Adaptation
Zero point zero one percent.
To anyone else, it would have been a figure small enough to wave off as barely anything at all. I found nothing welcome in that number. The more I grew used to the Saintess's life, the stranger the name Kang Jinhyeok began to feel.
"...Haa."
Had it already been a week? The moment I thought about my future, all that came out was a sigh.
Stopping the first tragedy means I'm bound to die at least once.
Even setting that aside, wearing the Saintess's mask and holding on to her dignity was anything but easy — the speech, the conduct, even the expressions and the way I walked. And in the early days of the possession, simply having become a woman had left me tangled up in more than a few kinds of confusion.
Still, I had read so many web novels of that sort that I grasped the fact of my transformation quickly enough, and I set about adapting. My head accepted it. The beauty in the mirror — that is, me — remained a stranger all the same.
So did Nina's voice, the one that woke me every morning. For someone used to a drab, quiet life spent alone, her energy was far too bright. Brighter, beyond any comparison, than anything the me of my previous life had ever been.
Well. A week or so on, even that was starting to feel familiar. What I had no idea of at all was that, without my noticing, I was growing fond of Nina.
I watched the figure working away in front of me, wearing that loose, happy grin. Every morning, Nina changed the flowers in my room.
White roses today, wasn't it...?
I had no interest in flowers, but whenever she explained them I nodded along well enough. Strangely, I didn't dislike that time.
Is this the contamination rate's doing, too?
"Ah, Saintess! Today's the day you said you'd go to the training grounds. You need to wash up, quickly!"
Nina started humming as she prepared the wash water. I sat blankly on the bed and looked down at my palms. Slender fingers. Smooth skin. A world apart from the thick-knuckled, rough hands of my previous life.
I've accepted the situation in my head... so now I have to adapt to this body even more. This isn't a novel. It's reality.
Climbing down from the bed, I stepped on the hem of my skirt and nearly slipped. I caught my balance at the last second, but Nina was watching me with a puzzled face.
"Saintess, are you feeling unwell today? You seem a little strange..."
"...I was contemplating the will of God for a moment."
For an excuse blurted out in a hurry, it sounded remarkably plausible. The station of Saintess was terribly convenient. Do something odd, call it the will of God, and it usually passed without question.
I changed clothes with Nina's help. At first, even putting on a single piece of underwear had been an ordeal, but a week later, even when her hands moved over my body this way and that to straighten my clothes, the shame didn't rise nearly as sharply as before. The moment I decided I had grown somewhat used to it, a chill ran down my spine instead.
This has to fall under ego contamination, too.
My senses as Kang Jinhyeok were fading, little by little, however faintly. At first I had denied it with everything I had. Now it seemed I would have to admit it, at least to some degree. Was my mind coming apart? Or was I assimilating into Elysia?
Surely it wasn't something like female corruption. That was the sort of thing you only ever saw in web novels...
...Except I am inside a web novel.
An ominous thought rose, but I shook my head hard and forced it away.
"Saintess? Is something uncomfortable?"
Nina tilted her head, worried, and straightened my collar. A person a full handspan shorter than me. The Elysia I had cursed as stupid back in the novel — I was beginning, little by little, to understand why she had thrown her life away time after time to save this girl. And yet, after repeating death upon death, Elysia had in the end given up on saving Nina.
Looking at her, a smile slipped out of me before I knew it. Spending the same morning with someone, every day, wasn't as bad as I had thought. If anything, I might have had to call it a little nice.
"Nina."
"Yes, Saintess!"
"You... don't you think I've changed a bit from before?"
At my question, Nina answered with a bright smile.
"Hmm. Maybe that you've become a little more... human? Before, it really felt like you lived above the clouds, in a completely different world. These days you're much more familiar... like a big sister. And the way you space out sometimes is cute, too!"
Cute. The word least suited to a sturdy man in his twenties — but faced with Nina's loose, happy grin, I couldn't even bring myself to argue. She cherished me with all her heart. No. She cherished the owner of this body.
I stood still and left the arranging of my clothes to her, and she spoke up carefully.
"Saintess."
"What is it?"
"What kind of place is the Academy?"
"...Why ask something like that all of a sudden?"
Nina fidgeted with her fingers, a little shy.
"I've never been outside Luminaris. I heard the imperial capital is completely different from the Holy Kingdom. I want to see the markets... and I want to try on a pretty dress, too. Hehe."
If things went as they had in the original, we would be ambushed before we even reached the capital. There was no need to tell Nina that. It was something I would stop. I let out a short laugh.
"Once we arrive in the imperial capital, there'll be time to go out. Let's go together then."
Nina's eyes went round.
"Really?"
"Yes."
"...Promise?"
Bright as sunlight, she held out her little finger. Without much thought, I hooked mine around it.
"Promise."
That small hand was strangely warm.
A short while later, finished with my preparations, I headed for the training grounds inside the Papal Palace. The cloister I passed along the way was dazzling enough to sting the eyes. The angel statues carved into every pillar seemed to look down at me, and the back of my neck prickled in a way I couldn't quite name.
A week of wandering the place had made one fact even more certain: this was the Papal Palace, standing in the capital of the Holy Kingdom of Luminaris. It was excessively vast, and an excessive number of holy knights stood guard over it.
I passed through the cloister, reached the training grounds, and began to loosen up. In two weeks I would leave Luminaris and set out for the imperial capital. If things went as in the original, the ambush would strike on the road that crossed the border. Before that, I needed to know how much power dwelled in this body. Only then could I make sure no one died in the attack.
The moment I stood at the center of the grounds, the clash of metal stopped all at once. Dozens of pairs of eyes fixed on me together. I, who had once shrunk from even meeting someone's gaze, was now receiving the reverence of knights counted among the finest in the Holy Kingdom. Tension stiffened my shoulders, but I forced my back straight.
The knights who had been training halted as one and dropped to their knees. Among them was my escort knight, Bern de Lacroix.
"I pay my respects, Saintess."
A warm voice, and a face that still looked a little young. Bern was a holy knight who had reached the realm of Sword Master at barely twenty. I swallowed and put on the Saintess's mask.
"Sir Bern. It's good to see you."
Bern's eyebrow twitched, ever so slightly.
Was my tone off?
Elysia, the Saintess of Mercy, was always perfect. Speech, expression, even gesture — let any of it slip by a fraction, and someone who had attended her up close would feel that something was wrong. And if it came out that I was not the Saintess, there was every chance I would be branded a demon, or one of the demonkin, who had seized this body. Regression or not, I had no desire to die under torture.
Keeping my face as calm as I could, I walked up to a wooden practice dummy. I thought of what I had confirmed on the status window: Divine Power, Ex, and beneath it the special ability, the Qualification of the Saintess. The description had been clear. It wielded vast divine power, and a calibration correction was applied whenever that power was used.
A correction. Taken at face value, it meant that even without knowing the precise formula or the prayer, so long as I could draw the divine power out, magic of a low order would take shape with ease.
In the novel, they described incredible light bursting forth and the magic activating the moment she so much as reached out a hand.
Hmm... was I just supposed to stand here?
Right. Just imagine it. Pour the heat inside me — the energy — into that wooden dummy...
I slowly extended my hand. Nothing happened. Of course it wouldn't be that easy.
In that instant, a heat trembled low in my belly.
...Wait. My lower belly?? Something's wrong—
From deep in my abdomen, up through my chest and down my arm to my palm, something hot whirled and burst free.
Breath of Life has activated.
Kiiiing—!
A blinding flash, and a soundless shockwave swept the training grounds. White radiance pouring from my fingertips swallowed the place whole. Where the light vanished, only a melted wooden dummy and a collapsed stone wall remained.
The healing magic had activated properly. The problem was the output. Using divine power for the first time, I had poured it out far too hard. An overwhelming life force had flooded into a dummy and a wall that could not accept it, and in the end the structures, unable to bear that power, had come down.
So even healing, past a certain point, becomes destruction...
The knights stared at me with shock written across their faces, not even breathing. I shoved my trembling hands into the sleeves of the Saintess's robes and hid them as fast as I could. In my previous life I had been a pathetic shut-in who did nothing but hammer a keyboard inside a room. Now a single gesture was enough to shatter whatever I pleased.
Seriously, with power like this... I can stop it, can't I?
I could stop the tragedy. I could keep anyone from dying. What had just happened only made me more confident — and more arrogant. With power of this degree, of course I could stop it. That was what I thought, and what I was sure of, never knowing that when fate prepares a tragedy, the first thing it places in a human's hands is arrogance, carelessness, and confidence.