The temple in the city was far more luxurious than the temple back in town. It was triple the size and had multiple stories. I managed to spot it a few blocks away and was able to push through the crowd to it. Like the district full of smithies, the general area around the temple wasn’t as crowded as the main streets. However, there were far more people, both believers of various gods and knight orders loitering around the street or the entrance.

The foundations of the building and the steps leading up to it were made of marble or perhaps granite. It was white with natural designs and streaks that made it quite pleasing to the eyes unlike the normal stone lining the streets. The building itself was made of a light grey stone that had been smoothed to make the proportions on everything even. In the front was a wide building entrance that was about three stories high with spires climbing up to the levels where a five or six story building would be. A few supporting flying buttresses lined the sides and the space between it and the next buildings over could fit at least three more buildings, leading to very wide roads.

It felt strange to enter such an intimidating building. As if I didn’t belong there, a silent pressure kept my feet stuck to the ground as I stared on just outside the hustle and bustle of the street crowds. Eventually, I walked inside and found myself greeted by one of the caretakers for the temple. I wasn’t sure if he was a priest, assistant priest, or someone employed by the temple to take care of the bulk of visitors that don’t need the attention of a full-on priest. Whatever he was, he was dressed similar to Jeoffry and brought a bowl with some coins resting in it, a place to put donations.

Since I was using the temple, it would be best to give them a small offering. I doubt they’d let me use the place for free even with a divine item considering all the knight orders in this city. All I had was silver so I placed a single silver coin in the offering cup and saw the man carrying the cup scowl at me before turning away and walking deeper into the temple. Apparently, he expected more from me but it was enough to grant me entrance as no one stopped me from going inside. A part of me thought that maybe the scowl was from my clothes or they let me in with just one silver because I looked like someone without any more cash from the state of my clothes.

The only part of the building that was cordoned off was the spires, the rest of the space was wide open. I could look up and see an unusually high roof with a mural painted on it. All sorts of people or perhaps renditions of gods and goddesses painted the ceiling. It was somewhat hard to make out the details at this distance but the image as a whole was impressive. There was some serious money going into this fancy temple. If a small trading city had such a nice temple, I could only imagine how great the one in the capital was. I could imagine foundations of gold and walls made of silver, if only a coating of it with something stronger beneath like steel or stone but still luxurious.

There were several lines of benches leading towards the other end of the temple with some knight orders and believers seated and praying to their divine of choice. Most of them congregated towards the other end of the building where a line of statues of some of the more major divines sat in a circular shape and a pedestal with a priest was, also deeply in prayer like the believers. I took a seat towards the back, away from all that as I only needed to be here with a divine item to make a connection.

Three rows from the back on the right to be exact as I wasn’t the only person with this idea and the two rows in the back were already filled with people, mostly knights but there was an odd believer or two as well. Then again, I probably looked more like believer if not a beggar in the eyes of the others here. If not for the fact I would have to wait an undetermined amount of time, I would have gone back and brought Jerry or even Stephen so I wasn’t doing this alone. Then again, it’d be awkward with Stephen learning how I disliked him before especially with how I was pretty sure he had a good opinion of me at this point.

I focused on the shield before me and entered another state of consciousness that I had only experienced a few times. Time passed and I communicated my lack of direction and uneasiness with the goddess. She listened to all of my complaints or more accurately, knew of them as soon as I entered this state of being. As did I understand all of the answers to my questions more or less.

To be recognized as a proper knight order and receive the benefit of a renewed liver, I had to have at least seven members equipped with a divine item, be acknowledged by either one hundred people or two knight orders, and then head to the temple in the capital to be officially sanctioned. My progress towards this end is two members, it would be three if we had another divine item to spare, and we’ve been acknowledged by six people to be a proper knight order. Most likely those six came from Jeff, Tom, Jeoffry, and some of Matt’s family. Matt himself probably counted towards that six.

Being recognized by normal people could be easily achieved by changing my and the others appearances to be more in line with the image of knights or communicating with others. So we were basically halfway towards my goal and it had been only a little over a week since I had started, making good progress. There wasn’t anything else left to do here except head back towards the inn.

Back at the room, I reunited with Stephen and passed the shield back to him and then we sat in silence until the others got back. I relaxed on the edge of the bed, looking around at all the sides of the bed where ores had been shoved into every opening. The sword I had found was now resting on the bed instead of sitting on my back. My plan for it was to sell it tomorrow as I had to go towards the smithy district anyways but I thought it’d be best to wait in case Matt or Jerry needed another weapon due to circumstances.

Around an hour or two later, the others got back with even more ores and two swords similar to the one I got. Like me, they had managed to get this rare sword to drop from the body of some monster. They had both gotten lucky with dungeons populated with weak and easy to handle monsters. At some point, they had gotten some bags similar to mine, but a bit smaller and filled them to the brim with ores, essentially tripling the number of ores in this tiny room and leaving little space for us to actually sleep here.

Thankfully, there was enough space since I slept on the ground, leaning on the foot of the bed rather than on it or we’d be forced to sell off some of the ores at a bad price just to sleep. With our money situation, I thought that Jerry would rather sleep on the ores than ditch them at this point though. They brought back another set of meals for everyone when they came back.

We all had a share of food and then went to sleep early that day with nothing else to really do other than grab a drink or two of beer. The dungeon had been explored, twice by myself, and we had come out of it with what will become a tidy profit after prices normalize. Stephen seemed to be on the verge of growing his leg back enough to move on his own and possibly start doing dungeon runs or at least some walks outside the room. Tomorrow we would wake up early and hopefully have as much success if not more than we had this day.