8 – return-8

What kind of ritual should be performed for the saintess was one of the topics of discussion among all the priests.

The Holy Land insisted that no matter how much a saint was, she was only a ‘woman loved by God’.

The logic was that all members of the church were loved by God, and that they were laymen who only received more of it than others.

However, some believers, especially the common people, insisted that the saint should receive greater ceremonies than the pope.

It was the logic that the rank and rank of the priest were nothing more than a hierarchy created by humans. The value of a Shinto was determined by how much the god loved him and how much devotion he had to the god and his followers.

However, the saintess of this generation became a saint from an early age, too young to understand this conflict, and there were no forces to support her.

And the pope gave her a high enough rank. Although clearly below the pope, in the eyes of ordinary people, he held a far higher position.

Whatever the reason, the followers had no choice but to obey her.

/////

The saintess toddled and stood in front of the huge cathedral. The young nun, who was cleaning in front of it with eyes full of fatigue, threw down her broom and shouted as soon as she saw the saintess.

“welcome!”

“Nice to meet you!”

The saintess also raised her hand and shook it. The nuns she had been with since childhood were like family to her, who did not know who her parents were.

“Guys, gather! Hurry up! Saint Celia has returned!”

The calm atmosphere of the cathedral was broken. The nuns announced the saintess’ return from mouth to mouth, and soon the young nuns surrounded Celia and bombarded her with questions.

“How was your adventure?”

“Wasn’t it difficult? What do monsters look like?”

“Have you ever seen a handsome man on your travels?”

For being near downtown, the cathedral is a fairly closed space. It was natural to be thirsty for new stories.

In addition, the person in front of them was one of the heroes who had successfully defeated the demon king in several hundred years. Even if you are not a saint, everyone will be curious about their story.

“Well, where should I start talking…”

After hesitating for a while, the saintess explained what she saw and felt one by one.

She wasn’t a good storyteller, so the chronology was jumbled, and the circumstances were exaggerated or understated, but their adventures were nice enough and worthwhile even in their degraded state.

The saintess felt herself at ease as she confided in the person she could live without fault and the hardships that had now ended.

“The adventure was good! All of them were good people by nature. They did bad things sometimes… The monsters look very strange, but I haven’t seen them up close. I just backtracked and prayed, and the Goddess defeated them.”

The saintess laughed hesitantly and told the stories she had been pushed back.

There was a chance to meet people at the banquet hall, but all the people there were only those who were looking at others with a little strange eyes.

They would even say the same weird things, as if they knew each other were looking at each other with weird eyes.

When I confided this to Eleanor, she gave me only a superficial solution: ‘Just don’t tell anyone.’

I was accustomed to practicing silent words, but the silence in the banquet hall, not in the prayer room, was boring and boring.

“I’ve never seen a good-looking person on my travels. I haven’t met many people.”

However, these nuns had been with the saintess since she was a child. Although the saintess gained the power of a goddess in earnest and rose to a position that they couldn’t even look at, the childhood they spent together didn’t disappear.

It was just that the saintess received the love of the goddess and served God more faithfully.

“Wow, that must have been really hard. It’s okay!”

“It’s getting harder and harder, but you’ve done well! Mr. Eleanor, Mr. Nerwen, uh, Mr. Farseer and Mr. Porter…”

The saintess’ face stiffened for a moment and then loosened, but no one noticed the subtle change.

Still, the saintess truly liked this conversation. Meeting other people is as tiring and tiring as it is exciting and fun.

I’m not sure how to react to her words. She despises behaviors and values that are natural to her, sometimes as if they are nothing.

But these people tell her what she wants to hear and ask her what she wants to say. Closer than anyone else, it was her biggest asset.

“How was the elf?”

“Uh… she’s really pretty, and she’s tall. She shoots a bow very well and has quick hands, but she said a lot of bad things.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I-I don’t know exactly, but the porter just told me that he smelled bad, and some incompetent person yelled at me why he was here…”

“Did you just leave it there? You should have been very hard on yourself!”

The saintess shut her mouth in surprise. I didn’t want to speak too badly of Nerwen, but the words came out strangely.

“Yes, Nerwen is nice too! He shoots arrows well, and he’s very alert when the porter is sleeping. When he has nothing to eat, he goes hunting and finds meat hidden somewhere…”

“Wouldn’t it hurt your body if you ate something like that? Besides, if you ate unclean meat…”

“It’s okay because I blessed you!”

However, as the saintess continued her story, she realized that a gap had arisen between her peers and the nuns that even she could not bridge.

Among the nuns, the saintess’ authority was absolute. But when she went out into the world, there was little to protect her.

Among the hero’s party, the saintess had the lowest voice. I was also the youngest. The difference in age between the elf and the wizard was so great that it was impossible to match them at all, and the hero who looked relatively similar was the party leader and daughter of the emperor.

Except for the porter, who was not treated as a member of the party at all, no one was easy enough for the saintess to get angry with or ask for something.

It wasn’t simply a party where seniors were given preferential treatment, but when an argument ensued, she didn’t know how to convince others.

Within the church, it was enough to just be angry about why this was happening. Still, if the other person didn’t listen, it was overflowing with showing the necessary passages while unfolding the scriptures of the goddess.

But inside the hero’s party, that way of thinking was treated like a young fool’s idea.

Whenever that happened, it was the porter who supported the saintess. When other people tried to do bad things, he and the saintess yelled at each other saying no to that even though he received all sorts of swear words.

When he was lucky, Eleanor or Farseer would listen to him. Nerwen, though inconsistently refused to speak to him.

And that wasn’t all. I could see that he was getting tired and exhausted as time went on, but he did everything the saintess asked for without skipping a single one.

“ah!”

The saintess also suddenly realized that she was lost in thought, but the nuns who watched her waited with a smile as if it hadn’t happened for a day or two.

“By the way, I have a question!”

“Why, did something happen on the trip?”

“So, uh, there was someone who was nice to me for no reason, why was that?”

The saintess did not think of it when receiving his kindness.

It’s natural for people to be kind to people, and the other party members thought it was strange. And by the time they get to know each other through life and death, his ‘kindness’ has already become natural.

“Aren’t you someone who believes in the Goddess extremely well?”

“Oh, he was an unbeliever. Too bad…”

“A non-believer? It must have been disgusting. Defeating the demon lord for the will of the Goddess was such a difficult task. To have to share life and death with an unbeliever…”

The saintess wanted to shout, ‘That person isn’t that bad,’ but she didn’t know what to say when asked how a non-believer could be good.

“Are you a man?”

A mischievous nun put the saintess in trouble.

“No, that’s right…”

“You don’t like Celia?”

The saintess denied it, saying that it couldn’t be, but the question soon came to me as the truth.

She was a saint with no information about the relationship between men and women. Although she was already an adult in her age, she had no chance to meet a man or see a woman who had met a man.

At most, when other nuns shared their love stories handed down from mouth to mouth, all I could remember was angrily saying, ‘That kind of gets in the way of prayer!’

“Don’t say anything strange. There were no men in this group of warriors.”

“Ah, that’s right. With the princess and that wizard…”

“There was a man! Well, nobody talks about it, but Mr. Porter went with us too!”

“Was the porter a man?”

“Uh… uh!”

The saintess’ face turned red.

“Ha, but is that really so? I said hello at the Imperial Library a while ago, but when they asked me to come to the celebration, I said I didn’t like it because it was inconvenient…”

“The imperial library? No one will be able to enter there… He must have a great status. What should I do!”

“Saintess, is he handsome? If you like him, snatch him away!”

“Doesn’t the fact that you don’t like celebrations mean that you want to see them alone, not in front of other people?”

Even if they were nuns and elders, they were only girls a year or two older, who knew a little more about the world than the saintess.

The saintess, having had a direct conversation with him, thought it couldn’t be so. However, I also had a thought.

If you respect his opinion, ‘It’s inconvenient to meet you’, the hero’s party will end unfortunately. That was a very sad thing for the saintess.

There was not much time left to meet Eleanor, who would soon become the Crown Princess, Nerwen, who would return to the World Tree, and Farseer, who would be immersed in research.

If he was avoiding the other party members simply because he was shy, he would regret not holding onto him and laughing with him at that time.

“Then, I’ll go again!”

The saintess smiled brightly like a child.