novelbin Chapter 141 : Chapter 141
Chapter 141 : Chapter 141
Chapter 141. The Essence of Power
The crowd scattered like startled cockroaches, disappearing without a trace.
All that remained on the muddy street was the creaking, broken handcart, and the young nun struggling to haul a corpse onto it.
Sylvia watched that slight figure from behind. The hand resting at her waist slowly left the hilt of her sword, but the whiteness in her knuckles from gripping it too hard had not yet faded.
Her sunglasses hid her eyes, but they could not hide the taut line of her jaw.
“Go give her a hand,” she said, nudging the man beside her with her elbow.
Logaris—currently going by the identity of the bounty hunter Leon—raised a brow. An unlit cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth as he strolled over at an unhurried pace.
He said nothing. He simply reached out one hand, grabbed the corpse by the belt as easily as if he were picking up a chick, and lifted the hundred-plus-pound weight one-handed before setting it steadily onto the cart.
Lucia jumped in fright. The shroud in her hands nearly slipped loose.
She took half a wary step back. The staff in her hand rose half an inch on instinct, and those pale blue eyes of hers were filled with vigilance.
In the Lower City, unprovoked kindness usually meant one of two things: either someone wanted your money, or they wanted your body.
And when it came to two outsiders who looked this hard to deal with, wanting her life was also a possibility.
“Relax, little sister.” Logaris slipped his hands back into the pockets of his leather jacket and shrugged. “If I wanted to make a move, I wouldn’t have stood there watching you blow up just now.”
“…Thank you.”
Lucia studied him for several seconds. Only after confirming that he did not carry that uniquely violent aura common to the Lower City did she finally squeeze out those two quiet words.
Sylvia walked over. For once, she was not carrying herself with her usual hauteur. Instead, she very naturally pulled a clean handkerchief from her pocket and held it out to Lucia.
The girl had gotten quite a bit of mud and corpse filth on her hands while moving the body just now.
“My name is Ada, and this is my partner, Leon.” Sylvia deliberately kept her voice as gentle as possible, as if afraid of frightening this somewhat skittish little girl. “In a situation like that, why did you interfere? Those people were out of line, but in a place like this, risking your life over a dead person’s clothes isn’t worth it.”
Lucia froze for a moment. She stared at the handkerchief, so white it was almost glaring, and did not dare take it.
Instead, she wiped her hands hard on her robe before lowering her head and saying, “If the clothes are gone, then they’re gone. That kind of rag isn’t worth much anyway. But if the body isn’t collected, then when night comes…”
She bit her lip, and her voice carried a weight that did not match her age. “When night comes, the black market ‘dismantlers’ will come. They’ll drag the corpses away and cut them open like pigs. The heart, the liver, the kidneys… anything still usable, they’ll dig it out.”
Sylvia’s breathing caught sharply.
“Dismantlers?”
“Mm.” Lucia turned and began pushing the heavy cart, its axle giving off a shrill grinding screech. “Lately Lord Tarassa has added a whole pile of new taxes. Two copper coins a day. Too many people can’t afford to pay. To keep from being dragged off to the mines as laborers, a lot of them can only sell things.”
“Once they’ve sold everything the living can sell, they sell the dead.”
The little girl said it very calmly, as if she had long since grown used to this kind of life.
“If this corpse is intact, it can fetch three silver coins on the black market. That’s enough to cover nearly half a year of breathing tax.”
Sylvia stood where she was. Behind those sunglasses, her gaze was fixed on the filthy water pooling on the ground.
Three silver coins.
A person’s dignity—even the last scrap of decency they were entitled to—in this Northern Territory that she ruled, was worth only three silver coins.
This was no different from keeping people penned up like livestock.
Logaris glanced at Sylvia and reached out to pat her shoulder, signaling for her to keep her emotions in check. This was not the time to erupt.
He took a few quick steps and caught up with the young nun pushing the cart.
“That move you used earlier, ‘Holy Light Impact’—you handled it well,” Logaris said casually, as if making idle conversation.
“The construction of your divine art was extremely stable, and its explosive force was strong too. At your level, even in the grand cathedral of the royal capital, you could at least land a deacon’s post. Why stay cooped up in this hellhole and suffer?”
That was not flattery. It was the truth. A third-tier cleric only had to nod once, and even serving as a noble’s private physician would be enough to guarantee a life of comfort and luxury.
Lucia’s pushing slowed for a moment.
She lowered her head and looked at her badly worn cloth shoes. A complicated expression crossed her face, one that mixed embarrassment with self-mockery.
“The grand cathedral… they didn’t want me.”
“They didn’t want you?” Logaris sounded a little surprised. “What, did they think you ate too much?”
“…”
Lucia choked on that reply. The heavy mood was thrown thoroughly off by that terrible joke. She shot this infuriating man a glare.
“Do you ever say a single serious thing?”
“I was thrown out.”
She drew a deep breath. Since these two outsiders probably would not understand anyway, she seemed to think there was no shame in saying it aloud.
“The Holy Church’s Tribunal judged me to have ‘heretical tendencies.’ They stripped me of my eligibility for promotion and exiled me to the abandoned church here.”
“Heretical?”
At that, even Sylvia stepped forward and gave this harmless-looking little girl an astonished once-over.
The Holy Church had always been severe in its definition of “heresy.” It usually involved collusion with demons, blasphemy against the gods, or the practice of dark magic.
This girl was full of pure light-attributed power. No matter how one looked at her, she did not resemble some dangerous dark witch.
“It’s really… not that serious.” Lucia shrank back a little guiltily. “I just… wrote a paper.”
“You got exiled for writing a paper?” Logaris became interested. “What did you write? The Pope’s Private Life Exposed? Or On Why the Saintesses of Every Age Are Always Single?”
“What is wrong with your mouth? Can’t you say anything proper?” Lucia’s face flushed red with anger as she glared at him. “It was an academic paper! About the nature of Holy Light!”
Perhaps some competitive instinct had been stirred in her, or perhaps it had simply been too long since she had anyone to share her academic frustrations with, but once she started speaking, she could not stop.
“Two years ago, I read a scholarly publication signed ‘Logaris.’ The author was a genius! He put forward a theory in that paper: Holy Light, mana, and even a knight’s battle aura are all, in essence, just different manifestations of Aether energy. The only differences lie in their ‘frequency’ and their ‘mode of observation.’”
The expression on Logaris’s face instantly became a little unnatural.
Under Sylvia’s teasing gaze, he awkwardly adjusted his sunglasses.
Good grief. A theoretical conjecture he had written back at the academy had actually spread all the way to a place like this—and ruined a promising young woman’s future?
Lucia noticed none of the man’s abnormal reaction. Her eyes were shining, the gleam of someone speaking of faith—no, of truth.
“That idea was far too captivating! If their essence is the same, then why must divine arts rely on prayer? Why must there be a medium called ‘piety’ at all?”
She waved that battered staff in her hand, her voice full of excitement. “So, based on that hypothesis, I wrote a draft. It got circulated by accident.”
At that point, her eyes dimmed, and her voice turned small.
“And then… I got beaten.”
“They even broke my legs. I was bedridden for three months. After I recovered, they dumped me here.”