Chapter 3

After arranging his funeral affairs, the detective on the bed closed his eyes. Xia De pursed his lips and waited for a while, then pulled his hand free and tested his breathing and pulse.

"Dead?"

He couldn't believe that the other party had died so easily, and it was really about ten minutes.

Before he could make the next reaction, suddenly a black light flashed across the corpse's face. Xia De felt a tightness in his heart for no reason, and extreme terror instantly drowned him.

But when he came back to his senses, the black light had dissipated in the air and disappeared.

Following the disappearance of this light from the corpse, the thin corpse that looked like it had been starved to death actually gradually plumped up at a speed visible to the naked eye, as if someone were inflating the corpse from the inside, until it turned into a normal corpse.

"Where is this considered normal? What exactly is the situation now?"

In the silence of the room, Xia De looked around with some unease. The unease was not about being alone in a room with a corpse, but unease about the strange environment. This world was not the previous world; he had already caught a glimpse of the truth of the world of mystery and danger.

The woman's voice in his mind sounded again, as if reminding Xia De that this was not a "person":

【You have touched 'Whisper'.】

"What touch? What whisper? Can you explain in detail?"

But the voice still didn't give an answer.

【Whisper】 was one of the "four elements of mystery" that the detective had just mentioned. Clearly, the so-called 【Relic】 and 【Whisper】 were the truth that led to his death.

Although the oppressive and unknown truth made Xia De at a loss, looking at the corpse on the bed, unexpectedly, there was not much terror.

"If all this is someone playing a joke, that would be great."

He hoped at this moment that this was acting, but his reason knew it couldn't be acting.

Standing by the bed for a while, he bypassed the four-poster bed as quietly as possible and came to the window, carefully and calmly pulling open the heavy curtains. Immediately, the faint morning sunlight shone in through the gray fog on the street and the glass on the window.

This light seemed to temporarily dispel the unease in his heart.

"Is it morning now?"

Because of the heavy fabric curtains, he had thought it was night.

Bang, bang, bang~

The sound of knocking on the door suddenly rang out at this time, which startled Xia De. He subconsciously let go of the curtains, but immediately gripped them and pulled them completely open. Squinting his eyes to look out the window, outside this window was the street. He had no time to examine the strange scenery of the steam era in the fog; first, he looked down to confirm that the person knocking was the undertaker, and he could see the carriage pulling the corpse. Only then did he turn to open the door.

"Being able to accurately know one's own time of death, that's why the undertaker could arrive so precisely."

He said in his heart and pushed open the bedroom door. Outside was the living room, which also had gas pipes suspected to be from the steam era clinging to the wall, and handmade solid wood furniture and various piled-up alphabetic books and documents scattered everywhere.

The small blackboard hanging on the wall, the very formal coffee table and fabric sofa combination, also looked very much like the style of a detective agency.

The living room didn't have the curtains drawn, allowing the dim morning light in the fog to shine in, the light shining obliquely on the floor in front of Xia De's feet.

In the light, floating dust was drifting quietly, like strange tiny creatures swimming. This sense of reality made Xia De feel a bit creepy.

Opening the cold bolt and anti-theft chain of the room door, directly opposite was the dark staircase rotating downwards, and there was another door next door, which meant that there were two residences on this floor, somewhat like the apartment building in Sherlock Holmes novels.

Not finding a light, he could only spiral downwards in the dark and oppressive staircase, his heart seeming to tremble wildly with every step. In the dark environment, it made Xia De, whose thinking was too scattered, feel that some terrifying existence was peeping at him.

From the second floor to the first floor, the staircase led directly to the foyer. On one side of the foyer, the passage connecting to the first floor was completely sealed off by wooden boards, as if it were a sealed coffin, making only the foyer available on the entire first floor.

This scene made the outsider, who was already a bit nervous, even more confused:

"Why seal off the first floor? What exactly is going on here?"

He passed the shoe cabinet, lifted the fallen umbrella, and glanced at the gas lamp on the wall above the shoe cabinet. After carefully turning it on, the light made his heart become steady.

Taking a deep breath, he opened the door.

A silent old man wearing a black coat stood at the door, with a badge of overlapping leaves hanging on his chest, and behind him was the gloomy sky and the choking fog. The old man looked up at Xia De, his voice low as if leaves were scraping against the cold, wet ground:

"Shade Hamilton?"

The language he used was consistent with the dead detective, both being the so-called Delarion language.

"Yes."

Xia De nodded somewhat reservedly, signaling the numb-looking old man to follow him upstairs.

So the old man greeted the decadent middle-aged man behind him who was soothing the horses, the latter having a gloomy face, like the current weather.

The three of them walked up the stairs together. Xia De didn't know what to say, so he silently led them to the bedroom of the room with the "No. 1" doorplate on the second floor.

Almost no one spoke during the whole process. The old man and the middle-aged man both had the smell of a corpse. They first put on gloves, confirmed that the detective's corpse on the bed was truly dead, and then handed Xia De a document that needed his signature.

That was a confirmation document confirming that the corpse was handed over to the City Public Cemetery Management Office for processing, and below it were the dual official seals of the City Public Cemetery Management Office and the City Funeral Committee. At the very bottom was a prayer for the deceased, and the translated meaning made the living Xia De very uncomfortable.

The old man and the middle-aged man checked the situation of the corpse, and Xia De sat at the desk in the bedroom and picked up the cold fountain pen.

His head was a bit chaotic now, but he could also realize that he could understand it when hearing it and understand it when seeing it, but he couldn't write it. Fortunately, the knowledge he had just accepted, besides the ability to speak, also had the ability to write. Translating the name into the "Human Northern Common Language, Delarion Language" with similar pronunciation, he intended to sign his name.

On the cold paper, the content was not worth noting; it was probably just confirming the handover of the corpse and that the money for the funeral had been settled.

"But judging from the other signature on the document belonging to the Committee Secretariat, the names in this world are very similar to the West in the previous life, divided into three parts. Formal documents must add a middle name. The first name is 'Shade', the surname can follow 'Hamilton', but the middle name..."

The chaotic and uneasy outsider didn't know for the time being whether that dead Mr. Hamilton had taken a middle name for the original owner of the body. But now was not the time to rummage through the room; he had to immediately think of a name to deal with it for the time being.

【Suellen.】

The whispering voice sounded in his mind again, and the whispering sound made Xia De almost jump up. The voice gave a word, and this word existed in both the ancient language used by the woman and the Northern Kingdom Common Language used by the detective, and its meaning was 【Silver Moon】.

"I can use this as my middle name, but you have to explain."

Xia De tried to communicate again, feeling exceptionally nervous in his heart, and the woman's whispering voice really sounded:

【This is fate, outsider; the silver moon is your fate. When you collect the four elements and push open the door of the supernatural, looking at this terrifying world, the meaning will naturally appear.】

Frowning, Xia De suppressed the panic in his heart, thought for a moment, and signed his name forcefully:

Shade·Suellen·Hamilton.

The undertaker didn't ask Xia De for a death certificate or a cause of death report, and didn't mean to notify the police for an autopsy. It was as if the detective's death was as ordinary as the departure of a stray dog on the street.

After retrieving the "Corpse Handover Permission Commission" from Xia De, he gave him a receipt with the location of the grave, and only then did he silently move away the corpse of Mr. Hamilton, who was wearing pajamas.

Xia De sent them to the door downstairs; he didn't go out himself. Watching the corpse being placed into the narrow coffin in the carriage, the coffin was covered with brown fabric, as if stained with blood.

The middle-aged man drove the carriage, carrying the coffin and the old man, deep into the thick fog in the distance of the street.

"Alright then, goodbye, Mr. Sparrow Hamilton."

Thinking silently in his heart, he closed the door. Xia De stood in the dim light of the foyer for a while, then walked back upstairs along the dim staircase that terrified him. The outsider's footsteps were a bit heavy, but with no one else around, there was an inexplicable sense of relief in his nervousness:

"Simpler than I thought. Didn't ask for the cause of death of Mr. Hamilton, didn't even care if I was really Shade Hamilton, didn't even want a tip for moving the corpse... Detective Hamilton really had already arranged everything."

The corpse left here with many secrets, leaving Xia De, the despicable outsider who had occupied someone else's body, with countless mysteries. He actually still had many questions he wanted to ask Mr. Hamilton, and countless doubts waiting to be answered.

But the dead cannot return to life; he had to accept the fact of the other party's death and try hard to gain a foothold in this world that looked exceptionally wrong.

The only good news was that the house on the second floor that used to belong to Mr. Sparrow Hamilton now belonged to Xia De. He had become a homeowner in this other world that looked like the mid-19th-century Victorian era.

The first floor was sealed off with wooden boards, the "No. 2" room next door on the second floor was locked from the outside, and the staircase leading to the third floor was completely broken. Therefore, in this empty house, only Xia De was left at this moment.

He returned to the room with the doorplate "1" on the second floor, carefully checked every corner of the study, living room, washroom, and bedroom with the lights off, and only after confirming that there was really no one in those shadows did he let out a long breath, sitting on the sofa in the living room, tilting his head slightly to look at the morning fog outside the window with a sense of relief.

Xia De finally had time to organize the current situation:

"I transmigrated and inherited a detective agency. The original owner of the body might have a problem with his head, was trained by the previous detective to help him complete a seemingly simple task after his death... Detective Sparrow Hamilton has secrets, this world has mysterious powers, the detective's death and the voice in my head both prove this point, and what I need is to gather the four elements. The detective's death has already made me touch 'Whisper'..."

Rubbing his face, although worried, the current situation was at least not bad. Although Mr. Sparrow Hamilton died suddenly, at least Xia De had a foothold in the brand-new world.

This was enough to support him in living on, exploring the secrets of this world, and perhaps finding a way home.

Xia De was not a person who was content with the status quo, but even less a person who complained about everything. Inexplicably leaving his hometown and coming here was certainly unfortunate; all he could do for the time being was to accept it, live well here, and attempt to live even better.

"By the way, go and see this world that possesses the supernatural, the mystery of the steam era, those rituals and spells... how could I be content with being ordinary?"

Xia De sighed in a low voice, and the woman's laughter sounded in his mind, as comfortable as a breeze blowing through a lavender field.