“When the food is served, go to the laundry room and help!”
“What?”
“When the food is served, the laundry room—!”
“Say something that makes sense!”
Elaine shouted, her eyes glaring, and the priest was startled.
“You’re asking someone who looks like she’s going to burn out after a day in the slum kitchen, to help out in the laundry room?”
“Ah, no, that’s because Saint Evelyn is not feeling well….”
I thought I had a rough idea of what had happened.
Evelyn, who was in charge of the laundry service, often missed work by pampering the priests or faking illness, using her pretty appearance.
It seemed that she even choose Elaine, the easiest of the saints, as a substitute in order to miss work today.
Annoyed, Elaine snapped a sharp shot.
“I’m about to die, too, so why don’t you take over from here? I’ve got two hundred people to feed and four hundred wooden bowls to wash?”
“What? Oh, I, I’m not the kind of person who does that.”
“Then what are you doing? Could it be that the person who became a priest to live according to Lord Bara’s words tried to sit back and read the scriptures while wearing nice clothes and eating good food?”
The priest’s mouth closed as if it were glued together.
The priest had a higher rank, both as a noble and within the temple, but he couldn’t beat an experienced saint who had been in the temple for ten years.
Meanwhile, Elaine was diligently serving the stew with her hands.
Without a single piece of meat, this stew, which contained milk, wheat flour, and plenty of vegetables such as potatoes and cabbage, was the best food that the poor in the Simile district, north of the capital, could eat only twice a month.
But for the person who had to chop the ingredients, simmer it all day, scoop it out to 400 people, and wash the dishes, it was the hardest day of her life.
To Elaine, both the humans who were trying to hand over their work to someone who was doing such a hard job, and the priest who was trying to make her look better, were equally unqualified to become priests.
“Don’t stand there and disturb my work, go back to Lady Evelyn and tell her. Don’t be ridiculous. If you’re staying in the temple as a saint, behave like a saint!!”
The priest hesitated for a while without erasing his puzzled expression, and finally turned around and left.
Whether he went or not, Elaine diligently worked on the stew with her ladle without turning her head.
Elaine, who poured the stew from the end of the food line to the bowl of the old man who was anxiously waiting for his share, barely straightened her back after about two hours.
‘Whoa… I’m done serving today.’
However, as soon as the meal was over, a fight broke out on the other side of the slum kitchen.
“You are smaller than me, so you eat less! Give it to me!”
“This is mine! Let go of this!”
Someone who had finished emptying his bowl grabbed the bowl of the person next to him and tried to take it away. It was Elaine’s job to solve this problem.
Elaine rushed over and shouted.
“If you don’t let go of that hand now, you know you won’t even be able to enter the kitchen next week!”
“Who are you?!”
The man who tried to take someone else’s bowl was a tall, rugged-looking man.
The man, who must have won everything with threats and violence, looked at Elaine up and down, who was wearing an apron full of stew residue.
Seeing his unfamiliar face, he seemed like someone who had just moved to the Simile district.
“I am Elaine Newt, the saintess of the Temple. Shall we add contempt of nobility?”
The man flinched at the word saint.
In the temple of the Calais Empire, children from each aristocratic family had a period of learning religious study in the name of a saint or saintess, but few of them participated in such hard work. They were collectively called ‘saints’ and treated as priests, but they were nobles after all. They only regarded the temple as a boarding school for aristocrats and were only busy making connections with the children of other families or high-ranking priests.
The man couldn’t believe Elaine’s story who looked like a commoner doing odd jobs at the temple.
“Don’t lie! What kind of aristocrat does this? Are you the only one who doesn’t know that the crime of impersonating an aristocrat is scary!”
“Why would I even lie to you?”
Elaine pulled out a silver necklace hidden under her clothes and showed it to him. It was a ‘Saint’s shield’ that could only be worn by a saint or saintess.
Only then did the man’s spirits subside.
“Oh, oh, sorry. I made a mistake because I had never met a saintess working in a place like this.”
“You mean if I wasn’t an aristocrat, you would have been messing around all the time.”
“Oh no! I’m sorry, saint…”
Elaine looked at him coldly and warned him.
“I have a good memory. In particular, I don’t forget the face of the person who caused the problem. If you do something like this one more time, I really won’t let you into the kitchen.”
“Yes, yes…”
The man who was causing the commotion quickly got up and left, and Elaine scanned the slum kitchen to make sure no one else was doing the same thing.
However, no one dared to make a fuss with her because the banning of the soup kitchen was the most terrible punishment for the poor, for whom eating was the most important thing.
“Saint Elaine! The bucket of water has arrived!”
“Yes, let’s go!”
Hearing that the water to wash the dishes had arrived, Elaine walked again and headed for the washing area on the other side of the slum kitchen.
There were piles of bowls and spoons stained with food.
And in order to open a slum kitchen today, only five people, including Elaine, were assigned to cook, serve, control people, and even wash the dishes.
“Let’s start quickly before it piles up.”
Elaine folded her arms and sat down. Her hands stung in the cold water, but she didn’t think it was particularly painful since she did it all the time.
“After you leave, I don’t know what to do with all of this.”
“Sorry…”
“Oh no! What does the saintess have to be sorry for? I was just saying that we were thankful for all this time.”
A week later, Elaine, who was finally leaving the temple, was greeted with a mixture of regret and gratitude by the women of the commoner who had worked together with her.
“You’re finally getting out. You’ve been here a few more years than the rest of us, right?”
“Yes. It happened that way.”
“Everything okay at home?”
“Same as always.”
Although the entrance to the school was late, it was not Elaine’s will to continue her life staying in the temple for 10 years, which is usually about five years at most for their religious studies.
Even after Elaine’s coming-of-age ceremony at the age of 20, her family, Count Newt’s family, did not want her to return, and Elaine, who had nowhere else to go but Count Newt’s family, had no choice but to stay at the temple.
But she wasn’t frustrated.
‘It’s better. Let’s take this opportunity to run away from the Newt family.’
Elaine didn’t have a single penny and had no place to rely on, so it must have been daunting, but she saved money by doing anything that would allow her to receive even a small amount of hard work.
After seven more years of working, he finally rented a small room for a year and raised funds to spend on living expenses for the time being.
And finally, the next week, Elaine was scheduled to leave the temple without telling the Newt family.
‘I can’t just stay here and be sold into the service of some old perverted nobleman.’
Her uncle, Earl Newt, did not allow Elaine to return home but was active in selling her out.
There were also various places to sell her, such as to be the second wife of an elderly nobleman without an heir, the mistress of a rich nobleman, and the night party partner of a wife who likes the same sex.
Each time, L’Arch, the successor of Count Newt’s family and Elaine’s cousin, stopped him, so she was still safe, but she was anxious to just believe L’Arch.
‘The only option left for me, who has passed the marriage period, is to become a saint of the temple or marry into an unfaithful marriage, and that’s not going to make things any better.’
If she ran away from the temple, she would have to live as a commoner rather than an aristocrat, but she was full of hope at the thought of enjoying complete freedom for the first time in her life.
That is, until she finished washing the dishes, rubbed her aching back, and lifted her head to look up at the bright blue sky.
* * *
“Uh? What is that?”
Someone pointed to the sky. Black clouds were gathering fast from far away in the clear blue sky.
“Even if we call it a dark cloud…Isn’t it too dark?”
“Is there a big fire?”
Before people could grasp the situation, the sky above Lecce, the capital of the Calais Empire, was covered with black clouds.
As the bright sunlight disappeared and the surroundings turned pitch black, the people began to tremble with fear.
And as if waiting for the right moment, a sound like thunder shook the heavens and the earth.
[Krawrk!]
It was a sound coming from beyond the clouds, but it certainly wasn’t thunder. Rather, it sounded like the low growl of a great beast.
At that time, when everyone was staring at the sky and tilting their heads, a loud voice rang out that was incomparable to the previous one.
[Listen to this, deceitful and arrogant humans.]
It was a human language, but not a human voice, so it sent a chill down his spine. It seemed that the light that flashed behind the black clouds would become a lightning bolt that would strike the ground at any moment.
[I will punish you for daring to mock the gods and seal it for five hundred years, and in three days you will perish under black flames, helpless humans, despair!]
After a terrifying warning, the owner of the voice broke through the black clouds and whirled rapidly over the city of Lecce.
At first, it was difficult to see because it was dark everywhere, but as time passed, people realized that it was something with a long black body and large wings.
At that moment, a light that had only flashed behind the black clouds struck the ground, and people could see the black dragon with blue eyes in that bright light.
Putting together the clues of ‘black dragon’ and ‘five hundred year seal’, they soon realized its identity.
“It’s Rabes! The evil dragon Rabes has returned!”
A scream gradually spread throughout the empire.
* * *
