The Handwashing Saint

They exiled me for having zero magic. So I moved to the village where people go to die — and started boiling the drinking water.

I'm Rieze von Aschental, sixteen, the disowned daughter of a broke noble house and, as of my magic assessment, a confirmed dud. What nobody knows is that I used to be Midori Nagata, thirty-eight, a high-school home economics teacher in Japan — until a crosswalk and a delivery truck ended that life. So when they dumped me on Rowden, the plague-and-famine village they call "the Graveyard," I didn't see a curse or divine abandonment. I saw a fouled well right next to the latrine, kids with the swollen bellies of malnutrition, and a to-do list a mile long.

I can't cast a single spell. What I can do is wash my hands, boil the water, salt-and-honey the sick back from dehydration, and teach people to eat something other than thin gruel. That's the whole trick. It isn't holy. Anyone could do it.

The village disagrees. To them, boiling water is a "purification rite," handwashing "banishes the miasma," and a pot of vegetable stew is a "Blessing." The more corpses fail to appear, the more certain they are that I'm a Saint — and the harder I insist otherwise, the holier they decide I am. Now the Church has sent an inquisitor to expose the fraud, and he's leaving as my most devout believer. Send help. Or better, send soap.

Author's note: I am the original author. This is my own English translation of my Japanese web novel, serialized on Kakuyomu: https://kakuyomu.jp/works/2912051603248122441. Royal Road is the only official English publication of this work.