“My lord, according to the informants across the entire western district and the intelligence gathered from all sides, we really have found several abnormal incidents.”

Dawn was just beginning to break. The chaotic cleanup and consolidation from last night had only just been completed, and the faint smell of blood still had not been washed from the streets by the drizzle. Yet Tyron had already arrived before Muen with the information he had organized overnight.

He was a large man, but at the moment he bent at the waist with utmost respect. Even the demon tattoo across his chest seemed to have grown almost friendly.

Times had changed. Tyron, who had once lamented becoming prey in a hunter’s hands, now felt nothing but gratitude that he had bitten that hook and been forced into becoming the loyal hound of the man before him.

Especially after what had happened last night—when a powerful mage had appeared from nowhere among Raskin’s men, and Tyron had thought they would have to pay a terrible price in casualties, only for the great Dark Emperor before him to solve the problem with ease—since that moment, Tyron had felt an endless tide of loyalty surging through his chest.

Being a dog was good. Being a dog was very good.

How could a wild wolf prowling through darkness ever eat as well or live as safely as a dog raised by a hunter?

What was more, although Tyron still could not quite grasp this Dark Emperor’s ultimate goal, he could already vaguely tell that Muen intended to gather and unify the dark side of the royal capital and use him to collect certain information.

A territory this large was obviously not something a great figure perched so high above would manage personally. He would appoint an agent, just like the Rat King in Belrand.

Everyone knew the Rat King was the Dark Emperor’s most loyal subordinate, his public-facing representative. And if even a rat from the sewers could one day shoot straight to the top, then he—the Beast of Xipos...

The thought made Tyron’s heart grow hotter and hotter. He quickly shoved those chaotic thoughts aside, bent even lower, and focused on flattering him properly.

“Since I didn’t know what kind of abnormal incidents you were looking for, I organized everything I was able to collect here.”

“That was fast.”

Even Muen looked a little taken aback.

“You were taking territory, absorbing manpower, and somehow still found time to organize all this? I honestly thought I’d have to wait longer.”

“You joke, my lord. A task assigned by you is our highest priority. Everything else has to give way to it. Of course we wouldn’t dare delay even for a moment.”

Tyron held out a thick stack of intelligence with both hands, posture lowered to the extreme. For an instant, Muen almost thought he could see a tail wagging happily behind him.

He really wanted to move up in the world.

“...You’ve put your heart into it.”

The corner of Muen’s mouth twitched slightly. He said no more and first took the reports from Tyron.

“In that case, let’s go take a look.”

The sky was gradually brightening, but the weak daylight still could not fully pierce the thin rain and mist. Muen looked out and saw that the entire city seemed shrouded in some unspeakable gloom.

“Let’s hope we find something...”

...

...

Knock knock...

The door of the ramshackle cabin was struck, the dull sound especially clear in the desolate outskirts.

The knocking sounded three or four times with no response. Judging from how ruined the cabin was, the place seemed long abandoned, the sort of place where no matter how many times you knocked, no one should have answered.

But the person knocking was clearly very persistent.

Knock knock...

“Which bastard is it?!”

At last, the person inside the cabin could not endure it anymore. After the fifth round of knocking, the rotten wooden door creaked open with a groan, sounding as though it might collapse at any moment.

But it did not open all the way. The old man pushing it only revealed half his face, staring outside warily.

“Who are you?!”

“Hello.”

Wearing a smile, Muen lightly raised his hat, not the least bit impatient from the wait just now.

“I’m with Xipos.”

Xipos was the name of Tyron’s gang. In dark places where the light did not reach, the name of a gang was often more useful than the official security force.

“Xipos?”

The old man looked suspicious and did not believe him at once. Only when Muen produced a silver coin that marked him as a member of the Xipos gang did the vigilance on the old man’s face suddenly ease.

“What should I call you?”

“Bruce is fine.”

“Bruce... never heard that name before.”

“I only joined recently. It’s normal that you haven’t.”

“Tch. Sending some rookie brat who just joined to brush me off, huh? Damn that Tyron.”

The old man cursed under his breath, but still opened the door and let Muen inside. Limping, he carefully took some warmed liquor from a stove nearby and poured Muen a small cup.

Muen lightly sniffed the cheap alcohol. The smell was harsh enough to sting his nose, but he still tossed back the entire cup in one swallow.

The spicy burn had only just reached his throat before he forced it down completely, his expression unchanged.

“Oh? Not bad.”

The old man raised his half-broken eyebrow in surprise and chuckled.

“My liquor may be low quality, but it’s distilled. It packs a kick. Not many people can drink it straight down like that.”

“It’s only one cup...”

Muen gave a dry laugh and shook his head, thinking that if he could drink An’s sleep-inducing black tea and his upperclassman’s cursed potions in one gulp, there was no way he would care about a single cup of liquor.

“And what should I call you, sir?”

“A thing like a name’s long since been forgotten. Around here, people call me the Limping Priest. You can call me that too. Or if that’s a pain, just call me Cripple.”

“The Limping... Priest?”

The moment he had entered, Muen had already noticed the old man’s crippled left leg. But only now did he notice the faintly visible holy cross hanging at his chest.

His gaze shifted slightly, and sure enough, in one corner of the room there stood a dust-covered statue of the goddess.

“If you’re a priest, why didn’t you ask the Church for help when something strange happened?”

Muen withdrew his gaze and asked curiously, “Why ask a gang instead?”

“Hah? The Church?”

The Limping Priest patted his leg. It sounded half like mockery, half like self-ridicule.

“I got into a little trouble when I was young and got thrown out by the Church a long time ago. Why would they care about me now? They probably wouldn’t even believe a word I said. But you gang types... as long as the protection fee’s paid in full, you still show up when it counts. Even if what they sent is some little brat I can’t tell is reliable or not.”

“If we take the money, we do the job. That’s the quality a proper gang ought to have. I imagine they’ll keep doing it that way in the future.”

Muen kept smiling, professional to the core, flawless in bearing.

“Tch. Hearing that kind of talk from the mouths of gangsters who kill, burn, kidnap, and loot is goddamn surreal.”

“I’m equally surprised to hear that much profanity coming from a priest.”

“...”

The Limping Priest took a sip of liquor and looked up at Muen.

“You’ve got something about you, kid.”

“In my eyes, you’re quite a character yourself, sir.”

“Hmph. Flattering me won’t let you off the hook. Since you’re here, you’re helping me deal with this. Otherwise all that protection money I paid over the years would’ve been for nothing.”

“Of course.”

Muen straightened his hat.

“That’s exactly why I came. Please, tell me—what exactly is this so-called ‘strange incident’ you reported?”

“...”

The Limping Priest suddenly fell silent. Under Muen’s puzzled gaze, he said nothing more. Instead, he set down his cup and rose, steadying himself against the table.

“This isn’t the kind of thing that’s easy to explain with words. Come with me. Better if you see it with your own eyes.”

“If I can see it for myself, all the better.”

“Heh. Let’s just hope you don’t piss yourself when the time comes.”

The Limping Priest lit a lantern and took a thick book from a wooden cabinet to the side. When Muen focused his eyes, he realized it was actually a Church canon.

The priest tucked the canon into his ragged coat with one hand, held the lantern in the other, and walked out through the back door into the vast mist and rain.

Muen followed closely behind.

The moment he stepped out of the cabin, a chill swept over him at once. The density of the fog and the bite of the cold here both seemed noticeably stronger than anywhere else.

Muen swept his gaze around. Against the nearly pure-white backdrop, row after row of uneven gravestones stood upright, ❀ Nоvеlігht ❀ (Don’t copy, read here) stretching all the way to the edge of sight in an atmosphere eerie enough to raise the hair on the back of his neck.

It was a graveyard. A very large graveyard.

“What? Scared?”

The Limping Priest cast him a sidelong glance.

“Not really.”

Muen shook his head.

“I’ve seen plenty of things far worse than this. A graveyard alone isn’t enough to frighten me.”

“Heh. Got guts. Let’s just hope you’re still that brave in a minute, and don’t end up giving me one more damn problem before the real one’s even solved.”

The Limping Priest kept cursing under his breath without pause, but his hands kept moving briskly.

He set down the lantern and produced a wooden staff from somewhere. Tapping the ground with it as he walked, he passed one grave after another, apparently searching for something.

“Found it!”

Before long, the Limping Priest let out a slightly excited cry and slammed the staff hard into the ground.

“Ooooo—”

At once, it seemed his movement had disturbed something. A shrill, wailing moan echoed through the graveyard.

“Here it comes!”

The Limping Priest threw away the staff and shifted several steps to the side, his eyes fixed on the spot he had struck.

“This is...”

Muen was still confused when the soil suddenly split apart and a pale hand shot violently out of the soft earth.

“Ooooo—oo—”

The wailing grew clearer. The dirt, softened by long days of rain, bulged and turned as something forced its way up from underneath. Very soon, a figure with limbs twisting in grotesque angles like a marionette crawled all the way out of the ground and appeared before Muen.

It was a woman. Her long hair hung loose, and she was naked. But she was not alive. Muen could clearly sense that there was not the slightest trace of life within that twisted, deformed body.

And yet that corpse moved with shocking agility. The instant it crawled out of the earth and noticed a living person before it, the mournful whine became an excited shriek. Its limbs jerked and writhed as the woman’s corpse charged straight at Muen with astonishing speed.

“This is... a ghoul?”

Muen’s pupils shrank as he recognized the origin of the female corpse at a glance.

A corpse that, after being affected by some form of Pollution or other mysterious force, suddenly “revived,” gaining the strength and speed it had in life—or even surpassing them—and then madly pursuing the living vitality it no longer possessed. That was what people called a ghoul.

Ghouls were not especially powerful, but they rarely appeared in a normal graveyard like this, so the sight did manage to surprise Muen slightly.

Surprised or not, Muen’s finger twitched, ready to—

Thud!

But before Muen could move, there came a heavy sound, like a watermelon bursting apart, and something foul-smelling and red-and-white exploded directly before his eyes. The ghoul collapsed on the spot.

His eyes widened as he watched the Limping Priest calmly wipe off the canon in his hand with a rag.

This was no longer slight surprise. This was genuine surprise.

“You can use that thing like that?”

“If I’m not using it to pray, then smacking things with it counts as recycling, doesn’t it?”

“...Fair point.”

Then Muen looked down at the corpse on the ground, which had gone completely still.

“So you can handle things like this?”

“Of course. Who do you think I am?”

The Limping Priest spat disdainfully.

“When I was young, trash like this was one punch each. You think I needed to purify them with a canon back then?”

“If that’s the case, why did you ask a gang for help?” The corner of Muen’s mouth twitched faintly.

“Because the reason I asked for help wasn’t that corpses were reviving.”

The Limping Priest seemed tired. He casually found a spot in front of a nearby gravestone that looked a little cleaner and sat down without the slightest concern for whether he might be disrespecting the dead.

“Ghouls might be rare, but after guarding graves this long, I’ve run into them a few times. You just put them back to rest and that’s that. It’s not something worth making a fuss over.

“The real reason I called you people here isn’t the ghouls. It’s... the identity of the ghouls.”

“Their identity?”

“That’s right.”

The Limping Priest pointed at the corpse’s head. Half its skull had been smashed open, but the pale, twisted face was still vaguely recognizable.

“I’m the gravekeeper here. I’m also the one who buries the bodies. Every corpse here was buried by my own hands. You could say that of everything in this place, above ground or below it, I know it better than anyone.”

“But...”

The Limping Priest paused, and his expression darkened.

“I don’t recognize this corpse.”

“...”

Muen’s heart tightened.

But that was not the end of it.

The Limping Priest continued:

“And it’s not just this one. There are lots of corpses I don’t recognize anymore... It’s like this graveyard suddenly has a whole lot of unfamiliar bodies in it.”