
“I have to keep learning if I want to keep winning. I might not be able to use it, but it’s not worthless information.”
“…Why did someone like you end up killing?”
The saint quickly closed her mouth, thinking that she said something she shouldn’t have said.
A person like me…
I would love it if there were more people like me. Even now, I’ve done everything I could just to blend into society. I’ve told people only the simplest side to my thoughts and explained everything about what I thought to people that I’ve met. If there were two of me, I would exchange thousands of words with myself to transmit information between each other.
“What? Did you think I was just a complete psychopath?”
“Well… Yes.”
How honest.
“I’m a normal person.”
That was a lie.
“I couldn’t help but murder.”
“Liar.”
She seemed quite confident in her denial.
“I’ve actually investigated you quite a bit in my free time.”
When?
She shouldn’t have had a lot of time. I was with her most of the time after I’ve revealed my abilities to her, after all.
…Other than that one time when she had to go see the fairy.
The saint sat down.
“You might’ve not known, but I know a person who is able to ‘attain information just through key words’. I asked him about you, and learned quite a bit as a result.”
A search engine…
Seems likely that it would exist. If one could search for products, I suppose there would be a power that could search for information as well.
“What did you learn?”
“About Whitehead. Where you were born.”
“I told you everything I know. What about it?”
“What happened there? How did you turn into a murderer? Surely you could’ve done something else.”
The saint seemed a little regretful as she said this, but I couldn’t agree with her at all. A different path? Could a human that was fascinated by killing creatures end up being anything other than a murderer?
Instead of answering the saint’s question, I quietly began to reminisce about my past.