It felt like her heart was being peeled open.

Although the heart beating in her chest right now didn’t actually have a shell to peel away, Kristina couldn’t help but feel that way. Her very core, which she had never wanted to show anyone, and the surface of her emotions, which even she couldn’t clearly grasp, felt like they were being rifled through by Eugene.

As such, she couldn’t stop her control over her expressions from faltering. It was extremely brief, but that momentary loss of control felt like it had lasted for a lot longer to Kristina.

‘What kind of expression did I just show?’ Kristina asked herself.

She wasn’t sure. It didn’t feel… like she had been smiling. Kristina unconsciously raised her hands to caress her cheeks. She touched the smile that she had always kept on her face and had started to take for granted.

‘It was different from my current expression, but I’m not sure what it was,’ Kristina continued to ruminate.

The Pope was elected from a selection of priests who held the strongest faiths in all of this expansive Holy Empire.

After the previous Pope received his final rites and before his soul rose to Heaven, the Pope’s soul would appear in the dreams of all the Church’s bishops. In this way, the pope would look into the souls of all the bishops, examining their faith, and then he would select his potential successors by engraving a stigmata onto the bodies of those bishops who possessed sufficient faith.

The bishops who were marked by this stigmata would enter ‘the Audience Chamber,’ deep within the Vatican, and one among them would be chosen by the Light. The chosen bishop would then become the Pope, while the bishops who were not chosen would become his cardinals.

The current Pope of Yuras, Aeuryus, was also chosen by the Light within that Audience Chamber thirty years ago. The Pope selected through this process was considered in Yuras to be the Emissary of the Light.

Saints were different from the Popes and the Cardinals. While the latter two were chosen from among the bishops for their piety, the Saintess was bestowed by the Light. In this generation, Kristina may have been the only candidate for Sainthood, but in the previous generations, there were usually three or four candidates for the next Saint.

‘The Blessing of the Light,’ the process by which Saint candidates were selected, required certain conditions. They had to be a girl raised in a monastery, someone who had been orphaned or abandoned. Among those girls who fit this background, some would suddenly start to radiate light, and even as children, they would be able to perform miracles that were incredibly powerful.

If ‘the Blessing of the Light’ that was bestowed upon each of these girls gradually diminished as a candidate...