Ch. 140 The Principle of 'Comparison'

Gua! Only one chapter today, I’ll make it up tomorrow.

So three chapters tomorrow (lying down)

——

The village pier was quiet in a strange way.

There were no soldiers who should have been holding torches.

Only the torches erected at the village entrance burned in pairs, yet lonely.

Mia looked back; Artoria and Kay were both holding their swords.

Merlin didn’t seem too worried about anything, looking around while holding his staff.

“There’s no one.”

“We just don’t see them right now.”

But where would those people go? Judging by the scale of the village, it was large enough to accommodate several hundred people.

Perhaps by the standards of later generations, this number is extremely low, but in this era, basically every family had their own single-story house and courtyard, and the buildings were not closely packed. A village of several hundred people already occupied a significant area.

If this were a typical boss battle scene…

The night would probably correspond to a mist.

However, there was no mist here, and the village on the plain had no undulations. The rows of houses obstructed their vision.

“Let’s take a look inside the house.”

Mia didn’t see anything suspicious in the surroundings.

With a sword in one hand and a staff in the other, she approached a residential building.

It wasn’t locked; the door was left slightly ajar.

Frowning slightly, Mia pushed the door open with the tip of her staff.

The furniture inside had been toppled, and miscellaneous items were scattered everywhere; it seemed a fierce struggle had taken place here not long ago.

There were bloodstains on the floor.

However, other than that, there was no jump-scare waiting behind the door.

Following the bloodstains further into the house, she found a blood-soaked man collapsed by the bed.

Mia knelt down and leaned closer to him, noticing that the source of the blood was several puncture wounds.

“Is he dead?” Artoria also saw the man sitting in the pool of blood.

“No,” Mia shook her head.

Although there were double-digit stab wounds all over his body, there was at least a thread-like breath remaining.

The young girl reached out her hand, and a golden light appeared.

This was the first time Artoria and Kay had directly seen Mia display her Golden Power.

Nourished by that light, the wounds on the man’s body healed rapidly at a speed visible to the naked eye.

His skin, which had turned pale from excessive blood loss, regained its color, and his breathing gradually became steady and strong.

Then, he opened his eyes.

The moment he saw Mia, he dazed for a moment; as his consciousness gradually returned, his lips trembled: “Am I dead?”

“No,” Mia comforted him. “What happened?”

The man froze there: “Where is he?”

The man asked, and Mia countered: “Who is where?”

After another few seconds of silence, as his thoughts fully recovered, the man clutched his head and let out a wail from his throat like a boiling kettle.

“God, what have I done? Did I want to kill him? I wanted to kill my younger brother…” He held his head, lying on the ground in agony.

Just as Mia was about to comfort him, he suddenly grabbed her leg, pleading through tears: “Quickly, kill me, I beg you! Any Christian with a conscience should kill me! I am a sinner!”

“First, explain clearly what happened.”

“I was bewitched by Satan,” the man wept bitterly, sobbing and speaking incoherently: “For a ring, I wanted to kill my brother. This is my sin, I confess my sin, just let me go to Hell!”

He rolled on the ground in pain.

From his few vague sentences, Mia got a general idea of what had happened.

Some kind of existence had influenced his mind, causing him to commit the great sin of fratricide. Judging by his extreme grief, it seemed he had initiated the crime but was instead severely wounded by his own brother.

Was this man’s brother also influenced by that existence?

Merlin smiled bitterly: “That is the power of the Beast of ‘Comparison.’ A calamity beast that feeds on the envy and regret between humans… Oh dear, it looks like it will be quite difficult to deal with.”

“However, as long as one dares to try, anything can be done, right?” He ignored the man still clutching his head and deep in guilt, cheerfully cheering everyone up.

Suddenly, Kay’s shout came from the doorway: “Hey! Come look at this!”

He stood at the door, gazing anxiously at something.

Firelight appeared in the distant night sky; some distant buildings had started burning at some point.

“Stay here!” Mia patted the man still curled on the ground, stood up, and walked quickly to the door.

“Hmm…” Merlin glanced at Mia, then at the person on the ground.

Then, he raised his staff:

*Thump!*

He struck the man’s head hard.

The man’s curled body stiffened and he immediately fainted.

“Merlin?!” Artoria looked at him in surprise.

Not only that, the crisp sound was enough to fill the entire room.

‘What a sturdy head.’

“This is for his own good,” Merlin said solemnly. “If a devout Christian realizes they’ve committed such a crime, they might commit suicide.”

In Catholic doctrine, one cannot go to Heaven after committing suicide.

But if he had already committed a sin he himself found unacceptable, making it impossible to reach the Heaven of his faith, it was hard to say he wouldn’t end his worldly suffering early to go to Hell and atone for his sins.

“…”

That makes sense.

“That’s quite a forceful act of kindness…” Artoria remarked.

Forceful in every sense of the word.

That man probably wouldn’t wake up for several hours.

“Well, so-called kindness is basically an existence like forced sales, isn’t it?”

Mia looked at Merlin with a slight, complicated expression.

Such a metaphor could probably only come from the mouth of Merlin, who didn’t understand human emotions.

“While I feel something is wrong with that sentence, now is not the time to discuss such things.”

Mia shook her head: “Let’s head toward the fire!”

No one told her, but her intuition told her that the others were in that direction.

The others felt the same way.

Leaving the sleeping villager behind, the group quickened their pace.

The fire appeared to the north.

Deeper into the island, at the center of the village.

Mia looked up at the flames while walking briskly.

The gray-black pillars of smoke were illuminated by the fire, looking like a twisted tree growing continuously under the night sky.

The fire was spreading rapidly along the thatched-roof houses in the village.

By the time Kay noticed the fire, it might have already been burning fiercely, lighting up nearly half the village as bright as day.

The village, which had been peaceful just moments ago, seemed to have been placed in another world.

Before even entering the burning area, Mia saw people appearing on the village roads—lying on the ground, dying or already dead.

“You guys go to the center of the fire first and find Cath Palug!” Mia knelt before a villager who was still breathing, treating her with Prayer while shouting to Artoria and the others.

“But you…”

“I have the strength,” Mia said brookingly.

By now, the outcome of the incident seemed very clear.

The villagers, influenced by the Principle of ‘Comparison’ wielded by Cath Palug, were killing each other out of envy.

Mia pressed her hands onto the villager in front of her.

She had to find a way to get the villagers out of critical danger without letting them wake up immediately; this would take some time.

If they didn’t want the disaster to spread further, splitting into two groups was the only way.

Mia held the golden light in her hands, her lips pursed.

If she only repaired the wounds to the point where they wouldn’t worsen, they wouldn’t come back to life on the spot from full recovery, nor would they die from excessive blood loss or shock.

She could do it.

But such delicate operation was much more complex than simply slapping on a full recovery.

“Melina, help!” Mia called out.

Melina also possessed Prayers for healing people.

“Get them out of life-threatening danger, but don’t let them wake up for now. Can I leave that to you?”

Melina nodded decisively.

The two of them identified those still breathing and pulled them back from the brink of death.

With the mindset of saving whoever they could, the two advanced slowly along the street.

As long as they were on the dirt road, they shouldn’t be affected by the spreading fire; the slightly damp dirt roads in the village were the best firebreaks.

The fire could only spread along the buildings on both sides.

There were no people inside those buildings either.

Everyone had converged toward the starting point of the fire.

Flipping over another villager, she found an old woman with three parallel puncture wounds on her abdomen; the image of a pitchfork immediately appeared in Mia’s mind.

Following the method she had used several times before, she treated the villager to the point where they wouldn’t wake up immediately but wouldn’t get worse, then Mia stood up.