In My Previous Life I Was a Saint, but Now I Want to Cut Corners - Chapter 2

After remembering my past life, I wasn’t able to contain my consciousness… I ended up sleeping until the next day till the early afternoon.

“Rena… Renaria!?”

I could hear my mother calling my name. I tried looking around, but because I was in a daze, my vision was blurry. After some time, I noticed my parents and my brother were in the room with me. They had serious looks on their faces.

In my dream I saw that I didn’t really have a family that I cared about, nor did I have anyone else to care about since nobody survived. Seeing those memories really gave me heartache, strong enough that I couldn’t contain my tears

“Rena, my dear, you need to be careful! Even if your spirit guardian is Aerial, you need to take care of yourself appropriately.”

“That’s right, even a ship can’t move without wind. So please don’t overdo it, dear.”

My family huddled around me, giving me different lectures. It all ended up becoming a jumbled mess of words that I couldn’t really make any sense of anything they were saying.

Eventually, I turned off the competing voices and focused on the events from the day before. I remembered that Aerial was my chosen guardian spirit, but I couldn’t see her. It makes me wonder where she is.

As I continued to ponder about Aerial, my hair started to hover into the air, as if it was responding to my thoughts about not seeing Aerial.

“Huh?… Oh… Wow!”

I could see my family turn their attention towards what was happening. They excitedly looked at me as I gasped in excitement.

“Look, Rena! Aerial is showing you her love! Look at the excitement in the air! You can feel her emotions!”

My brother, Arthur, started poking at my hair as it flutters through the air.

“It does seem like some exciting air is moving your hair. If you ask me, it does look like Aerial is affectionate towards you.”

It does seem that way. I started to feel really bad about my initial reaction when I first received Aerial as my guardian spirit. I hope Aerial understands that she didn’t cause me to faint since it was the sudden injection of my past memories that caused it.

“Aerial, please understand that it’s not that I don’t like you. I was just shocked at the time…”

I wasn’t sure if Aerial was there or not, so I decided to hold out my hand. Almost instantly, I could feel the wind moving around my fingertips, which most likely was Aerial’s response to me.

“It would seem that she’s very happy.”

I know it’s impossible to actually see Aerial, but the wind told me she was there with me. I gazed at my fingertips and couldn’t help but smile as the wind whistled again. I know Aerial’s not really a popular spirit because she’s invisible. Still, if I’m honest, I’m actually really glad she’s not popular. I really don’t want to have any special abilities in my current life. It only caused problems in my previous one. In this life, my goal is to live a pleasantly quiet, unobtrusive, and lazy lifestyle!

“Renaria, I’m glad you’re feeling better and all…”

“…but, we need to get you signed up for the Magical Academy.”

I had been lost in my thoughts so much that I completely forgot about that. I’m glad my parents reminded me of it but I have this uneasy feeling coursing through me.

In this world, if you are proven to have a magical talent, they force you to enroll in the magical academy to train and study magic. My family decided it would be best to wait until I went to the church to be tested before signing me up.

“Oh… Yeah… I completely forgot about the enrollment…”

I looked up at my parents and gave them my best surprised look as I said that.

“Honey, you seemed so excited for it. I’m surprised you forgot.”

“Yeah… I was excited about it…”

If I’m honest with myself, I really don’t want to go to the Magical Academy… The second prince is attending right now, and I would love to avoid anything to do with royalty in this life. Actually, no, not just royalty. I want nothing to do with any nobles in general!

Even though my mother is a royal, I have no right to inherit the throne, but another issue is at hand. I do have the right blood to be married into royalty…

Even the second prince in my previous life had some insane women after him. The princess that had killed me because she had a one-sided crush on the prince really left a generally bad taste in my mouth.

I’m hoping I could avoid getting engaged to the second prince. I’d rather not be killed again by some random noblewoman with an obsession for the second prince. So if I were to get engaged to him, I would absolutely hate it. If I’m honest with myself, it would be best to be engaged to someone in the baron rank, taking me as far away from royalty as possible.

However, there is an issue. Anyone with magical powers has no choice on whether they go to the academy or not since it is actually enforced by the country’s law. I was excited initially, but now I’m actually afraid to go.

I thought more about why I had to die in my past life. It was clear I didn’t have a proper understanding of magic because the church’s teaching taught us that it required us to use our own life force. In this age, we use spirit guardians that don’t use the user’s life force. But even so, wind magic in itself uses less life force than holy magic in my time, so who knows how life would have been if my previous life if I didn’t use holy magic.

If I had holy magic in my body, the guardian spirit Shine would have appeared instead of Aerial. So that would mean I have an affinity for wind magic in this life instead of holy magic. If I recall correctly from the past, wind magic was considered the second strongest in terms of power. However, I wouldn’t really know since I was a priest, I virtually never used anything other than holy magic.

I already know I’ll be above average in terms of magic. Still, in this life, my goal is to live my school life as inconspicuously as possible. So I think I should cut back on everything to keep myself away from the spotlight. Yeah… let’s go with that. It’s a good plan.