Editing Toaru Majutsu no Index:AgneseSS Chapter4 (section)

===Part 4===

It was just like a search engine.

Now that they had a term to search for, that vast collection of documents showed its true value.

Once back in the bank, Agnese’s group only had to search that pile of 28,000 books for just the one thing.

Sister Monica.

“I found something, Sister Agnese! Local folklore from Turin of Piedmont mentions a spell for tearing off your own face as a last resort to overturn a critical decline in your life. The idea is to throw out your old identity in order to leave behind the bad luck pursuing you!!”

If it was known simply as “folklore”, it was probably actually a witch’s spell.

But something not appearing in the Bible was no reason to take it lightly. There was a good chance it received power from a mythology or religion other than Christianity.

“How far did that spread, though? That spell isn’t the same as fortunetelling by picking a flower and plucking out the petals one by one. We’re talking about tearing off your own face here. To convince people to do that, you would need enough authority to conquer the pain, fear, and physiological disgust. That means it must have some kind of organization behind it.”

For example, people only accepted the pain of dental treatment because of the medical field’s seal of approval that it would heal your cavities. If some filthy old man in a rundown hut said he was going to drill at your teeth while chanting an original prayer of his, no one would ever agree to it.

It was all about providing authority.

People would accept far more from a source they trusted than from one they did not.

And to convince people that tearing off their entire face was a good idea would require a very powerful source of authority. Enough that people were convinced they would feel no pain at all if they tore off their face and that they would have no trouble at all after permanently losing the face they had possessed from the moment they were born.

The spell was from Turin, capital of the Italian region of Piedmont.

(I swear, this had better not come full circle and turn out to be the Roman Catholic Church after all.)

Agnese had a bad feeling about this, but then Lucia provided an answer.

“This mentions a ‘guild’.”

“A guild?”

That was a fairly common term for anyone steeped in the world of magic. Just like lodges and salons, it referred to a collection of craftsmen or intellectuals with a certain specialty.

But that alone was not enough to determine anything specific. Just like knowing something was a “school” or “company” did not tell you anything specific about it. You needed a more specific name like the Such-and-Such School or the So-and-So Company.

But Lucia shrugged.

“That’s all it says.”

“You mean…?”

“It must be something big enough that saying ‘the guild’ is enough for locals to know what you mean. Just like world-famous cup noodle and cola brands become words that refer to their entire industry. So if we send someone to Turin, I imagine we can figure out just what kind guild this is talking about.”

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