Chapter 68: The Man Who Lived for Four Hundred Years

Things like this did happen from time to time. A patient might suddenly improve, a doctor might have misjudged the situation, or maybe the patient was simply tougher than expected. Any of those explanations made sense, so the first time it happened, he paid it little attention.

But it happened again not long after, and then a third time.

Patients who should not have lasted much longer would suddenly stabilize after large numbers of people prayed for them. Once it happened often enough, he began paying attention and started recording how many people took part, how long they prayed, and how the patients changed afterward.

Eventually, he found a pattern.

The more people participated, and the stronger their faith, the more likely the patient was to improve. He changed the number of participants, brought in people who did not truly believe, and tested different conditions, but every result pointed to the same thing.

What should have been a visit lasting only a few days dragged on, and before he knew it, he had stayed there for years.

At first, he only wanted to understand why those patients had survived. The longer he studied the phenomenon, the more certain he became that whatever was helping them was not necessarily some god.

It was the faith itself.

When enough people believed in the same thing for long enough, something that had existed only in their minds would slowly accumulate until it became a force capable of affecting reality.

Later generations would call that force Sacred Energy.

Back then, it did not have a name.

As a doctor, the first thing he thought of was naturally medicine. Could it treat diseases ordinary medicine could not? Could it make wounds heal faster? And if it could affect the human body, could it slow aging as well?

His research kept moving forward, from disease and the body to consciousness and, eventually, the soul.

Years passed. By the time he finally looked up from his research, his father had already died, while the young men who had once studied medicine under him had grown old and taken on students of their own. The generation after that now greeted him respectfully as their grandmaster.

And he was still studying.

It was around then that he began seriously considering something he had never thought much about before.

Could he live longer?

At first, the reason was simple. The longer a doctor lived, the more patients he could see and the more experience he could accumulate. Ten years was different from fifty, and fifty was different from a hundred.

If he could keep living, everything he had spent most of his life learning would not disappear with his death.

He could keep saving people.

So his research gradually shifted from the body to the soul. Many years later, he confirmed that the soul did not vanish immediately after death, and later still, he found a way to separate it from the body.

That brought a new problem.

Without a body, a soul would steadily weaken and eventually disappear. Keeping one alive for any meaningful length of time required a continuous supply of Sacred Energy, far more than a single person could provide.

He needed more—enough to keep a bodiless soul alive for decades, perhaps even longer.

It was around then that he heard a rumor about a dragon.

Far away, somewhere in the mountains, lived a dragon that had already been alive for longer than anyone could remember. The people nearby knew it was there and knew the mountain belonged to it, so they rarely went near the place.

The dragon did not attack people either. Even those who accidentally wandered into its territory usually made it back alive, and for years, both sides simply left each other alone.

Until one day, an old man with white hair walked into the mountain by himself.

He made his way deep into the dragon’s lair, where a pair of enormous eyes slowly opened in the darkness.

The old man raised his head and asked the creature one question.

"Do you want to live longer?"

So that was it...

No wonder Church dared to build something that huge. They had been working together from the beginning.

The dragon created fear, and the doctor turned that fear into faith. One played the disaster that would forever hang over humanity’s head, while the other stood forward in the name of Church and told people that Sacred Energy could protect them.

The two of them kept the act going for centuries.

As the number of believers grew, so did the amount of Sacred Energy they could gather. The doctor used it to continue his research, while the dragon gained a longer life.

The doctor himself began replacing his aging bodies one after another.

At first, he only wanted to live longer so he could learn more and save more people. But four hundred years was a long time—long enough that even he could no longer remember when that thought had turned into nothing more than:

I want to keep living.

And to keep living, he needed new bodies.

That was what the Saints and Saintesses were for.

Whenever Church searched for the next Saint, they carried a container holding a fragment of his soul. Once they encountered someone suitable, the fragment would attach itself to them and establish a connection with their soul in advance.

Every Saint and Saintess chosen over the centuries had been a child.

There was a reason for that.

The process did not simply drive out the original soul and replace it with another. The two souls fused together, with the doctor’s soul remaining the dominant one.

An adult already had a fully developed personality, memories, and habits. Too much of that would remain after the fusion and affect him. A child’s sense of self was still developing, so the influence was much smaller.

But smaller did not mean nonexistent.

Over the centuries, every new body left something behind. Memories, habits, fragments of personality—all of it accumulated inside the same soul.

After four hundred years and countless bodies, even the doctor himself probably could not say how much of the man he had once been was still left.

That also explained the "bell" Lucia had been hearing.

A fragment of the doctor’s soul had already attached itself to her. The closer Lucia came to Church, the stronger its connection to the main soul became, and the more clearly she could feel it calling her back.

There had never been an Awakening. 𝘧𝓇ℯℴ𝓂

It was a takeover.

And now the same thing was happening to Lin Yan.

More memories continued pouring in, including some about the Convergence itself.

When two worlds overlapped, living beings from different worlds would instinctively reject one another. The effect never touched the mind directly, so [Willpower II] had nothing to react to. All it did was take a thought that was already there and keep pushing it forward.

The first time the dragon flew over them, it had already been leaving before it suddenly turned around and came back to attack.

Lin Yan had been the same just now. At first, he only wanted to stop Lucia, but once the chase began, killing her started to feel more and more natural. By the time he realized something was wrong, she had already been cut in half.

That was why he had never noticed anything wrong with his own thoughts while it was happening.

The memories continued, and the doctor knew plenty about the heretics as well.

They had appeared early in his partnership with the dragon, fanatically worshipping it and treating every Saint and Saintess as something that had to be killed. Church tried capturing them and tried talking to them; eventually, even the dragon itself told them to stop.

It made no difference.

They were no longer worshipping the dragon itself, but the version of it that existed inside their own heads. Even if the dragon personally ordered them to stop, they could twist those words into some other meaning and continue hunting Saints and Saintesses anyway.

The Double Moon Brothers were among them.

Back then, plenty of other heretics had stormed Church alongside them. A great many knights died in that battle, but they really did fight their way all the way to the doctor and successfully killed the body he was using at the time.

It did not matter. He simply changed bodies again.

By this point, the identity of the Anchor was also clear.

The System had said before that an Anchor was the native life-form within a Convergence zone carrying the greatest amount of world-origin. As Lin Yan understood it, world-origin was basically a measure of who was more like the protagonist of that world.

That ruled out the dragon.

Sacred Energy had been discovered by the doctor. Church had been built because of him. Every Saint and Saintess existed because of him, and even the dragon had only become humanity’s enemy for centuries because of what he had done.

He was the Anchor.