Prologue
Prologue
Prologue
I was the type of person who didn't particularly care how many religions existed in the country I lived in.
As long as someone wasn't constantly trying to proselytize to me, what did it matter who believed what?
Trying to preach my own views to people who weren't going to be persuaded would just leave both sides frustrated.
So whether people said this or that about real-world religions, or what influence they had in novels, it made no difference to me. If I didn't read it, that was the end of it.
But there was one novel I just couldn't let pass.
A world where it was revealed that God truly existed—and yet that God was not the god of any religion we knew, but a different being entirely, a fact that had spread far and wide.
Including that premise, the story itself was about Gates opening in the real world, countless monsters pouring out, and people standing against those monsters. It was fairly entertaining in its own way, and I liked the characters too.
However, there was exactly one part I couldn't stand.
"......A Theocracy? A State Religion? In 21st-century South Korea?"
That's right.
Because it was a worldview where God's existence had been proven, people didn't doubt God's existence.
Up to that point, sure, I could accept it as plausible. It was a common enough premise in other novels. Modern fantasy with Dimensional Portals wasn't exactly rare.
Although the protagonist constantly going in and out of that religion's convent did seem to lack any sense of realism, but whatever. The heroine had to show up somehow, after all.
What I couldn't tolerate was something else.
Seriously, because of that, South Korea suddenly became a Theocracy in just a few years?
Daily life supposedly hadn't changed much from reality, but as long as a legally established State Religion existed, that country could never be a Secular State. It fundamentally meant a world extremely exclusionary toward other religions and Atheists.
What kind of nonsense was that for a 21st century ruled by reason and rationality?
And not just any country—a country that already guaranteed freedom of religion! And not some deeply rooted existing religion, but practically a new religious movement!
Normally I would have ignored it and gone looking for another novel to read, but unfortunately, after watching the first few episodes, I'd grown attached to the characters, and in the end I read all the way through to the latest chapter.
And the more I read, the more the premise underpinning the novel kept bothering me.
After agonizing over it for days, I finally decided to send a sponsorship message to the author.
[Dear author, does it make any sense for a Secular State to become a Theocracy in just a few years?]
Beginning with that,
filling the maximum character count of a sponsorship message several times over and splitting it into multiple messages—
Why a new religion couldn't become the State Religion while ignoring the history of existing religions; why there was no way for that transition to happen without religious conflict; and, even if God existed, how serious the consequences could be when religion was dragged into secular affairs. I refuted it all with historical and logical arguments, and then—
[I am enjoying the novel. Keep up the good work.]
—a splendid sponsorship message that even properly observed etiquette with those closing words.
It wasn't as if I'd said I was dropping the novel while actually reading every latest chapter and harassing the author in the comments. I hadn't insulted other readers or disparaged the fundamental genre of the novel. There was no personal attack against the author—
The next day, I woke up as a five-year-old brat.
And not just that—with nothing in my hands, wearing nothing but a ragged scrap of cloth in front of a church.
I happened to be discovered by a priest who was returning to the church after running an errand outside, was brought inside, and—literally rescued—received a name and managed to settle into this world one way or another.
For my part, I examined this world I'd fallen into as thoroughly as I could. Based on a few words used in this world, my name, the location of this place, and—decisively—my own appearance, which, though I was still young, closely resembled the appearance described in the novel, I was able to reach a conclusion about what kind of world this was relatively quickly.
And I was horrified.
"......Saintess?"
I muttered.
No, wait—right now, they're telling me to become a Saintess?
A person gave sincere advice and counsel, and now they've thrown me into this world just to screw with me, right?
Don't tell me the one who wrote that novel was this world's God? Are you kidding me?
If someone claims to be God, as if I'd ever believe them.
I clutched the back of my neck.
Right. A Saintess.
Even though the setting was South Korea, for some reason the heroine was a white girl with blonde hair and blue eyes, seemingly of Caucasian descent. On top of that, she had a good figure and a gentle personality.
Well, a good personality and a good figure—sure, she's the heroine, so fine. But why is her ethnicity completely different?
No matter how much of an orphan she is, isn't that too unnatural? Isn't the author's taste showing way too much?
Did I ask them to change the entire foundation of the novel?
Couldn't they just tweak the background setting a little? Change the setting a bit, adjust the setup of the Korean clergy who were basically civil servants in the story, modify some characters' religion-related settings a little, change the setup where the Hero Candidate heroine's parents shoved her into a convent—just that much would've been enough. Was that really so hard?
I even wrote that it would be an excellent novel if they just fixed that.
Sure, they didn't want to put in even that much effort, so they tossed me into this world.
I don't know who it is, but they're damn irrational and unreasonable. If they're a god, there's no way they wouldn't know that revising a novel's content is far simpler than reincarnating a person into another world.
.......
"Hah."
I pressed my hand to my forehead.
What on earth is all this?
A Saintess. Me, destined to become a Saintess.
"......As if I would?"
I muttered.
Of course I had no intention of becoming one.
Fine. From now on, I'll go completely rotten.
And then I'll get kicked out of the convent and tear that whole plan up from its roots.
"So it looks like you're trying to claim you're God. Let's see whether I'll acknowledge that."
I'll say this in advance: on that one point, at least, I have no intention of ever acknowledging it, even if I die.
That's the very position I criticized most—there's no way I could!
What Atheist in the world could ever become a Saintess?