Chapter 86: Something Changed

Footsteps near my cabin at 2 AM. That was definitely not a good sign, especially with a murder this recent.

But would they really try to kill me this fast? I had just arrived at the mansion. It hadn’t even been 12 hours. Now that was dedication.

I got out of bed quickly and without a sound. Even inside my own cabin, my steps were way too quiet. Hell, even I felt weird walking around without making any noise.

The footsteps outside were still there, but I couldn’t tell if they were close or far away. My hearing had improved so much, and so suddenly, that I still needed time to get used to it.

I pulled back the corner of the curtain and looked outside. Whoever was making the noise wasn’t coming to kill me. It was two people sneaking around to hook up...

One of them was a woman in a maid uniform. It wasn’t the same one who had come to talk to me earlier, so it was someone else. A mansion that big had plenty of servants, so I didn’t think much of it.

The other was a man I didn’t know by name, but I knew his face. It was the same guy who had confronted me at the gate. The two of them went behind a tree in the middle of the night to make out, and who knew what else.

I didn’t keep watching, obviously, and I didn’t go over there to tell them they shouldn’t be doing that either. It was none of my business. I was just happy it wasn’t someone coming to kill me in my sleep.

I went back to bed and woke up early to someone knocking on my door. It was the same woman from last night, and now I knew her name. Joyce.

"I’ll show you what you need to do. Well, I don’t know anything about gardening, but I watched the last gardener a lot, so I know a few things," Joyce said as we walked through the garden.

"It’s pretty simple, honestly. You saw the tools inside the cabin, right? Your job is to take care of the plants. Trim them when they get too big, pull the weeds, water them, that kind of stuff. If you finish everything for the day, you can do whatever you want. Use the mansion’s facilities, grab a book to read, or just sleep."

Joyce showed me every spot in the garden where I’d be working. She explained which ones to start with and which ones usually needed more frequent care.

"Always try to keep the plants at the front of the house looking nice," Joyce said, pointing at a long line of hedges. "Since they’re right at the entrance, they need to look good."

That made sense, since any visitor would have to pass through there. But did they even get many visitors? I asked her out of curiosity.

"Does this place get visitors?"

Joyce shook her head. "Honestly? Almost never. Even before the invasion we barely had any, and now it’s pretty much zero. But even with no visitors, rules are rules, right?"

Someone shouted from inside the mansion.

"Joyce, get over here. We need your help."

It was another woman in a maid uniform. From her authoritative tone, I figured she was one of the head maids who bossed the others around. Joyce said goodbye and went inside. I didn’t say anything so I wouldn’t hold her up. Just like I had things to do now, so did she.

I spent most of the morning taking care of the plants. I stopped for lunch, and I had to cook it myself in the cabin. Nobody came to get me or offered me anything. At least there were supplies inside, so it wasn’t too bad.

I kept working on the plants outside the mansion until around 2 PM. By then I had finished everything I was supposed to do, which meant I had free time.

Normally, I’d use that time to absorb monster crystals and train a bit, but since I had a mission to complete, I decided to focus on that, at least for now.

I walked into the mansion for the first time. It was huge, but it didn’t scare me that much. After seeing Zoen’s mansion, it was hard for any house to impress me. Sure, it was big, but it was still smaller than Zoen’s.

There were a lot of people inside. Maids, butlers, cooks, guards. But I didn’t see my target anywhere, and none of his family members were around either.

The same thing had happened yesterday. He came to talk to me, told me I’d be taking the gardener position, and then vanished. I hadn’t seen him a single time since. And from the looks of it, that was normal around here.

I even asked one of the guards where he was and if I could talk to him, and the answer caught me off guard.

"None of us know where he is, and no, you can’t talk to him. We only talk to him if he wants to talk to us. Get used to it, and stop asking questions."

This guard wasn’t one of the new hires. He had been working in the mansion for a long time. My target was a lot more mysterious than I’d imagined.

Even after what he said, I explored the mansion anyway, hoping to catch a glimpse of my target and figure out where he was or what he did in there. I even tried using my senses to track him somehow, but it didn’t work.

That only made me more curious about him.

By late afternoon, I accepted that I wasn’t going to find anything and went to enjoy the rest of my day. I headed to a building outside the mansion. It was a big complex with several pools the staff could use, IF they were done with their work for the day.

There were some people there, of course, but not everyone. Only the ones who had finished their shifts.

I took the chance to go for a swim and talk to a few of the workers. A couple glasses of wine were enough to get some interesting information out of them.

"Everyone’s scared, you know?" a maid said, leaning in close and resting her head on my shoulder. She whispered in my ear, "This isn’t the first time someone’s been murdered in this mansion. The same thing happened last year."

I frowned immediately.

"So why does everyone keep working here? There have to be other good places to look for a job."

The woman giggled. I could smell the alcohol on her breath.

"But the pay here is better, and everyone accepts the risks, you know? There are so many workers, and only 1 person murdered in the whole year. The odds of getting picked are really low, right? Don’t tell anyone, but I’m glad it was the gardener and not me. At least now I know I’m safe until next year."

Damn, I had no idea things worked like that.

"And don’t get me wrong, I think everyone who works in this mansion thinks the same way. Relieved it wasn’t them."

She was right. I talked to other workers while I soaked in the pool, trying to gather more information, and they all felt the same.

Apparently, the owner of the mansion paid every worker a high salary, was barely ever seen inside his own home, and once a year someone died.

Well, I can’t deny it, I was kind of glad to hear it was only 1 murder a year...

I tried to find out more about my target, since that was the whole reason I was there, but nothing I heard was very useful. The workers were just as clueless as I was.

"There are rumors he isn’t human," a maid told me. "Nobody ever sees him around the house, only at night, sometimes, wandering around. We’ve never seen him eat, either. I don’t know, he’s a strange guy, you know?"

"Does he usually walk around the mansion only at night?" I asked.

That was good information. She was the first person to tell me where I might actually find him.

"Sometimes, yeah. Not every night, and not at any fixed time. In the 2 years I’ve worked here, I’ve seen him wandering the house only 4 times."

Not many times.

I went back to my cabin after gathering all that, deep in thought. I had learned a few useful things, sure, but nothing that would actually help me. The situation was getting complicated...

I had wanted to get in as a guard. That was the plan. Guards usually worked at night too, and inside the mansion. A gardener, on the other hand, worked during the day, and I wasn’t allowed inside the mansion at night. It was forbidden.

That would make things harder than they should have been.

Accepting reality, I sat down in my cabin and spent the night absorbing some of my monster crystals. I still had A LOT of them in my pocket dimension. It would take a long time to absorb all of them.

And that night, something happened. Something that shook everyone living in the mansion. For the first time, there was another murder. It wasn’t just 1 per year anymore. This was the second. It shook everyone, me included.

Something was different.