Reinette heard everything happening on the ship, but she did not pay it much mind.
While questioning the gods was a grave sin in other churches, in the Rose School—at least among some people—it had been tolerated during this period.
Although the current Rose School had set things right with the return of the Bound God, that could not change the fact that the Temperance Faction had been brutally suppressed by the Indulgence Faction for the previous several centuries.
As a result, the Temperance Faction had suffered a severe shortage of new blood. There were hardly any promising low-Sequence candidates, and only a handful of Mid-Sequence members.
Under such circumstances, cutting expenditures was impossible. The Indulgence Faction's middle and upper ranks had strayed too far down the wrong path; their bodies and minds had long since fallen into corruption. Even the Bound God could not change them. They had to be killed.
That left only one option: increase the supply—more actively accepting newcomers, while converting those new Indulgence Faction members who had not yet reached the point of no return.
For the latter group, the environment they had lived in and the education they had received were filled with traces of the Indulgence Faction. Those influences were not easy to erase, nor was it appropriate to wipe them out through violence.
It could only be done slowly, influencing them bit by bit.
Even so, only a small portion of them would genuinely embrace the Temperance Faction's ideals. Some might still be pretending, but that did not matter. They were destined never to become true high-ranking powerholders within the Temperance Faction.
Filling the Temperance Faction's Mid-Sequence vacancies, demonstrating its acceptance of the Indulgence Faction, and helping it through the growing pains of its shortage of talent after setting things right—that was