As soon as I crossed over, I faced the danger of ascending to heaven again. But this time, it will be due to starvation. I wandered around like a zombie and looked for food for days. The body that I possessed was still young, so I barely had any strength.
I walked past strangers for days while my physical condition deteriorated. Soon, I fell down in front of the entrance to an alley after searching for food for over four days. It seemed like this alley would be my graveyard.
I didn’t know the original name of the person whom I possessed, but that child probably had died before I possessed her body. While I started to lose consciousness, I prayed for the child and me, hoping that we would both reach heaven even though life had not been kind to us.
Then as if my prayer had been heard, the priest of a nearby temple found me dying in the alley and took me back to his temple. The priest prayed beside my sick body for several days. He even personally fed me porridge.
Due to his efforts, I managed to survive. The priest told me that I could stay in the temple if I had nowhere else to go. Even though I was an atheist, I immediately replied, “I believe in God.” I said this because I decided to stay in the temple.
As a result, I spent the next 13 years of my life in the temple. When I first told the priest that I believed in God, I merely said that so I could stay in the temple, so that I could survive. But after I stayed here for a while, I realized that God really existed. I didn’t say that because I’m a devout believer, but because there really was a “God”. I said that because some of the more capable priests in the temple could use divine power to heal people.
The temple I entered was called “Elnure”. It was a very small temple, so there were fewer devout believers and as such, fewer priests that had the ability to heal. Even though I had seen the priests here heal people with their divine powers, it was a rare sight. Beside healing the injured, Elnure was involved in many welfare activities, such as taking in orphans, raising them, and providing them with free education. These activities were all funded by the aid we receive from the Empire.
I lived a peaceful life. Although it was lacking in many ways, I did not go hungry and I was well-educated thanks to the temple. The language here was relatively difficult, so I had a hard time learning it. Even so, I was still very close to the orphans, this was especially true when it came to Lili, my childhood friend. I met Lilli when I first joined the temple and we have been roommates for over 10 years now.
I lived like this until the adult ceremony in the winter when I turned 17 years old. The priest who brought me to the temple asked me how I wanted to live my future life. He said that I could either choose to leave the temple to pursue my own career or stay in the temple and become a priest.
The empire I lived in was in a peaceful and prosperous era. People believed that it was more profitable to go out and start their own business than receiving a small salary from the temple. Because of this, with the exception of Avenell, the rest of the temples in the empire were unstable.
Under such circumstances, I naturally promised to remain in the temple. I didn’t want to live a difficult life outside, nor did I have the will to become rich through hard work. I just wanted to live a good life here. Besides, I wanted to help Priest Dimotheo, the man who took me in when I was dying.
So, he held a baptism ceremony for me to officially become a priest. In the process, I realized that my decision to stay at the temple was very wrong.
My divine power was very strong. It was even stronger than the strongest priest in Elnure and I was on par with the priests at Avenell. As soon as I put my hand on the crystal ball that was used to measure divine power, the light from the crystal ball lit up the entire room, almost blinding everyone. I was thinking in my heart…
Oh, I’m doomed.