People couldn't-at least, they shouldn't!

"Forget it. I'll worry about it later!"

After giving it some serious thought, Herbert decided to stop thinking.

Running away might be shameful, but it really worked.

Awakened memories, the Purity Oath, reforming other races... too much had happened, and there was too little he could do. Pointlessly agonizing over it would accomplish nothing. He could only take things one step at a time.

"What's done is done. Let's eat first."

Herbert had missed lunch while sorting through his memories. Rather than heading to the dining hall now, he went to the kitchen instead.

This wasn't the duke's estate. No servants would make a point of saving food for him, but the kitchen held smoked jerky and black bread.

They tasted awful, but they were filling enough.

Though this wasn't entirely within the rules, considering the Albert Family's generous donations to the monastery over the years, surely no monk would be tactless enough to make a fuss over something so minor.

"Come to think of it, if keeping my oath feels agonizing to me, the others must feel the same. How do they relieve that pent-up pressure when they can't stand it anymore?"

Herbert nodded to a few ascetic monks as he passed them, taking note of the details of their appearance.

Tattered clothes, emaciated bodies, utter silence... yet surprisingly few wounds.

"Looks like only a handful of ascetics use the pain of self-harm to suppress their desires. How do the others deal with it, then?"

Pondering this question, Herbert entered the kitchen. He was just about to pick out a long loaf that felt good in his hand when his pupils suddenly contracted.

A moment earlier, for some inexplicable reason, he had twitched his nose and picked out an extremely faint yet strangely familiar scent from the kitchen's jumble of smells.

The scent of photinia blossoms!

?

¿

Was that right?

That... that couldn't be right.

"Hiss!"

Herbert fell silent for a long time. After a great deal of mental preparation, he finally worked up the courage to turn slowly toward the source of the smell.

In a bucket in the corner, he saw a dead fish floating belly-up, its mouth wide open.

?

"Hiss... it's a grass carp!"

Dinner was stewed grass carp.

Herbert didn't touch a bite.

Forget touching it-he didn't even go to the dining hall.

He didn't want to accidentally eat a bowl of semen stew, but he couldn't warn the others outright either. That would inevitably attract the attention of a certain fish enthusiast.

Nothing for it. I can suffer a little. Let them enjoy this blessing.

Gnawing dry bread in his room was already plenty good enough.

Happily chewing on bread hard enough to serve as a murder weapon, Herbert couldn't help giving a little snort as he thought of the tragedy in the kitchen corner.

"Heh. That guy really went too far. Leaving our fish brother unable to rest in peace was bad enough, but he wouldn't even close its mouth afterward. How rude."

This was far too blasphemous.

Then again, he wasn't a fish, so how could he know what made a fish happy? Perhaps the two of them had been in love...

After letting his imagination run wild for a while, Herbert reined in his wandering thoughts and began pondering in silence.

He wasn't trying to gossip about the culprit's identity, much less earn the monastery leadership's favor by tattling. He wasn't that bored.

When it came to other people's unusual proclivities, he had always taken the stance that he didn't understand them, but respected them and wished them well.

After this eye-opening experience, he suddenly realized something. He seemed to have accidentally discovered an exploitable bug... no, a feature.

Did forbidden intercourse between a monk and a fish count as blasphemy?

Absolutely!

An act that outrageous should have triggered backlash not only for a monk who had sworn a Purity Oath, but even for monks bound by other oaths.

People couldn't. At least, they shouldn't.

Yet something so blasphemous had simply happened in an unnoticed corner, and no one had heard the grass carp's anguished cries.

As of that moment, everything in the monastery remained normal. Herbert hadn't heard of any monk suffering injuries from breaking his oath.

"Was the news suppressed? Or... is it like how 'a priest having an intimate exchange with a little boy' doesn't count as breaking his vows? As long as it isn't between a man and a woman, it's fine?"

Grass carp ≠ broken vows?

Tsk.

Goddammit, I'm in another world, and that fucking inequality is still chasing me!

"...Heh."

Even as he found himself utterly speechless, Herbert felt a little excited.

Not because he had any particular interest in slender little boys wearing white over-the-knee socks-he really wasn't into that-but because this discovery had given him an idea.

His occupational habit of finding legal loopholes had kicked in.

Hey, I've got an idea!

Say, if animals don't fall within the scope of partners who count as a violation, couldn't that mean... it's fine as long as the partner isn't human?

There were an awful lot of races in this world, after all!

Elves, dryads, centaurs, merfolk, dragons, succubi... all those different races were enough to send anyone with a taste for nonhumans into ecstasy.

And his current position as warden happened to give him the perfect opportunity to test his theory.

Yet beneath his excitement, Herbert also felt a little hesitant.

Paladins had existed for so many years. He didn't think he was the first lucky soul to discover this feature.

Humans in this world had astonishing reproductive capabilities, second only to certain green-skinned goblins, and there were no reproductive barriers between them and most other races.

Though humans were wary of these races, or even considered them enemies and disparagingly called them monsters, mixed-blood children born of unions between humans and other races were hardly rare, owing to such delicate factors as racial wars and the slave trade.

There were half-elves, half-orcs, dragonkin, half-shapeshifters, half-demons, and so on. Some coastal legends even spoke of fishmen with fish heads and human bodies... huh?

Uh, why does it feel like I've accidentally uncovered some kind of secret?

Though these mixed-blood descendants, shunned and despised by both their parents' peoples, couldn't rival the major races in numbers, their populations were large enough to form communities of their own. Some of the more powerful ones had even established countries.

Judging by that information, the possibility of intermarriage with other races definitely shouldn't have needed his sudden flash of inspiration to uncover it. Someone should have discovered this loophole long ago.

Sure enough, when Herbert opened the religious canon, which was thicker than a brick, he easily found a wide variety of inventive ways to break one's oath-or rather, case histories.

Hiss!

Brave souls had already sacrificed themselves to feed demons. Each had gotten more creative than the last, and each had died more horribly too.

Perhaps because knowingly breaking the law warranted a harsher sentence, none of those brothers had met a pleasant end.

These bold men had either died from the backlash of breaking their oaths or, if they survived, been hunted down by the Church Inquisition and subjected to capital punishment-not a single one escaped.

Now that's criminal!

This really feels like reading the penal code!

All right, then. This route's a dead end.

At that point, Herbert could only put his rather dangerous little clever idea aside for the time being-people couldn't, because the precepts forbade it.

Besides, even setting that aside, those young ladies of other races in the prison could crush him with one hand despite having their powers suppressed. Even trying to sell his looks carried the risk of being toyed with to death.

Even being a male escort could get him killed. This world was far too unreasonable.

Sigh. Forget it, forget it!

"Let the big head control the little head. Getting stronger is the priority. No more shady shortcuts."

All Herbert hoped for now was to gain enough strength through his paladin training as soon as possible, so he could withstand the punishment for breaking his oath, escape his cage, and enjoy a life of freedom.

"Freedom!"

Herbert stood and stretched, then headed toward the door, intending to step outside and breathe in the sweet air of a free land.

But just as he was about to push the door open, the Holy Mark on the back of his hand erupted in searing pain. His whole body jolted, and he stopped abruptly before the door.

"..."

At that moment, a bone-chilling cold ran down Herbert's spine.

On his very first day at the monastery, Herbert had been warned repeatedly that he must never go outside after midnight. He had never entertained any thoughts of wandering around at night, either.

Yet just now, he had nearly walked out of his room completely unguarded, into that seemingly peaceful night.

What on earth...

Gulp.

Herbert swallowed and turned his head with difficulty toward the mechanical clock beside him.

He saw that its gilded hand had just completed a full circuit-

Midnight had passed.