Millennium Witch

Book 3: Chapter 280: Church Alliance

“Now, everyone close your eyes, empty your minds, let go of stray thoughts, and begin praying to the Goddess with me.”In Ice Stone Valley, inside a vast stone cavern carved out from a natural cave, Sara stood beneath the Silver Witch holy statue on the stone platform. She wore a gray robe embroidered with the silhouette of a girl in profile, her expression solemn as she led the believers in worship.

She lifted her hands with a grave look, palms facing upward, making a prayer gesture as if she were holding up the stars themselves. The guided worship would last about ten minutes. Throughout the entire process, the statue behind her continuously shed a gentle radiance, illuminating the dozens of believers within the cavern. When the rite ended, Sara heard exclamations of delight rise and fall in hushed whispers that echoed through the stone chamber.

“It’s really healed! Incredible! The Goddess is real!”

“From today on, the Goddess is just as important in my heart as the Snow Emperor!”

“Now we don’t have to look at the priests’ faces anymore. This is great.”

“Think we can maybe stop paying next month’s tribute?”

“Yeah, let’s talk to the chieftain about it. We’ve got the Goddess’s protection now anyway.”

A few minutes later, once all the believers had left the cavern, Sara walked to a corner to check the offering box. Seeing the pile of tower coins inside, along with all the furs, cured meats, and other material offerings people had placed there, she couldn’t help smiling.

It was now mid-December; two months had passed since she’d become a church priestess and returned home to preach.

Strictly speaking, during this period she shouldn’t have had any real budget at all. Trying to spread a brand-new church under those conditions should have been very difficult.

But the Goddess was simply too reliable. She had helped the locals with many tricky illnesses that the valley’s own priestesses had never been able to handle over the years. The results were fast and dramatic, cutting through the Ritual Council’s already fragile grassroots base like a hot knife through butter. In return, the honest villagers had showered her with material and monetary offerings, and somehow she’d had no financial problems whatsoever.

Still, if Sara had to summarize the reasons for this success, at least thirty percent of it came down to the Ritual Council itself.

For the people of the Snow Country, the Ritual Council of today was nothing like it used to be. Forget comparing it to the Council when it first appeared a hundred years ago—even compared to thirty years ago, the change was enormous.

First was the matter of fairness. In the old days, the Ritual Council was full of upward possibilities. Any ordinary believer might become an apprentice, an assistant, even eventually a priest or priestess. Now, however, every upper and middle level position in the Ritual Council had been monopolized by the younger generation of the four great clans—Icehammer, Winterwolf, White River, and Coldstar—leaving not even a sliver of space for commoners.

The only positions available to ordinary people were things like menial laborers or trainee priestesses. At best, after a lifetime of effort, they might be promoted to priestess’s assistant, learn a few basic wind-and-snow divine arts…and that would be the end of it.

Still, even if all those paths were blocked, the common folk of the Snow Country would have put up with it—if the Ritual Council at least did its core job well.

But when it came to their core duties, they’d been getting worse every year.

Take the basics: treating injuries and illness. In an era without hospitals, church organizations that wielded divine arts were essentially the same thing as hospitals. They were also one of the few places where healing magic was taught in a systematic, group setting.

Yet the priestesses stationed in various settlements by the Ritual Council now were all worse than the last at handling divine arts. Decades ago, a priestess could heal seven or eight people in a day. Today, a priestess was doing well to heal even one.

They also needed plenty of rest. They had to be waited on like lords, begged and placated. When there were mass casualties, people had to queue up. If someone badly wounded wanted treatment first, they had to pay a hefty sum to cut the line. Sometimes, when the priestess was in a bad mood, she would simply shut down services and go off to have fun for ten days or half a month. During that time, any problems just had to be endured until she came back. On top of that, they were almost all from the four great clans, and often looked at the locals in their assigned settlements with the snobbish gaze of city folk toward country folk—making them even more loathsome.

And the people of the Snow Country were powerless to resist. If they failed to pay tribute one month, the next month the priestess would simply leave. At that point it was one thing to have no one officiate the rites, but who would treat the sick? Who would drive away evil influences? Who would handle the cold-mountain beasts that might threaten the settlement?

Put bluntly, it was all the result of a monopoly. In theory, simply introducing a new church to create competition should have improved the situation dramatically.

But the wars the Herman Empire and Sit Kingdom had once waged against the Snow Country meant that the people here could not accept the Crimson Sanctum or the Three Saints Church either. Even ignoring blood feuds, the arrogance of those two neighboring powers toward the Snow Country was in no way inferior to that of the Ritual Council—in fact, it was often worse, because they looked down on the four great clans as well. Otherwise, why would everyone, all of whom were human, be divided into “Snowfield savages” and everyone else?

And so everything ended up stuck in an awkward stalemate. The Ritual Council grew more and more unrestrained. The priestesses they trained grew more and more incompetent, their tempers worse and worse, utterly unworthy of the high tributes demanded each month. In some settlements, if people refused to pay, the Ritual Council would secretly go into the cold mountains and drive beasts down to attack those villages—creating casualties, spreading fear. There was no proof, but it was practically an open secret.

But—

Right at this point, when the people’s resentment had been building for years and was ready to explode, the Silver Witch Church appeared.

It was an absolutely perfect moment to enter the stage!

So, out of a certain desire for payback—and after confirming that the Goddess truly could protect her believers—the vast majority of Ice Stone Valley’s residents converted at once. They might still believe in the Snow Emperor, but that didn’t stop them from also believing in the God of Serendipity. The doctrines of the two were compatible from the start anyway.

As for the Ritual Council, it didn’t represent divine will; it had merely taken over roles that originally belonged to the Snow Emperor Temple.

Even so, despite how smoothly everything was going, Sara still had plenty of worries. Years of accumulated prestige made her somewhat fearful of the Ritual Council. She was afraid the priestess here would send someone to report her. On top of that, the Silver Witch Church was a new faith. If the Snow Emperor Temple took the same stance as the Ritual Council and branded her preaching as “illegal,” then as a devout believer who had worshiped the Snow Emperor since childhood, she truly wouldn’t know what to do.

And Sara’s worries were quickly borne out. Once Ice Stone Valley had been completely taken over by the Silver Witch Church, the local priestess flew into a rage, then sent an assistant to Icehammer City to report the situation, determined to teach this new church a lesson.

After receiving the report, the Ritual Council didn’t take it terribly seriously, but they still felt their face had been slapped. So they sent a few people over, intending to work with the local priestess to arrest Sara in the name of the Icehammer clan, using “illegal preaching” as the charge.

Naturally, this made no sense at all. There was no such crime as illegal preaching in the Snow Country’s laws, and the Snow Emperor Temple wasn’t a single-god church to begin with.

As a result, the people they sent soon clashed with the Ice Stone Valley settlement. The two sides faced off at the entrance for quite some time, but Ice Stone Valley had the numbers, and in the end the people sent by the Icehammer clan had to back down.

Of course, the Icehammer clan had no intention of swallowing this loss. The operation had failed mainly because they had no legal leg to stand on; they lacked a proper pretext to convict that young priestess named Sara.

Finding a “just cause,” however, was simple enough. All they had to do was get the Great Prophet to speak. He was the true interpreter of divine will, the spiritual leader of the entire Snow Country, and the author of the Snow Emperor Temple’s doctrines and commandments.

They would just have the priests make a trip to the Snow Emperor Temple and appeal to him with emotion and reason. Surely the Great Prophet would not tolerate some random girl from who-knows-where waving the banner of the Silver Witch, bewitching people’s hearts in Ice Stone Valley, and encroaching on devotion to the Snow Emperor.

—They genuinely believed this. They truly believed their every move on this trip was righteous beyond question, that each point of it was for the sake of the great Snow Emperor, and not for their clan’s利益.

And then—

While they were in the midst of these secret preparations, the Snow Emperor Festival—the most grand event in the entire Snow Country—finally arrived.

It was a New Year’s Eve lit by rune-lights. Magic fireworks blossomed in the night sky and turned into countless tiny snowflake-like motes of light that slowly drifted down. The air was filled with the smell of roasted snow hare, Rockstone stew, and Icefield ale. In the streets and alleys, traveling bards sang and plucked their strings, jugglers performed their routines, children dashed back and forth, and adults gathered in small groups to chat and laugh. Everything seemed peaceful and orderly.

But very soon, something happened that no one had expected.

In full view of the four clans’ chiefs and elders, the Ritual Council’s priests, and the chieftains who had come from settlements all across the land, Esvia Solomon actually invited a chestnut-haired, plain-faced short-haired girl in a white mage’s robe to step slowly out to the center of the altar.

Then he cleared his throat and, in that low, solemn voice that could carry across the entire square, announced that he would formally establish a church alliance with the Silver Witch Church represented by this Throne, henceforth advancing and retreating together, sharing honor and disgrace.

Without a doubt, this was news that shocked everyone—like dropping a massive boulder into a calm lake and throwing up ring after ring of waves.

What was even more shocking was that this seemed to be an edict personally issued by the Snow Emperor.

Because when Esvia announced the news on behalf of the Snow Emperor, at least a hundred thousand people in Icehammer City saw it: in that deep night sky, a huge, crystal-clear snowflake-shaped holy sigil appeared out of nowhere, radiating a gentle yet unbearable light. For many of them, it was the first time in their lives they had ever seen the legendary Divine Descent, the first time they had ever seen a god’s will personally descend to the mortal world.

At that moment, thinking back on what had happened in Ice Stone Valley, many of the Ritual Council’s priests finally began to realize, belatedly, just how serious things had become.