Conrad welcomed him.
His adoptive mother was beside herself with joy.
His adoptive father was nowhere to be seen.
Iskel, too, stood beside him with a pleased expression.
Looking at them, Su-ho let out a hollow laugh without realizing it.
They were appearing at this timing?
As Su-ho silently stared at them, Conrad rose and welcomed him.
“You must be quite startled. Shouldn’t you greet us?”
“Ah... hello.”
“Yes, yes. I heard you were on your way back from shopping. But...”
Conrad’s eyes narrowed.
“All you have in your hand is a bottle of liquor?”
“Ah... yes. I originally had many things, but I shared them with hungry neighbors on the way back.”
“I see. What sort of hungry neighbors?”
“Beggars.”
“I see. But among them, there may have been people who don’t believe in the Chief God. Did you happen to know that when you shared with them?”
Conrad’s narrowed eyes.
They were like a snake’s.
Su-ho looked at Conrad.
When his answer came late, Iskel gestured with his chin, urging him to respond.
His adoptive mother was the same.
The tyrannical expression she had shown for days was nowhere to be seen, and her fake smile, urging him to hurry up and give the correct answer, looked as if her cheekbones might cramp at any moment.
For an instant, his mind seemed to go blank.
“Yes, I knew and shared with them.”
“How did you know?”
“I asked them directly.”
“Well done. Naturally, you did not give food to unbelievers, did you?”
“I did.”
“What?”
“On the way back, I met a mother and child. They said they did not believe in God, but even so, I gave them all the food I had.”
Flinch—
For a moment, the skin beneath Conrad’s eye twitched.
“Why did you share with them?”
“Because I pitied them.”
“But they are people who do not believe in God. Such people do not know gratitude even when food is shared with them.”
“No, they clearly thanked me. People who looked as though they might die at any moment squeezed out every last bit of strength to do so.”
“Bell!”
The one who could not hold back and shouted at his answer was his adoptive mother.
“What sort of way is that to speak to the bishop! Can’t you answer again properly?”
“What should I change? They clearly thanked me. Even the child who was on the verge of starvation moved his dried-out lips and tried somehow to thank me. I saw it plainly.”
“You...!”
His adoptive mother’s face flushed.
She looked ready to strike him at any moment.
But she would not be able to hit him.
That was all acting for the sake of the test, and his body, which was to become that of a saint, could not be damaged.
As proof, until now, she had thrown plenty of objects around him to threaten him.
But Su-ho had never once been hurt.
Conrad raised a hand and stopped her.
“Well done.”
Praise.
What came from his mouth was, unexpectedly, praise.
“I believe you said that because you are still young. Children’s eyes and ears accept things exactly as they are. But.”
Conrad rose from his seat and approached Su-ho.
Then he lowered himself to his eye level and smiled his distinctive snake-like smile.
“Once you have been properly taught, you won’t do that anymore, will you?”
Su-ho looked at Conrad for a while.
Then he asked,
“What exactly am I supposed to learn?”
“Mm?”
“The Chief God said to share what belongs to us with hungry neighbors. But are unbelievers not my neighbors?”
“Bell!”
His adoptive mother shouted again.
But Conrad raised a hand and stopped her.
“So that is what you are curious about?”
“Yes. I’ve always wondered.”
“Unbelievers are not our neighbors.”
“Why not?”
“Because only those who believe in the Chief God can be saved.”
“Who said that?”
“What?”
“Is it written in the scripture?”
“What are you...”
“There was no such passage in the scripture.”
Pause.
At Su-ho’s words, time seemed to stop for an instant, as if someone had cast magic.
More precisely, the people’s movements stopped.
The air changed.
In the silence and stillness, the first thing to move was Iskel’s eyebrow.
Tremble—
It quivered faintly, and soon even the muscles around his eyes began to shake.
Conrad’s eyes narrowed.
Straightening the waist he had bent to match Su-ho’s eye level, he looked down at Su-ho with his narrowed, snake-like eyes.
He said nothing.
The changed air.
The stiffened expressions.
It seemed they thought this alone would be enough to crush a mere child.
But the person before them was not a child.
It was Su-ho.
Not Bell in her childhood, but An Su-ho, the new Pope of the Pantheon, who had pierced through everything and reached this point.
In the silence that followed, Su-ho spoke clearly once more.
As though reading the scripture the bishops made the children recite when testing them on temple Sundays.
“The scripture records the words of God. And nowhere in the scripture did it say that unbelievers cannot be saved. Because the Chief God never said anything like that in the first place.”
“You...”
“But the Chief God told us to love everyone. To love, share, give, and treat everyone equally without discrimination. Even to forgive our enemies, and if someone strikes one cheek, to offer the other cheek as well. Would that same Chief God refuse to save unbelievers just because they do not believe in Him?”
“Bell!”
His adoptive mother shouted.
But Su-ho’s patience had now run dry.
“When I saw the mother and child I shared food with earlier, a thought suddenly came to me. Why am I doing this here? I understood that Bell spent a childhood that was practically abuse, and that she had twisted ideas injected into her because of it. If it were me, I would have turned out that way too. She was born an orphan with no one in the world, and the temple was the only thing she could rely on. To eat and have clothes to wear, she would have had no choice but to believe in God.”
Su-ho slowly continued speaking.
But the more Su-ho spoke, the more Conrad’s gaze, which had been looking down at him, gradually rose from below to above.
“Even so, I decided to hold back and keep watching, just in case. This trial began in order to give her a teaching, and I thought that, to do that, I had to understand her background accurately.”
At the same time, Su-ho’s voice also grew steadily deeper.
The youthful, childish voice was gone.
“But when I saw that pitiful mother and child, all sorts of thoughts came to me. Were they people arranged to test me? But they were far too real for that. Don’t tell me they prepared their physical condition until they were on the brink of starvation just to deceive me?”
Su-ho’s eyes, no longer Bell’s, looked straight at Conrad.
Conrad was growing more and more frightened.
“What is the position of saint worth? Just what is that damn position of saint worth, that they would drive people to that state and disguise them like that just to test me? Of course, I might be mistaken. They might not have been actors for the test, but truly hungry neighbors. And then I realized it. My own idiotic attitude in trying to ignore them for the sake of passing a test.”
Su-ho stretched out his hand.
Then blood-red energy gathered in his outstretched grip.
[ Blood Armory is activating. ]
What formed in his grasp was a sword.
A blood sword.
A partner he had not held in a very long time.
“It was only a few months at most. Yet even in that short time, my mind ended up like this. Then how long did Bell have to fight against hypocrisy?”
Su-ho’s gaze shifted to Iskel.
He was just as shocked as Conrad, his mouth hanging open while his jaw trembled.
“I’m done playing along. I’ll confirm the rest with my own eyes.”
Slaaaash!
A blood-red trajectory swept through the house.
With that single slash, Conrad’s and Iskel’s heads fell.
“Ah... ah...”
He did not kill his adoptive mother.
Because she was his adoptive mother?
Because she was a woman?
That was not it.
It was because he still had something left to ask.
He approached her as she trembled like an aspen leaf.
The being before her was no longer Bell, but Su-ho.
Covered in the blood of two bishops, Su-ho looked at her with the same dry expression as ever.
In her eyes, Su-ho was Satan and a devil.
Su-ho pressed the sword to her and asked,
“Who told you to adopt me?”
At those words, she pointed to the two dead men without the slightest hesitation.
Of course.
Everything he had endured until now had only been suspicion based on circumstantial evidence, but this made it reality and certainty.
“Why did they tell you to adopt me?”
“B-Because they said you were a chosen child...!”
Right.
Bell truly had been a manufactured saint.
Su-ho looked at the sky through the window beside him.
A blue sky.
Its clarity made him feel even worse.
“Get lost.”
“Hiiiiiik!”
As if afraid Su-ho might change his mind, she scrambled out of the house.
He reached a hand toward the two dead bishops.
Then the blood soaking the floor gathered into Su-ho’s hand and was absorbed, and the memories they possessed surged into his mind like waves.
“Ah.”
The memories they held.
Filthy.
Disgusting.
Ugly.
Most people, when gathered, stagnated, and when they stagnated, they naturally rotted.
That was true not only of religion, but of all groups.
Of course, just because all groups were like that did not mean everyone within them was the same.
Rare as beans in a drought, there were beings like lotuses blooming from the mud.
The high priests of the Church of the Chief God knew that fact as well.
That was why they needed a saint.
Because to the Church of the Chief God, the saint was the lotus they would show the public, and the self-portrait they believed to be their mirror.
Su-ho stepped outside and looked up at the sky again.
The blazing sun.
The clear sky.
It was still blue.
Over it, Bell’s face seemed to overlap.
His thoughts grew heavy.
Especially his thoughts about Bell.
Suddenly, he regretted it.
Just as she had said, he truly knew nothing about her, yet had only condemned her blindly.
The things a person knew were bound to differ depending on the environment they had lived in.
‘Even comparing neighboring countries, there are countless cultural differences...’
Bell.
You asked me to give you a teaching.
But I still don’t know what teaching I should give you.
I was able to endure this life because I knew it was a test, but for you, all of this must have been reality.
Ah.
My head hurts.
What teaching am I supposed to give Bell?
Thinking that, he slowly began walking.
Toward the Central Church of this worldline, the source of everything.
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