Amazing Village Building

“Millia, what did you talk about with that official?”

“Oh, fufu, it’s nothing, Luke-sama.”

After our audience with the Divine Emperor, Millia for some reason stayed behind instead of returning with us right away to the waiting room. The person herself was playing dumb, but I had a bad feeling about this.

In any case, now that we were done with our audience and have left the palace, it was decided that we would be touring the city, using Gai-san’s family home as our base point.

However, while we were touring around, there was quite a bunch of people who rushed toward us as soon as they spotted us.

“Thank you for saving my family. Thank you, thank you…”

“Thanks to you all, we no longer have to be scared of that epidemic!”

“You guys must be Buddha in human form!”

They thanked us with teary eyes. It would appear that because of our distribution of a large amount of cure potions, rumors had spread about us.

“If you don’t mind, please give this a read. Here’s one for you too.”

Millia sneakily handed something out to those people.

“Millia, what have you been giving to those people?”

“Oh, it’s nothing, fufufu.”

At any rate, I couldn’t help but notice that there really were a lot of temples in this city.

We were told that monks with shaved heads lived there while following some strict precepts everyday.

In each of the temples, there always was a statue of Buddha. Buddha was more or less their god, but there seemed to be a quite the variety of them, if the different statues enshrined in each temple were any indication. From a stern man holding a weapon in his hand, to those who had multiple arms.

Among the statues, there was one that was over 10 meters in height.

“This Buddha statue was built to pacify a large-scale plague that occurred back then. It is the depiction of the Matreiya bodhisattva would save us from the age of degeneration.”

The former monk Gai-san informed us so.

This large statue was open to the public, so we also gave it a visit. With an appearance that was neither definitively male or female, it had a smile that seemed to suggest that it was deep in thought. The statue was massive, yet it didn’t feel daunting. If anything, it gave off a sense of being welcomed and embraced.

“Is this Buddha supposed to be a man or a woman? It’s really hard to tell.”

“The concept of gender does not apply to the Bodhisattva.”

Gai-san gave that answer to the puzzled Selen.

“It’s magnificent, isn’t it? If we could build a statue this big in Luke-sama’s likeness…no, if we’re building a large statue, we might as well make it ten times bigger than this…”

Millia mumbled something. Whatever she said, I felt like a chill ran down my spine for some reason.

We spent our days touring like that, but on a certain day, a messenger from the Divine Emperor came to Gai-san’s family home. I suspected it concerned their reply from the discussion the other day.

“We would absolutely love a reyl way in our nation.”

From the way the high-ranking officials were reacting back then, I thought it would be harder to convince them, but it apparently was approved already.

“There is one more matter. It is a request of the Divine Emperor…”

A request? What can it be? Some kind of condition to the deal?

“We, the nation of Kyou including the Divine Emperor themselves, hereby request to be added as your villagers.”

“…come again?”

Unable to comprehend what was just said to me, I replied with a cracked voice.

“Huh? Added as my villagers?”

This wasn’t at all part of our conversation back in our audience the other day.

In the first place, they must know about my Gift before they could come up with such a request.

“Ahm, do you understand what that would mean…?”

“But of course. We have read it, after all.”

Read it? Read what?

“Fufufu, isn’t that great news, Luke-sama? We’re going to have more villagers!”

“…say, Millia, did you do something again?”

“Whatever do you mean? More importantly, we must strike while the iron is hot! Let’s add them as villagers and also connect our places through the railways so that they could come and go! *(and then, I can introduce the new villagers to our scripture and make them new believers of Luke-sama! Of course, we should do the same for the people of Edou and Osaku too!)*”

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