Technically, it would be possible to take someone that the priest cared about more than himself and compel obedience that way, but Capua had no leads on such a person. Even if they did, making such moves would be the most foolish thing they could do.
“Of course. I remember none of it. I simply intend to answer any questions with ‘all that I am certain of is that I am currently alive,’” the priest said with his calm smile.
Aura looked somewhat doubtfully back at him. “I see. I had assumed you would call it the dragons’ guidance or similar.”
The mystique around resurrection had remained the same throughout the generations. Aura had assumed that if the priest had yet to break, he would use it as a convenient claim. If his claim was true, then he would also be saying he had no intention of actively using the events.
The priest’s smile took on a rueful tinge as he answered. “The dragons’ guidance is nothing so direct or biased. It is much wider ranging, impartial, and useless,” he said directly.
Of course, the meaning only reached Aura’s ears through the mercenary’s translation, so the words actually carried more weight when they reached her. The veteran’s face was twisted as he spoke, a clear question of whether he should actually say such a thing all but written on his face.
In other words, what the priest was saying was not a normal view within the faith. With some relief, Aura straightened and continued the conversation.
“You surprise me. I had heard that you were a devout follower of the faith in accordance with your rank.”
“I do indeed personally follow the dragon faith,” he answered. “However, I am also a researcher of dragons and have a position to explain my teachings. Oh, I was excommunicated from the church before my capture, so my position as priest is self-proclaimed now. I will always preach, though, that the dragon faith is nothing more than an emotional aid and a guideline for life. Breaking the faith’s creed will not cause a direct smiting from the heavens, and keeping the faith will not allow one to directly petition the dragons for supernatural aid. The faith is its teachings, and those teachings will lead you to salvation.”
“I see. You seem to be a highly intelligent man,” Aura said, her almost reddish-brown eyes closing slightly in a smile.
At the same time, she was internally certain of something. No matter what, she had to send him back to the Northern Continent. Even their brief conversation had been enough to make her sure that he was a man with intelligence, logic, adaptability in service of his goal, and a fixation on that goal that would allow him to surrender even his life for it. As a politician, he was the kind of person she wanted nowhere near her country, and that was precisely why she wanted her theoretical enemies to have to deal with him.
The priest had no way of knowing her thoughts as he answered. “My thanks. Regardless, coincidence or not, I cannot countenance not taking this opportunity to redo things. To avoid inconveniencing you, Your Majesty, I would like to ensure that my assumptions of the current situation are accurate,” he said, indicating he wished for there to be more information shared between the two of them.
“Hm, I would be willing to hear you out, but what do you mean by it inconveniencing me?”
The priest immediately answered. “To be specific, I wish to establish what happened while I was absent. If we are not in agreement about how to treat that period, it could disadvantage you in the future.”
“That would indeed be a problem,” Aura agreed. “Without an established timeline, ensuring our responses match will be rather difficult.”
She had not reverted him to “the the day before his execution,” but instead to the last day the mercenary had confirmed he was alive. This was to add a safety margin to account for the fact that criminals could die in prison before their official execution date without an immediate announcement of their passing. It was avoiding the possibility of rewinding time on the bones and changing them from “long since charred and blackened bones” to “only just charred and blackened bones.” If that had happened, they would have already used the magic tool, so there would have been no second chances.
Of course, although they hadn’t revealed it to Yan, her hopes were always for a resurrection, so she had added even more of a safety margin to avoid him being alive yet beyond help from his experiences while incarcerated. As a result, the priest had come back to life as she had planned, but there was a decent amount of time that he had no memory of. If they wanted to hide that his resurrection was a result of reversing time, they needed an established story to cover that period.
“First let us ascertain how things currently are. As far as you are aware, your memories are from fifty-three days ago? You have no memories after that, but prior memories remain clear, correct?”
The priest nodded shallowly. “Indeed, while I believe Commander Yan’s word, it honestly doesn’t feel real. Truthfully, I cannot believe the year’s end has already passed.”
The reason the priest hadn’t felt how much time had passed was that being imprisoned underground made it hard to accurately count the days. Maintaining an accurate sense of time when confined in a space without sunlight was difficult. While he had been provided with food and water once a day and could keep track of the days by counting how many times that happened, there was no way of recording it. Memory alone was unreliable. Human memory was far less accurate than people thought it was. Even so, the priest was still certain that it hadn’t been over two months since he was incarcerated.
“Is that just a problem of intuition? Does your body feel the same? Does anything seem amiss physically? Do you feel either weaker or stronger than you believe you should?” the queen asked.
“Pardon me for a moment,” he replied, then stood and rolled his neck, stretching and moving around several times.
Once he was done, he sat back down on the bed.
“No. For better or worse, I feel as I should. See this injury on my right hand... It was something I did accidentally soon after my imprisonment, but it has healed significantly, no? And yet it still remains. The cell was pitch-black so this is the first time I have personally seen it, but it feels as I remember it,” he said, lifting his hand to show its back.
While the priest’s face remained composed, his translator’s twisted in pain, his single gray eye narrowing. The mark on the older man’s right hand was, to be more specific, an injury at the base of his middle finger. Anyone who looked at it could see how it had happened at a glance. It was the kind of injury you got from punching something hard. He had probably punched at the walls of the cell—the holy man who was currently sitting with a placid smile. How emotional must he have been?
At the very least, it was not something she should touch on directly, Aura decided. She ignored its origin and spoke simply on its current state. “Intriguing. Even recovering wounds have returned to the state they were. While I am deeply interested in the results of my spell, let us set them aside. In other words, you lack the memory of the last fifty-three days and wish for an agreement on what to tell people who are aware of what happened during that time, correct?”
“Exactly,” he answered, lips lifting into a soft smile. While many of the priest’s expressions could be summed up as “smiles,” there was a shocking range in the emotions they demonstrated.
He had been rewound to his state of fifty-three days prior, but the church had announced his execution forty-six days ago. In other words, there were seven days he had no memory of. Although he may have been confined below ground, it was all but impossible that he had made absolutely no contact with others over those seven days. At the very least, he’d have interacted with someone as he was being taken for execution. There would have been some form of conversation between them, and if the priest didn’t remember it, the church could declare the reincarnated man a fraud.