"What’s wrong?"

The priest shook his head and turned with his hands still clasped together.

"The wound is lethal," the priest whispered. He looked troubled, his pale grey eyes moving back to the injury. "To heal something this deep... it would usually take a group of priests working together to share the strain. The toll on one person is too much."

Alaric scowled, his arms folding over his chest. "We only have you. So you have to make it work."

The priest frowned and let out a long sigh. He looked like he wanted to argue, but he knew he didn’t have a choice.

"I will need time then. Twenty-four hours at the very least to mend the bones and the nerves."

He felt that was reasonable. But the Duke thought otherwise.

"We don’t have twenty-four hours," Alaric said, his voice hard, leaving no room for debate. "Make it twelve. He needs to be healed before noon."

The priest snapped his head around, staring at the Duke in shock.

"That’s impossible! You can’t compress a blessing like that into twelve hours," he defended, but the Duke was not having it.

He stepped right into the priest’s space, towering over him with an imposing and forceful presence.

"You’re a priest, are you not? You make miracles happen. So make the impossible happen and heal Julian before noon."

The priest bit his lip. He found the Duke arrogant, unreasonable, and overbearing. He didn’t want to help a man who gave orders like a tyrant and expected the gods to follow them. He prepared himself to say no, leaving his fate to whatever was to come, but as he looked into Alaric’s blue eyes, he stopped.

The arrogance was there, but behind it, the priest saw a deep, raw guilt, accompanied by fear of the unknown.

It was the look of a man who felt he owed a debt he could never repay, a man who feared he would fail at the one thing he had to do.

The priest realized the Duke wasn’t being bossy for his own sake—he was desperate.

The priest turned back to look at the man on the bed, stared into his mismatched eyes with his grey ones, and came to a realization. The reason the Duke was being so desperate, going so far as to bring in a priest without the Empire knowing, was all for this man.

Knowing this, he felt a little bit of remorse. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝚠𝕖𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝕖𝚕.𝚌𝗼𝗺

The priest’s expression softened. He cleared his throat and looked at the floor.

"I will do my best," he muttered. "I can’t leave here without your permission anyway, and if the Emperor finds me, I’ll be thrown into the dungeon for interrogation."

"Then get to it," Alaric said. "Heal him."

"Yes, I will," the priest said. He reached down and started pulling off his brown gloves, exposing his pale hands.

Julian watched him, his heart racing. He wondered if this was finally the moment. Was he going to be free from the pain? Was he finally going to walk again like a normal person?

"Know that I am no magician," the priest suddenly said, looking directly at Julian. "The blessing of our god doesn’t just fix things out of nowhere. What you need is faith. Have faith, and all will be made whole."

Faith... Julian thought.

He looked at the Duke, then at Lucius sleeping soundly by his side despite the noise and the tension.

Faith was the only thing that had kept him going since he arrived in this world—the faith that he would survive and change his story even as he walked blindly on a road of thorns.

If faith was what the priest needed to do a good job at fixing him, Julian definitely had a lot of it.

"I have it," Julian whispered.

The priest nodded and placed his bare hands just above Julian’s knees.

Julian felt himself tensing, his fingers gripping the sheets as he prepared for a surge of agony and pain during this healing process. He had endured so much pain since the incident that he braced for the ritual to feel like his bones were being reset with a hammer.

But the pain never came.

Instead, a wave of thick, gentle warmth washed over his legs.

A soft, golden light began to glow from the priest’s palms, filling not just Julian but the room with warmth and the scent of spring.

The warmth didn’t stop at Julian’s leg; the sensation climbed up his chest and wrapped around his heart, feeling less like medicine and more like a heavy, sun-warmed blanket. It was so soothing that his shoulders immediately dropped, and the constant, buzzing tension in his mind finally went quiet.

The priest noticed the look of pure shock on Julian’s face and offered a small, knowing smile.

"Our god embraces all with warmth and kindness," he said softly, his silver hair shimmering in the glow. "The stronger your faith, the more comforting the process is."

Julian didn’t have the energy to respond. He simply let out a long, shaky breath and sank deeper into the pillows. The golden light coming from the priest’s hands began to spread, swirling around Julian’s lower body in soft, luminous ribbons. It felt like his nerves were being bathed in honey.

Beside him, Alaric stood like an anchor, a protective shield. He kept his gaze on Julian, his blue eyes watching the process with a mixture of intensity and relief. Seeing Julian’s face lose its pinched, pained expression seemed to calm the Duke as well.

As Julian eased into this warm sensation, the system window flickered to life one more time, glowing with a soft gold hue—not purple this time—that matched the room.

> [NOTIFICATION: HOLY RESTORATION IN PROGRESS]

> Current Status: 32% Integrity —> 35% (Increasing...)

> Estimated Time to Completion: 11 Hours, 58 Minutes.

> Note: Host has entered a ’Deep Recovery’ state. Initiating forced sleep protocol.

Julian felt a sense of profound relief as he stared at the system window hovering over him, but he wasn’t exactly looking at the window. He was watching the golden light dance on the ceiling of the canopy until the forced sleep protocol initiated and caused his eyelids to draw closed.

But before he fell into a deep sleep, Julian made a wish. He wished that the moment he woke up, he would finally be able to move his leg freely again, and the pain that had traumatized him would be nothing but a memory of the past.