The Girl Who Hacked The Magic System

There's one thing that all poor people have in common, no matter the world or the point in time. And it is the suffering of injustices in the hands of the powerful.

Even in medieval times, when the control of the church was at its peak in Europe, there were constantly rebellions and uprisings.

The absence of those in this world was something that struck me as odd the moment I started studying history in the Academy.

It isn't like injustices stopped happening, or the powerful were good, wise, and lenient. No, there was an artificial reason for that weird compliance.

And now that that artifice ceased, we moved in to seize the opportunity.

There was already talk and some idealization of my mother because of her actions as an adventurer and her fiery personality. She always sided with the common people when there were conflicts, and the fact that she was a princess added to the mystique.

When the Duke's trial took place, everything that the Church said about her only made her look more relatable, more worthy, for the common people.

Duke Addlington was one of the most hated nobles of this country, and he was notorious for his cruelty against commoners in his domain.

So, when word came out that princess Lillian, that princess, had been living as his slave for ten years, the common folk looked at her and thought, 'one of us.'

The trial put her directly against the person who was seen as the very incarnation of the oppression by the commoners. And the Church sided with him fully and very audibly.

It was enough to start branding the Church as the enemy of the people. Something that the king quickly capitalized on.

Shalia already had a strong spy network, and she was tasked with spreading pro-Lillian propaganda. It started years before our official preparations for the war began.

My mother wasn't even notified about it, much less myself. I only learned about it when my army was already in the making.

But all that propaganda fertilized the field for her to grow in the minds of people. She went around everywhere, being very loud about who she was and solving all kinds of problems.

What's the difference between what she did and what normal adventurers were supposed to do? None, if I'm being honest.

But the point is that there wasn't any actual need to be any difference. With how the early happenings were laid out and all the propaganda, she just needed to be there.

Confirmation bias, it was all that was needed. If everyone thinks of her as a saint, if she appears and rescues your kitten from a tree, she will be a saint in your eyes.

It doesn't matter the size of what she did, but simply that she was there and she did it.

She would gladly tell the story about her years in captivity and show the marks on her body. Those marks became sacred, like a certain crown of thorns.

And, as she solidified her position as Saint Lillian, she started to speak out, slowly. At first, she would tell stories about the beastkin who helped her escape or who shared her plight in captivity.

And people started to listen.

In the last year, the king has created holidays in different parts of the country to celebrate Lillian's feats. There are huge feasts, with singing, dancing, and theater.

The Church hated it, but the more they stood against it, the more people saw them as the enemy.

You see, the reason people started hating on other races was because of a war and a period of confinement that happened so long ago that nobody remembers anything about it.

And the history that could've recorded it was lost in time because of the goddess' revisionism.

To everyone there wasn't even a 'betrayal' of the fae folk siding with the dragonkind, because there was no war, no confinement, nothing.

So it was very easy to frame the discourse against beastkin and fae folk as just talk from the 'greedy church people' who loved to extort riches from the people so they could live in opulence in the temples.

With time, the places where some of her main feats took place became literal places of worship, and it seems that a church of the saint is starting to take form, to the horror of the church of the goddess.

I've heard that even the place where the slave den where I was born was located is now a small chapel dedicated to her, which receives pilgrims from all over the country.

A religion based on a lesbian, empowered, anti-racist, former slave, Saint. Not bad, if I say so myself. I almost feel tempted to join the religion as well.

And this was a point we made to the nobles that wanted to crown her. She's a saint. Saints don't wear crowns, only halos.

She can only fight for the oppressed if she is not part of the government herself.

It was a really hard argument to have with them, but in the end they heeded her own words.

The Saint should never hold mundane power became one of the tenets of her growing cult. And that's the seed of the division between religion and the state.

Of course not everyone is on board with this. There are a lot of conservatives and staunch chauvinists even among the commoners, and they've been congregating around the banner of the Blessed faction.

That's the reason we'll even have a war, after all. If it was just a matter of getting public support and enacting the reforms, I wouldn't have spent the last year or so training a fucking army.

We have two timers running.

First, the war has to begin before the agreed marriage of uncle Jyllian and the princess of Castro takes place.

Second, we have to win the war before the goddess wakes up. We don't know exactly when it will happen. We only know that she will be summoning heroes by the time of my seventeenth birthday.

It's a tough call, but not doing it is not an option. There's just too much to lose if we give up now.

Then, let the show begin!