Millennium Witch

Book 3: Chapter 268: Could He Actually Be an Ally?

Though she still had no idea how to cobble together a proper doctrine for the time being—and every option she could think of was basically patching this bit and copying that bit—Sara couldn’t wait any longer. Within two days, she quit her job as a waitress at Snowmist Lodge, planning to say goodbye to her parents in Icehammer City first, then head back to her hometown, Ice Stone Valley.That was where her father’s family came from. Every year during the Snow Emperor Festival, she would return there with her parents to visit relatives, so she knew the place like the back of her hand. As long as she showed off the protective effects granted by the holy icon—driving out all sorts of minor ailments and old injuries from the villagers—she believed it wouldn’t take more than a few days to turn the whole of Ice Stone Valley into a base for the Silver Witch Church.

Meanwhile, Yvette was still making her regular trips to the Snowfields. Wrapped in a thick gray fur cloak, she trudged along the rugged paths buried in snow, exploring as she went and carefully marking things down in her sketchbook with a quill pen, continuously refining the map of the Snowfields.

From time to time, she would rescue those struggling in blizzards or being chased by magical beasts, then hand them that seemingly simple yet oddly mysterious wooden holy icon.

As a result, the rumor originally spread by the Icefang Party—that “the Snow Priestess is a servant of the Silver Witch”—was now essentially cross-verified. It began to spread at high speed, its influence growing by the day.

At the border between the Fringe Belt and the Cold Mountain Belt, inside a tavern in a certain adventurer town, the boisterous chatter was loud enough to nearly shake the roof beams made from whole trunks of fir. The air was thick with the smell of roast meat and ale, and the pine logs in the fireplace crackled and popped, the leaping firelight stretching the hunters’ shadows long across the walls.

A few adventurers who had just withdrawn from the edge of the Blizzard Belt sat around a rough wooden table, snow still clinging to their leather armor, loudly bickering as they cashed in their haul from this run and used strong liquor to steady their nerves.

“Damn, we really got stupidly lucky this time—almost didn’t make it back!”

“Yeah, scared the hell out of me.”

“Oh, give me a break, Hank.” A dwarf miner at the next table who knew them well laughed and teased, “You lot say the same thing every time you come back. Can’t even be bothered to change your lines!”

“This time’s different!” The burly man named Hank slammed his mug down, deliberately lowered his voice, and put on an air of mystery. “We ran into her!”

“Her who?”

“The Snow Priestess! The guide in the blizzard!”

“Woah.” A low wave of gasps and whispering rippled through the surroundings.

Seeing that he had everyone’s attention, Hank grew even more pleased with himself. Swearing up and down, he said, “Swear to you, it’s true! Just when we were about to get boxed in by frost wraiths, a flash of light swept past and those monsters were sliced clean in half in an instant, too gruesome to look at! Then we saw a figure in a gray cloak. Couldn’t make out the face. She handed us a holy icon of the God of Serendipity and left. That has to have been the Snow Priestess!”

“Didn’t they say the Snow Priestess is a messenger of the Snow Emperor?” a younger adventurer asked doubtfully.

“That’s people getting it wrong. The one she truly serves should be the God of Serendipity! Think about it—she specifically shows up in blizzards to guide those poor bastards who aren’t meant to die yet back to life. Isn’t that the greatest ‘serendipity’ there is?”

“You know, that actually makes a lot of sense.”

For a while, the tavern buzzed with discussion. As early as last month, rumors about the connection between the Snow Priestess and the God of Serendipity had already been making the rounds among adventurers, but back then most people dismissed them as drunken nonsense, or tall tales made up for bragging rights, and didn’t really take them to heart.

However, as time went on, more and more adventurers claimed they’d been saved from desperate situations in the Blizzard Belt by the “Snow Priestess” and had received a holy icon from her. The supposed truth of the rumor shot up. The ancient and mysterious legend of the Snow Priestess thus gained a new footnote.

At the same time, in a corner of the tavern, a girl in a gray fur cloak was sitting alone at a small table. The tabletop in front of her was piled with empty wooden plates stacked like a small hill, and beside them lay several bare, gnawed-clean snow rabbit bones and a huge mug of ice-moss beer that was almost drained.

Her eating habits weren’t exactly refined—there was even a kind of hearty recklessness to them that didn’t match her slender frame. Her speed was astonishingly fast, yet strangely, she didn’t come across as crude. It felt oddly natural.

When she heard the talk around her about the Snow Priestess and the Silver Witch, her hands, which were holding a big hunk of roasted mountain lamb, paused ever so slightly.

Serving the God of Serendipity?

Staring silently at the roast lamb in her hands, Shuanghua’s first thought was that she’d misheard. As the real Snow Priestess, she’d been wandering the Snowfields lately just as aimlessly as always, but she truly hadn’t run into anyone who needed her help. Naturally, there was no rescuing people, and certainly no handing out holy icons of the God of Serendipity.

So clearly, this was a misunderstanding.

Even so, that mysterious missionary who’d been mistaken for the Snow Priestess gave her a huge inspiration.

Ever since Esvia had candidly told her that the Snow Emperor Temple couldn’t promote the faith of the Silver Witch, she’d spent a very long time sunk in deep frustration and helplessness.

Of course, she could descend directly in the Snow Emperor’s true form and forcibly order the Council of Rites, which held the real religious power in the Snow Country, to carry things out. As long as she spoke, in theory there wouldn’t be any resistance within the Snow Country at all—the ones who’d be sidelined would be the Snow Emperor Temple and the Great Prophet. A god’s will was not something that could be defied.

She just didn’t want to do that, because it would make her feel like she was forcing others’ hands. She had never protected the Snow Country for the sake of controlling it. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have told Esvia to limit the Snow Emperor Temple and keep it from meddling in secular power in the first place.

So since the Snow Emperor Temple couldn’t help, she decided to do it herself. But how she should actually do it left her utterly at a loss.

After all, she had long since been revered as a god. She had zero experience as a missionary, and she had crippling social anxiety—she didn’t dare talk to strangers at all. Expecting her, with no experience and a timid personality, to go around like some door-to-door salesperson promoting the God of Serendipity was really asking a bit too much.

How was she supposed to pull that off?

Yet, just when she was suffering over it to the point of wanting to give up, this new “intel” about the Snow Priestess circulating in the tavern became a great example for her to follow.

Save people, then hand them a holy icon of the God of Serendipity. That way, she could complete the missionary work with ease, without even needing to exchange a single word with the target in between.

This was practically tailor-made for her.

She didn’t know who exactly that mysterious missionary who’d been mistaken for the Snow Priestess really was, but one thing was certain: the woman had indeed saved many people, and truly didn’t care about fame or credit, which was why all her merits had been grafted onto a Snow Priestess who had nothing to do with her.

As the real Snow Priestess, there was nothing stopping her from quietly saving people and spreading the faith out on the Snowfields together with that mysterious missionary, scattering the radiance of the Silver Witch across the land.

Surely, this was also what that mysterious missionary wanted to see, right?

Time slipped into mid-November.

Diligently mapping the Snowfields while saving people and spreading the faith, Yvette wasn’t making especially fast progress on the map itself, but she felt that her missionary work, on the other hand, seemed to be going a little too smoothly.

Leaving aside the very real protective effects of the holy icons, Sara had already returned to her hometown of Ice Stone Valley, full of confidence. Rumor had it she was actively going around among relatives and friends, successfully persuading quite a few people to convert into devout believers of the Silver Witch.

Even in many adventurer towns and settlements on the edge of the Cold Mountain Belt, the buzz and discussion around the Silver Witch had become a bit over the top.

In particular, there were lots of adventurers she didn’t recognize at all—she had clearly never met them—yet they insisted with absolute certainty that they’d been rescued by the Snow Priestess in the Snowfields and had been given a holy icon, and that they now bowed in prayer to the God of Serendipity every single day.

Looking at those devout expressions, Yvette herself started to feel a little lost. She wondered if it was because she was getting old and her memory was going. Had she really forgotten who she’d saved?

Was this an early sign of Alzheimer’s?

However!

Soon after!

Through careful observation and brilliant deduction, Yvette arrived at a conclusion—these people were most likely bragging.

The evidence was clear: the Silver Witch holy icons they produced were nothing like the batch she’d handed out, the ones she’d secretly inscribed with magic circuits and marked with the holy emblem of the girl’s side profile. What they had were just ordinary little wooden figures sold by the Adventurers’ Guild.

From this, Yvette felt she might have glimpsed an interesting social phenomenon. In the current adventurer circle, being saved by the Snow Priestess seemed to have become a badge worth showing off. Those who had truly been rescued would present their holy icons as proof, while others, driven by vanity or the urge to fit in, would dig into their own pockets to buy regular wooden figurines, then brag that they’d had a similar “serendipitous encounter.”

In her eyes, that had to be it—flawless and logically airtight.

So, convinced she’d seen through everything, Yvette simply continued her regular, tranquil routine of mapping and preaching in the Snowfields and didn’t take this little episode too seriously.

Until one night, the world shrouded in a raging blizzard, when she stood atop a snowdrift and spotted, far in the distance, a small party of about five or six adventurers trapped by the sudden storm. They were struggling forward through snow up to their knees, their figures swaying, about to collapse.

Their torches had long since gone out. If they couldn’t quickly find a cave or rock crevice to shelter in and light a fire, it wouldn’t be long before they froze stiff in this deadly cold and became new ice sculptures on the Snowfields.

She was just about to head over when she saw another figure quietly appear atop a bare black boulder ahead, catching her eye.

She saw that figure wearing a gray fur cloak just like hers, hood drawn low. The person turned into a swirling flurry of snow and wind, re-forming beside the half-dead adventurers. Then, with a simple lift of the hand, a small hut of crystal-clear ice, large enough to hold several people, appeared out of nowhere on the snow, providing the desperate adventurers with a precious refuge.

It was undoubtedly help in their hour of need. These adventurers weren’t short on supplies. With this temporary shelter to block the wind and snow, they could light their tinder and firewood and make it through this lethal night.

Sure enough, having clawed their way back from the brink, the adventurers were overwhelmed with gratitude, crowding around the gray-cloaked figure to thank her profusely.

But in the next second, Yvette saw that the mysterious person in the gray fur cloak took out a little wooden figurine that looked very familiar to her and handed it to the leader of the rescued adventurers, then turned on her heel and walked straight out of the ice hut.

Yvette immediately closed in, turning into a patch of shadow and appearing right in front of the other party, blocking the way.

The blizzard still howled on, whipping at the hems of their cloaks.

After carefully seeing the face beneath the other’s hood, Yvette said, “So you’re the Snow Priestess.”

Although she’d already had her suspicions, actually confirming that the Snow Priestess was Shuanghua still surprised her a little.

Shuanghua looked at her calmly, her face showing no embarrassment at being caught, and she didn’t admit or explain anything. Her silent attitude was impossible to read.

Yet a few seconds later, she suddenly scattered into a gust of wind and snow and vanished on the spot.

Yvette remained where she was, quietly watching in the direction Shuanghua had left. Amid her confusion, a strange thought slowly took shape.

She thought, the Snow Priestess was undoubtedly a servant of the Snow Emperor. Didn’t that mean that today’s missionary work by Shuanghua was also done with the Snow Emperor’s approval?

Combine that with the fact that the Snow Emperor didn’t collect faith, and—could it be that He really was willing to hand over all of the Snow Country’s faith to her?

Could He actually be an ally?