The Auction of Miracles
I already knew it. This kind of dominance could never last long. For now, the Iron Alliance was full of absolute bastards, and the situation was perfectly legal for us to tear apart and devour their fragments, so our interests aligned nicely. But even a little more time would bring all sorts of alliances and betrayals. It might not even last a full year.
Ziegfried had delegated his voting rights to me, and while cooperation between me, the Church, and the Brien royal family was the foundation, it would be naively optimistic to think the royal family would stay on my—on the Church’s—side forever. Still, that was a problem for later.
Whatever the case, I had somehow obtained the strongest card available right now, almost as if someone had arranged it for me. Though it did feel a bit excessive, to be honest.
“Um… Your Holiness the Saintess.”
“Oh come on, even calling me ‘Your Holiness’ is too much. We’re both students at the same academy, so let’s avoid such extreme honorifics. It makes it seem like we’re only concerned with asserting our own authority in a place that’s supposed to symbolize harmony and cooperation.”
“Ah, I’m sorry, Saintess. I was just wondering… if I might ask how one could possibly obtain gold coins…”
“Hmm? Wouldn’t you normally ask the academy’s archbishop about that?”
The Academia originally had an archbishop in charge of religious affairs. With two bishops and quite a few priests under him, it carried symbolic weight as a major diocese, but an archbishop was still an archbishop. I’d learned this by chance while doing university assignments back in Korea. Even in Korea alone, there had been three major archdioceses—Seoul, Gwangju, and Daegu—dividing the entire country into three parts.
To begin with, even though the papacy was split in two, there were only sixteen patriarchs in the entire Church organization, and only about forty archbishops. That made them quite high-ranking clergy. Each archbishop had slightly more than ten bishops under them, for a total of around five hundred bishops. In short, even an archbishop was a sufficiently high-ranking figure. While they couldn’t set Church policy, they were more than enough to discuss the current situation.
“The archbishop told me to ask you, Saintess. The hero said the same thing.”
Whether it was the archbishop, Zieg, or the cardinals, everyone seemed busy dumping all Church-related matters onto me now that I was their equal or higher. They could have handled most of it themselves. Of course, this was nothing more than me complaining about being saddled with annoying tasks. In reality, it was only right that I handled them.
More than anything else, it was because I had already swept up all the gold coins in the area. Even if the archbishop or the hero wanted to tell the inquiring nobles something or give them any, they had nothing left to give. So the only answer they could offer was, “You should ask the Saintess.”
“Do you wish to purchase a miracle with gold coins? Or are you hoping to buy the coins themselves?”
“Purchase… I wish to purchase the coins.”
That was why more than a few people had come to see me like this. Right after the Iron Alliance designated gold coins as their official settlement currency, the value of gold coins—which had already been rising sharply—had bent upward at an even steeper angle and begun soaring to truly ridiculous heights.
Nobles might lack compared to merchants, but they weren’t completely ignorant when it came to money. Even if they couldn’t think of creative ways to produce the resource themselves, they weren’t blind enough to miss a glittering golden mountain sitting right in front of them.
“I see. Then here you go.”
“October 15th, Blue Ocean Theater, 13 Academy Plaza Avenue? What is this place?”
“There are simply too many buyers. If we did it first-come-first-served, the competitors would all be formidable people. So I thought we’d hold an auction there.”
“……Pardon?”
The noble heir blinked rapidly, clearly wondering if this was really going to work. Then he blinked again, even more slowly and stupidly, as if he couldn’t understand what I was saying. If this had been the first time, I might have been somewhat flustered wondering what was wrong with him. But I had already met several others who had come with the same purpose, so I knew exactly why he was reacting this way.
The Saintess was holding an auction. And not just any auction—for currency backed by miracles that could reasonably be interpreted as carrying the Church’s divinity.
“There’s no helping it, is there? There are many people but limited supply. We can’t create a situation where someone monopolizes miracles just because they arrived first. Nor can we blindly give priority based on status or power. If we want to be fair, this is the only way.”
“But then… wouldn’t that mean selling holy relics for money…”
“Holy relics? These? In your eyes, do these look like holy relics? Rather than perfectly round gold coins bearing the Church’s seal, with quite high gold purity, whose value keeps hitting new record highs every moment?”
Swish. Swish.
Since a gold coin was slightly larger in diameter and a bit thinner than a 10-won coin, it wasn’t difficult to roll it between my fingers. And every time it rolled, it caught the sunlight pouring through the window and reflected it back, creating a dizzying repetition of silver and golden flashes.
“I-it’s… a gold coin, yes.”
“Oh, don’t worry. I’m not pretending not to know while actually knowing. People think these coins possess divinity simply because I designed them and the Church authorized their minting.”
Ting!Clink-clink-clink.
I flicked it with my thumb so it landed beautifully on the wooden desk and spun in place. That had its own charm too. The technology might be medieval, but since magic existed in this world, the purity, shape, and satisfying tactile feel of the gold coins were no joke.
“Are you saying… they don’t?”
“Does it look that way to you? Does it really seem like divinity dwells in this mere worldly lump of gold? It does give off a golden light similar to my divine power, but is it truly the same golden light as mine?”
I stretched out my right index finger and gently pressed down on the vertical axis of the spinning gold coin. The 1-gold coin stopped rotating, showing the Church’s seal facing me and the number 1 embossed largely against the background of the Romano Cathedral facing the noble heir. When I lightly infused a tiny amount of my divine power into the tip of the finger pressing on the coin, it created the image of a pure golden sacred sun shining down on a more worldly golden coin.
Kya, the presentation is killer.
“I can only say… they cannot possibly be compared.”
“Right? In the end, this is just a rather special piece of gold. Among them, it’s merely an object to which people have attached special meaning. Though now its actual uses are expanding very quickly and widely.”
Tap!
I lightly pulled my right index finger downward, laying the gold coin flat so that the tip of my finger covered the upper part of the boldly embossed number 1 against the Romano Cathedral background. The other party stared at the coin in a daze before raising his gaze to me and swallowing dryly.
Good. The mood was perfectly set.
“So if you don’t want to participate, that is your free will and I will respect it. Don’t believe any rumors that you’ll receive a curse or bad luck because of this. Neither the Church nor I are so petty as to do something like that.”
“Th-thank you.”
“No, I should be the one thanking you. Well then, I look forward to your wise choice?”
When things went like this, I really felt like a merchant doing business with divine power. Of course, if you thought about it objectively, that was exactly what I was doing. Using my position as the Saintess and leveraging this divine power that shone with pure golden light as a fulcrum to conduct business.
“Wow, the nobles of our empire really are throwing themselves into this with fire in their eyes, huh?”
The moment the imperial noble heir left, Yulia poked her head in and asked while cautiously looking around the room. In response, I spread both arms wide toward her.
“Right? This is all thanks to you, Yulia. If it weren’t for you, they wouldn’t have shown even half this much interest.”
“Eek, Lucia is really… too much…”
At that, Yulia came running over with quick, light steps—tap tap tap. Even though her movements weren’t particularly vigorous, her bun hairstyle swayed with a charming swish swish, and her chest jiggled noticeably.
Ugh, I’m going crazy. God, why are you giving me this kind of trial? At least drop me in a world that’s free and open about this kind of thing.
“How was today?”
“Everyone was really kind. I had no idea the people of the kingdom could be so wonderful and beautiful, and kind on top of that.”
She sat down sideways on my thigh with her legs neatly together. From this position, she was just the right height for my eyes to reach her lips. When I looked up at her to meet her gaze, she seemed to really, truly love this angle. Even without words, I could tell from her eyes alone how satisfied she was.
“See? In the end, the Demon King and demonic creatures are the ultimate enemies, so we’re all people who must join forces and stand united. The current conflict is only temporary.”
“Mmm, that seems right. By the way, how can Lucia be so pretty, so wise, and so smart?”
“Well done. Praise makes even a whale dance, so make sure to give praise generously to everyone, Yulia. That alone will be enough.”
“Ehehe, e-ehehh…”
I had only taught her a bit about styling and instilled in her the core principle of social navigation: that no one can spit on a smiling face, especially when that face belongs to the empire’s imperial princess. In other words, I had her fire all the exclusive maids who couldn’t even style her properly despite serving an imperial princess, and taught her how to get rid of those who acted hostile toward her for no reason.
In times like these, her un-princess-like naturalness and purity actually helped. I told her not to overthink it and just do it this way. If someone was hostile without reason, simply pass them off to the people around her. And she really did exactly that.
It was admittedly a rather sloppy method, but as long as she thoroughly maintained her title as imperial princess, it was a method that wouldn’t cause any major problems. And that period would probably last her entire life. Even if she got married, the label of “former imperial princess” would never disappear.
Put another way, it meant that until now she hadn’t been able to remove the maids who couldn’t even style her properly because of that label. It also meant she had been completely at the mercy of a count’s daughter who not only borrowed her authority but tried to devour her entirely.
“Still, there will probably be at least one truly rude and shameless person in your life. I told you about that, right?”
Quite a few people within the empire already knew about Yulia’s extreme introversion. Now that she was returning, they would probably think she had at least the basics down and be careful not to touch her recklessly. But there was no telling what kind of lunatic might appear.
“Mmm. You said in that case, I shouldn’t deal with them and should withdraw and tell Daddy.”
Therefore, I had advised her that if such people approached, she should simply not engage with them and report to her “Daddy.” It was clear that the emperor cherished Yulia. Otherwise, how could the word “Daddy” come from the mouth of a sixteen-year-old imperial princess? If he hadn’t cherished her, he would have issued a stern rebuke long ago.
“Aww, how good and admirable. You did well, you did well.”
“Hehehe…”
When I reached out and gently stroked her hair, she burst into a bright smile as if that alone made her happy. No, it wasn’t that we were thinking of each other in that way. Honestly, I was starting to feel like my eyes were slowly opening in that direction, but I was certain Yulia wasn’t. Rather, it seemed she felt something about her “older sister”—whom she strangely avoided mentioning in depth—through these actions with me. It was a kind of vicarious satisfaction.
“Alright, now come down. Before we wrap up the day, we should do some work together.”
“E-eh, work, that’s right. We have to work. Let’s do it together, me and Lucia, together.”
Ziegfried and the academy’s archbishop had expressed some concern about this part. They said that since it was related to gold coins, it was ultimately the Church’s business, so was it appropriate for her to work together with the imperial princess, who was affiliated with the empire? On principle, it might seem absurd for the legitimate Church to work with the imperial princess who was either under the influence of the imperial Church or pulling the imperial Church into her sphere of influence.
“The bigger the market, the better.”
“Market… you say.”
“That’s right, Archbishop. It’s a market. A market that the imperial princess herself will open for us. If we want to achieve the reunification of the Church, don’t we need to increase the number of common points as much as possible first?”
The academy archbishop seemed somewhat unfamiliar with referring to dioceses as markets, but he agreed with the idea of increasing common points for the sake of reunification. Thanks to that, my recruitment of Yulia was able to proceed very smoothly. And as a bonus, the deeper the intimacy grew through the recruitment process, the more naturally it prevented the crown prince from getting entangled with the imperial princess.