Becoming a God Starts with Acting
Chapter 139: [The Corpse Collector] (15)

Chapter 139: [The Corpse Collector] (15)

The gentle sound of water being parted echoed softly. A small boat carrying Silvanus and Silas drifted across the water’s surface. Silas’s slow voice rang out:

"Ever since I appeared, I’ve been doing this job and witnessed everything that happened in the village. I was seen as a solution to the villagers’ problems, but because of that, I was also cursed."

It turned out that the moment Silas appeared was also when the incident began—people in the village started drowning. Strangely, however, only Silas ever found the bodies. No matter how hard the villagers searched, they found nothing.

From then on, Silas was known as the "body retriever," and recovering drowned corpses became his responsibility. Because of his abnormal appearance and strange arrival, he was shunned by the villagers.

Silas spoke in a flat, emotionless tone, clearly unfazed by whether the villagers accepted him.

Silvanus frowned. "Alright, since you’ve come this far, can you tell me what happened that day?"

Silas’s vague storytelling was starting to irritate Silvanus.

Silas continued rowing through the waves, saying, "It was like a case, but more likely a spiritual one. The story goes that a family of three came from afar to take refuge in this village. It was summer then, and the lake had dried up completely. Nothing could survive in it, and the villagers were on the brink of starvation. Like many old and superstitious villages, they believed it was divine punishment. They found a sacrifice."

"The family of three began to disappear, one by one until there was no trace of them left in the village."

As Silas spoke, a sudden gust of wind swept across the calm lake. Violent waves surged up, causing the small boat to rock, nearly capsizing at any moment.

Silvanus gripped the side of the boat tightly—he had no desire to know what kind of monster was causing this.

BANG!

Silas suddenly lifted his oar at that moment and calmly struck the water. The force was so great that a wave over five meters high crashed down, washing away all the ripples. The water surged like a storm. Amid the waves created by Silas’s strike, Silvanus could even see a few rotting corpses with hideous appearances.

Silvanus: "..."

He stared at Silas’s expressionless face, then at the lake, now trembling from his power. At last, Silvanus understood why the monsters didn’t dare to mess with Silas. It wasn’t because he wasn’t one of the villagers—it was simply because the monsters didn’t want to die.

[That kind of power... Is Silas a monster?]

[In any case, he’s not an ordinary person!]

[Has anyone close to Silvanus ever been normal? It’s the protagonist’s aura at work!]

Silvanus didn’t want this so-called "protagonist aura."

"Why do you talk like you’re reading everything from a book? Can’t you give more detail?" Silvanus asked.

Silas shook his head honestly. "No, I’ve had these memories since I appeared but didn’t witness it firsthand."

Silvanus was starting to doubt the truth of this whole story.

Still, he didn’t say anything more—he just turned away, no longer facing Silas.

If everything Silas said was true, Silvanus had uncovered a major clue: the number of bodies he needed to recover must be three.

The family of three had been killed one by one for the sake of a ritual sacrifice. Their bodies, offered to the lake, were undoubtedly lying at the bottom of it. What Julie and Ciel saw might have been those "corpses."

Of course, this was a dungeon—those corpses were no longer just corpses. They had become grotesque, walking monsters.

The monster Ciel saw was probably the daughter of that family.

Now that he had a lead, the main issue was how could he retrieve those three bodies? They were hidden deep beneath the surface, and he couldn’t just part the water and drag them up...

Just as that thought crossed Silvanus’s mind, the water in front of him suddenly began to part—splitting gradually into two halves.

Silvanus’s eyes widened. Before things became too clear, he quickly shut his eyes tight and threw all thoughts out of his mind.

Wait a second—this all happened so suddenly he hadn’t had time to prepare. What the hell was going on? He wasn’t Nerio right now!

Silvanus snapped his eyes open, staring at the now-still surface of the water in front of him, mouth slightly open as he gasped.

"Look," Silas’s voice rang out suddenly. "Something is interesting over there."

Despite his words, his tone and expression were far from anything that resembled interest.

Silvanus followed Silas’s gaze. All he could see were two pale, purplish legs sticking upright in the middle of the lake, with no visible support beneath them. They stood there, motionless.

The legs had mutated—the skin was smooth and slick, colored a strange purplish blue. The toenails were a bit too long, sharpened by how the toes curled inward. Black slime oozed from some cracks along the legs. Silvanus could tell with his experience fighting monsters—these were not the legs of a usually drowned corpse.

"That thing’s trying to lure you down there. Want to go?" Silas leaned in close to Silvanus, so close that his breath and voice brushed against Silvanus’s ear.

Silvanus’s face remained emotionless as he asked, "You keep saying that those people will take revenge on me, but I didn’t do anything."

"That’s true. You didn’t do anything. But your parents were part of this village. They tried to escape with you like a few other families did. But none of you ever suspected that someone gathered all of you here... to host one final feast."

Silas paused, then tilted his head, narrowing his eyes as he looked straight at Silvanus, sneering:

"There was a traitor in your group, little lamb."

Silas’s expressions today were probably more varied than all he’d ever shown since arriving in the village.

Silvanus lowered his gaze in thought, not revealing that he had already known Bryan was the traitor.

Silas gently ran his fingers through Silvanus’s hair—soft as a breeze, as if mourning a naïve soul lost among wolves, completely unaware.

What beautiful hair... black as ink, naturally wavy—so different from Silas’s dull and lifeless strands. So envious. So very envious...

Silvanus frowned and swatted Silas’s hand away. Every time Silas came close and touched his head, he got the disturbing feeling that the man could pluck it off at any moment. It wasn’t a comforting sensation.

"Let’s go. If it wants to lure me, fine by me—I was planning to retrieve the corpse anyway," Silvanus said, pointing toward the pale, upturned legs rising out of the water.