Bro, I'm not an Undead!

"What happened to him?! He was alright when we came back hours ago!"

"I have no idea, my lady! He suddenly started vomiting and he just... It was sudden."

"What did you feed him?!"

"Nothing, nothing! I swear! I would never poison him! <Sniff>! I don't think it's anything he ate. He just..."

A sombre atmosphere overwhelmed the household.

The death of a normal person had a sense of mundaneness that gave it a more impactful punch.

Not facing defeat by the sword.

Not facing the veil by the maw of a Cluster beast nor by some magical phenomena that scrambled the body...

There wouldn't be any tales told about one's extraordinary exploits.

For this simple, rich home populated by six people – a man, a woman, their three children and a house maid – the loss of the father figure was a hard blow.

A teary woman was bombarding the maid with a plethora of questions and accusations. She assumed the worst had been brought about by this maid whom she had never trusted from the beginning.

There was no way her husband would die in such a ridiculous, pathetic way.

It had to be poison.

The children had been locked in a room to prevent them from witnessing the distorted and pained visage of their father. It was much too gruesome – the patches of vomit mixed with blood spotting the face and clothing.

The woman grabbed the trembling maid by the collar and bashed her against the wall!

"Tell me the truth! Speak! I swear I'll skin you alive myself if you don't admit it! What did you do?! What did you do?! What did you do?!" the woman screamed with a bitter expression on her face that showed the ache and agony of losing her better half.

Strength faded from her body after a few minutes as she slid down to the ground, as did the maid, both women weeping separately.

The children banged on the door while calling in loud voices for their mother but they received no response.

They would not understand the tragedy until some time later.

The wife of the man lying dead on his broad bed crawled up to him and embraced him as she wept.

Why?!

Why was this happening?

What had she done wrong?

Why did the Deities punish her and her husband so?

Her tears flowed without ceasing, her grip persisting with each passing second.

Yet, it was with this clawing of her hands over his flesh that she felt it...

Her husband's corpse shrunk quite a bit, a terrible cold that exceeded one she would expect from a corpse gushing through it and licking her skin!

The woman shuddered and drew back hastily.

Her husband's body had, as if robbed of muscle mass, reduced in size, its slightly muscular build shrivelling by a great margin.

The sorrow didn't allow the woman to see with clarity but she could feel something unnatural around her husband's dead body.

Yet she could not see it.

All she saw was the terror on his face, his pale skin and the Control Seal on his arm that expelled a light glow briefly before returning to its normal state.

***

Skullius exited the city on foot, meeting with the ever present queues of people waiting to enter the city for various reasons.

The Capital Knights and Capital Order Knights who exuded a dangerous presence walked along the various different lines for different kinds of distinguished and otherwise personn while keeping the order as usual.

"Even more people are here than when I entered the city for the first time," Skullius said while sensing the vast crowd with [Koten Machi].

It seemed like the hype around the Premium Age Royale was calling more people to Genhuis City as the EverSword Household seemingly hadn't erected a larger network to expand the dissemination of Control Seals for some reason.

Skullius' hypothesis was that Rearren was trying to minimise the vast suspicion already barrelling down on him because of this event while also avoiding encroaching in the territories close to the other Houses.

The Luman couldn't shake off the feeling that the EverSword House was actually running solo in this thing, without the help of the other Houses, contrary to Silrat's belief. Perhaps Rearren was afraid of giving them a reason to interfere.

Whatever was happening had many layers of danger folded into a cataclysmic food wrap.

"Hmmm," Skullius hummed to himself while walking away from the gate, the annoying sensation of the second sun that one could only see and feel when they entered Genhuis City no longer finding room to bother him.

With the feeling of being set loose also came something that piqued Skullius' interest.

There were close to three thousand people standing in line under the lax sunlight from the sky.

Along with their arrangement came the jumbled shadows stretching from under their feet, some interlocking in nasty ways.

'Could this be an easy, free harvest?' Skullius asked himself while glancing in vain at the Capital Order Knight walking on the other side of the queue he was walking past.

With his new attainments in mana manipulation, following the acquisition of [Greater Mana Crafter], Skullius could now activate skills in a more discreet manner when compared to before by controlling the flow of mana through his mana channels.

The usage of a technique among most experts outside of Assassins and Mages was usually felt pretty easily because while they could control their cores, the finer details following the flow in their mana channels was lost to them.

Skullius, because of [Greater Mana Crafter] and the hell he had to go through after losing his mana core understood it very well, however.

And this gave him a hefty advantage.

'Might as well start with the Task as planned,' Skullius thought as he activated [Basic Evil Sanction].

~~~

[Basic Evil Sanction (Special) | Lv.1]

Using the inherent darkness within, grab ahold of all material and representational darkness, pulling out what it hides and everything attached to it within yourself.

The stronger the skill grows, the more concepts can be drawn and shaped as the user wills.

Mana Requirements: ---

Duration: ---

Cooldown: ---

~~~

With the skill's activation, Skullius drew his focus on what was below the people's feet.

He could feel it.

Material darkness.

Unlike how he had dealt with the bandits before reaching Genhuis City, Skullius' usage of the skill now was different and essentially useless.

Absorbing shadows instead of absorbing the darkness he could see within people with Crude Vision, didn't give him much in the way of benefits.

At most, he could learn a person's name but things such a learning everything attached to the evil deeds they conducted, was not possible. He couldn't exercise that here so he resorted to taking shadows. His task didn't specify the types of 'pieces of darkness' anyway.

One by one, shadows dashed towards him from the ground with blinding speed that eclipsed what weak Advancement Stage experts could perceive!

It was a funny and epic sight to see. The Hybrid Luman didn't make any explicit moves other than walking, so he didn't look suspicious at all.

As [Basic Evil Sanction] stole the darkness, Skullius ensured that he skipped over some other sections in order to reduce the likelihood of suspicion. The issue though, was how the people would react to finding out they didn't have a shadow anymore.

The answer was... weird.

After absorbing a shadow, another shorter one grew after the real one had been stolen, a peculiar phenomenon that Skullius saw by using Crude Vision for a few seconds.

'I didn't think it would grow back,' the Hybrid Luman thought while waking quickly past the standing or sitting individuals. 'Honestly, I was prepared to make a run for it if anyone pointed to me about it.'

People, carriages, animals... Skullius didn't discriminate.

He could technically also steal colour but he restrained himself. That would be too conspicuous.

Naturally, Skullius couldn't walk through the many lines, taking his sweet time as it could cause problems. If [Basic Evil Sanction] had a wide range, he wouldn't be facing this problem but alas, this was his limit with this portion of his journey.

Still, as Skullius surmised before, the first portion of his Twelfth Task to absorb 1,000 pieces of darkness was the easy part as by the time he reached the end of the line, he had 600 collected pieces already!

He was already past the halfway point!

'Hehe. This makes me dread what the next Task will be though,' Skullius humoured this dark thought and went on his way.

This was comically easy!