The Reversed Hierophant
Chapter 34: The Sinful Saint

The doctors wearing bird-beaked masks and large hoods began to splash vinegar water again. The strong, pungent smell was carried by the wind to this small, barren hillside. Rafael, who had a keen sense of smell, sneezed twice. Ferrante glanced at him and silently changed his position, blocking a little of the wind for him.

“Look, Florence is dying.” Rafael didn’t notice his movements, but just looked at the sprawling and rugged buildings and said softly.

On the specially opened narrow road, carts carrying corpses passed one after another. The corpse bearers hunched over, sending the corpses with their miserable deaths into a unified tomb for burial. However, they might also fall to the ground on the journey, becoming a part of the cargo on the cart.

Some carts were parked outside houses, while the corpse bearers were nowhere to be found. The priests no longer entered to check, but knocked on the door. If there was no response, they would seal the door and wait for manpower to be available before dealing with it again.

“Has God abandoned Florence?” No matter how many times he saw it, even the most hard-hearted person cannot remain indifferent when facing the death of his own kind. Ferrante was only a sixteen-year-old boy, and he had never seen such a living hell. The Holy See had an atlas obtained from an island country in the East, which recorded the people of that country’s imagination of hell: twisted and terrifying demons dancing on corpses, with flames and sulfur burning in the stone mountains. When Ferrante looked at the scene in front of him, the chill of facing hell rolled down his spine again.

Rafael curled his lips in mockery: “God has never abandoned Florence. This is the evil deeds of greedy people.”

Ferrante turned abruptly.

As just a member of the papal guard, he was not qualified to know the true secret of the plague in Florence. Until now, he still thought that this plague was an accident, just like any other tragic story of coincidence, death and disease always fairly favored every person and every piece of land.

So when Ferrante saw the desolate and miserable lower city, his only feeling was sadness. He was born here, and although this place was despised and hated by everyone, even the residents here hated it, but when this land really died, the children who were fed by its smelly and shriveled milk would also be sad about it.

Perhaps he thought of the rotten roof that once covered his head, or perhaps he thought of the merchant who had cursed him but also gave him half a loaf of bread. They were all dying in this plague.

But such death can be given by fate and sentenced by God, but it should never be imposed by humans.

Ferrante’s blood ran cold. Then he was filled with excruciating rage, the likes of which he had never experienced in his life. If the culprits were standing in front of him at this moment, he would not hesitate to pierce their bodies with his sword and throw them into the crowd of the sick, letting them also experience the feeling of their bodies covered with sores and carbuncles, spitting foul-smelling black blood and struggling on the ground.

After this anger subsided, another strange and terrifying feeling surged up, like the cold hair of a banshee, wrapping around his heart.

For the first time, he faced the ultimate malice of humanity and the indifferent contempt for committing such evil acts.

He couldn’t tell which he couldn’t tolerate more; the evil done or the attitude of taking so many lives so lightly. The strange and indescribable feeling he had a year ago when he learned that Francois had not been punished reappeared, only this time it was more intense.

He was angry, but he couldn’t say why he was angry; he was sad, but he didn’t know why he was sad; he was even afraid, but he didn’t know why he was afraid.

Ferrante looked at Rafael in despair. The slum boy who crawled out of the Holy Grail Church had faintly touched a more sinister rule. Unlike in the past when he obtained information through language and used cunning means to seek benefits, this was a much larger gamble. At the gambling table were the well-dressed big shots, and life, power, and wealth were the eternal stakes here. At the door of this gamble, he was seeking help from a reliable person.

This was something Rafael was all too familiar with.

Everything related to faith ultimately came down to the control of people’s thought. Combined with his previous life, Rafael had been the Pope for six years, and with the education he received from Julius, he knew very well how to destroy a person, reconstruct a person, and even create a person.

Just like taming one’s own prey; you have to forcefully destroy all his reliance, cognition, and beliefs, stir up all his thoughts like a storm, uproot everything in his mind with a mixture of truth and falsehood, cleansing it thoroughly, and then he could easily and happily rebuild his own things on it.

From the moment they went out, Rafael had been doing this.

Telling him his own origin – to destroy Ferrante’s trust in the church.

Telling him the origin of the plague in the lower city – to destroy Ferrante’s trust in people.

His relationship with Lia became the only rope that Ferrante could grasp in the void. The kinship connected by the shadow of his mother was ethereal and fragile, but it was Ferrante’s lifeline at the moment.

Then he shattered his lofty fantasy about saints, and all the spiritual pillars he could rely on collapsed. In the dust of the fragments, only Rafael could become his beacon.

How cruel. How callous.

Oh God, please spit on me, please punish me, Rafael murmured in his heart, I am acting for my own selfish interests, my sin is unforgivable.

“Reality is ugly and dirty, and the nature of man is to pursue profit,” Rafael said slowly, “The twelve lords of the Papal States want to return to their own territories. They want to break away from the rule of the Papal Palace and become completely independent, but I won’t allow it, so they tried to resist me in this way. As long as the plague sweeps across all of Florence, I will have to leave here and then step into their territory, becoming a dead soul under their knife.”

“You see, although these things have nothing to do with the residents of the lower city, they are the biggest victims in our struggle. Because they are helpless and no one loves or protects them, so they became lambs to be burned by the flames.”

Ferrante listened intently, his blue eyes like the sparkling sea under the moonlight. He asked softly, “If you don’t have power, you can’t protect yourself? But power is limited, is it destined that some people will be innocently hurt?”

He looked at the patients who were wailing miserably, and thought of his mother who had died early. Wasn’t she the one who struggled at the bottom of the mud without being able to obtain power? A poor and beautiful woman, he hadn’t even grown up enough to understand her life when she died of illness. Where was she born? Who were her parents? How did she end up in a rose garden? And how did she become the mistress of a clerk?

He knew nothing. Lia’s life was buried so lightly in a pile of dirt.

She had no ability to protect herself, so could she only accept such a fate?

“So someone needs to protect them. When God created the world, he made men and women come into being and unite, causing humans to multiply from generation to generation. Disordered humans created conflicts, wars caused people to die constantly, the earth was full of sin and evil, and demons walked the earth preaching. God’s believers prayed for salvation in the cold land, so the holy envoy Saint Leah was born, and he was ordered to go among the people, preach his morality, bear the suffering of mankind, cleanse people’s souls, and become a beacon for people. All people in the world should look at his thorny staff and move forward towards the throne of God to obtain eternal peace.”

Rafael said in a soothing tone. The story he told was a children’s enlightenment story, something everyone was familiar with, but when he told it, it still had a magic that made people involuntarily listen attentively.

“But the light of St. Leah stung the demons’ eyes. They found that they could no longer gain new believers, so they gathered together to kill St. Leah. God heard the demons’ secret conversation in heaven, so he sent the archangel to protect St. Leah with a sword in hand, and keep him safe from all harm from the demons.”

“The demons could not harm St. Leah, so they came up with another plan. They incited the people protected by St. Leah, causing the evil among them to oppose the saint. The ignorant people then exiled St. Leah and drove God’s firstborn son to the barren plain.”

Rafael suddenly stopped talking and turned his eyes to smile at Ferrante: “You should be familiar with this story too. What do you think?”

Ferrante was silent for a moment: “…They were deceived.”

“You’re right, there will always be ignorant people in a large crowd. They are confused by the money, power, and status that the devil gives, and when such people gain power, a tragic situation like the lower city will arise.” Rafael clasped his hands together, his cold palms rubbing gently, drawing a little insignificant warmth.

“So God gave Saint Leah the power to oversee the ignorant lambs. Since many years ago, under the papal throne stood the Secretary-General who preached the doctrine for the Pope and managed the Holy See. He was the Pope’s pastoral staff, and he issued orders on behalf of the Pope. The Knights Templar spread the Pope’s flag and orders to all parts of the continent, causing all believers to make pilgrimages to Florence and defend the supreme majesty of the Papal State with guns and shields. But everyone forgot that believers also needed to be managed.”

Ferrante couldn’t help but hold his breath. He had a premonition that he was about to hear something extraordinary, like the girl who was bewitched to open the box, and the devil inside might immediately jump out and laugh at him ferociously. But he couldn’t control the ambition surging in his veins. He needed this opportunity, even if it would lead to his eternal damnation.

“Behind the Pope stood the dark shadow of the Inquisition¹. They punished the evildoers seduced by the devil, protected the pure believers from being harmed, blessed every innocent and unarmed civilian, allowed the powerful to exercise their power appropriately, let the good return to God’s embrace, and let the evil return to the flames. They were silent, never announcing their arrival, nor publicizing their names. They do not covet fame or fortune, nor do they crave power – until a disaster destroyed the Pope’s crown and sent the Inquisition into the abyss of no return.”

Rafael’s voice was gentle, but the meaning behind his words was like thunder, and a chill ran down Ferrante’s spine.

The Inquisition, this familiar yet unfamiliar name, was a name that had long been sealed in the books of the Papal Palace and could no longer be seen again. Hundreds of years ago, when the Knights Templar declined, the Inquisition, as the Pope’s wing, had once tried to restore the glory of the Papal States. They launched a glorious movement that swept across the entire continent, identifying the beliefs of believers, sending heretics to the stake, and rejecting any unofficial interpretations of doctrinal scriptures.

This overly radical, bloody, and violent movement aroused the dissatisfaction of the entire continent. Calais was the first to raise the flag against the Inquisition, and many countries followed suit. Finally, the army marched to Florence, the Pope stepped down from the throne, took off his crown, admitted his dereliction of duty, the priests of the Inquisition were arrested and tried, and the Pope promised to disband the Inquisition and never rebuild this institution.

This was the shame of Florence, marking the moment when the Pope was completely pulled down from the divine throne by earthly royal power.

But Rafael needed such a knife, silent, sharp, obeying only his orders, able to penetrate every corner… a killing weapon.

Unlike the Knights Templar, it didn’t need any bright and glorious code of conduct, nor does it need to abide by the doctrines of righteousness, kindness, and purity.

Rafael wanted it to use any means necessary, to be shameless and vicious, to be a dog that crawled at his feet, and to bow its head obediently in his hands.

“I’ll tell you where the saint is,” Rafael leaned closer to Ferrante. He paused, a fierce flame burning in his eyes. This flame seemed to have burned from the underworld, to burn through the chaotic world, and to blasphemously rush to the throne of God. He had never so clearly known how terrible the words he was about to say were, but he was rational and calm. His soul seemed to float out of his body, and he found a secret pleasure in that trembling fear. “…The saint is everywhere.”

Ferrante felt as if he was struck by lightning. He had never heard such blasphemous words, but the person who said them was the Pope who held the power of faith. The golden-haired Pope smiled subtly, and his lavender eyes flashed with a strange and crazy light: “There are countless saints in the scriptures of the Holy See. Each one was canonized² by the Pope, and the standards for sanctification were also formulated by the Pope. If you write me a document, I can even canonize your mother as a saint right now – Saint Lia. How does that sound?”

Rafael trembled involuntarily all over. He used up all his strength to say the following words, but he had to say them, he had to say them. He wanted someone who was completely loyal to him – even God could not be above him!

“God will not answer you, nor will he reach out to you. I can forgive all sins, redeem all who want to live, balance all good and evil, and send everyone to where they should be. And you shall be my scale and my dagger – Ferrante, give me your faith.”

The most terrifying words came out of his mouth. At this moment, Rafael was ready to be punished by God and die.

“Do not be afraid.” The young Pope reached out and held Ferrante’s face. The young man, who had suffered a huge shock, had a stiff expression. He was forced to listen to the Pope’s words. These words poured into his brain, forcefully occupying all his thoughts.

What is wrong?

What is right?

His faith had been shattered by the highest incarnation of this event, and he could no longer even pray to God for an answer.

“If you don’t know what to do, give yourself to me, and let me tell you what to do,” Rafael’s tone was unbelievably gentle. He murmured in Ferrante’s ear like a baby. “No need to think, no need to suffer. All sins belong to me, I practice fairness and justice, and you just need to follow me to get an ideal country.”

Is there really anyone in this world who could refuse this invitation?

Ferrante heard his soul let out a comfortable sigh. He squeezed a strange and familiar sound from his throat. This sound seemed to be his body eagerly responding, responding to the call of fate.

“Yes, I will believe in you and be loyal to you.”

“Holy Father.”

His answer was like the hammer of divine punishment falling heavily, declaring that unforgivable sins were about to befall him. Rafael silently revealed a sad and desperate smile.

Author’s Note

Diary of Sistine I: The puppy is very cute and obedient, I like it very much.

Translator’s Note

Folks, while reading about someone like Rafael is quite cool, if you ever meet someone like him, run. They’re most likely from a cult.

1 The Inquisition – a judicial procedure and a group of institutions within the Catholic Church whose aim was to combat heresy, apostasy, blasphemy, witchcraft, and customs considered deviant. Violence, torture, or the simple threat of its application, were used by the Inquisition to extract confessions and denunciations from heretics. One of the most famous being the Spanish Inquisition.

With the exception of the Papal States, the institution of the Inquisition was abolished in the early 19th century, after the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and the Spanish American wars of independence in the Americas. In the Roman Curia of the Vatican, the institution survived and is currently called the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.

2 Canonization – the declaration of a deceased person as an officially recognized saint.Popes began making such decrees in the tenth century. Up to that point, the local bishops governed the veneration of holy men and women within their own dioceses; and there may have been, for any particular saint, no formal decree at all.