Snow brought her hands to her chest and took a deep breath, as if doing warm-up exercises before entering water.

‘It’s okay. It’s going to be okay. She repeated to herself.’

Then she nodded to Elios who was watching her. Elios gave her a clear smile as if to tell her not to worry too much, then opened the door.

“Oh?”

Snow, who had stepped inside, opened her mouth slightly in surprise. The atmosphere of the ward was not as gloomy as she had feared. The large hall-like room resembled a bustling marketplace rather than a hospital.

Beds were densely arranged in three rows, but they were clearly insufficient to accommodate all the patients who flocked in like a flock of birds. There were overwhelmingly more people sitting on makeshift beds created by spreading clothes or blankets on the floor than those properly lying on beds. The dark atmosphere that usually accompanies places with deep wounds or illnesses, like spilled ink, was absent. As for patients… there were occasionally people with light bandages on their fingers or wrists.

“This room is for people with minor injuries or illnesses.”

Snow nodded at Elios’s explanation. The people seemed to have come more to find a warm place to chat without worrying about firewood in the cold winter than for treatment. Some were even sharing steamed potatoes brought from home or peeling fruit with small knives to hand to the doctors beside them.

While Snow looked around the ward, Elios remained vigilant. In such a crowded place, one had to be extra careful. Although he had taken more precautions this time compared to their previous outing, he couldn’t let his guard down.

However, Snow withdrew her gaze soon after scanning the ward briefly. What unfolded before her eyes was certainly a vibrant and lovely scene that she would appreciate. But it wasn’t a new sight. She had already seen this on the day she first ventured outside the temple holding El’s hand.

Snow, lacking in experience and needing to see and feel many things, needed new scenes rather than familiar ones. With a warm expression, Snow quietly exited through the door again.

“El. Show me the next room.”

Snow said. And she saw Elios make a subtle expression that was hard to define.

“Are you done with that room already? Don’t you want to look around more?”

“It’s a warm and cozy scene, but it’s one I’ve seen before when I went out previously. I left the temple today to see other aspects of the world that I haven’t seen before.”

Due to having been raised preciously in the temple all her life, Snow tended to act somewhat childishly. But occasionally, like now, she would calmly pour out unexpected words, and Elios was helpless against this side of her.

Nevertheless, Elios still hesitated. The two rooms that Snow was asking him to introduce were, in order, a room with patients suffering from serious illnesses, and a room with patients who had suffered visibly horrific external injuries.

He thought Snow was fundamentally a delicate person. Although he had boasted that he would guide Snow to the darker parts of the world, standing in front of the door to that “dark place,” he found it impossible to open it for her. He didn’t want Snow to be hurt by seeing such gloomy scenes.

On the way to Oblivion, Elios had felt an inexplicably uncomfortable feeling, like a thorn lodged somewhere. He had judged that after showing her only the pleasant aspects of the city during their previous walk, it was right to let her know about the realities of Oblivion this time, but strangely, something didn’t sit well with him.

Only after facing Snow, who was asking him to open the door to a room crowded with bloodied people with amputated limbs, did he finally understand why he had felt uncomfortable.

Despite her being a saint who had volunteered to save the world herself, he wanted to lie to her that the world contained only beautiful and good things, that everyone lived happily and with smiles. He wished that Snow wouldn’t be hurt at all by seeing the world. That was his true feeling, which even Elios himself hadn’t fully realized.

At some point, Snow grabbed Elios’s arm. Elios flinched as if he had touched something sharp. Snow gently pulled him from the center of the corridor toward the wall. At that moment, someone rushed past Snow and Elios in a hurry. Snow had pulled Elios aside to avoid obstructing that person’s path.

It was a thin man.

He was wearing a single thin garment that seemed woefully inadequate for winter, with wind passing freely through it. The problem was that the small baby in the man’s arms was also dressed in such clothes. Both the man and the baby looked filthy, as if they hadn’t bathed properly for months. As if to prove this, an unpleasant smell wafted from them. Though they only passed by briefly and she couldn’t see clearly, the baby’s body was pale blue. Judging by the fact that such a young baby wasn’t making any crying sounds, it was either already unconscious or in a condition too serious to make a sound.

A doctor hurriedly followed behind the man. The man, with desperate eyes like someone half-submerged in the gates of hell, looked around anxiously before following the doctor’s instructions and entering the second door on the left. They rushed in so quickly that Snow and Elios could feel the wind as they passed by. The place he had entered was a room for patients with serious illnesses.

“Let’s go, El. We need to go there.”

“Snow, that room is—”

“It’s okay.”

As if understanding what El was about to say, Snow spoke in an uncharacteristically firm voice. Elios didn’t know it, but that voice closely resembled the tone she had used when she had vowed to become someone who would bring light to the dark places of the world during her coming-of-age ceremony. No one could tell where such strength came from in the seemingly fragile Snow.

“I am the saint, after all.”

Her silver eyes, which he had expected to tremble, were surprisingly steady and upright. Elios realized that he had been thinking incorrectly. Snow was not weak. The saint who had been afraid to take even a step out of the Santarium for fear of being swept away by her emotions had grown more while Elios wasn’t looking. Things that might be nothing to others were each a huge barrier and adventure for Snow. She was overcoming these walls one by one.

So Elios had no choice but to make way for her.

Snow strode forward and opened the door to the ward herself.

The atmosphere in the ward was completely different from the bustling, vibrant one she had seen in the previous room. It was so contrasting that Snow momentarily wondered if one of the two scenes—what she had just seen and what she was seeing now—might have been an illusion.

If the previous room had been filled with people’s laughter and cheerful conversation, the reality she now faced was filled with the groans of people in pain and the thick, salty scent of tears falling drop by drop.

Before long, Snow was able to spot the man who had been desperately running while holding the baby as if he might crush it. The man looked as if his soul had left his body. The baby was still lying on the bed, pale blue. The doctor changed the baby’s thin clothes for thicker ones and placed a warm but heavy cotton blanket over the fragile body.

That was it.

After wrapping the child like a cocoon in a cotton blanket to prevent further drop in body temperature, the doctor handed the baby back to the father’s arms and tried to move on to another urgent patient.

But the man grabbed the doctor’s clothes and pleaded. Was this all they could do? Was there nothing more they could do for a child whose consciousness was coming and going? The doctor said with a regretful expression:

“There’s nothing more I can do. Already…”

The doctor deliberately didn’t say out loud that the child’s condition was already too serious to be helped. However, the man seemed to understand, as he burst into tears while holding the pale, trembling baby with a dazed expression.

The doctor looked at the despairing man for a moment, as if reluctant to leave, then shook his head slightly and turned away. Unlike the room caring for patients with minor ailments, this place was always short-handed. Patients fighting for every minute and second were still desperately waiting for the doctor’s attention.

For Elios, who had frequently visited Oblivion for inspection purposes, such depressing scenes were not unfamiliar. He couldn’t take his eyes off Snow, who would not be at all immune to this kind of atmosphere.

The baby wasn’t the only one who seemed about to breathe their last. The cool scent of death wafted from all around. Unlike the previous room where family members would place pieces of fruit in the doctor’s hands, here the uninjured people were each holding the hands of dying individuals, wailing.

Snow found it unbearably sad that such heart-wrenching cries and soul-melting groans could be completely blocked by just a thin door.

Snow walked slowly across the beds. Elios quietly followed behind her. The patients fighting disease, the doctors struggling to save as many people as possible, those holding the hands of family members lying in bed and praying—everyone was too busy dealing with their own situations. So no one even glanced at the small girl crossing between the beds. Snow continued to move slowly, undisturbed. She gently swept her gaze over the faces of each person lying in bed.

On Snow’s youthful face, having just turned nineteen, settled an expression like that of a mother looking at her sick child. Her transparent silver eyes, as if touched by the wind, filled with compassion for those precious to her.

Without realizing it, Snow quietly recited a prayer for peace.

‘Mother. Please use me. As an instrument of peace.’

Her words were broken, not flowing smoothly due to the emotions quietly rising within her. The soft, low voice seemed both like Snow’s and not like hers.

As tears seemed to well up in Snow’s eyes, Elios reflexively turned his head toward a small window in one wall.

The star-studded sky was clearly a dark navy blue, but strangely, Elios felt as if he was dazzled by sunlight and slightly closed his eyes. Broken moonlight became shining powder and descended through the window. It followed and illuminated Snow as she walked between the beds. Snow looked as if she had descended from heaven on a beam of light. It was an extraordinary sight.

Elios finally realized that tears and sadness are not necessarily negative emotions. Those tears falling drop by drop from Snow’s eyes were not created because of loss, threat, or injury.

They were tears of compassion shed for all the people in the world who had not received light. It was sadness, but not negative sadness. It was a noble spirit and sacrifice. It was emotion, but not an emotion that mere humans could easily possess. It was the emotion of a goddess, and thus the emotion of a saint.