The Crown Prince Who Raises Alt Characters

#355 Bad Priest Rufus (13) - Rumors At first, the villagers were wary. In truth, they had no choice but to be. It was frightening and warranted caution enough that a swarm of outsiders had suddenly descended on them, and now those same people were claiming they'd cure their illnesses. Anyone gullible enough to swallow that without a shred of suspicion simply couldn't survive in this harsh world to begin with. But. "Brother… I'm cold… so cold…." "Elli!! Damn it…!!" Desperation sometimes makes people bold. And a person whose family member is sick—not themselves, but someone they love—grows more desperate than one could ever imagine. The woodcutter Dolren was in just such a situation. His little sister, stricken with fever, was in bad shape. She kept saying she was cold, but her forehead and the back of her neck were hot enough to be called scorching. A village without so much as a single herb gatherer, let alone a proper priest. Even the nearest city was a day or two's travel away, and while that might be manageable for Dolren alone, moving with a sick sister in tow was, in every respect, far from ideal. And even if they somehow made it to the city, what then—how would he find someone there and pay for treatment? They'd lost their parents early and had been living a modest life, just the two siblings. Living hand to mouth was hard enough as it was; there was no way they had any savings to spare. So when he heard that those suspicious "outsiders" were curing illnesses, Dolren was the first to scoop his sister into his arms and go running. As already said, he was far too desperate to hesitate over something as trivial as caution. In a way, it was a foolish thing to do. After all, people are wary for a reason—because caution, more often than not, raises one's odds of survival. But. Yet the world, every so often, throws up an exception to that "more often than not." "Brother! I'm not sick anymore!!" "Oh, oh, Elli!!" Dolren, his face brimming with emotion, pulled his sister into a tight embrace as she hopped about, perfectly fine again. Watching the scene with a warm smile, Raphaela spoke up. "Fortunately, the treatment came in time, so there shouldn't be any lasting effects. But please try to get in the habit of washing your body at least once a day—or if that's difficult, at least your hands. Just keeping clean goes a long way toward avoiding fevers like this one." "I'll keep that in mind!! Now, Elli. You should thank the Saintess too." "Thank you! Pretty big sister!!" "...Just 'doctor' will do just fine." There was the minor issue of Raphaela feeling awkward and embarrassed, but with that, the first treatment in the village came to a safe close. Dolren, who had been prepared to go into debt if that's what it took to pay properly for the treatment, marveled at how much cheaper the cost turned out to be than he'd expected, and once again praised the grace of the Saintess (Raphaela's protest was taken as mere modesty)—and word of this soon reached the rest of the villagers' ears. People in this world, by nature, don't put much trust in herb gatherers or healers. That's because the proportion of quacks and swindlers among them runs so high. The catch is that even those quacks and swindlers are only high in "proportion"—in absolute numbers, they're vanishingly few. Meaning there are far more villages without one than with one. This village that Rufus and Raphaela had stopped at was one of the ones without, and when someone fell ill, all they had to fall back on were folk remedies passed down through family or the village as a whole. Naturally, that alone couldn't handle every little injury and ailment that came up. No matter how accustomed the people of this era were to the survival-of-the-fittest logic where those who couldn't endure simply died and only the strong lived on, there were limits to that. Aching joints, all manner of skin conditions, and every other symptom that fell under "it hurts, but I don't know exactly what's wrong." And now a chance to have all of that treated had come along? At a shockingly low price, no less? The villagers, as if they'd never been wary or standoffish in the first place, raced each other to the makeshift clinic. Had this journey been undertaken by just the two of them, Raphaela and Rufus alone, it would surely have become a serious problem. No matter how capable Raphaela was, she only had one body. But Rufus had brought along every last member of the medical staff who'd insisted on going with Raphaela. And he kept them steadily supplied with all manner of materials through the Brown Trading Company as well. As a result. "Ohh! My joints! My joints don't hurt anymore!!" "My body feels so light! The air tastes so good!! So this is what a healthy body feels like!!" "My hair! My hair's growing back!!" Far from taking days on end, it took less than half a day for every patient in the village to be cured. Even after all that, the medical staff still had energy to spare. That was because the regular medical staff, Raphaela included, would first administer the appropriate preliminary treatment, and then the priests who held Divine Power would use it to finish the job—maximizing efficiency on both ends. Normally, whether it was an illness or an injury, one had to keep monitoring the patient's progress and follow up even after initial treatment—but Divine Power could dramatically shorten that recovery period. And Divine Power, which used to just be crudely poured out in brute force, now only needed to be applied precisely where it counted on a body already primed to heal—so its efficiency shot up to a ridiculous degree. The trouble was, the ordinary villagers had no idea about these underlying mechanics. In other words, the common believers of this Sacred State thought as follows. 'So then... why don't the other priests?' Every citizen of Hasht is a believer. Which is to say, whether they wanted it or not, they lived under the temple's control. They prayed at fixed hours every day and received the god's teachings on a set schedule. It wasn't that a priest was permanently stationed in the village, but they did show their face at regular intervals. And even setting that aside, once you got to a city, priests weren't all that hard to find. So they thought. 'Was it really so hard to spare us just a few minutes?' It hadn't even taken half a day for every patient in the village to be seen. Treatment time varied slightly depending on the individual's symptoms, but as a rule it never took more than about ten minutes. And within those few minutes, ailments they'd suffered for years—decades, in serious cases—simply vanished. Yes. They understood. Priests were precious, esteemed people. Divine Power was a precious resource. And precious time and precious resources ought to be used by precious people. But still—was even just a few minutes truly too much to ask? A lump rose in their throats somehow, but they still couldn't bring themselves to speak of it carelessly. Thrift, restraint, obedience. Those were precisely the values drilled into them their entire lives. As they always did, they let their discontent and anger sink down into the depths of their hearts. "Hey, did you all hear? About the ones who treated us. Word is they're on their way to be punished." They had tried to let it sink down. Before the strange rumor reached their ears. "What are you talking about? Why would such wonderful people be punished? No, wait—what bastard would dare punish them?" "Watch your mouth, calling them bastards. They're priests, you know." "...Priests? Why? What could they possibly have done wrong?" What they heard after that was, to the villagers, utterly incomprehensible. They were at fault for treating people without "authorization"? They were at fault for using Divine Power on "lowly folk"? So, meaning, people like them should've just been left to be sick or drop dead, whichever came first, and because the doctor—no, the Saintess—cured them instead, she was now on her way to be punished? Had the priests attending the Grand Council heard this version of events, they would have found it absurd. After all, the stories glossed right over things like beating down the Wardens who kept the city's peace as he pleased and carrying out a Heresy Inquisition, or tearing apart and rearranging the city's systems and order however he liked (the fact that these weren't buried entirely was the more insidious part—harder to expose him later that way), while stubbornly, almost obsessively, harping on details like "he healed the people" or "he fought for those who had nothing." Anyone a bit sharper might have grown suspicious of the fact that the circumstances of outsiders who were only passing briefly through the village had spread as rumor in suspiciously precise detail, neatly summarized to hit only the key points that ordinary people could easily grasp. A politician from that republic up north might have flat-out thought of the term "media manipulation." But believers who'd been forced to live simply and naively their whole lives knew nothing of such things. All they understood was that their benefactor, the "Saintess," had devoted herself to people like them, only to be marked by those in power and unjustly persecuted for it. And that many people, unwilling to let the Saintess go through it alone, had followed after her. And so. "Please let us come along too!!" "We can't do anything grand, but we can handle chores like cleaning or fetching water, as much as you need!!" So it wasn't so strange, either, that a few hot-blooded souls among the villagers insisted on joining the medical staff's journey. Normally, the Wardens managing the village would have stopped such an unauthorized departure, but this time, they couldn't. After all, the one leading the group was Fredrick, mayor of the city of Boots, and there were other priests mixed in among the medical staff as well. They'd all quietly heard that Rufus and Raphaela were being treated, at best, as suspects, and at worst, as criminals-in-waiting—but as for Fredrick or the other priests, there had been no particular word on them. That was because even among the powers outside, no consensus had yet been reached on how to handle the power players within Boots. So the Wardens and local officials, unable to muster any real objection, simply let them go, and the medical staff took them in as well. After all, Rufus had said there was no need to turn away volunteers. And in the next village, much the same thing happened all over again. Visit. Treatment. Rumor. Joining. "Um, Father?" "What is it, Raphaela?" "Hasn't our group been growing somehow?" "It might have, yes." "Don't you think it's grown by quite a lot?" "It might have, yes." "N-no matter how I look at it, the number of newcomers seems to have outgrown the number we started with…." "Raphaela. Don't worry. They're simply pure volunteers. What's so remarkable about a bit of a large headcount? It's not as if they're armed or anything, after all." A little while later. The mayor of the city of Belt looked down from atop the city wall. "...Say, guard captain. Is our city on the front lines?" "No, sir." "Then why does it look like at least a thousand people are surrounding us?" "They say they'd like to 'stay' for a little while…. They even said not to worry about food or lodging, that they'd handle it themselves." Something strange was clearly happening.