novelbin Chapter 142 : Chapter 142
Chapter 142 : Chapter 142
Chapter 142. Your Teacher Was a Good Man
The air fell silent for several seconds.
Sylvia turned her head and looked at Logaris beside her, her gaze plainly saying, Look what your nonsense has done.
But Logaris had already put away that flippant expression.
As he looked at the little girl in the ill-fitting robe before him, something called appreciation appeared in his eyes for the first time.
Even a kind of delight at finding someone of the same kind.
In this era, where divine authority reigned above all else, someone had actually dared to follow his line of thought and directly kick “god” out of the entire divine arts system?
This was not heresy.
This was practically digging up the Holy Church’s ancestral graves.
“Interesting.” Logaris stroked his chin, and a faintly amused curve rose at the corner of his mouth. “Very interesting. Little sister, is that… masterpiece of yours still around? Would you let me read it?”
Lucia froze.
“You want to read it?” she asked in disbelief. “That thing was classified as a forbidden book. And you’re just a bounty hunter. Would you even understand it?”
“A little, a little.” Logaris waved a hand modestly. “I studied for a few years myself back in the day. I have a particular interest in things that defy orthodoxy.”
Perhaps Logaris’s attitude was simply too sincere, or perhaps Lucia had been pent up for far too long in this hellhole and desperately craved even a single person’s approval.
After hesitating for a moment, she nodded.
“It’s in the church. No one comes to inspect the place anyway, so I hid it under the altar.”
...
The so-called church was really nothing more than a slightly larger condemned building.
It stood in the most remote corner of the Lower City. Half the roof had collapsed, and the windows that should once have held stained glass were now nothing but black, gaping holes through which the cold wind howled without restraint.
Inside, there was nothing except a few pews with broken legs and a dust-covered statue of a god.
Oh, and a mildew stench that refused to go away.
Lucia laboriously parked the handcart in the courtyard, then led the two of them into the main hall.
She ran to the bare stone altar, shoved aside a loose slab with all her strength, and pulled out a stack of manuscripts wrapped tightly in oil paper.
“This is it.”
She handed the manuscript to Logaris as if presenting a treasure, rubbing her hands uneasily. “The formulas inside might be a little messy. I didn’t have the money to run experiments, so most of it is just theoretical derivation...”
Logaris took the manuscript. Its title was: 《On the Feasibility of the Mechanized Mass Production of Divine Arts》
Well now. Even the title alone was explosive.
The paper was somewhat rough, but the handwriting on it was extremely neat. Dense magitech formulas and divine-art models were crammed together like a swarm of ants fighting each other.
He flipped through it quickly.
The more he read, the brighter the light in his eyes became.
Many sections were immature, and some of the data was plainly wrong, but that core line of reasoning—
To create a machine that could simulate the steps of prayer, bypass “divine grace,” and allow ordinary people to use basic divine arts—
It was sheer genius.
It was like everyone else was still kneeling and begging the heavens for rain, while this girl was already researching how to make artificial rain shells.
If she were given sufficient resources, if she were given a proper laboratory...
Logaris closed the manuscript and let out a long breath.
He lifted his head and looked at Lucia, who was waiting nervously for his judgment, then at Sylvia beside her. Sylvia could not understand the manuscript, but she knew exactly what that look on Logaris’s face meant.
“What is your teacher’s name?” Logaris asked suddenly.
“Ah?” Lucia blinked. “B-Bishop Prozorov.”
“That old drunk?” Sylvia seemed to remember him. He was a notorious slacker within the Holy Church, a man with no great ability who only knew how to drink.
“Mm... yes, him.” Lucia looked a little embarrassed.
“You should thank him properly.” Logaris handed the manuscript back to Lucia, his tone turning unusually serious.
“Why?” Lucia sounded aggrieved. “He’s the one who had my legs broken!”
“Because if he hadn’t personally broken your legs and thrown you into a godforsaken place like this as if you were useless trash, you would already be a pile of ashes by now.”
Lucia’s face instantly turned deathly pale.
“I-it was that serious?”
“What did you think you were writing? An academic paper?” Logaris gave a derisive snort. As someone who had published countless papers that infuriated the Holy Church, he had more right to speak on this than anyone.
“What is the Holy Church’s foundation? It is the monopoly of divine authority. It is the right to declare that ‘only through pious prayer can power be obtained.’ And this thing of yours is telling everyone that god is unnecessary—that as long as there is a machine, anyone can use Holy Light.”
He stepped closer, staring straight into the frightened eyes of the little girl.
“You were digging out their roots. Do you understand?”
“I can more or less understand what your teacher was thinking back then. He probably did it to show the upper ranks of the Holy Church that this matter ended there. The child is still young. He had already punished her.”
“Otherwise, you most likely would not have left the Holy Church alive.”
Lucia stood there in a daze, her mind gone completely blank.
“However...”
Logaris abruptly changed his tone. That severe, oppressive gravity vanished, replaced by the gentle smile of a businessman who had just discovered a once-in-a-lifetime treasure.
“Since the Holy Church doesn’t want you, wouldn’t it be better for your talent to shine somewhere else instead of rotting away here in the mold?”
“W-What do you mean?” Lucia still had not recovered from the fright he had just given her.
At the side, Sylvia could not help showing a helpless smile.
She was far too familiar with this process.
Logaris was about to start luring someone in again.
“What I mean is, if you’re willing, I can provide you with a place where you won’t have to worry about being burned alive, and where the funding will be more than sufficient, so you can actually build this ‘mechanized divine grace.’”
Logaris even looked as though he wanted to pull a recruitment brochure out of his coat.
Suddenly—
His movement stopped.
The hand that had been about to reach into his pocket moved instead, smoothly and without warning, to the modified revolver at his waist.
At the same time, Sylvia spun around in an instant and pressed her back to Logaris’s. Her sword remained sheathed, but her entire body had already become like a fully drawn bow.
The atmosphere froze in that instant.
Lucia looked utterly bewildered. “W-What is it?”
Logaris did not look at her. His nostrils twitched twice.
Amid the stale mildew and the stench of the sewers, he caught a scent so faint it was nearly imperceptible, yet so sharp it was impossible to mistake.
It was the smell of rust.
It was also the warm, fresh smell of blood that had only just flowed from a vein.
And it was inside this ruined church, which appeared to be completely empty.
“Little sister.”
Logaris’s voice dropped very low, as calm as the stillness before a storm.
“You said no one ever comes here, right?”
“R-Right,” Lucia said, frightened by the two of them. “Other than me, not even rats are willing to come here.”
“Now that is interesting.”
Logaris lifted his head. His gaze moved past Lucia’s shoulder and locked dead onto the dust-covered statue of the god, the one missing half its head.
Slowly, he pulled back the hammer with a crisp click.
“If no one ever comes here, then the friend bleeding under that statue—could it be that a god has manifested and shed holy blood for us?”