Chapter 165 Lycanthropy

"You're quite brave."

Xia Nan studied the skinny, curly-haired girl in front of him, a strange look in his eyes.

Nym might be a famous city, but that was only in comparison to the small towns and villages surrounding it.

Its average citizen might be a little better off than the people back in Rivervale Town, which was constantly crawling with adventurers.

But it definitely couldn't compare to the peaceful modern society of his previous life.

Theft, robbery, kidnapping, and murder were all incredibly common.

Not to mention the bizarre supernatural powers in this world.

Walking skeletons, hags that would drag you out of your house in the dead of night to skin you alive...

If he had run into something like this in the middle of the night without his current strength, he never would have gone out to investigate. He would have just wrapped his blanket tighter around himself, buried his head, and pretended he hadn't heard a thing.

But the young woman in front of him, Harriet, was clearly an ordinary person. There was no chance she could let out a roar, bulge with muscles, and transform into a two-meter-tall Barbarian.

Ash Tree Alley obviously wasn't some wealthy district with constant guard patrols, and she lived alone.

Under these circumstances, she had actually dared to go out alone late at night to find the source of an obviously unnatural sound.

He didn't know whether to praise her courage or assume she was just tired of living.

"I'm not usually like this!"

Realizing the intense-looking adventurer on her sofa had misunderstood something, Harriet hurriedly waved her hands.

"I've lived alone for years since my parents died. I have basic situational awareness."

"Sometimes, if I wake up late, I'd rather go hungry for the whole night than step outside. I wait until dawn when there are more people around before going out for breakfast."

"But that night, I don't know why, I suddenly became so careless."

"Thinking back on it now, I'm still terrified."

Listening to her describe the experience, Xia Nan frowned slightly. He suspected some sort of mind-altering spell might have affected the girl.

At the same time, he grew a bit more curious about what had happened to Buck's family next door.

"You must have followed the guards into the house afterward, right?"

"What was it like inside?"

Harriet's expression instantly grew uneasy. As if recalling some horrifying scene, her body began to tremble.

"Dead. They were all dead."

"It looked like they had been attacked by a wild beast... severed hands, toes, arms, blood all over the floor."

"I'm sorry, I was too scared at the time. I only took one look before I backed out."

Xia Nan nodded in understanding. "So, including Buck, their entire family died that night?"

"No, Mr. Buck... might still be alive." Harriet shook her head. "I heard the constables say later that they didn't find his body in the house."

Then the situation was very simple.

There were only two possibilities:

1. Buck was still alive; 2. Buck was already dead.

Regarding the first, if Buck hadn't died that night, he was highly likely the murderer who had killed his own family, or there was a small chance he had been captured alive by the attacker for some reason.

As for the second, considering the girl mentioned his body hadn't been found in the house, he might have been taken away by the real killer.

But just as adventurers used the left ears of Goblins to claim bounties, if someone had really taken a bounty on Buck and acted on it, they would at most cut off his head for proof. There was no need to take the entire corpse.

Unless there was something special about Buck's corpse.

Clear thoughts flowed through his mind.

Xia Nan suddenly felt like he had a bit of a talent for being a detective. His reasoning was quite comprehensive.

"So... my quest is to find the killer?" he asked, waving the small slip of paper the Association had given him containing the address of this house.

"Yes," Harriet nodded.

"But shouldn't this be a matter for your West District constables?"

Xia Nan felt increasingly confused.

But just as the words left his mouth, a few extra thoughts popped into his mind.

In the eyes of the world, "adventurers" were usually seen as people who hunted monsters in dangerous forests and dungeons, living off the bounties they earned.

When Xia Nan first transmigrated to this world, he had thought the same.

But as he went further in this line of work, his initial thoughts gradually changed.

Take the "Glowgarlic Vine" gathering quest he had accepted during his transition period, the caravan escort quest where he met Jeff, or even the Spore Druid Bounty that had been posted on the Association's task wall for over half a year.

The things an "adventurer" could do were, to some extent, unrestricted.

As long as you had enough money to submit a commission to the Association, and the Association was willing to accept it and post it on the task board.

In theory, whether you lost a pet and wanted someone to find it, or you felt lonely late at night and desperately needed a strong, hot body to satisfy your desires, you could hire appropriately qualified adventurers in the form of a quest.

To say something blasphemous, as long as the pay was right and the Adventurers' Association wasn't worried about the trouble, even the gods sitting high up in their divine kingdom could have a bounty slapped on them and pinned to the Association's task wall.

Of course, whether anyone was willing to accept the quest was a different story.

With that in mind, him taking a quest to investigate a murder didn't seem too strange.

But...

"It takes more than half a month just to travel from Rivervale Town to Nym by carriage."

"If a crime happened, the bodies would already be rotting by the time anyone arrived, wouldn't they?"

"If it's a serial killer, that's enough time for them to kill a few more people."

"Considering the worst-case scenario, after twenty-odd days, I wouldn't even know if the attacker had already left Nym."

"Shouldn't this kind of case have been handed over to the local constables immediately?"

The more Xia Nan spoke, the more confused he felt.

Under his barrage of questions, the girl in front of him shrank back slightly.

"The constables did come, but they only took a quick look and left."

"It seems that because something happened with the City Lord recently, the constables in Nym are quite busy."

"I... I don't know..."

Hearing Harriet say this, Xia Nan finally figured it out.

So they just hadn't taken it seriously.

The girl herself wasn't the client; the quest had most likely come from Nym's officials.

The only reason the Association had left her address to provide quest information to visiting adventurers was because of her status as a neighbor and a witness to the event.

And just as she mentioned, from reading the newspapers and chatting with Jeff's family over the past two days, he had caught wind of some major events happening in Nym—mainly that the City Lord was gravely ill, causing a shakeup in the upper ranks.

Under these circumstances, with chaos spreading from the top down, the constables naturally had no mind to deal with a murder case, the likes of which happened hundreds of times a year.

Not to mention, the crime scene wasn't in a wealthy district.

At most, they had just used some official funds to symbolically commission the quest to the Adventurers' Association.

If someone took it, great. They weren't spending their own money anyway, and catching the killer would be a good thing for them, saving a lot of trouble.

If no one took the quest, it didn't matter.

Once the bounty period expired and the quest was taken down, they certainly wouldn't spend more money to renew it.

If anyone actually pressed the issue, they could just say they had tried their best.

With so many people coming and going in Nym every day, it was completely normal for a few necromancers or cultists to slip in.

If they had to meticulously investigate every single case, they wouldn't be able to handle it even if they hired hundreds more constables.

"But using this kind of commission as my Advancement Quest... isn't that a bit too sloppy?" Xia Nan muttered to himself.

Although there was no time limit and failing wouldn't incur a penalty, it would most likely just force him to swap to another quest to continue.

But after learning the details of the commission, he couldn't help but suspect: had the Association staff member that receptionist Molly mentioned assigned him the wrong quest? Or was it just a half-hearted assignment because they were short on time?

Or was he just supposed to go through the motions without putting in much effort, and once he reported the situation back in Rivervale Town, the quest would be considered complete?

Since he was already here, Xia Nan couldn't just do nothing and spend another half month scurrying back with his tail between his legs.

He only hoped the Association had already investigated the quest beforehand, ensuring it matched his strength and was actually possible to complete.

He had to bite the bullet and investigate.

"Let's go." Xia Nan sighed silently, swallowed his last mouthful of tea, and slowly stood up from the sofa. "Take me to take a look."

...

Compared to Harriet's two-story house, Buck's house next door didn't look much different from the outside in terms of overall architectural style, but standing at the door, one could clearly feel an aura of desolation.

In Xia Nan's words, it lacked "human vitality."

It had only been a little over a month since the night of the incident, yet green vines had already climbed up the edges of the wooden walls. Spiderwebs clung between the railings, and a thin layer of dust covered the outer windowsill.

He took the key the constables had left with Harriet and pushed the door open.

The first thing to hit him was a cold draft mixed with a faint stench of decay.

Shards of glass were scattered beneath the shattered back window, and the curtains swayed gently in the cold wind blowing in from outside. In the morning light, he could faintly see specks of dust floating in the air.

The interior layout remained exactly as it had been that night.

An overturned wooden table, shattered plates, a sofa with cotton stuffing bursting from its tears, a few mangled scraps of clothing...

And blood.

The floor, the inner walls, and even the ceiling overhead were stained with massive amounts of dried, dark brownish-red blood.

Just standing at the door and looking at these terrifying traces was enough to imagine the horrific scene that had unfolded that night.

"What about the bodies? Have they all been dealt with?" Xia Nan asked without turning his head as he walked into the house, his eyes scanning the surroundings.

"Yes, the constables had someone drag them all away the next day," the somewhat fearful female voice replied right behind him.

Without the low temperatures of an icehouse for preservation, a month was more than enough time for ordinary corpses to rot and stink. Naturally, they couldn't just be left in the house.

"They must have examined the bodies then. Did they find anything?"

"They said there were a lot of bite and tear marks from wild beasts."

"And then?"

"That's it..."

Xia Nan couldn't help but stop. Frowning slightly, he turned around to look at Harriet. "They should have been able to roughly determine the species and size of the beast from the wounds. Did they not do that?"

The only answer he received was silence.

"Right." Xia Nan felt a deep sense of helplessness.

It seemed he had still overestimated the professionalism of the constables in this world.

Oh, wait.

He had overestimated their conscience and work ethic.

Based on Xia Nan's understanding of this world's overall level of development, he believed the constables in Nym definitely possessed basic criminal investigation skills.

It was just that, while bogged down with important matters, they weren't necessarily willing to waste their time and energy on a family of ordinary commoners from the countryside.

He felt even more troubled.

Although he had read a few detective novels during his student days in his past life, he was ultimately just an ordinary office worker.

Right now, perhaps due to his enhanced physical stats, he had gained decent observational skills, but no relevant knowledge had magically appeared in his brain.

To give a simple example:

Xia Nan's deep, dark eyes could act like a magnifying glass, clearly seeing the tiny textures on the walls that had been soaked in blood, and the dried, coagulated bloodstains trapped within them.

However, unlike the detectives in novels, he couldn't reconstruct the scene of Buck's family being attacked based on the direction of the blood spatter and the volume of blood sprayed.

"It's so complicated, I don't even know where to begin."

Xia Nan still preferred more straightforward commissions.

Who to kill, where to kill them, and how much it paid.

Simple and clear.

Why make a quest so brain-racking?

"Did that constable mention any other information?" Xia Nan asked Harriet, who was following behind him, after wandering around the house for a bit without noticing anything.

But just as he spoke, before she had time to reply, he suddenly noticed something.

He stepped forward quickly and arrived at the broken window.

On the slightly caved-in windowsill, there was a glaring, deep claw mark.

He brought his fingers together and stretched out his hand to compare it, finding that the claw mark was much larger than a normal person's palm.

Five toes: slightly shorter on the sides, the middle three a bit longer, distributed in a parallel pattern overall.

"Wild beast," "bipedal," "late-night low howling"...

A mess of clues surfaced in his mind one by one as Xia Nan thought carefully.

And it was only then, prompted by his question, that Harriet behind him finally recalled another piece of critical information.

"The constable seemed to have mentioned something at the time."

"He said it might... be related to 'Lycanthropy'."