Chapter 3: The Funeral Procession

After finishing his final arrangements, the detective on the bed closed his eyes. Shade pursed his lips and waited for a moment before pulling his hand away, testing the man’s breath and pulse.

“Dead?”

He couldn’t believe the man had died so easily, and that it had truly taken almost exactly ten minutes.

Before he could react further, a black light suddenly flashed across the corpse’s face. Shade felt a sudden tightening in his chest, and a sense of extreme terror instantly engulfed him.

But by the time he regained his senses, the black light had dissipated into the air and vanished.

As the light disappeared from the body, the gaunt corpse, which had looked as if it had starved to death, began to fill out at a speed visible to the naked eye, as if someone were inflating it from within, until it became a normal-looking corpse.

“How is this considered normal? What exactly is going on here?”

In the silence of the room, Shade looked around with some unease—not the unease of being alone in a room with a corpse, but the unease of being in an unfamiliar environment. This world was not the world he had known; he had already caught a glimpse of the truth of a world filled with mystery and danger.

The woman’s voice in his mind sounded again, as if reminding Shade that this was not a “person”

【You have come into contact with a ‘Whisper’.】

“What contact? What whisper? Can you explain in more detail?”

But the voice offered no answer.

A ‘Whisper’ was one of the “four elements of mystery” the detective had just mentioned. Clearly, the so-called [Relics] and [Whispers] were the truth behind his death.

Although the oppressive and unknown truth left Shade at a loss, looking at the corpse on the bed, he was unexpectedly not overly terrified.

“If this were all just someone’s prank, that would be great.”

He hoped at this moment that it was all just acting, but his reason told him it couldn’t be.

He stood by the bed for a while in silence, then carefully and calmly bypassed the four-poster bed to reach the window. He cautiously pulled back the heavy curtains, and immediately, the faint morning sunlight shone in through the gray fog on the street and the glass of the window.

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

“It’s morning?”

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, startling Shade. He subconsciously let go of the curtains, but immediately gripped them again and pulled them fully open. Squinting at the window, he saw the street outside. He had no time to examine the strange scenery of the steam-powered era in the fog; he looked down first to confirm that the person knocking was the undertaker. Seeing the carriage for transporting corpses, he turned to open the door.

“He knew his time of death accurately, which is why the undertaker could arrive so precisely.”

He thought to himself as he pushed open the bedroom door. Outside was the living room, which also featured gas pipes—suspected to be from the steam era—climbing along the walls, along with hand-polished solid wood furniture and various stacks of books and documents in alphabetic script scattered everywhere.

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

The curtains in the living room were not drawn, allowing the dim morning light in the fog to shine in, casting a slanted beam across the floor at Shade’s feet.

In the light, dust motes floated quietly, like eerie, tiny organisms swimming. This sense of reality made Shade’s skin crawl.

He opened the cold bolt and security chain of the front door. Directly opposite was a dark staircase spiraling downward, and there was another door next to it, meaning there were two residences on this floor, much like an apartment building in a Sherlock Holmes novel.

Unable to find a light, he could only spiral down the dark, oppressive staircase, his heart pounding wildly with every step. In the dark environment, Shade’s overactive imagination made him feel as if some terrifying existence was watching him.

From the second floor to the first, the staircase led directly to the foyer. On one side of the foyer, the passage to the rest of the first floor was completely sealed off with wooden boards, as if it were a sealed coffin, leaving only the foyer accessible on the ground floor.

This sight left the already nervous outlander even more confused

“Why seal off the first floor? What on earth is going on here?”

He passed the shoe cabinet, straightened a fallen umbrella, and glanced at the gas lamp on the wall above the cabinet. After carefully turning it on, the light helped his heart settle.

Taking a deep breath, he opened the front door.

A silent old man in a black coat stood at the door, wearing a badge with overlapping leaves on his chest, with the gloomy sky and choking fog behind him. The old man looked up at Shade, his voice as low as leaves scraping against a cold, wet ground

“Shade Hamilton?”

The language he used was the same as the dead detective’s—the so-called Derarian language.

“Yes.”

Shade nodded stiffly, signaling for the numb-looking old man to follow him upstairs.

The old man beckoned to the dejected middle-aged man behind him who was calming the horses. The latter’s expression was as gloomy as the weather.

The three of them walked up the stairs together. Shade didn’t know what to say, so he silently led them to the bedroom of the room marked “No. 1” on the second floor.

Throughout the process, almost no one spoke. Both the old man and the middle-aged man smelled of corpses. They first put on gloves, confirmed that the detective on the bed was indeed dead, and then handed Shade a document that required his signature.

It was a confirmation document stating that the body was to be handled by the City Public Cemetery Management Office, with the official seals of both the City Public Cemetery Management Office and the City Funeral Committee at the bottom. At the very bottom was a prayer for the deceased, the translated meaning of which made the living Shade feel very uncomfortable.

As the old man and the middle-aged man examined the body, Shade sat at the bedroom desk and picked up a cold fountain pen.

His mind was a bit chaotic, but he realized he could understand and read the language, though he couldn’t write it. Fortunately, the knowledge he had just received included not only the ability to speak but also the ability to write. Translating his name into the phonetically similar “Human Northern Common Language, Derarian,” he prepared to sign it.

On the cold paper, the content was unremarkable, mostly confirming the handover of the body and that the funeral expenses had been settled.

“But judging by the other signature on the document belonging to the Committee Secretariat, names in this world are very similar to the Western world of my previous life, divided into three parts. Formal documents require a middle name. The first name is ‘Shade,’ the surname can be ‘Hamilton,’ but the middle name...”

The confused and uneasy outlander didn’t know for the moment if the late Mr. Hamilton had given the original owner of the body a middle name. But now was not the time to rummage through the room; he had to come up with a name immediately to get by.

【Suellen.】

The whispering voice sounded in his mind again, and the whisper made Shade almost jump. The voice provided a word that existed in both the ancient language used by the woman and the Northern Kingdom Common Language used by the detective, meaning 【Silver Moon】.

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

Shade tried to communicate again, feeling exceptionally nervous. The woman’s whispering voice truly sounded again

【This is fate, outlander. The silver moon is your fate. When you gather the four elements, push open the door of the extraordinary, and gaze upon this terrifying world, the meaning will naturally reveal itself.】

Frowning, Shade suppressed his inner panic, thought for a moment, and firmly signed his name

Shade Suellen Hamilton.

The undertakers did not ask Shade for a death certificate or an autopsy report, nor did they show any intention of notifying the police for an examination. It was as if the detective’s death was as common as the passing of a stray dog on the street.

After retrieving the “Body Handover Authorization Form” from Shade, they gave him a receipt with the location of the grave, and then silently carried away Mr. Hamilton’s corpse, which was still in its pajamas.

Shade saw them off to the door downstairs, though he did not step outside himself. He watched as the body was placed into a narrow coffin inside the carriage, the coffin lined with brown fabric that looked 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.

“Well then, goodbye, Mr. Sparrow Hamilton.”

Thinking this silently to himself, he closed the door. Shade stood for a while in the dim light of the foyer before heading back up the staircase that filled him with dread. The outlander’s footsteps were heavy, but with no one else around, he felt an inexplicable sense of relief amidst the tension

“Simpler than I thought. They didn’t ask about Mr. Hamilton’s cause of death, didn’t even care if I was really Shade Hamilton, and didn’t even ask for a tip for moving the body... Detective Hamilton really had everything arranged.”

The corpse had left with many secrets, leaving Shade, the despicable outlander who had taken over someone else’s body, with countless mysteries. He actually had many questions he wanted to ask Mr. Hamilton, and countless doubts waiting to be answered.

But the dead could not return to life; he had to accept the fact of the man’s death and strive to gain a foothold in this world that seemed exceptionally wrong.

The only good news was that the house on the second floor, which had belonged to Mr. Sparrow Hamilton, now belonged to Shade. In an instant, he had become a homeowner in this strange world that resembled the mid-19th-century Victorian era.

The first floor was boarded up, the room next door, “No. 2,” was locked from the outside, and the staircase leading to the third floor was completely broken. Therefore, in this empty house, Shade was the only one left.

He returned to the room marked “No. 1” on the second floor, carefully checked every corner of the dark study, living room, bathroom, and bedroom, and only after confirming that there was truly no one in the shadows did he let out a long sigh. He sat on the living room sofa, tilting his head slightly to look at the morning fog outside the window with a sense of relief.

Shade finally had time to sort out his current situation

“I’ve transmigrated and inherited a detective agency. The original owner of the body might have had a problem with his head, was trained by the previous detective, and helped him complete a seemingly simple task after his death... Detective Sparrow Hamilton had secrets, this world possesses mysterious powers, and the detective’s death and the voice in my head both prove this. What I need is to gather the four elements, and the detective’s death has already brought me into contact with a ‘Whisper’...”

He rubbed his face. Although worried, the current situation was at least not bad. Even though Mr. Sparrow Hamilton had died suddenly, at least Shade had a foothold in this brand-new world.

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

Shade was not the type to just drift along, but he was even less the type to complain about everything. It was certainly unfortunate to have inexplicably left his homeland to come here, but for now, all he could do was accept it, live well here, and attempt to live even better.

“By the way, I’ll go see this world that possesses the extraordinary. How could the mysteries of the steam era, those secret rituals and spells, be content with being ordinary?”

Shade whispered to himself, and the woman’s laughter echoed in his mind, as pleasant as a breeze blowing through a field of lavender.

(End of chapter)