Drinking poison to quench thirst

"Drink poison to quench thirst."

Yes, this is the saying that sparked my plan to survive.

I cannot run, I cannot hide.

When you are in a crazy world, sometimes the only thing you can do is to survive is to be even crazier than the world.

The only way to save myself from an angry powerful church is to use a god to take the blame for me.

Yes, ritual magic.

Normally, this would be a problem because calling a god, any god, with ritual magic is usually an incredibly stupid thing to do. Because a god can do literally anything they want to you when you call them. The very least powerful being that can even answer ritual magic is a sequence 3 being, which is already a being with thoughts warped by their own powers. Even a supposedly good god will likely include you as a pawn in their unknowable and likely dangerous plans. The last thing you want is for a high level being to know about you, a normal person.

At this point, the goddess would not know me. Even later, she will not bother to know about a random robber who killed her bishop. The church itself will be what will actually be troubling me.

Normally, one should never draw the attention of a god to themselves just to escape pursuit from a church.

It would be like having a wolf in your house and inviting a bulldozer inside to fix it.

Well, in this crazy world, let's go crazy.

I will invite that bulldozer in to take care of the wolf. Better a friendly or at least neutral bulldozer than a rabid wolf. I will be the one to survive.

However, there is a method to this madness. I choose to do this because there just happens to be an exception to the don't ever call any god rule, a god that no sense of self that can only answer ritualistic prayers mechanically, and that just happens to be an enemy of the Evernight Goddess and would gladly take the blame for this death.

Artificial Death.

I immediately start acting on my plan, grabbing the dead bishop and dragging him towards a nearby warehouse that my former self knew was unused. I drop the corpse and kick open the door.

With a "bang" it doesn't work. The door remained locked shut.

With a few more kicks, curses, pleading, and tears, I manage to get the door open.

After even more curses, I throw the four corpses inside the unused warehouse.

I strip the dead bishop of his clothes. He is not wearing a bishop's uniform, but is instead wearing a black suit. Luckily, the black makes it difficult to see the bullet hole and blood at this time of night. I try to wipe off as much blood as I can and I exchange my poor patchwork work clothes for the dead man's suit. It is a little large for me, but that is also hard to tell at this time of night.

Unexpectedly, inside his wallet I find 532 pounds, 43 soli, and 24 pence, which is an absolutely massive amount of cash to be held on a person. To put that amount into perspective, 1 soli is 12 pence, 1 pound is 20 soli, which is worth about $150 in daily necessities like food and something like $1000 in rent or housing since housing prices are much lower here than in the United States.

Obviously, the bishop was planning on doing something very sketchy.

Why is a bishop of the Evernight goddess in this area at night not wearing his bishop's outfit caring this much cash on him? Why did he kill almost immediately without trying very hard to avoid us?

These are questions I will likely never know and honestly I don't particularly care about knowing at this moment.

My and my three dead friend's wallets combined didn't even add up to a single pound. Almost all of our money goes to our family. Why else would we hang out at this time and place looking for people to rob. Everything else is spent on cigarettes and alcohol, trying to escape our terrible lives through them. Of course, those things only bring temporary relief and don't ever fix anything, but just make things even worse.

After looting the dead, a small smile appeared on my lips and I almost felt the urge to whistle. All of these terrible things happened but being suddenly much, much richer made me quite a bit happier about my current situation, even with everything going on.

The money in my pocket brings me a illogical, even unreasonable, confidence, that everything was going to be ok.

I leave the warehouse in this unexpected and weird good mood.

However, the kicked in door refused to stay shut. So, I use one of my former friend's corpses as a door stop.

At this time of night, you can't even tell that the door was kicked in without looking closely.

I immediately turn and head for the Backlund Bridge nearby.

Backlund, the capital of Loen Kingdom, is a city split in two. South of the Tussock River, where I currently am, is the poor side with slums, factories, and warehouses and north of the river is the rich side, with mansion, universities, and museums.

I already had a plan to throw the blame for the death of the bishop onto the Death cult, an enemy of the Evernight church. However, there was a problem with this plan. I don't know Hermes. In fact, I don't know elvish, or giant, or ever draconic. I don't know any language that could be used in ritual magic. I don't even know Chinese, which apparently can be used to call the name of the previous Lord of the Mysteries.

I only know English and Loen. And one of those languages is now useless.

I was not lucky enough to transmigrate into a scholar that knows these languages and as far as I can tell I don't have a golden finger, system, or Mary Sue power.

So in order to save myself, I need to get a Loen to Hermes dictionary with phonetics.

Especially phonetics because if I mispronounced a ritual magic call for help I would likely not even be left with a corpse. Maybe my very soul would be destroyed.

The only place I know of that would both have this kind of dictionary and also not have a beyonder guarding it is a university.

At this time of night the universities would be closed, but that is ok with me because they would never give a guy like me a book on Hermes anyway.

The only way to get it will be to take it myself.