The church was a spired building deep within the town. Sandora and I had spotted this structure, so different from the surrounding architecture, when we surveyed the area from the air. What we had not expected was for religion in this world to be so strange: from beginning to end, it concerned itself solely with "sealing away technology." All religious activities revolved around that goal, and Ancient Relics did not appear every day, so the church lay idle most of the time.
There were no daily prayers, no regularly scheduled ceremonies, and no need for believers to listen often to the teachings of the gods—as long as nothing related to ancient knowledge happened, the Lost Divine Teachings might as well not exist.
This was the first time we had seen a religion with such a clear purpose, one that did not even care much about spreading itself. Any ordinary sect that operated this way without an actual god backing it would probably have died out long ago, but the Lost Divine Teachings had no such concern. They possessed ancient technology, their clergy were armed like space marines, and they practiced elitism from top to bottom. The power gap between them and ordinary people was nearly that between gods and mortals, so the church showed no signs of decline even now.
Sailin was the town's only member of the Divine Office, naturally making her the manager of the little church. She frankly told me that its doors had not opened for more than half a year. The Ancient Relic beside the town had never opened before, so few adventurers came here on business, while ordinary people never encountered "forbidden knowledge" in their daily lives. Naturally, there was no reason for the church to open. The last time it had opened, half