The Healer's Burden
The morning call came as it always did—sharp, urgent, and far too early.
“Your Holiness, we have a patient! Complaining of severe abdominal pain!”
“Understood. I’m on my way!”
In games, there were all sorts of classes—swordsmen, priests, thieves, archers. Among them, priests usually took on the role of healer. They were the ones responsible for keeping their allies alive, offering prayers that could mend wounds in the blink of an eye, performing what looked like miracles.
I never realized it back then.
I had no idea just how brutal a job being a healer really was.
Most people who play games choose damage dealers. Only a small fraction pick support classes, and even among those, very few want to play pure healers. That shortage often led to desperate recruitment calls in parties.
So I chose to be a supporter.
Because the rarer you were, the more noblesse oblige you received. The special treatment I enjoyed as a supporter in the game ended up shaping my next life.
Knight. Mage. Priest.
When I was young, I had many paths open to me. The wealthy Holy Empire actively supported children in pursuing whatever they wanted to learn.
Most kids would have simply picked whatever caught their interest. But I was a little more calculating.
Want to learn swordsmanship? You’d have to sweat through endless training for the rest of your life. I’d already lived one life full of hardship. Wasn’t it only natural to want an easier one this time around? So—rejected.
Want to learn magic? You’d spend your entire life glued to a chair, wrestling with books. Thanks to memories from my previous life, that idea repulsed me even more. I’d already endured enough studying during my senior year of high school and while earning certifications for employment. That was more than enough.
“I will enter the temple.”
So I chose to become a healer.
Having always played support characters in games, I didn’t feel much resistance. And here, too, healers were incredibly rare. A precious, irreplaceable class that not just anyone could take on.
That was how, at the age of nine, I left home and entered the temple to begin my life as a priest.
It didn’t take long for me to realize, with bone-deep regret, just how terrible that choice had been.
This is too much! How is this any different from my last life?!
A knight only had to train. At least their head didn’t hurt. A mage only had to use their brain. At least their body didn’t suffer. But a priest had to do both.
Wake-up time: five in the morning. After washing up and getting dressed, we had to attend two straight hours of dawn prayer. Once that was over, we ate breakfast and classes began immediately.
Ten volumes of scripture containing the words of the gods. Each book was packed with tiny print and boasted an absurd number of pages. Memorizing all of them was our primary task.
And to prove we’d actually done it, we had exams every quarter. Since passing those exams was required for advancement, memorizing the scriptures became our top priority.
Failing is absolutely not an option!
Failing meant being forced into reflective prayer duty, so we couldn’t allow ourselves to fall behind no matter what.
The problem was that wasn’t even the end of what we had to learn.
After scripture lessons came choir practice, followed by classes on history, culture, art, and even exorcism rituals. Our days were packed wall-to-wall with classes from dawn until dusk.
Once all the lessons were finally over, we ate dinner—only for evening prayer to begin right after.
Praying right after eating? Isn’t that crossing the line? How is a kid supposed to fight off the food coma?!
Two hours would pass in a hazy blur where I couldn’t even tell if I was praying or dreaming. Only after surviving that exhausting schedule did the dark night finally arrive, when we were allowed to sleep.
Having lived that routine myself from such a young age, I finally understood why there were so few healers. I couldn’t deny that I had made the worst possible choice.
It was the worst possible outcome of trying to be clever.
In the game, most players simply avoided it because it wasn’t fun. I should have realized that in reality, there might be a completely different reason so few people became healers.
So that’s why there were so few of them—because becoming one was pure hell.
What an idiot I was. I hadn’t known that at all.
I had tried to take the easy path, only to make an irreversible decision and end up sinking into the mud. That foolish mortal was me.
Once you entered the temple, there was no leaving unless you were excommunicated. And no one in the world looked kindly upon a defrocked priest. There was no place where an ex-priest could live comfortably.
So I became a healer.
Even though a comfortable life was now completely out of reach.