Chapter 27
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Translator: penny
Chapter: 27
Chapter Title: Yes, It's a Mental Illness
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Well, it is indeed a mental illness.
There is a mental disorder where the brain secretes an excessive amount of dopamine whenever stories involving sexual stimulation come up.
The clinical term for it is paraphilia.
But Saintess Kim Sohee wasn't some pervert who had been fantasizing about men's "dangling bits" with sparkling eyes since birth.
Quite the opposite. Hearing her story, it felt like the title of saintess was well-deserved.
Even up until a year ago, just after graduating high school and becoming a saintess of the Church of the Goddess, she had never gone through the instinctive process that every human experiences.
That act called "masturbation."
I didn't take it in some sleazy way.
It's a healthy habit, medically proven to temporarily relieve sexual tension.
Yet the saintess said she had never once touched herself, not even during her school days, right up to adulthood.
"I never had any interest in sexual things to begin with."
"I see."
"Yes! So the high-ranking nuns of the Church of the Goddess praised me, saying a 'true saintess' had finally appeared after so long!"
Her pure blue eyes sparkled innocently as she spoke.
There wasn't the slightest hint of deception, no matter how I looked.
She truly deserved the title of saintess.
Even though we'd only just started talking, the aura of holiness emanating from this woman made it impossible to imagine her lying.
But...
At some point, those blue eyes began to cloud over.
"Every day, I drew strength as a saintess, healing the poor who couldn't afford hospitals outside, and inside dungeons, treating the holy knights and hunters fighting for humanity... Ungh?!"
Mid-sentence, Saintess Sohee suddenly hugged herself tightly and began trembling all over.
I immediately realized this wasn't some religious ecstasy or creepy confession.
It was a clear acute PTSD episode.
Her breathing grew rapid, cold sweat beading on her skin.
She looked like a child cornered against a wall, gripped by fear.
'Damn, I didn't see this coming...'
In that moment, it hit me.
This wasn't just a 'priestess's faith testimony.' It was a medically profound 'patient's account.'
As her primary physician, I initiated emergency treatment right away.
I chose entrainment breathing.
It's an emergency technique that synchronizes the patient's erratic breathing and pulse to my own rhythm, slowly stabilizing them.
I gently placed my hand on the back of her trembling hand.
Sharing body heat and heartbeat helps the scattered autonomic nerves gradually return to normal.
"You're okay. Match my breathing."
With a low, steady voice, I led her while letting her feel the rise and fall of my chest nearby.
At first, her inhales and exhales were off-kilter, but soon they aligned with mine, steadying bit by bit.
Her trembling visibly subsided.
"Thank you... Counselor Kim Seungbin."
Saintess Sohee let out a deep sigh as her breathing normalized.
And finally, she cautiously began recounting that very 'incident' that triggered respiratory distress just by recalling it.
The pristine saintess who had never comforted herself once in her life.
The events of that day that awakened her to dangerously intense sexual arousal.
"It was half a year ago, when I appeared as a saintess at a monastery in Italy. Right in the middle of Venice's cathedral, an upper dungeon with 80 floors suddenly appeared."
The Church of the Goddess had taken root not just in Korea, America, and Japan, but in China, Italy, India, and even Pakistan. It was essentially the world's only religion.
As such, Saintess Kim Sohee was the iconic face adored by believers worldwide, and her duty was always to tour expeditions around the globe.
Among them, Italy stood out for its particularly devout faith.
In the old world, it would have been the heart of Catholicism, but here it was said to be "the land born from the largest droplet the Goddess shed while pleasuring herself."
In the midst of her speech there, a massive dungeon tower erupted in the center of the cathedral.
She immediately joined the Church's knight order to raid it, she said.
And that's when the incident occurred.
"We were deep into the raid, with only the top floor left. As you know, I'm a saintess specialized in recovery, not combat, so I was always at the rear. Even when the exploration team headed to the top floor, I stayed on a relatively lower level, treating the injured being carried down."
Dungeons raided by hunters or the Church were always tower-shaped.
The higher the floors, the exponentially more threatening the monsters, a structure etched into hunters' minds as the "Stairway to Death."
A healer with combat skills would normally join the front-line party as a supporter.
But Saintess Sohee was different.
As the world's one and only saintess with zero combat ability, her position was the mid-layer camp.
Her role was to heal those critically wounded from above and brought down.
"When setting up a base in a dungeon, periodic 'spawn waves' always occur. So each party takes turns patrolling to clear nearby monsters and maintain safety."
"Ah, I see. I'm not a hunter, so this is all new to me."
"Yes. That day, it was around dawn, I think. No day or night in the dungeon, but I checked the clock I'd brought and knew it was dawn outside, so I was about to sleep."
That's when it happened.
As she reached to turn off the lamp, a strange shadow flickered in the saintess's vision.
Right at the camp's base, a green arm like a blade split the solid stone floor and burst upward.
What emerged was a dwarf-sized, but unmistakably inhuman, green monster.
A goblin.
With the brute strength to burrow through earth alone.
Its eyes gleamed with a predator's instinct fixed solely on prey.
Drooling saliva and a long, protruding tongue stirred primal disgust.
Above all, that predator's gaze was locked on the revered saintess herself.
"D-did that goblin do something vile to you, Saintess?!"
I reflexively assumed as much.
Otherwise, how else to explain this bizarre 'paraphilia' where even a hint of sexual content triggered a dopamine explosion like an epileptic fit?
Probably—
She hadn't lost her virginity that day, but she'd been cornered right up to rape, and her brain abnormally awakened to the forcibly imprinted 'rape pleasure' for the first time, etching in PTSD.
That had to be it, I was certain.
But she shook her head.
"No, not that. The moment I screamed, the guard knight at the camp entrance rushed in and blocked the goblin."
Ah, not that then.
Well, that trope is straight out of some fanfic erotica anyway.
I nodded, feeling awkwardly embarrassed.
So then, what exactly had left Saintess Sohee with such trauma that she sought counseling from me, a man?
Her voice trembled as she continued soon after.
"But... that goblin must have been a freshly spawned one; it was incredibly strong. The knight started getting pushed back. His armor got clawed and torn, even the sturdy plate mail crumpled, and his helmet half-ripped off, exposing his face. It was brutal."
"No way... the knight in your place?"
I swallowed hard.
I got it now.
As a psychiatrist, I could finally piece together the full story.
The holy knight protecting the saintess fought the goblin but lost, ultimately getting pinned by the male goblin.
Unable to help due to her lack of combat skills, the saintess could only watch helplessly. The guilt, combined with the shock of witnessing sexual activity for the first time, overloaded her brain's emotional centers.
From that moment, any sex-related talk triggered overlapping PTSD and paraphilia fits!
...or so I thought.
"No. The holy knight defeated the goblin."
"......"
Not that either?
Twice I'd made plausible deductions, and both missed the mark.
At this point, my detective act as a doctor felt pathetic.
So I shut up and decided to just listen to the end.
And right away.
Shiver, shiver, shiver.
"?! Saintess, are you okay? Deep breaths!"
The episode started again.
As she trembled and gasped, I reflexively reached to hold her hand, but she waved me off like she wanted no part of it.
And with a quivering voice, the confession continued.
"B-but during the fight... the knight's armor got completely shredded."
In that instant, the saintess lifted her head, and her eyes took on a different kind of strangeness.
Madness gleaming in heart-shaped sparkles.
Lips drooling saliva.
And then.
"Bra ripped, panties torn... hehehe! His hair grabbed, belly punched, crotch kicked... that sight... it was so beautiful!"
"......Beautiful?"
"I'd never seen anything so ecstatic! It should have been horrific, but that scene of treating a woman... no, a female like a toy... I just... peed myself in my underwear!"
The episode intensified.
But I merely stayed silent.
Because this wasn't a seizure symptom—it was closer to convulsions from arousal.
For her, that incident wasn't trauma; it was life's first 'discovery of her kink.'
Like a gourmet who can't forget the ultimate dish, Saintess Sohee would tremble in pleasure every time she recalled the knight being brutally ravaged.
Eventually, she confessed to rubbing her thighs and even wetting herself, admitting her inaugural 'self-touch' had been hardcore genre.
As a result, she had become a patient with severe masochistic paraphilia bordering on mental illness.
And like developing tolerance to drugs, repeated fantasies and mental images no longer satisfied her.
So, she came to me.
A man and psychiatrist.
Someone to treat her safely, handling her like a nun captured by goblins.
'...Why are none of my patients normal?'