The Temple Within
"Paladins? Diligent fellows, they are."
"What's that supposed to mean? Then what about priests?"
"...Even more diligent fellows. They always have to recite a little prayer before they do anything."
His master's words came back to him. But that was not a "little" prayer by any stretch of the imagination.
Benedict offered up his prayers with tireless devotion, all to save a single critically wounded man. In the time it took, the patient had slipped to the very brink of death — and Messi had already swept Heal through Benedict's body and still had time to spare.
Even that prayer, though, had an ending. A little past three minutes, a period finally fell.
A flash.
The holy power that had been spreading through the room concentrated on the patient in a single instant, and the man's body — wracked with agony only a moment before — became miraculously whole. He was restored, quite literally, to the state he had been in before the accident ever happened.
The mining slave kept groaning, not even realizing he had been healed. It was only a few moments later that he noticed something was wrong, and began feeling over every inch of himself.
Overcome by the astonishing miracle, he broke into fervent praise of God and of Benedict.
After sending the mining slave on his way, Benedict approached Messi.
"You said this was your first time witnessing a miracle. How did you find it?"
If he were asked for an honest impression... well.
How on earth did you memorize a prayer that long?
He could hardly say that out loud. He decided to stick to the facts. The treatment, at least, had been certain.
"It's a completely different principle from Heal. The concept of returning the body to the state it was in before it was ever hurt... this truly is a miracle of God."
"Just so. It would be impossible without the love of Lady Gaia, who watches over us."
He looked genuinely pleased — not because he had been praised, but because someone had recognized the power of God.
Baron Boavang and the Pengel Company's deputy merchant-lord, who had been trailing at Benedict's heels, burst into applause and poured out shameless exclamations.
"Indeed, indeed! The Silver Paladin! Every time I behold that silver holy power, I can only marvel. That astonishing majesty, which makes one realize that God Himself is present and watching over us!"
"Truly beautiful beyond measure. If only Sir Benedict's silver holy power could be sold separately, we should never have been able to keep up with the demand!"
"This is what Lady Gaia has bestowed. All of it is Her achievement. It does not seem to me praise that I ought to receive."
Benedict humbly turned every bit of credit over to God.
But whether they were simply oblivious, or whether Benedict's words had never mattered to them in the first place, they did not stop clapping, and tried to stir the room into joining them.
"My, have you ever seen such a humble man."
"Did everyone see? This is the kind of person Sir Benedict is!"
Clap, clap, clap...
The reaction of the people in the Prayer House, however, was not nearly as enthusiastic as they had hoped.
There was a reason for that. Everyone in the room was thinking the same thing.
Wouldn't Sir Messi's Heal actually be better? It's faster... more effective...
Erena was bewildered.
She, too, was a person of this world, and the belief that a priest's miracle was the pinnacle of the healing arts had been laid down in her like bedrock. Without realizing it, though, two days of Messi's Heal had reset her standard.
At first she had even felt a flicker of that rapturous awe, standing in the light of holy power. But then she looked at the patient waiting in agony for treatment, and all she felt was frustration.
She even caught herself thinking:
If it had been Sir Messi's Heal, he would have been treated already.
"Hmm. You lot over there don't seem particularly pleased with the miracle Sir Benedict just showed."
"That's right! With faces like that... a sick man has been healed, and you can't even be happy about it!"
The baron and the deputy merchant-lord could not bring themselves to aim their words at Ereb or Erena, so they jabbed their fingers at the others standing nearby. To their eyes, the expressions of the Ahental knights and attendants all looked distinctly unsettled.
Of course they look sour. They must have realized Sir Benedict's power is on a completely different level from that foreign healer.
The baron and the deputy merchant-lord were flushed with a sense of victory. Just as they were about to get carried away, Benedict reined them in.
"Please don't be like that. Compared to a miracle of God, Heal is a firefly set beside the moonlight. These are people who have worked with good hearts for the patients all this time. Must you treat them that way?"
"Kh — this... they ought to know the depth of Sir Benedict's heart!"
"Please bring in the next patient. If we mean to finish today, there is no time to rest."
That much was certainly true. It was one of the reasons priests disliked unpaid volunteer work. The patients never ended, and their own mouths grew tired.
At Benedict's urging, a Prayer House attendant brought in the next patient.
It was a mining slave who had been standing near a mine mage when the mage's mistake set his entire body on fire. Half his face and a third of the skin on his body had been lost, weeping with discharge and pus. The man on the stretcher was writhing in pain.
Benedict was about to step forward at once when the baron and the deputy merchant-lord cut in.
"Do you intend to treat them all yourself? You just took one, so this time it should be that side's turn."
"That's right. We heard the foreign healer's skills are remarkable — shouldn't we see them for ourselves?"
Hmm... I told them not to interfere with the treatment.
Benedict had a fairly clear idea of what they were after.
He had introduced them as his patrons, but that had only been since yesterday. They had arrived with Ayres and suddenly volunteered themselves as his sponsors.
Benedict was no fool. He had noticed well enough that their patronage was anything but pure. There was no priest at the monastery in Ahental Territory with a greater name than his own, and they meant to use that patronage as a pretext to crush the Saint of the Foreign Race.
Ordinarily he would have refused such sponsorship outright. But considering the monastery's difficult circumstances of late, he had not been able to. How delighted they had been only yesterday, when House Ahental's contribution to the church had come in.
That decision was coming back to him now.
He turned and looked at Messi.
"Saint. Can you do it? Be honest, for the patient's sake."
I'm fond of you, so I'd rather not clash if I can help it. I'll be considerate — just admit your inadequacy here and step aside.
That was the intent behind Benedict's question.
Messi, however, answered as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
"Of course I can treat him."
At Messi's reply, Benedict's face went cold.
He had asked whether it was possible, assuming of course that it was not.
And the other man had said that it was.
Heal cannot cleanly treat burn scars in the first place... you can fill in the skin, but the uneven marks will remain. Does he not even consider the life the patient has left to live?
As a man who had treated a great many people, Benedict was someone who thought about what came after the healing as well. In his eyes, though, this Messi seemed to consider only whether the patient lived or died. That, surely, was why he would say he could treat it.
Benedict let out a long sigh. He decided to set him straight.
"The patient is suffering, so I will ask again, and quickly. Can you truly treat him? What I mean is complete healing — healing that does not leave even a trace of the burn."
Contrary to his intention, Messi agreed at once.
"Of course."
"...This man?"
His speech had shortened without his noticing. That was how far his estimation of Messi had fallen in his heart.
I misjudged him. I rated him highly because he was a man who had saved many lives... and yet he digs in like this. Is it pride?
Benedict asked nothing more. He simply pointed at the patient. The meaning was plain: then go ahead and try.
"If the patient's skin is not cleanly healed, I will spread rather unpleasant rumors about you throughout the city. Are you still all right with that?"
Even at Benedict's cutting words, Messi did not bother to reply. He simply walked forward.
Watching the clash unfold, the baron and the deputy merchant-lord felt as though they might die of inner delight. They had not even needed to fan the flames. The firewood had caught all on its own.
At last, Messi stood before the burned mining slave.
From Messi's point of view, treating a burn was not difficult. His Heal had long since left the ordinary category behind. It was not even something to think twice about.
Right now, though, he was turning over something a little different — something beyond simply healing with Heal.
Holy power. What would happen if I applied that force to Heal?
Having already scanned Benedict with Heal, Messi knew the principle of where holy power originated and how it was used.
Simple, if you called it simple. Difficult, if you called it difficult.
The brain... that is, you raise a temple of your own in the space of the mind. And then you invite a god to dwell there.
Let us turn the clock back a little.
It was the moment Messi swept Heal through Benedict as the man recited his prayer without a stumble.
Their senses became one, and in an instant Messi was flooded with an inexplicable fullness.
He understood that this was the joy Benedict felt in serving a divine being. The joy and rapture of a frail human who realizes that God exists, and volunteers himself as that Absolute's servant...
How could anyone be so wholly filled with faith in God?
Lee Eunho of the twenty-first century could not have understood it. But Messi of this other world could understand it now.
The moment Messi set foot in the temple within Benedict's mental space, he too came face to face with a great being.
"How were you able to come here, child?"
When the god within Benedict asked him that, Messi wanted to answer — and could not.
He was merely an uninvited guest who had slipped into another man's mental space. He had no right to interfere there.
But even without his speaking, the god understood. That, after all, was what made her a god.
A woman's murmur reached him with perfect clarity.
Who? Messi wondered — and she seemed to sense it, because she answered.
"■■■ is a child who may become this world's hope, and who may also become its despair — a child who connects and sews together countless choices. Needle and thread are that child's symbols."
?
Um. I couldn't hear the first part of that.
So that was how Benedict used holy power. Messi understood.
With those words, Messi felt his body being pushed backward as if drawn by a magnet. He was being flung out of Benedict's inner world.
...Hah!
In the blink of an eye, he was back in reality. Messi felt a drained, hollow sensation not unlike regret. It was a phenomenon common to every human who had stood before a god.
Murmur, murmur...
Even in that moment, Benedict was still reciting his prayer. The room was still dyed in silver. The people were still marveling. The patient was still dying.
Only a few seconds had passed.
She said to build a temple within myself?
Messi did not hesitate. He opened his own mental space. The method was easy. He had only to follow Benedict's senses and open it.
...!
In a single instant, Messi arrived in a world of nothingness, where nothing at all existed.
If Benedict's mental space was a pure, featureless white, Messi's was black as a starless cosmos.
Raise a temple of my own...
The only image of a temple Messi knew was a Greek one, the kind he had seen in comics and textbooks. He tried to build one from that imagination, and it was no use. In the end, that was only fiction — a modern man's fancy, colored by media. In a situation that demanded true faith, it could not become real.
He turned it over in his mind, and all at once a place he had visited rose before him.
The Forest of Resentment... the ruins...
Kkyu had said that place was a temple from five or six thousand years ago. She had not known whose temple it was, only that it seemed to have been converted and used as a laboratory...
Still. A temple was a temple, wasn't it?
Rather than raise a meaningless fake, it seemed better to take as his foundation a temple he had actually seen and walked through.
That the thought was right, Messi realized almost at once.
As if it had always been that way, he was already standing in the middle of a familiar corridor. It was the path he had walked with Ereb, Ramang, and the Ahental Knights.
Creeeak...
Messi opened that door again, after a long time.
Enzo Muerte was inside here.
But in the temple Messi had constructed, there was no Enzo Muerte. Only the scenery, exactly as it had been then.
That did not mean it was ordinary. The Northern Gate he had never been able to pass beyond was realized before his eyes in perfect detail as well.
Can I open it and go through this time?
He did not know what lay on the other side. He wondered if, the moment he opened the door, the dark mental space would simply be waiting again.
The worry did not last long.
The instant Messi laid his hand on the Northern Gate, the great glass orb embedded in its center poured forth a golden light.
His breath caught at that overwhelming majesty.
Then someone's voice reached him.
It was a voice he had heard before.
It was the same as back then. When he had laid his hand on the Northern Gate in search of Madri's body, that voice had spoken.
But the words that followed, he was hearing for the first time.
A flash!
Light descended, and Messi's vision went white. A pillar of radiance had fallen into the center of the hall. Gradually, his sight returned.
In the place where Enzo Muerte had stood last time, there was a massive being he had never seen before.
No. It seemed to be there.
He could not see it. But he could feel that something radiating an immense presence stood in that spot.
Its gaze found him.
"I have dreamed of this day. The day you would invite me into your temple."
Who are you?
"I am ■■■. I am the ■ who ■■ed you as ■■, and I ■■■ ■■ you as ■ ■■."
...?
The same phenomenon again. It felt as though the words were being transmitted, then vanished into the air before they arrived. When Messi made a puzzled face, a sigh reached him.
He wanted to crack a joke, if only to cut the gravity of the atmosphere. The unseen one's words continued.
That was it? Again?
I just heard that a little while ago.
"Until then, I shall dwell in this temple you have made for me."
Messi realized that a certain being now resided in the temple within his mental space.
It was a presence of a different caliber — one whose very existence left no room for doubt. He understood, now, why Benedict could be so wholly filled with faith.
Believe that He is there, and He shares His power.
Swaaaa...
Golden light began to pour from Messi's head.
The mouths of those who witnessed it slowly, little by little, fell open.
Feeling that power connecting to him from the Absolute, Messi extended his hand toward the injured mining slave.
Heal