National destiny: Starting with a coffin, building an aircraft carrier is broadcast live globally.

Myriel did not stand up.

Sunlight poured into the sanctuary from the broken dome, illuminating the half-human's body, making his unretractable tentacles and spikes impossible to hide.

He spoke.

With a tongue and voice that do not belong to him.

"...I'm a terrible priest."

Myriel spoke haltingly, but Ren didn't urge him. He found a bench that was only half full and sat down.

Klaus leaned on his hammer, while Aurora and the others escorted the remaining two townspeople out of the church, only to turn back.

"It's a poor place...nobody wants to come here. I was ostracized because I was arrogant when I was young, and that's why I was assigned here."

The priest gazed wistfully at his own distorted shadow on the wall.

The fishermen didn't believe in God, only in the wind and tides, but over time they gradually accepted him, and year after year he gradually accepted the town.

"Karl, the blacksmith, is seventeen years old, left-handed, and always gets distracted when he's working on the blacksmith's shop."

"Old John didn't know, because the kid liked his daughter."

"His hand was broken that day—for a blacksmith, a hand is no different from life. The boy was devastated, and you all know what happened next..."

This is a test from the Lord.

Miriai twitched the corners of her mouth, though it was hard to tell whether her expression was a bitter smile or a smile.

"...That's what seminary teaches. When you encounter a problem you can't solve, you blame it on God—'His will is higher than man's will, Amen.'"

"Ah, that's very convenient."

Just like those brief entries in his diary.

A few strokes summed up a young man's future.

"There are too many... Romeo's accident before his engagement, Marie's leg as a dancer, Carol's debts..."

His twisted fingers drew lines on the dust.

"I can't answer any of them. I'm just a guy who lives off the parish allowance every month, a coward."

"The last time I blessed Anna, I didn't even dare to hold her... Until the day she died, God... she was too light, fifteen pounds? Or twenty pounds?"

He looked up at the sky.

The blue that's mixed with gray isn't bright enough, nor is it dark enough.

"Then Willie found the coin."

"The Touch of Fate?" Renyi asked.

"...Whatever you call it," Miriam said disdainfully. "When Vili showed it to me, I thought that idiot had picked up a moldy piece of bread."

Nathan couldn't help but chuckle, but quickly suppressed it.

"But it spoke to me, saying it could give me anything I wanted, at the cost of something invisible and intangible, something whose very existence I didn't know."

"You refused."

"Of course." Miriam's fingers clenched, her black nails digging into her palm.

"Kevili was the last one to come to me... I went to see everyone... Ah, so much time has passed..."

He thought that after so much time, he wouldn't remember.

But the truth is... it's as clear as yesterday.

“‘This gift…is from evil, it cannot be accepted,’ I said.” Myriel repeated flawlessly, then mimicked the other’s angry expression: “She asked me, ‘Where is the one from God?’”

He told Mary that free things are the most expensive.

Mary pointed her cane at his nose: "It's easy for you to say that when you're not the one suffering!"

"I also went to Bud's house."

At this point, Myriel paused for a very long time.

It grew so long that Ivan thought he wasn't going to continue.

"Anna lay there, wearing overalls sewn from scraps of cloth that Bud had begged from a hundred households, and Bud asked me a question—"

"Which is more valuable, his soul or his daughter's life?"

Silence fell over the church once again.

No one can answer that.

"They're right. I haven't experienced those things, so what right do I have to tell people in the abyss not to grasp at that straw..."

The tentacle trembled a few times, then quickly drooped down again.

So everyone got what they'd always wanted, and Willie became the mayor...

"But you were all deceived?" Ren Yi asked abruptly.

"......right."

The priest raised his twisted claws, his fingers opening and closing, his lips opening and closing as if he wanted to say something, but didn't know where to begin.

"And then you also made a deal?" Renyi continued to patiently unravel the mystery.

Myriel shook her head, then nodded.

"I think... it should be prayer, after all, that's what I'm best at."

"prayer?"

Klaus's eyes widened.

Knowing full well that the other party is a scammer, would you still pray to them and beg for mercy?

"What do you think prayer is... appealing to and reasoning with an existence many times more powerful than you... isn't that just negotiation?"

The priest corrected him, displeased:

"However, negotiating with God requires no bargaining chips, but negotiating with this thing..."

"I lured it into the church under the guise of a transaction, and told it that my flock had eaten your grass, which was my dereliction of duty, and I would hold it against me."

Ivan opened his mouth—

"This deal seems a bit unfair. Will they agree to it?"

"Of course," the priest smiled, a hint of his former charisma still visible in his eyes, "he was a fraud, but so am I this time."

"I ate it."

These five words were spoken in a plain and unassuming manner, as if they were a casual remark about yesterday's dinner.

"Or it ate half of me... oh, it's still eating, but I've tied up half of it too."

"I obtained some of the 'rules,' not all of them, but enough for me."

The souls of the townspeople were not taken away, but forcibly imprisoned here, becoming what they are now.

Then he cut off his own tongue.

A person who has become a monster is not qualified to read the Bible, listen to confessions, or pray for forgiveness for anyone.

Words are for preaching; he is not worthy to use them.

At last.

He made the townspeople forget all the past suffering, and forget him as well. "Every day I see them smiling, they are happy, happy for thousands of years."

"They have been happy for thousands of years."

He stood up casually, holding the Raven, and slowly walked to Miri Ai. He squatted down and looked at him intently.

"They have only been happy for one day in thousands of years."

We were happy for only one day?

Myriel couldn't understand why the eternity he had given everything for had become meaningless in this young man's mouth.

"Yes, it's the day the 'gift' takes effect."

Ren Yi continued to gently dissect his self-brainwashing:

"And you've taken that away from them too, Father. You've made them forget their pain."

Without pain as a reference, happiness becomes a habit, a numb, and taken-for-granted backdrop.

"You are not a savior, Father."

"You're just... a madman who pressed the pause button."