[BL] Accidentally Becoming the Healer of the Deranged Archduke novel Chapter 312

Chapter 312: A True ’Fake Saint’

The hall had fallen into the kind of silence that makes even breathing feel like a betrayal.

The priest raised a hand and pointed at the crowd. "You," he said simply.

As if on cue, two guards helped the old man onto the podium. As his feet dragged on the marble, his broken sandals slapped faintly as if protesting with each step.

Soon, they laid him on the altar.

Talia tilted her head and smiled as though greeting an old friend. "Your name?"

"Orren, Your Holiness."

"Sin?"

He hesitated, eyes flitting briefly to the statue in front before he bowed his head.

"I... I helped a fugitive to hide," he rasped. "E-even when knowing that he was the runaway s-slave I still hid him in my h-home."

A whisper ran through the congregation.

Talia said nothing, only continued to smile, like a teacher pleased with a student who finally confessed to cheating on a test.

"H-He was my son, Y-Your Holiness," Orren’s voice cracked in desperation. "I couldn’t l-let them take him back. I-I couldn’t—"

He begged while repeatedly bowing to the statue, but never once dared to lift his eyes toward the ’face’ of the goddess.

A slender blade with a bone-white hilt was given by the equally slender hand.

Orren stared at it before recalling what he had witnessed just now. With trembling fingers, he accepted it.

Mirroring the Saintess’s earlier gesture, he pressed the blade against his palm. His flesh split with a soft gasp, and the blood came.

It slowly dripped to the altar. But unlike Talia, he didn’t heal.

His blood smeared his fingers, dripped down his wrist, and pooled in the creases of his shaking hand. When he turned back, perhaps to ask if this was enough, his eyes caught the goblet.

One look was all it took.

His wrinkled eyes widened in horror as he slapped his bloody hand over his mouth. He gagged, right there, on the altar.

It would’ve been considered utterly disrespectful to vomit on the sacred altar.

But could Xion blame him? The others were in some kind of trance, but he wasn’t. And with the system’s help, he could more or less guess how horrifying it really was.

The thing inside the goblet moved again. It was no longer slurping but twitching, quivering, pressing against the inside of the goblet like it was hungry and expectant.

Orren opened his mouth to speak, maybe to beg forgiveness for his behavior, or maybe to ask what that thing was.

Regardless, Talia didn’t give him the chance.

Her smile never wavered as she snatched the knife back and in the same breath plunged it deep into the old man’s neck.

A sickening gurgle and a heavy gasp tore from his throat.

[H-Host... T-That’s not a statue, that’s not a statue, that’s not a—]

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