Perhaps realizing that her Saintess persona had taken a bit of a hit, Sherry took a deep breath and quickly composed herself.

No matter how much of a jerk Carlisle was, she had to remain graceful at all times.

The old man approaching from a distance wasn’t a mentor at all. He was Harrison, the dean of Saint Perode Academy.

Harrison was somewhere over three hundred years old. His face was so wrinkled you could’ve crushed a fly between the folds. His eyes had once been fairly large, but now half of each was hidden behind the creased skin. The clarity in his pupils was gone, replaced by a murkiness that was hard to describe.

“Dean Harrison!”

Sherry waved to him, all her earlier anger gone without a trace.

Back when she was a student at the academy, Harrison had often praised her for her impressive spellcraft. That was why she’d always enjoyed chatting with him.

He’d praise her after just a couple of sentences, and back then, it had nearly sent her soaring with pride.

“Liya, you’re finally here.” The dean’s old face broke into a smile when he saw Sherry. His terrible wrinkles bunched up around his raised mouth, writhing like maggots.

His gaze lingered on Sherry for only a moment before shifting to Carlisle.

“And you are?”

Carlisle took off his hood, placed a fist against his chest, and performed the salute used by the Knights of the Round Table. “Carlisle. A Knight of the Round Table, here at Morse’s request to investigate the murder.”

Harrison nodded without surprise. After a few brief pleasantries, he led Sherry and Carlisle to the scene of the murder.

At the academy, mentors usually had residences of their own. This particular murder had taken place in the home of Mentor Roman.

“The deceased was named Roman Woodlow. He was a mentor at the academy, and he was found dead at home seven days ago. He lived alone, had no parents, and was unmarried.” As they walked, Harrison filled them in on the deceased’s life.

Mentors often passed by Roman’s residence. They were there to keep students from wandering into the area by mistake.

The moment Sherry stepped inside Roman’s residence, the stench of corpses hit her. She covered her nose and looked toward the shadowy second floor.

The smell was coming from up there.

Honestly, she really didn’t want to go upstairs. Just thinking that something unclean might be lurking there made her calves tingle.

She couldn’t even handle the Headless Shadow. What if there was some other abomination up there…

Wait. Could they end up fighting each other first?

The absurd thought flashed through Sherry’s mind. She shook her head, then reluctantly followed Carlisle toward the second floor, inching her way up.

The stench of decay came from a study on the second floor. Sherry followed them inside, but one look was enough to make her cover her mouth with both hands and turn away.

The sight nearly made her throw up everything she’d eaten that morning.

The corpse’s soft tissues had long since rotted away. His face could no longer be called a face; it looked more like a skull wearing a layer of decaying human skin. Where his eyes should have been were two enormous, pitch-black hollows, staring at everyone who looked his way like the depths of an Abyss.

His torso was in much the same condition as his head: shriveled and incomplete, his skin a sickly white like moonlight spilling down at night. It sent a chill through anyone who saw it. No flies buzzed around the corpse. For some reason, not a single scavenger was anywhere to be seen.

She was a Saintess who’d grown up in Ayideen. When had she ever seen a corpse that revolting? Even though she’d killed people, they’d still been fresh corpses—not enough to make her feel sick.

Even tentacle monsters were a hundred times cuter than this.

“How long has he been dead?” Carlisle crouched down and asked calmly.

He’d contained plenty of bizarre things, and had long since grown used to all kinds of strange, disgusting corpses. Roman’s body seemed fairly normal to him, actually. He’d seen plenty that were much harder to stomach.

Harrison answered, “Seven days. He was still teaching his students the day before he was found dead.”

“This doesn’t look like a body that’s been dead for only seven days.” Judging by how badly the corpse had decayed, Carlisle figured Roman had been dead far longer.

“That’s right. So we concluded that he came into contact with something unclean before he died.”

“Hmm… In that case, was he already dead while teaching his students, or did his body decay faster after he died?” Carlisle murmured, rubbing his chin.

Sherry stood outside the door, still struggling to hold back the urge to vomit.

Too absorbed in his investigation, Carlisle didn’t notice anything amiss with Liya. He reached into a bulging pocket on Roman’s corpse and pulled out a rough, round stone.

“What’s this?”

He couldn’t sense any power from it, and the Golden Sword Scepter didn’t react at all. The thing seemed to be nothing more than an ordinary stone.

He turned it over in his hand a couple of times, then tossed it into his ring.

After studying the corpse for a little longer, he suddenly asked, “Who did he come into contact with a month ago?”

Who Roman had been in contact with? That was quite a list.

The mentors standing beside Harrison exchanged glances. At last, a middle-aged man with brown hair stepped forward. “A month ago? He’d only been in contact with his students and a few of the other mentors.”

“Only students and mentors?” Carlisle dusted off his hands and straightened up. He carefully surveyed the study, then said, “There’s nothing else here worth collecting. You can take care of the body.”

His words took everyone by surprise.

“Have you figured something out?”

Carlisle had reached a conclusion so quickly that it caught Sherry off guard. Still, she was glad. When it came to strange cases like this, she actually hoped the Knight of the Round Table would show what he could do.

The sooner they solved the murder, the better. She’d rather reveal her identity in front of Carlisle than deal with anything unclean.

“Not a clue.”

Carlisle crushed her hopes without the slightest mercy.

“We’ve basically got nothing. Roman left no notes, and a corpse alone can’t tell us much.” Carlisle sighed and pressed two fingers to his temples. Then, for some reason, he seemed to perk right back up. “But now that we know who he was in contact with, we can start by investigating them.”

“Anyone who’s come into contact with something like that will eventually slip up, no matter how well they hide it.” His eyes narrowed, and his dangerous tone made one of the mentors beside Harrison take an unconscious step backward.

Only after learning that Roman’s body could be dealt with did Dean Harrison order several mentors to collect it and prepare to cremate it in the furnace.

When it came to dealing with strange incidents like this, even after living for more than three hundred years, Harrison still chose to follow the Knights of the Round Table’s advice—even when the knight in question was young.

Perhaps it was that very caution that had kept him alive for so long in such an absurd world.

As they left the study, Carlisle came up behind Sherry and gave her a pat. Her face was still a little pale.

“Liya, you can head back on your own for now.”

“Hm? What about you?”

“Me? I’m going to be a student at the academy for a while.”