The Second Key
The four pillars crumbled, and the ritual came to an end.
Vodyanoy, who had reigned like a king over the sanctuary, vanished.
And with him, the tidal wave of spirits that had been surging toward them was gone as well.
Lawrence rose from his seat and was hit at once by a wave of violent dizziness.
The headache drilling into his skull was nauseating beyond words.
Only the insects that had been chewing at his vision like enraged bees had disappeared.
The churning in his body was still as bad as ever.
But he couldn’t afford to sit here like this.
Yekaterina, after inspecting the shattered pillars one by one, was now heading toward the center of the sanctuary.
Unlike Caelo, who had never shown much interest in the place, she was one of the Holy See’s own. The odds were good that she would recover the unidentified sheepskin manuscript that had fallen where Vodyanoy had stood.
“Feeling a little better now, junior?”
“Yes. I’ve managed to recover, more or less.”
“You don’t look like it.”
“I’m fine.”
But his resolve outpaced his body.
He had taken only a few steps before his legs gave out under him.
It was Yekaterina who caught him before he could fall.
“Sorry. I’m going right now—”
“Enough. Lean on me. Your stubbornness isn’t exactly ordinary, is it? You were going to push on no matter what I said. Then it’s better we walk together.”
Lawrence had no answer for that.
He leaned on her and made his way toward the center of the sanctuary.
“You’ve had a rough time. I ended up dragging you down through no fault of your own.”
“Not at all. It was my lack of skill.”
Even after preparing as much as he had, it had still come to this.
If not for the enhanced Holy Shield, he would never have held out.
The mana he had spent on Holy Shield was clearly several times greater than what he had used on Shadow Trap.
There might have been things to reflect on, but no regrets.
At the time, it had been the best choice he could make.
Because of that decision, Lawrence had survived.
Yekaterina had survived too.
“Fair enough. If that’s what you think, I have nothing to say.”
“I’ll train harder.”
What he had overcome today was not by Lawrence’s strength alone.
To put it bluntly, if not for Caelo, anything could have happened.
Invincible Caelo.
The Four Knight of the Promise he had seen with his own eyes truly lived up to the name.
That he had passed through the sanctuaries unharmed until now had been sheer luck.
If the first two sanctuaries had held a divine spirit like Vodyanoy, Lawrence would not have walked away from them alive.
He had vaguely thought that one day he would go to the magic tower.
Now, he could no longer afford to keep putting it off.
He had only just fallen into that swamp of thought when a faint fragrance began to rise through the stench.
He didn’t even need to turn around to know whose scent it was.
A soft touch brushed against his arm.
“For someone so filthy, you don’t smell that bad.”
He said it as if to hide his own embarrassment.
“Hm? Look at you, talking big. Sisters don’t smell, you know. Keeping your body clean is respect for the Goddess.”
“You always have tobacco in your mouth, though.”
“Tobacco is tobacco. What I smoke is special tobacco made by the Holy See. Precious stuff. You can use it instead of prayer if you want. It’s made from completely different ingredients than the cheap stuff the layabouts on the street puff on.”
“Is that true? Then the reason you were smoking was….”
“There aren’t many ways to help with a prayer from the outside. Well, setting that aside, it tastes good, too.”
Lawrence blinked at her, momentarily at a loss.
“I’m sorry, Sister Yekaterina.”
“What’s that supposed to mean all of a sudden?”
“I think I may have misunderstood you.”
She let out a snort, as though it didn’t matter in the slightest.
“You can just call me Yerina, by the way.”
“Pardon?”
“Yekaterina’s too long. Call me Yerina. That’s what all my colleagues do.”
“Understood, Yerina.”
Perhaps embarrassed, Yerina thumped him lightly on the back.
While they exchanged a bit of idle chatter, the two of them arrived at the stone Vodyanoy had left behind.
Lawrence’s dizziness had eased, and he stepped away from her.
Compared to the colossal Vodyanoy, the stone was small.
But that was only in comparison to the creature’s absurd size.
The stone itself, seen up close, was so huge it couldn’t be taken in at a glance.
Dozens of pages’ worth of sheepskin parchment were stacked before it.
An ominous pulse of mana.
The space around the parchments seemed somehow warped.
Lawrence’s guess was right.
This was no ordinary sheepskin parchment.
The same mana he had felt from the Grimoire Acheron had shown him in Dragon Valley was seeping from it.
He had found it.
The Key of the Spirit World.
The thing he had searched for so desperately was right there before his eyes.
“Well, that’s that, more or less. Now all that’s left is to carve this into a statue of the Goddess and take care of the sanctuary.”
“You’re going to turn this stone into a goddess statue?”
“It can’t be used as it is. We have to consecrate it in preparation for any future incident. That alone takes a minimum of a few years. There’s no helping it if we want it safe. Only saints with stigmata, or a Saint, can do this work.”
Lawrence recalled the goddess statue he had seen at the other sanctuary.
The broken statue.
The gate that had connected to a crack in the spirit world.
Listening to her explanation, that statue seemed to be something different from the ones consecrated by the church.
Yerina nodded when she heard him.
“Naturally. That’s a relic from the past. It’s often damaged so badly that it can’t be moved to the Holy See, and restoration work has to be done on the spot.”
“I see. If someone had tried to move it carelessly, it would have broken.”
Could the fragments of the goddess statue left behind in Rombamel’s playground have been traces of that kind?
Maybe someone had tried to move it by force, only to shatter it, leaving them no choice but to salvage the fragments….
No. It was too soon to jump to conclusions.
There had indeed been fragments of a goddess statue left there, but a playground was a rather implausible place to call a lost sanctuary.
“Sometimes you’ll find a statue in good condition. In those cases, we move it to the Holy See and carry out the restoration there.”
“What happens after the restoration is finished?”
“They’re sent to temples or monasteries scattered all over the place. Usually, a local region secures its own statue, but that can change however the diocesan bishop sees fit.”
Yerina approached the Key of the Spirit World.
She kept her gaze on it as she drew a length of cloth from her robes and carefully covered the parchment.
“You may already know this, but the things found in a lost sanctuary are extremely dangerous. Some of them can drive a person mad just by being seen. Recovering such objects and sending them to the Holy See is part of our job.”
Grimoire.
A magical book that could drive a person insane just by being looked at.
Yekaterina knew exactly how to handle an object steeped in the knowledge of the spirit world.
“Still, wouldn’t it be fine to take just one quick look?”
“I’m giving you this warning from the bottom of my heart. Stop, junior.”
Yerina placed the cloth-wrapped parchment into a reliquary.
Lawrence stared at the tightly shut reliquary with regret.
He had finally found a Key of the Spirit World.
It was far too painful to let it slip right out of his hands like this.
If he missed this chance, it would be taken to the Holy See.
Was there any way at all?
To his surprise, the problem resolved itself.
A sinister black light seeped from the reliquary, then flowed into the bag slung across Lawrence’s shoulder.
Yerina did not see the dark trail.
Without the Seeing Eye, it was invisible to her.
Only Lawrence could see and feel it here.
When he cautiously looked inside his bag, Lemegeton, sealed by the stopper, was trembling faintly.
The ominous force that had been lingering inside the reliquary could no longer be felt.
Lawrence was certain of it.
He had recovered the Key of the Spirit World.
The stopper Veles had made was not limited to Lemegeton.
It seemed to exert its influence over the other Keys of the Spirit World as well.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I was just thinking… that this was a valuable experience.”
It was a convenient way to put it, but when he thought about it, it was true.
He had never imagined he would meet a divine spirit inside a sanctuary.
According to Acheron, there were only a few of the spirit world’s neighbors left in the mortal realm now.
Lawrence had met one of them today.
And not just any one—he had met the divine spirit Vodyanoy, who possessed formidable power.
If he had faced it alone, without Caelo or Yerina, would the outcome have been different?
He didn’t know.
Lawrence had not answered Vodyanoy’s question.
If he had revealed that he had awakened all five Cognitive Concepts, perhaps the spirit would have regarded him with a friendlier attitude.
No. That was a what-if layered on top of another what-if.
No matter how he spun it, the fact remained that Vodyanoy had tried to take the boy’s life.
A beloved child is dangerous.
Acheron had said as much when they first met.
The neighbors in Dragon Valley had said the same thing, too.
They had said Acheron had already taken the lives of many beloved children.
Every action had a reason behind it.
Lawrence recalled the cemetery keeper’s warning from the Temple of Sorrow.
“Remember this. It is the beloved child who becomes the most terrifying changeling.”
Now he understood.
The changeling they had spoken of was fundamentally different from the changelings in Dragon Valley.
Acheron’s warning.
Vodyanoy’s words.
The cemetery keeper’s advice.
All of it clicked together, and with it came a strange, uneasy premonition that some unavoidable crisis was waiting just beyond the next turn.
“Are you really serious? One tiny mistake and you might’ve been dead, junior.”
Yerina’s voice pulled Lawrence out of his thoughts.
“If I were afraid of that, I wouldn’t have gone around searching the sanctuaries by myself.”
“Hmph. Fair enough.”
She nodded, then went on.
“So? Are you interested in becoming an inquisitor?”
“I don’t even know what inquisitors do.”
“Don’t give me that. What have you been looking at all this time? This is what inquisitors do. And you’ve got the black sacred cross, too. If you’re interested, I was wondering if you’d like to come join Celestial.”
So that was it.
Yerina was offering him a chance to become an inquisitor.
He had been asked something similar in the swamp, too.
Back then, they had asked whether he wanted to become an Ulbaniero.
“I appreciate the offer, but I don’t want to be tied down too tightly to the church. Watching what you do, Yerina… Yekaterina, it seems like the Holy See ends up handing down a great many tasks one way or another. That isn’t the life I’m looking for.”
Cedric might have been right.
Lawrence was satisfied with being able to move freely as he was now.
If he joined Celestial, he might receive all sorts of support from the Holy See, but in return he would lose a great deal of personal freedom.
At that point, the means would become the end.
And a thirst for magic could only ever be quenched by magic.
His search for the lost sanctuaries was ultimately to find cracks in the spirit world and recover the Keys of the Spirit World.
The boy knew that all of this was connected to a wider mystery.
To the underlying laws of the world.
“So you’re saying no because it’s too much work? What are you, a child?”
“I’m sorry. Still, since it’s your suggestion, I’ll think about it.”
“No need. If you’ve turned me down once, that’s the end of it. Why are you trying to leave the door open? We don’t accept just anyone, either. That’s why we’re always short-handed.”
Yerina snorted and called Caelo over.
“So what are you planning to do now?”
“Find the rat. That’s my mission.”
Come to think of it, that was what he had said.
From the start, exterminating the rat had been Caelo’s purpose.
“That’s the payment for helping you. There’s no rat you’re after here.”
“Can you be certain?”
“You think I spent my time in the village without investigating a thing? I can say it outright. There may be a middleman, but there’s no rat tied to the organization.”
“Then I’ll start with the middleman.”
Caelo shifted the greatsword bound in cloth onto his back.
“The village is in the middle of a festival. Tracing a tail won’t be easy.”
“The cooperative mission is over. From here on, it’s on my own ability.”
He turned to Yerina, as if asking whether she had anything else to say.
“I’d like it if I didn’t have to look at your face anymore, Caelo.”
“Same here. I have no desire to meet you either, Yerina.”
Yerina gave a short laugh.
Caelo let out a snort.
The handshake was brief.
No more words were needed.
As though that was simply how the two of them were, the whole thing felt strangely familiar.
“Thank you for your hard work, Mr. Caelo.”
Lawrence called out a farewell to the man as he walked away.
For a moment, Caelo’s steps seemed to pause, but he did not look back.
“Today was amusing. I’m sure I’ll see you again someday. Until then, please take good care of our little lady’s watch, Lawrence.”
“…….”
With that, Invincible Caelo left the sanctuary behind.