"Open up! Open the door!"

The violent pounding shattered the silence of the district. A few muffled curses drifted out from the narrow alley, then quickly vanished into the deep night.

"W-who is it...?"

Only after the knocking had gone on for quite a while did a hoarse old voice finally answer.

"Security force. Routine inspection!"

"Security force? Didn’t you just inspect last week? Why are you checking again... and this late too..."

The battered old door was pushed open with difficulty by a withered hand. Rusted from lack of maintenance, the metal latch gave off a sharp scraping squeal that, in the stillness of the night, was even more irritating than the pounding had been.

Fortunately, the old man was obviously used to dealing with this sort of thing. He braced his foot hard against the lower edge of the door, and the awful noise instantly improved into something more bearable.

"Security force... are you really the security force? I can’t see very well at night. Do you have identification?"

The old man stayed pressed tightly behind the door and did not open it all the way. The rusted blast chain formed a final line of defense as he asked warily.

"You old bastard, does anyone in Belrand still dare impersonate the security force these days?"

The middle-aged man in front cursed, but he still did not force open the door—which for him would have collapsed at a touch—nor snap the chain, which would have broken with a tug. Instead, he turned and took a lantern from his companion. Using its light, he showed the old man both his badge and his uniform.

"See it now? Security force. I’m Karl Yelen, the officer responsible for this area, and this is my assistant..."

"Oh, Officer Karl, please come in, please come in."

The old man widened his cloudy eyes and squinted hard at the badge. Only after seeing the bright red seal stamped across it did he finally relax and hurriedly invite the two inside with great respect.

"My sincerest apologies. I didn’t mean any offense. I just didn’t expect you to be inspecting this late. I thought it was some gang of thugs again..."

"I already told you, nobody dares pretend to be the security force now."

Karl sized up the stooped, frail old man before him and let out a sigh. 𝐟𝚛𝕖𝚎𝕨𝗲𝐛𝚗𝐨𝐯𝐞𝕝.𝐜𝗼𝗺

"I don’t want to be disturbing people this late either, but we’re hunting a few suspects, so it can’t be helped. There were traces of a suspect on this street before, so this is now a priority search zone."

"S-suspect?"

The old man jumped. "W-will they kill people?"

"Who knows. From what I’ve heard, they’re bad news."

Karl shook his head and stepped into the low-ceilinged house.

At once, a strange smell drilled into his nose and sharply irritated his nerves.

The odor was faint, but it smelled like excrement mixed with something rotting. Karl’s expression changed only slightly before returning to normal. But the assistant behind him, still a fledgling, lacked that level of composure. He gagged and nearly vomited.

"You need to get used to it. This is already the easiest thing you’ll be dealing with tonight. A few of the places we’re heading next are packed with junkies. Those people have fried their nerves with illegal drugs, and most of them are already incontinent. Some are even too weak to stand."

The fledgling’s face changed instantly, as if Karl’s description had already painted the vivid scene in his mind.

Karl patted him on the shoulder and comforted him with a distinctly malicious sort of sympathy, privately pleased that someone else was finally walking the same road he once had.

Then again, fledglings these days were lucky. Back when Karl himself had still been a fledgling, the places where junkies clustered together had contained a lot more than just excrement and the dregs of society...

All he could say was that His Majesty truly was brilliant and ruthless. After Belrand had gone through several purges—and after the sewers had run red for a very long time—the city had, in the end, become much cleaner.

Karl opened the registry in his hand and got down to business.

"Old Zorde... you’re Old Zorde, right?"

"Yes, I’m Old Zorde, I’m Old Zorde."

The old man nodded vigorously.

"Zorde was the name my uncle gave me. That was over forty years ago. And for the last ten years everyone’s called me Old Zorde, so that’s who I am."

"Forty years..."

Karl glanced at the old man, whose face held enough wrinkles to rival tree bark. Judging from his appearance alone, it was hard to imagine he was only in his forties.

But in this part of the city—chaotic even by the standards of Belrand’s Lower District—that was perfectly normal. Most people here had either been smuggled in from elsewhere or trafficked in by gangs years ago. They had no legal identity and no real skills to support themselves, so the only work available to them was illegal labor in black factories. During the harshest period, some of them had even had to work a full sixteen hours a day.

The steam boilers in those black factories had to be cooled periodically to prevent the temperature from getting too high. But the workers had to keep going nonstop all day, wringing their lives dry in workshops as hot as steamers.

"Family name?"

"I don’t have one."

"Current occupation?"

"Sewer clearing. I clear sewers now."

"Mm. Good. The information matches."

Karl paced through the cramped, narrow room and ◆ Nоvеlіgһt ◆ (Only on Nоvеlіgһt) noticed a thin little boy cautiously poking his head out from behind a hanging curtain that divided off part of the space, silently watching them.

"You also have a son."

"Yes. A son."

Old Zorde grinned and hurried to tug the curtain shut, pushing the little boy back behind it.

"He’s my only son. I spoil him too much sometimes. Please forgive me, Officer... forgive me..."

As he spoke, a trace of doting tenderness appeared on Old Zorde’s wrinkled face. It was as if nothing else in the world mattered to him at all, and only that son was his treasure.

"You don’t keep a cat, do you?" Karl nodded and continued.

"N-no. I can barely keep people alive. Where would I get the room to keep a cat?"

"Mm... nothing wrong here."

Karl quickly scanned the basic information that had already been recorded for Old Zorde and, after confirming there were no errors, was about to end the inspection—

"Hm? Wait."

But when he turned to the next page of the registry, Karl’s expression sharpened.

"It says here you should also have a wife. Where is she?"

"She... she..."

Old Zorde suddenly grew tense, so flustered he could barely speak.

"What are you stammering for? What is there to hide about something like that?"

"She... she’s sick. She’s lying in the back room..." Old Zorde’s eyes darted, then he forced out a fawning smile. "She’s ill, so it isn’t good for her to come out and greet the two officers."

"Sick?"

Karl immediately caught the old man’s unease and frowned. "Which back room? I’ll take a look."

"Th-that wouldn’t be good."

Old Zorde waved his hands in panic. "If the illness infects the two officers... h-how could I bear that responsibility?"

"If it were contagious, you and your son would’ve caught it already. Why would it wait for me?"

Karl’s face hardened. "Take me to her. Now."

"Officer, I really can’t take responsibility for—"

"If you keep babbling, I’ll make damn sure you can’t bear the responsibility!"

Karl took the handcuffs hanging at his waist and gave them a shake right in front of Old Zorde.

"A-all right..."

Old Zorde shuddered in fright. Though deeply unwilling, he did not dare offend the authority of an officer—already a figure beyond measure in his eyes—and could only lead Karl inward on trembling legs.

After pushing aside a pile of junk that had obviously been deliberately stacked to hide the entrance, Karl bent over and squeezed into a narrow room that stood barely more than half his own height.

The nauseating smell instantly became more distinct. This seemed to be the source of the stench.

Karl swept his eyes around. There was no window in the room. Aside from piles of clutter, there was only one bed in the center.

The bed itself was ordinary enough, nothing strange about it.

But the person lying on it... had wrapped themself tightly in a ragged blanket, with not even their head exposed.

A glint flashed through Karl’s eyes.

Someone who was sick needed fresh air. True, in a crowded neighborhood like this, there was no such thing as good air quality to begin with, but if a person were truly gravely ill, did they really need to be shut up in a cramped place like this?

On the other hand, if he looked at it from a different angle, if someone were trying to hide a person here, then given how concealed this room was...

Thinking that, Karl immediately gave the fledgling a hand signal to guard the exit. He himself took hold of the weapon at his waist, silently stepped around the clutter, bent low, and crept toward the figure on the bed.

"O-officer, she really will infect you, she really will..."

Old Zorde kept babbling, but no one paid him any mind anymore. Karl slowly raised his free hand toward the ragged blanket.

There was no movement from under the blanket at all. It seemed as if the person beneath it had not even noticed his approach. But the more still it was, the more cautious Karl became.

Ignoring the growing stench, he took a deep breath, tensed every muscle in his body to the limit, grabbed the blanket, and carefully lifted one corner...

"H-how is it?"

It was the fledgling’s first time facing a situation like this, and he was so tense he could barely stand it. He gripped his weapon tightly as well, eyes fixed dead on Old Zorde. If anything happened on Karl’s side, he would pounce immediately and arrest the old man.

But he waited a long time without hearing any order from Karl.

Karl himself seemed to have turned into a statue, frozen motionless and silent.

The silence stretched on for who knew how long before Karl finally let out a sigh.

"It’s fine."

"Huh?"

"There’s no problem. Put it away."

The fledgling looked utterly bewildered, but he still obeyed and put his weapon away. Karl straightened up and silently pulled the blanket back into place.

There was no dangerous person hidden beneath it, just as he had suspected.

It really was Old Zorde’s wife.

But Old Zorde had also lied. His wife was not sick.

Or rather, at this moment she was not sick.

—She was dead.

And had been for a long time.

What lay on that bed was only a gradually rotting corpse.

"Why?"

Karl stepped away from the bed and turned to look Old Zorde in the eye.

"Why didn’t you bury her?"

"B-because graves in Belrand are expensive... I didn’t have the money to buy one."

Old Zorde struggled for words for a long while, and in the end could only bare a strange smile that looked half like laughter and half like crying.

"I just thought... since this was where she lived anyway, I might as well bury her here. That way it could count as her coffin too... Before she died, she said the same thing. The child has to go to school. He has to learn to read. We can’t spend extra money."

"You can stand keeping her here?"

"What’s there not to stand?"

Old Zorde grinned.

"I clear sewers. Belrand’s sewers. They’ve got everything in them. Smells far worse than this."

Karl said nothing more.

He bent over and left that narrow room, which felt as cramped as a coffin. After a moment’s thought, he reached into his coat, pulled out several large-denomination banknotes, and slapped them into Old Zorde’s callused palm.

"Take this. Buy your wife an urn. The Church only charges twenty Aimirs for cremation. Even if you can’t afford a grave, she should at least have someplace better to stay than this."

"Th-this... this... how could I..."

Old Zorde, suddenly handed such large bills by Karl, was so overcome he could barely speak coherently.

"That’s so much money. I... I can’t pay it back..."

"I’m not asking you to."

Karl kept a stern face.

"Call it the cost of making you deal with the body. If you keep leaving it like this and I don’t arrest you for abandoning and desecrating a corpse, then the one who gets punished will be me."

"Th-thank you so much..."

Old Zorde was almost ready to kneel before Karl.

"Officer, thank you so much..."

"All right. Handle it as soon as possible. Even if you can bear it, what about your child? At his age, can he really take something like this?"

Karl turned and just happened to see the little boy peeking at him again.

The innocence that ought to have filled the eyes of a child that age was completely absent from them. All that remained was the numb deadness of a puppet.

"Sigh."

Karl let out another sigh.

"Let’s go. There’s another house that still needs checking."

"Oh... y-yes!"

Still trying hard to understand what had just happened, the fledgling answered and followed Karl out of the house.

Not long after, the same pounding sounded at the neighboring house.

"Open up. Routine inspection!"

...

...

Old Zorde crept to the window, lifted a corner of it, and watched Karl take his assistant out of the neighbor’s house before heading deeper into the alley.

That inspection had not lasted long, because Old Zorde knew the neighbor was only a gambling addict living alone, already so completely ruined that a single glance was enough to take in the whole house.

Not like this place.

This place held so many things hidden away.

"That was close."

The little boy, who had remained silent all this time, suddenly spoke.

"We almost got found out."

As soon as he said that, the little boy abruptly collapsed to the floor, all sound and motion leaving him.

Old Zorde showed no surprise. He only limped over, picked up his son, and carried him back to the bed that belonged to him.

The hanging curtain divided off a section of the already cramped room. Inside, the space was square and neat. The pale-skinned boy lay atop black cloth, making it look as though this place were...

a coffin.

Creak... creak...

On the other side, the bed beneath Old Zorde’s wife suddenly shifted. A supple figure with the flexibility of a cat stretched itself and crawled out from underneath.

"I take back what I said before. Belrand’s bureaucratic hounds are at least somewhat efficient."

Dennis came to the window too, his face full of mockery as he watched the direction Karl had gone.

"At least they’re a lot more efficient than those idiots in the Kingdom. No wonder even the Third Seat had no confidence in the Kingdom."

But that was a good thing, wasn’t it?

If the Kingdom had truly been as powerful as it imagined itself to be, how would the Salvation Society ever have found room to intervene?

The only problem was that escaping Belrand this time would become much more difficult.

Still, fortunately, everything remained under his control.

"Holy envoy..."

By the time the thought crossed his mind, Old Zorde had already come over and dropped to his knees before Dennis.

"I did exactly as you told me. My wife... can she really board the Ark of Cleansing and go to the new world?"

"Of course."

Dennis bent down with a smile.

"Didn’t you already see the scene foretold by the Holy Lord? The Ark of Cleansing cutting across the sky, the old world collapsing amid flames and storms, all sinners dying...

"Only the spotless who have cleansed away their sins can board the Ark of Cleansing and, under the Holy Lord’s guidance, reach the new world. And because of your efforts, your wife has already cleansed away her sins."

"I saw it, I saw it!"

It was as if blazing fire had already ignited in Old Zorde’s eyes, and on that great ship shining with endless radiance, his wife was smiling and waving to him.

No longer suffering the hardships of the human world, but heading instead for a new world filled with nothing but beauty...

Tears streamed down Old Zorde’s face.

"Th-then... what about my son?"

"Your son?"

Dennis glanced at the little boy, who had also been dead for some time now after catching the disease from his mother, and said meaningfully,

"That depends on how well you perform."

"I-I’ll atone for him, I’ll atone for him!"

Old Zorde raised up a battered iron box in both hands. Inside it was all his savings, along with the bills Karl had just given him.

If one had not seen it with one’s own eyes, it would have been hard to imagine that a man who had once worked in a black factory and now made his living clearing sewers had actually managed to save up a fair amount.

"Very good."

Dennis took the money, the corners of his lips curling upward.

"The Holy Lord has already seen your sincerity. He will surely bestow endless glory upon your son and cleanse away his sins..."