Chapter 34 Jadeite Gem (5)
◎The Sinful Saint◎
The doctors wearing bird-beak masks and big hoods began to splash vinegar water again. The strong and pungent smell was blown to this small barren hillside by the wind. Raphael, who had a keen sense of smell, sneezed twice. Ferrante glanced at him, silently changed his position, and blocked some of the wind for him.
"Look, Florence is dying." Raphael did not notice his movements, but just looked at the sprawling and rugged buildings and said softly.
On the narrow road that was specially opened up, carts carrying corpses were pushed one after another. The carriers were hunched over as they carried the bodies in miserable states to a unified cemetery for burial. However, they might fall to the ground while walking and become one of the people on the carts.
There were some carts parked outside the houses, and the corpse carriers were nowhere to be found. The monks no longer went in to check, but knocked on the door. When there was no response, they would seal the door and wait until more people were available before dealing with it again.
"Have God abandoned Florence?" No matter how many times he has seen 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. He had never seen such a living hell on earth. The Vatican had an atlas obtained from an island country in the East, which recorded the people of that country's imagination of hell, with twisted and terrifying evil spirits dancing with corpses and flames and sulfur burning in the stone mountains. When Ferrante looked at the scene, the chill of facing hell rolled down his spine again.
Raphael curled his lips in sarcasm: "God has never abandoned Florence. This is the evil deed of greedy people."
Ferrante turned around suddenly.
He was just a member of the Pope's Guard and was not qualified to know the real secret of the Florence plague. Until now, he thought that the plague was an accidental accident. Just like all sad stories that happened by chance, death and disease always favor everyone and every land fairly.
So after seeing the desolate and miserable lower town, Ferrante's only feeling was misery. He was born here. 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 insulted him but also gave him half a loaf of bread. They were all dying in the epidemic.
But such death can be given by fate and sentenced by God, but it should not be imposed by humans.
The blood in Ferrante's body froze, and then he was filled with extreme rage, the like 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 people suffering from the plague, so that they would also experience the feeling of struggling on the ground with sores and carbuncles all over their bodies, spitting out smelly black blood.
After the anger subsided, another strange and terrifying feeling surged up, like a banshee's cold long hair, entangled in his heart.
For the first time he was confronted with the ultimate malice of man and the nonchalant contempt with which he committed such evil.
He couldn't tell whether he could not tolerate such evil more, or the mentality of taking so many lives so lightly. The strange and indescribable feeling he had a year ago after learning that François had not been punished appeared again, but this time it was more intense.
He was angry, but he couldn't tell 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 Raphael in despair. The slum boy who crawled out of the Holy Grail Church vaguely felt a more sinister rule. Unlike in the past when he obtained information through language and used cunning means to gain benefits, this was a larger gamble. Standing in the gamble were well-dressed big men. Life, power, and wealth were the eternal chips here. At the door of this gamble, he was seeking the help of a reliable person.
This was something Raphael was all too familiar with.
Everything related to faith ultimately comes down to the control of thoughts. In his previous life and this life, Raphael has been Pope for six years. Add to that the years he received education from Julius, and he knows well how to destroy a person, reconstruct a person, and even create a person.
Just like taming your own prey, you have to forcefully destroy all his reliance, cognition, and beliefs, stir up all his thoughts like a storm, use language that is a mixture of truth and falsehood to uproot everything in his mind, cleanse it thoroughly, and then you can easily and happily rebuild your own things on it.
Raphael has been doing this since he left the house.
Tell him his origins—to destroy Ferrante's trust in the Vatican.
Tell him the origins of the blight in the lower city—to destroy Ferrante’s trust in people.
The relationship between himself and Leah became the only rope that Ferrante could grasp in the void. The kinship linked by the shadow of his mother was ethereal and fragile, but it was Ferrante's lifeline at the moment.
Then his lofty fantasy of being a saint was broken, and all the spiritual pillars he could rely on collapsed, leaving only
Raphael could be his guiding light.
How cruel and callous.
God, please spit on me, please punish me, Raphael murmured in his heart, I have committed unforgivable crimes for my own selfish interests.
"Everything you see is ugly and dirty. The nature of human beings is to pursue interests," Raphael said slowly. "The twelve lords of the Papal States want to return to their own territories and want to be completely independent from the rule of the Papal Palace, but I won't allow it, so they try to use this method to resist me. As long as the plague sweeps across Florence, I will have to leave here, and then step into their territory and become a dead soul under their knife."
"You see, although these things have nothing to do with the residents of the Lower Town, they are the biggest victims in our fight because they have no one to rely on and no one loves or protects them, so they have become lambs burned by the flames."
Ferrante listened intently, his blue eyes like the sparkling sea under the moonlight at night. He asked softly: "Without power, can't you protect yourself? But power is limited. Is it destined that some people will be harmed innocently?"
As he looked at the patients wailing miserably, he thought of his mother who had died early. Wasn't she the one who was struggling at the bottom of the mud and unable to gain power? A poor and beautiful woman. She died of illness before he even grew up enough to know her life story. Where was she born? Who are the parents? Why did I end up in the rose room? How did she become the secretary's mistress?
He knew nothing, and Leah's life was buried lightly in the pile of earth.
Since she has no ability to protect herself, can she just accept this fate?
"So they need someone to protect them. When God created the world, he made men and women come into being and unite, allowing people to multiply from generation to generation. Disordered human beings gave rise to conflicts, wars caused people to die constantly, the earth was full of sin and evil, the devil walked the world preaching, and God's believers prayed for salvation in the cold land, so God gave birth to Saint Leah and ordered her to go among the people, preach her own morality, bear the suffering of mankind, purify people's souls, and become a signpost for mankind. All people in the world must look at his thorny staff and move forward towards the throne of God to obtain eternal peace." Raphael said in a soothing tone. The story he told was an enlightenment story for children, something that everyone was familiar with, but when he told it, it still carried a magical power that made people listen carefully.
"But the light of Saint Leah hurt the eyes of the demons. They found that they could no longer gain new believers, so they gathered together to kill Saint Leah. God heard the secret conversation of the demons in heaven, so he sent the archangel to protect Saint Leah with a sword in hand, so that he would be protected from all harm from the demons."
"The demons could not harm Saint Leah, so they came up with another plan. They instigated the people who were protected by Saint Leah and made the evil ones among them oppose the saint. The ignorant people then exiled Saint Leah and drove the firstborn son of God to the barren plain."
Raphael suddenly stopped talking, turned his eyes and smiled at Ferrante: "You should be familiar with this story, what do you think?"
Ferrante was silent for a moment: "...They were deceived."
"You are right. There will always be ignorant people in the huge crowd. They are confused by the money, power and status given by the devil. When such people gain power, tragic situations like the one in the downtown area will appear." Raphael clasped his hands together and rubbed them gently with his cold palms, absorbing that insignificant bit of warmth.
"So God gave Saint Leah the power to supervise the ignorant lambs. Many years ago, under the Pope's throne stood the Secretary General who preached morality for the Pope and managed the Vatican. He was the Pope's pastoral staff and issued orders on behalf of the Pope. The Knights Templar spread the Pope's flags and orders to all parts of the continent, asking all believers to make a pilgrimage to Florence and defend the supreme majesty of the Papal States with guns and shields. But everyone forgot that believers also need to be managed."
Ferrante couldn't help holding his breath. He had a premonition that he was about to hear something extraordinary, like the bewitched girl opening the box, and the devil inside might be about to jump out and laugh at him hideously. But he couldn't control the ambition surging in his veins. He needed this opportunity, even if it would lead to his irretrievable destruction.
"Behind the Pope stands the dark shadow of the Inquisition. They punish the evildoers seduced by the devil, protect the pure believers from being harmed, bless every innocent and defenseless civilian, let the powerful exercise their power properly, let the good return to the arms of God, let the evil return to the flames. They are silent and never announce their arrival, nor do they publicize their names. They do not covet fame and wealth, nor do they crave power - until a disaster destroyed the Pope's crown and sent the Inquisition into an abyss of no return."
Raphael'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, is a name that has long been sealed in the books of the Papal Palace and will never be seen again. Hundreds of years ago, when the Knights Templar declined, the Inquisition, as the wing of the Pope, once tried to restore the glory of the Papal States. They launched a glorious movement that swept across the continent, identified the beliefs of believers, sent heretics to the stake, and rejected all unofficial interpretations of doctrinal texts.
That overly radical, bloody and violent movement aroused dissatisfaction throughout the continent. Calais took the lead in raising the banner 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 monks of the Inquisition were arrested and tried, and the Pope promised to dissolve the Inquisition and never rebuild the institution again.
This was a shame for Florence, marking that the Pope was completely pulled down from the throne by royal power.
But Raphael needs such a knife, silent, sharp, obeying only his orders, penetrating every hole... a killing weapon.
Unlike the Knights Templar, it does not require any bright and glorious code of conduct, nor does it need to abide by the doctrines of integrity, kindness, and purity.
Raphael wanted it to use any means necessary, to be shameless and vicious, to be a dog crawling under his seat, and to bow its head obediently in his hands.
"I'll tell you where the saint is," Raphael approached Ferrante. He paused, a fierce flame burning in his eyes. This flame seemed to be burning from the underworld, burning through the chaotic world and rushing to the throne of God in a rebellious way. He had never known so clearly what terrible words he was about to say, but he was rational and calm. His soul seemed to float up from his body, and he got 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 horrible words, but the person who said these words was the Pope who held the authority of faith. The blond Pope had a subtle smile on his face, 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 canonized by the Pope, and the standards for sanctification were also formulated by the Pope. If you write me a letter, I can canonize your mother as a saint right now - Saint Lea. How does that sound?"
Raphael's whole body trembled unconsciously. He used up all his strength to say the following words, but he had to say it, he had to say it. He wanted someone who was completely loyal to him - even God could not be above him!
"God will not respond to you, nor will he reach out to you. I can forgive all sins, redeem all those who want to live, balance all good and evil, and make everyone go where he should go. And you will be my balance and my hidden sword - Ferrante, give me your faith."
The most terrifying words came out of his mouth. At this moment, Raphael 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 and forcefully occupied all his thoughts.
What is wrong?
What is right?
His faith was shattered by the supreme 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,” Raphael’s tone was incredibly soft. He whispered 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 only need to follow me to achieve an ideal country.”
Is there really anyone in this world who could refuse this invitation?
Ferrante heard his soul sighing comfortably, and he squeezed out a strange yet familiar sound from his throat. It seemed as if his body was responding impatiently to the call from fate.
"Okay, I believe in you and will be loyal to you."
"Holy Father."
His answer was like the gavel of divine punishment, which fell heavily, declaring that unforgivable sins were about to befall him. Raphael silently revealed a sad and desperate smile.
The author has something to say:
Diary of Sistine I: The puppy is very cute and obedient, I like it very much.
Fat Pigeon Diary: I saw a lot of perverts saying they wanted to crawl into my brain, huh! [Sneer] I'm not afraid at all! Because there is nothing inside! [Shakes his empty mind][Shows an evil smile]
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