The Last Gentleman

The Dean Dis sensed the death aura emanating from the secret passage and immediately raised his right hand over his shoulder, signaling for all the church members behind him to stop.

“All personnel except for Vice Dean Evatt and Captain Brog, return to the surface and help out.”

The two called upon had already transcended human limits (single attribute), and together with him, they symbolized the Sunlight Clinic’s highest combat power.

As the two set foot in the secret passage, walking on the death-sandified ground,

they were swept by a sense of crisis greater than any previous mission, feeling that something was gathering at the end of the passage, or rather something was about to emerge.

Dean Dis was without fear; he had resolved to eradicate all the pathogens in Levinholm and restore it to its past state, and he was also very curious to learn what was secretly carrying death.

Raising his index finger,

a sun vine sprouted from the fingertip, immediately blooming into a splendid sunflower, providing ample illumination and temporarily suppressing the death fog that pervaded the area.

“Let’s go.”

The mask on Dean Dis’s face was an exaggerated smiling sun,

the Vice Dean wore a white ghostly mask, and Captain Brog donned a silver metallic mask with long fangs.

The deeper they went, the more bizarre the sensation became.

Stones that had turned into sand due to death were starting to reconstitute into perfectly-shaped skulls as the concentration of death increased. The skulls, all with mouths agape, constantly exhaled death aura.

Such an environment even gave the three the impression of delving into the Old World.

At the end, a chamber constructed of countless skulls.

A man dressed as an ordinary citizen was suspended in a cross shape midair, with ‘the last breath’ of all the suicides in the river and surrounding areas accumulating inside him, indicating that some ritual had been completed.

When the ordinary citizen opened his eyes, the death fog also began to spill from his eye sockets.

“Dean Dis~ you’ve finally arrived.”

“Who are you?” Dean Dis, looking at the ordinary citizen in front of him, had no recollection of him.

“As expected, a significant person like you would never remember someone insignificant like me.

Let me remind you, I was once treated for stomach cancer at your hospital, and having been advised to wait for death at home due to the metastasis of cancer cells throughout my body.

Since I was just an ordinary person, you weren’t willing to inject me with that miraculous Sun Secret Medicine to bestow me a chance at rebirth.

While waiting at home for death, I came to understand many things,

You gentlemen claim to want to protect us, but in reality, you fear that our transformation into higher-order patients will affect your control over human society.

If I could become a patient, perhaps the cancer cells in my body could disappear.

I didn’t know how to come into contact with patients, and my body couldn’t support a long journey… Hence, I went alone to the filthiest area of the sewers to consume carcasses of various animals and filthy things in hopes of inducing some pathological reaction.

Due to the excessive consumption of filth, my body rapidly deteriorated, putrefied, and reeked, to the point where even rats and cockroaches turned up their noses at my flesh.

As I lay dying, a certain death symbol appeared before me,

When I smeared the black substance I vomited onto my chest in the shape of that symbol… The tumors spread throughout my body and the putrefying flesh no longer affected me.

Somewhere deep, I heard whispers from another world, asking me to bring the gift of death to more people, to more ordinary citizens who are overlooked by you and cannot enjoy quality treatment.

I began to control the creatures in the sewers, quietly constructing symbols before hopeless homeless people, then gradually spreading to residential areas, targeting solitary dwellers.

The death of ordinary people hardly draws your attention. It was not until yesterday that I was finally exposed.

Didn’t that young man named William Behrens come with you? He said a lot of unpleasant things in my ear, which made me have to bring him to witness death.”

“But it doesn’t matter, you will all die soon, and although it won’t be by my hand, my physical form will bear witness to everything.”

Upon hearing the other party’s account, Dean Dis responded with disdain:

“The organization has given everyone the chance to ascend, everyone can become a gentleman through assessment. Even as a gentleman, one must face various unknown dangers and grow amidst life and death, only those who contribute can enjoy corresponding privileges and obtain the associated resources.

The Sun Secret Medicine is one of the organization’s rarest secret medicines, and most gentlemen do not have the right to use it, only those who stand on the front line fighting against illness possess the qualifications to use it.

What you call ‘unfairness’ is merely an excuse for your own cowardice and selfishness. A person like you surely has no loved ones willing to be with you, or perhaps no relatives at all.

It is precisely because you are all alone that you chose to seek an opportunity in the sewers, and it just so happened that you encountered ‘Death’ that wished to invade our side.

Fearing death, yet you work for it… a pathetic tool.”

Dean Dis’s words struck a nerve, causing the man to break down instantly.

Just as the man was about to curse out loud, Dean Dis flicked his fingers and a miniature sun shot into the man’s body.

Explosions and incineration left not a trace behind.

But, in merely three seconds.

This ordinary citizen was resurrected by condensing Death Aura, reconstructing his original physical form, still suspended in the air in a cruciform.

Just as Dean Dis was preparing to use an even stronger method… whoosh! A curved dagger surrounded by black smoke pierced the body of the ordinary citizen from the inside,

Spilling his guts and cutting him into a cruciform, creating a temporary black cavity that connected to the Old World.

An Old World being with fluttering black hair and wearing a silver skull mask (without a mouth structure), wrapped in a cloak, used the body of this ordinary citizen to temporarily step into this world.

The long boots adorned with a small skull trinket tapped the ground,

Dragging behind him, the black cape was branded with a silver Death Symbol,

“Death Plague Knight Order, Harvester-Rotweis has come.

Sacrificing 1081 suicides, the body has a usable duration of 13 minutes and 10 seconds, enough to erase the waste of your Skin Market…”

As his words fell, a pure silver frame emerged above his head, its ends dagger-shaped, filled with black Death solution between the frames.

…

Levinholm City.

Yi Chen, who was helping to retrieve and burn corpses by the riverbank, looked up at the black smoke rising to the sky from the burning, growing increasingly anxious.

When he realized something and wanted to stop the burning, it was already too late, and even if the burning were stopped, the corpses themselves posed a latent danger.

No matter what, Death could not be avoided.

As swirls of black smoke rose into the sky,

A colossal Cross symbol appeared among the clouds, perfectly matching the deduced Death Symbol and precisely covering the entire Levinholm City.

“Don’t look up! Don’t stare at the sky!”

Even though Yi Chen and some gentlemen who realized the problem shouted this out immediately,

Still, a few gentlemen and many citizens saw the rune patterns in the sky, the instinct of Death instantly branded in their consciousness.

Not only that,

All sorts of insects, rats, and birds began forming symbols through swarming in different areas, spreading Death.

From the homes of citizens who had once died, disturbances were heard, as seemingly benign ‘dead citizens’ walked out one by one, embracing others, spreading the Death Plague one-to-one.