Wasn’t This a Night Game

A Chilling Prophecy Inescapable

Cold sweat drenched my body.

My most secret shame…

Obvious, isn’t it?

That the miracles I perform are not miracles at all, but just vulgar, bottom-of-the-barrel er*ge skills.

Besides, didn’t the prophecy just call the powers I wielded base and vile?

There’s nothing else I could call my most secret shame.

And on top of that, to be revealed and die by the hands of those who love me?

“Holy One! I’m healed thanks to you, Holy One! Thank you!”

“The Holy One is the living embodiment of grace! Because of you, I can see tomorrow!”

“Thank you… thank you. If it weren’t for you, really…”

Faces of people smiling at me flicker in my mind.

The people of the slums, the people of the Order of Lilia, bowing to me, showing their respect.

They are the people who love me more than anyone.

I can’t even think of anyone else *but* them.

And they…

Will kill me.

I can’t breathe properly.

It feels like my whole body is convulsing with terror.

Seems I’m hyperventilating. The speed of my breathing is maddeningly fast.

But the prophecy aimed at me hasn’t ended.

[But death will not be the end. The one who sows grace will seize your soul after death. She will send your soul to a place befitting your deeds. You will live there doing things you do not want to do.]

“Ugh… ugh!!”

I collapsed onto the floor.

Death isn’t the end either.

The one who sows grace.

It’s Lilia, of course.

After I die.

Lilia will seize my soul, that’s what this sounds like. And I’ll be sent to a place befitting my deeds, where I’ll suffer things I never wanted?

What place befits my deeds?

Hell.

Hell!!

They’re saying I’ll be tormented for eternity in Hell!!

For over half a year, I acted like a saint, and now I understand why the Goddess didn’t just strike me down.

Lilia wasn’t cutting me slack because I was doing a good job!!

That was my delusion!

She was planning to punish me.

Only, not with a bolt of lightning to the head!

After my secret is spilled.

After everyone abandons me in misery, after I’m executed by the hands of Grace cultists and the poor for impersonating a saint, she plans to pluck out my soul and throw it into hell!!

It’s like the Almighty Goddess herself declared she’d personally screw me over.

What’s the point of being recognized by the Emperor?

What good is receiving gifts and celebrating?

If my soul is damned to hell, it’s all over.

My hyperventilation grows worse.

[You shall suffer alone, but through this, Grace shall plant its will in the world, and seeing you, people will know that the true Grace-bestower lives.]

The will of Grace.

What else would it be?

Claiming to be a saint ends in ruin.

No matter how many people you save, a fellow with no faith, with ugly, base skills, pretending to be an Apostle of the Goddess – I won’t stand for it!

They’re saying they’ll ruin me to set an example: see what happens when you falsely claim sainthood!

And seeing that, people will realize the Goddess Lilia lives!

Fuck……

Breath……

I can’t breathe.

My vision went black.

*

“The Saint of Healing!!”

I opened my eyes to see Zerba, the High Priest of the Prophecy Order, looking at me with a bewildered face.

“H-how, what on earth did Lord Lupiel tell you? What future did he show you?”

I didn’t answer him.

My clothes were soaked with cold sweat.

Shivering with chills, I asked Zerba.

“High Priest. Summon High Priest Yodel of the Lilia Order, please.”

“I-immediately, I will do so!”

Zerba shot out like a bullet and soon returned with old man Yodel.

I stared at Yodel.

“Yodel-nim.”

“Holy One! No! What in God’s name happened?”

“There’s something I must ask.”

I was scared shitless and couldn’t speak the truth.

How could I say I was scamming them and would end up brutally murdered and, even after death, be eternally roasted in hell?

“If those who have wronged the Goddess Lilia wish to be forgiven… how must they do it?”

First, let’s ask about how to get the Goddess’s forgiveness.

“Why such a question all of a sudden? Holy One?”

“Answer me. It is something I must hear.”

Yodel looked at me, seemingly worried, and then began to explain.

“Naturally, they must not repeat the wrongs they have committed.”

Meaning I shouldn’t keep pretending to be a Holy One.

“They must distance themselves from their wrongs, and…”

I gotta bolt.

I fucked up my strategy. When am I supposed to wait until the elixir’s flowing while the Order goes bankrupt and abandons me? Shit. Plus, if I bankrupt the Order, Lilia, who’s already royally pissed, might get even angrier!

You real dumb b*stard!

I should’ve just run!

“Endless self-denial, and…”

I gotta go around asserting even stronger that I ain’t no Holy One! Every chance I get, I gotta keep saying I’m not!

“They must accumulate good deeds and approach the Goddess.”

“Seeing as what I’ve already done, shouldn’t this be enough? I’ve healed enough people already, haven’t I!

No need for me to grandstand, playing the damn saint!

But… this alone feels lacking somehow.

It’s all just too…fundamental, theoretical!

The mistake I made, it’s not some petty thing, you understand!

That Grace-given Goddess, she declared she’d personally grab me and chuck me in hell the second I kicked the bucket! She’s not just a little ticked off!

Something…

Something’s missing.

Need to add more countermeasures, just in case this saint-quitting plan goes belly up.

“Is there a way for a soul stained with sin, a soul the Goddess herself has sworn to never forgive, to avoid hell?”

“Saint, what… what kind of prophecy have you heard?”

Zerba, looking rattled, asks me.

Am I gonna spill the beans?

“I cannot answer that, Yodel. Tell me. Is there a way for a soul the Goddess herself has sworn to punish, to avoid hell?”

“If, through a Saint’s miracle, one is cleansed of sin, then one can avoid hell.”

That’s a method I can’t use, then.

Never heard of another Saint besides myself.

Means there ain’t no real Saint around, except for a conman like me.

So, if everything else fails, being saved by the miracle of another Saint… it’s impossible.

“Any other ways?”

“A loophole it is, though if your soul gets shattered by a curse potent enough, while it won’t outright *prevent* your trip to hell, it might buy you some time.”

What sort of drivel is this now?

“Explain it to me, in detail.”

“It’s as I said. How can one punish a soul already pulverized? Naturally, it can’t go to hell either. Records exist of wicked black mages using this trick, trying to avoid torment in the afterlife.”

These are records practically *written* for me!

How? How can I prevent it?

“Souls are terribly difficult to destroy, but even if you manage to shatter one, its essence isn’t obliterated. Time will pass, but if a preordained lifespan remains, it will eventually reform into its original state, only to vanish after that remaining time is up.”

“And how does *that* dodge hell?”

“By intentionally shattering your soul – with a powerful curse – while lifespan remains, and then artificially manipulating the soul’s rate of restoration, making it regenerate only after an extremely long time. The idea was that people would forget their evil deeds, that the gods would forget their sins, too. A desperate gamble to avoid hell, but ultimately it didn’t stick.”

“Why not?”

“Once a soul is created, it’s tethered to its plane of origin. The instant it’s shattered, it returns to where it was born, regenerating slowly there. This made it easy for the gods to identify whose soul was being rebuilt. Eventually, those black mages, their souls reformed after ages, were still dragged to hell and suffered.”

There *is* a way!

A perfect countermeasure!

Get hit with a curse powerful enough to shatter my soul, is it?

The black mages failed, but *I* won’t!

Why, you ask?

Because my soul doesn’t belong to *this* plane!

If my soul is destroyed by a curse, doesn’t that mean it will regenerate in Korea, the plane to which it’s tethered?

How is Lilia going to punish me if I escape to another plane?

Get hit by a curse, shatter the soul, skip the hell trip!

Reborn…in Korea!

Back in Korea, I’d just be some nobody graduate from a backwater university, but anything’s better than a one-way ticket to hell!

A thousand times better!

“Thank you, Yodel-nim. I am weary. Would you both please excuse me?”

High Priest Zerva and old man Yodel looked at me with concern, but soon bowed their heads respectfully. Then, they left me.

Right.

The plan is set.

For this escape, I need three things.

First, I need a way to shake off the Miracle of Tracking, since being chased after making this much fuss would be a problem.

Second, I need to secretly scrounge together enough money from this place to live on the run.

Third, I need to find a way to handle Time Stop, my most crucial skill for escaping, more efficiently.

Once these three conditions are met, I bolt!

And then, I get my face changed through body modification and live like a complete mouse.

Of course, this method is incredibly textbook, but the chances of failure are too high.

The support I have from the Lilia Order and the paupers is beyond the level of fanatical devotion.

No matter how careful I am, there’s a high possibility they’ll somehow find me.

So, just in case of failure, I also need to search for a powerful curse, a cheat key that’ll let me skip the hell-bound train in one go.

The problem is, such powerful curses aren’t exactly lying around in the streets.

In other words, the textbook method has a low probability of success, but I can attempt it at any time.

Using a cheat key is something I can’t always try, but if it succeeds, it’s a 100% guarantee to avoid hell.

Well, what else is there to do?

Stick to the proper methods, usually, and if by chance a powerful curse gets spotted, immediately try to dodge that curse and avoid a one-way trip to hell.

Something like that, I guess.

Even a thousand-li journey starts with a single step, they say.

Guess I’ll sleep for now.

Hearing that grim prophecy made my whole body sluggish.

I felt the heavy weight pressing down on my eyelids as I lay down on the bed.

And before long, I was asleep.

*

Humans twisted into grotesque shapes, like something out of a nightmare, were screaming.

And those grotesque shapes, they were even infectious.

The twisted humans, screeching, were hunting the living.

To make them just the same.

Gunfire and magic. Miracles were unleashed, pushing back the twisted ones, but they wouldn’t stop.

The ramparts crumbled, the city crumbled.

Humanity crumbled.

Undead things, whether zombies or ghouls, devoured all human territory, tearing at the corpses of the living, and before long, those corpses turned into the same twisted things, rising from the ground to wander the earth.

And at the center of it all were two women.

One woman, brutally butchered, lay bleeding on the floor, dying, and beside her, another woman, with the same face as the fallen one, was wailing.

Wings sprouted from the back of the wailing woman.

That wing was stained pitch black, and the dark, wicked aura spilling from it was the source of all these twisted beings.

“No! No!!”

The woman with wings black as night wailed.

“I just!…….I just wanted to be loved!”

But there was no one left who could love her.

She, with wings like a fallen angel, sadly.

Wept and wept again.

But around her were only the twisted ones.

The person who would love her.

Nowhere to be seen.

*

I shot up from my bed, drenched in cold sweat.

Again!

The same experience, again!

A prophecy of an unhappy future!

But…….

It doesn’t scare me or frighten me anymore.

The wicked aura radiating from that woman’s wing in the dream!

That!

That’s a curse!

“Hit by that and die, and my soul’s destroyed, skip the trip to hell!”

Rebirth in Korea, no?

That’s it!!

This is it!

A cheat code found this quick!

Now, just need to find that black-winged woman scattering curses!

And get hit by the curse, soul destroyed, end of the line!

Just as I was thinking this, all happy and whatnot.

“Saint. Are you awake?”

Yodel gramps’ voice, from outside.

Me, I was asleep, then woke up halfway through a nightmare, but why’s Yodel gramps up at this ungodly hour?

“Yes. I’m awake. What is it?”

I opened the door, and the look on the gramps’ face outside was… heavy.

What is it? What’s wrong?

“His Imperial Majesty secretly wishes to meet with you.”