TLNTAAM Chapter 3

A God Who Needs Painkillers

"Well. You have a point."

"When I said something like that, the priest would scold me. Marriage is God's will, he'd always say."

"Laughable." Sabina snorted. "So when the Church marries off their orphan girls and calls it God's will—if one of them ends up beaten to death by her husband, will they answer for it? These are the same people who sell every child in their care into servitude. Damn the lot of them. Insane bastards. Oh, they have beautiful words. Nina—ignore it. The Church has always been very good at demanding others keep rules they won't keep themselves, and calling it divine."

The fighting spirit radiating off Sabina was genuinely something to admire. Get a drink in her and she'd make an excellent ally.

'She and I are going to get along just fine.'

The urge to befriend her was immediate and specific. I'll be good to you, ma'am. Let's get closer. I'm reasonably hardworking and I have a decent sense of humor. You won't regret it.

Whether it was deep hostility toward the Church or just her general temperament, Sabina was fuming—but she took Nina's hand and kept walking. The people of this country seemed to genuinely despise the temple. I kept pace beside her, legs working to keep up while I took everything in.

Castellium was a castle built from gray stone. Blunt-looking, but clearly built to last. I studied the watchtowers set at close intervals along the walls and the soldiers stationed at each. I didn't know much about fortifications, but the functionality of this place was unmistakable.

'Honestly, none of this feels real. Like an incredibly vivid VR experience.'

Strange and new to a girl from the countryside like Nina. Strange in an entirely different way to a twenty-first-century Korean woman like Lee Hwayun. Castellium was remarkable to both of them.

I was still busily cataloguing my surroundings when it happened.

'My God.'

I froze. My feet stopped on their own, and I stood there staring upward with my mouth open. What—what is that?

"S-senior maid! That—that thing! What is it?"

I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

"Hmm? Oh, that?"

Sabina, on the other hand, could not have been less concerned.

"That's the pillar of fire and the pillar of cloud."

I blinked hard and rubbed my eyes. She was right. My mind understood the words. My mind simply refused to do anything useful with them.

At the far edge of the clear blue sky, reaching impossibly high, stood a pillar of fire and a pillar of cloud. My first thought had been volcanic eruption—something blazing in midair with that kind of force. But there was no lava. No flowing magma. Nothing like the volcanoes Lee Hwayun had seen in documentaries.

'How does something like this exist?'

I went through every piece of earth science and physics I could locate in memory. None of it helped. Against a cloudless sky, a pillar of fire and a pillar of cloud simply stood there. And the woman who served the king of this castle regarded them as unremarkable as the weather.

"The crystallization of His Majesty the King of Iberia's great magical power."

Sabina placed one knee slightly bent, her opposite arm across her chest.

"The pillar of fire and the pillar of cloud—always wondrous. Our pride, and our blood oath, and the reason Iberia exists."

I couldn't quite parse all of it. It had the rhythm of a prayer recited in temple. But I caught enough.

'That means the king controls those things?'

Did the king of this country actually have that kind of ability?

I cast my mind back to Bound Bird, the TL novel Lee Hwayun had been reading. The king was established as possessing tremendous magical power, yes. But nothing like this had appeared in the pages she'd gotten through.

'And a pillar of fire and a pillar of cloud—why does that sound familiar?'

My brow furrowed. Lee Hwayun was an atheist, but she'd attended church as a child. Faith wasn't something that could be forced, and she'd always been a child who considered sleep more important than most things—by elementary school she'd limited her attendance to Christmas. But still.

'I've seen something like this before.'

Now that I thought about it, there was something she'd heard about.

'But I always assumed that was mythology. Ancient stories.'

The sort that went alongside a bear transforming into a woman to marry a divine son. Except here, it was unambiguously real.

I swallowed. Something about this felt deeply, viscerally off. I was in a world that was very, very different.

'No. This is Nina's world. It always was.'

"You look startled. You've gone quite blank."

Sabina took Nina's hand again. I shook myself back to the present and nodded.

"That's understandable, I suppose. The Church doesn't teach any of this. Iberia is so far removed—if you haven't seen it with your own eyes, how could you imagine it? That something as great as any miracle they perform exists here."

"I've never actually seen divine power in person, either."

"The temple keeps it locked away and monetizes it. The rare sacred individuals who can wield it stay only in the capital. Of course you'd never have seen it, out in the countryside."

Sabina's voice was full of pride as she spoke of the fire and cloud. I took a slow breath and looked up at the two pillars against the sky.

It was red fire and black fire, interwoven. The edges roiled and shifted like something alive—it looked like a demon's flame. The impression, even from this distance, was that anything coming near it would simply burn.

The cloud pillar was equally strange. Not white and soft. A column of dense, dark stormclouds.

'If the fire is just fire, what does the stormcloud do?'

Black clouds typically meant rain. Could it actually—

'That's the domain of the divine.'

In Lee Hwayun's world, controlling natural rainfall was rare technology. Here, apparently, it was just Tuesday.

I pressed a hand to my chest. I could feel Nina's small heart going thump-thump-thump.

'I'm actually nervous.'

It was overwhelming. This was the world? This was the world I had to live in?

'Calm down. Get it together, Nina.'

I forced myself to breathe through it. I was shocked, yes. But I couldn't lose sight of what I needed to remember.

"Iberia is remarkable."

I had to survive here. I had to make them want to keep me.

"It's such a strong country. More extraordinary than I ever imagined."

And it wasn't a lie. Now I understood why Iberia could hold its own against a Pope with the greatest authority in the known world. Whatever those pillars were used for in warfare—whatever possibilities that implied—I was beginning to grasp the scale of it.

"You'll be even more astonished when you see the manna."

Whether she sensed my thoughts or not, Sabina lobbed another grenade directly into my mind.

"M-manna? What's manna?"

She gave Nina's hand a small, gentle shake.

"Something even more extraordinary than those pillars. It's a white crystalline substance—even if you're starving on a battlefield, a handful of manna and you can last a full day. Feed it to animals and the creatures gain tremendous strength. We don't produce it in large quantities during peacetime, but I've always thought the manna more remarkable than anything else."

By description alone, it sounded like a highly efficient combat ration.

'Like a nutritional supplement with a buff effect?'

Food that simply gave you strength on consumption. It sounded functionally absurd.

"I once survived on nothing but manna for a stretch. That's when I truly understood its worth. The taste is dreadful, though—nobody eats it unless they have to."

Effective but terrible. The manna that performed miracles apparently tasted like punishment. I turned it over in my mind. A king who wielded pillars of fire and cloud and provided manna for his people.

"He really does sound like a god."

In the modern world Lee Hwayun came from, leaders who let their own people starve were commonplace. The king here provided food.

And the thing about someone who feeds you is that you end up loyal to them. In a world where systems of governance and political philosophy hadn't yet developed fully, "loyal" didn't begin to cover what that meant.

'He must have near-absolute authority.'

I should make a very good impression on His Majesty. That had already been the plan—but now I needed to flatter him to within an inch of his life. What a genuinely remarkable person.

"Oh my!"

Whether it was the words or some private satisfaction, Sabina laughed, open and unhurried. She laughed for a while, then reached up and gently tucked Nina's short hair back from her face.

"But our king is human."

She said it close to Nina's ear, almost to herself.

"If he were truly a god, he wouldn't be in such pain."

The words were puzzling, but I understood exactly what she meant. This was something that had appeared in Bound Bird.

'The king is in pain.'

Using his magical power cost him. Not fever, not paralysis. Something worse: unrelenting thirst and a burning agony that never resolved itself.

'Something like severe, untreatable neuralgia?'

No painkiller touched it. No medicine existed for it. Hallucinogens barely helped—which was why the great kings before him had turned to narcotics. Nearly every king in Iberia's history had died of drug dependency.

But the male lead hadn't done that. He'd simply endured the pain. With nothing.

'That's why he kidnapped the heroine.'

Seraphie—the Sacred, who could cure any illness. The heroine of Bound Bird. The novel opened with the king's abduction of her: he'd infiltrated the temple, rendered her unconscious, and brought her back to Iberia.

'Not for love. Not infatuation at first sight.'

A straightforward abduction for use as a human painkiller. That was how the story began.

"I've been talking too much, haven't I. Are you frightened of this place?"

Sabina's whisper carried something wry and a little sad. I shook my head quickly.

"I don't know quite what I feel. But it's where I'm going to live now."

"I've thought it since earlier—Nina, you have a lovely way of speaking. And you're perceptive."

Still holding Nina's hand, Sabina pointed ahead with one finger. I turned to look and found an imposing iron gate.

"The passage to the inner castle. Not just anyone may enter—but as her dedicated poison taster, you'll be staying within."

A soldier who recognized Sabina moved the crossed spears aside. The iron gate began its slow, heavy descent.

The path forward was revealed.

"I hope your wish finds its way to you."

Another maid was waiting at the far end of the corridor. Sabina released Nina's hand and gestured toward her.

"Thank you so much!"

I smiled and bowed. The kind-spirited woman smiled back and actually waved. I turned and ran toward the maid she'd indicated.

As I passed inside, the iron gate rose again behind me. I bowed to the unfamiliar maid.

"I'm Nina Cage."

"I know. You're the taster, yes? Just a moment—I need to speak with an inner castle knight. Wait here. I'll show you to your quarters after."

"Of course."

The maid went to the knight. I stood there with nothing to do but look around, and found myself turning to look back the way I'd come.

Soldiers everywhere. The inner gate was already closed. The light shifting through the narrow windows made my eyes sting, for no reason I could name.

This was a foreign place. It felt, at moments, like somewhere I was not supposed to be. And if I thought about it—this was where Nina had died.

This wasn't a quiet corner somewhere to live in peace. This was a place where countless lives collided.

'There's no going back from this.'

Both Nina and Lee Hwayun felt the fear settle in their chest at the same time. But nothing was ever reversible. If what both sets of memories wanted was survival—then I had to move forward.

'I want to live.'

Could I manage, in a place with no human rights, no rule of law?

What I had was a single ability: tasting for poison. Nothing else. No one beside me. Nina had no family, no relatives anywhere. The orphanage that had raised her was worse than nothing.

There was suspicion already aimed at me. The original story's death to avoid. Skills beyond poison-tasting to develop.

'Can I actually do this?'

Out of nowhere, I missed Lee Hwayun's parents. They existed only in memory now—but they were the only people I still held with certainty.

I prayed, quietly and desperately.

'Help me. Mom, Dad. My brother. I can do this, can't I?'

I trusted them more than I'd ever trusted any god. They were impossibly far away. That distance was its own strange comfort.

'Come on.'

I can do this. What's the alternative? Failing isn't an option. The only direction is forward.

The maid returned quickly. I was so glad to see her that I actually jogged over. She glanced at me sideways and spoke with complete practicality.

"Follow me."

"Yes."

I followed, and looked back once more at the windows. A thread of ivy had climbed the gap between the gray stones and swayed in the wind.

Whether the prayer had worked or not, the fear was gone. Reliable as ever—family more steadying than any god too distant to know her name.