A few minutes after the Zombie Duke left the cave, a group of humans emerged from within the shadows of the forest.

"Is this the place?" An adult male with a well-trimmed mustache spoke as he looked towards the cave.

One of his companions closed her eyes and chanted some kind of magic before nodding to his words. "It indeed is the last place that criminal stopped at. I'm also quite sure he never moved beyond this spot."

"I see," he said. "Then shall we proceed to apprehend him?"

The other five people in this group of six nodded firmly at his words as they began to carefully move towards the cave—where all the traces of the criminal stopped.

"Hm?"

"Huh . . ."

However, the only thing they found inside the cave was half of the criminal corpse with the skeleton intact, except for the cranium. The upper half of the corpse was without any flesh, the skull was half-broken and there was no brain.

The woman that spoke earlier turned her face away with a frown while another one ran off to a bush and released her mental shock through her mouth. The last of the three women of the group was different, however. She just blankly looked at the mess of a corpse over there with a nonchalant look—which defined the thickness of her experience on the battlefields.

"Did the Knight Captain do this . . ." the man with the mustache murmured to himself, but the surrounding was so quiet that other members of the group also heard his mumbling—or maybe he actually let them hear on purpose . . . no one knows, excluding himself.

Upon having those words coming from their leader entered their ears, the team members all had their blood run cold. The image of the Knight Captain in their hearts was a refined and dignified figure of justice. It's safe to say that it was nowhere near to be this messed up. Thus, the team fell into even deeper silence.

Glancing at his subordinates, the mustache man heaved a sigh. "Well, the brain is gone. It could be a zombie, no?" His tone was strange.

"R-Right . . . here, you can see a teeth-mark . . ." One of the other two men aside from the leader spoke while pointing at one spot on the corpse. That instant, a shadow of displeasure cast on the face of the leader, but it immediately vanished as he also nodded to those words.

The third man—their only Priest—quietly let out a big sigh of relief as he now doesn't have to follow this hunt any further. While it's true that his talent in Exorcism is unique, he's not the kind of man that finds excitement in combat. He's simply just happy because this S-rank criminal had already been dead before they came. Though, as a Priest from the Central-branch of the Holy Church of Aesthea, he still offered a prayer in his heart to the soul of the criminal.

The criminal was, in fact, one of the most dangerous ones being secretly imprisoned within the Underground Magic Prison of Traz'kha in Arland Kingdom—one of the three biggest countries within Northern territories.

Aside from his status being that of Lord class, another reason why he was locked up inside Traz'kha was because he stole a secret forbidden scroll from the Holy Church of Aesthea. Though he never succeeded in mastering the technique written inside the scroll, he memorized it while no Court Magician within the country was strong enough to erase his memory.

Unfortunately—could also be fortunately, or both—a certain zombie stole all his knowledge.

After a performing an overall survey on the vicinity of the cave, the group of humans left empty-handed.

...

As I walked through the dense forest, I also tried to review all the new things I've learned.

"This . . . be . . . Aqua grass . . . dehydration . . . cure . . ."

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

—or other things along those lines I kept mumbling and talking to myself. My human language was still very strange. Pronunciation was a pain in the arse because of my zombie tongue, conjugation and grammar structures were off by miles because of my only-functioning-in-half zombie mind.

Now that I looked back on that time, it really felt like I was a four year old child or something of the sort.

I spent some idle time walking while pointing at this and that, verifying the knowledge I obtained. Hardworker wasn't I? Well, when something was so interesting for you to learn, you just don't really feel like you're doing anything tough, even if you're a zombie.

Then I spotted a river.

I was not thirsty—nor could I ever become thirsty—but I was curious, so I decided to to take a detour and walked towards the river instead of heading deeper into the dense forest. Though the gigantic trees were also cool things I wanted to study more about.

"This is . . . myself . . ." I began mumbling to myself again as I looked into the reflection of myself in the river. The water was extremely clean, to the point of being completely transparent. I could clearly see fishes swimming happily inside the current. Upon seeing that, a question suddenly popped into my head like a kid.

Does this count as the fishes are flying, but just within a different persepective of environment than birds or other avian reptiles?

It was an interesting question that I wouldn't be able to obtain an answer much later until I visited a special place.

Back to my reflection on the water surface.

It was the image of a young man with bright blue eyes and pure white hair. It wasn't grey-ish white seen on elderly humans, but a bright white like that of clouds. The length of my hair was long enough to touch my shoulders. My facial features were normal, nothing too special.

I also noticed my clothing. Both my shirt and pants were all tattered with cuts and tears. They were also really dirty, but I paid no mind to those details. Incidentally, I've been walking bare-footed all this time, but my feet were never damaged—or maybe they did but I just simply feel no pain.

My true color is a walking dead corpse after all.

All in all, I looked like a young male human, however my skin color was as expected, very pale. In the end it was probably more appropriate to keep calling me a walking corpse rather than a pale young man.

While I was messing with the water, my ears picked up noises of a ruckus nearby. The direction from where the noises were coming was on the other side of the river, also a dense forest of the same kind with the one I've been walking through up until now.

My senses somehow detected the so-called "presences" of the creatures causing the noises.

"Humans," I murmured quietly.

I quickly used the water inside the river to wash away all the blood on my hands and face, the blood stains on my clothes couldn't be helped so I didn't care.

Then I stood up and jumped over the river.

It was rather an easy task, even thought the river's width was around seven meters.

As I approached the noisy place, I subconsciously began to erase my presence and applied the skill Sneak Through. The skill itself wasn't something you just need to activate and you'll be hidden from others' awareness, but it was a set of movements that could help you do the sneaking as effectively as possible.

Of course, it was my first time trying it out after obtaining it from the blond guy's brain so I couldn't perform it well. If I have to say, then it was only fifty-percent effective because of my clumsy movements. However, the technique to erase one's presence was a bit simpler so it made up for the errors in using the skill Sneak Through.

Even though I said that, the two skills combined could only reach the bare minimum of effectiveness to hide from the Common class humans I was peeping at.

The reason I hid was because I wanted to observe them and learn more things.

If I simply jumped out and looked at them in the eyes, they would just start attacking me and I would murder them too easily. Well, if that happened I could gulp their brains down and get the knowledge anyway, but I was one hell of a curious zombie. I wanted to observe them alive because it seemed interesting. It wasn't like I got to see a group of humans quarreling every single day when I was still a normal zombie.

My hearing was perfectly clear even at a distance, but I wanted to practice using some skills I had so I activated skill Eavesdrop anyway. It was a bit weird at first, but after a few minutes I began to get the gist of the skill.

"I SAID, I was the one who caught her! That's why I'm going first!" The man with most rude-looking body figure among the twenty or so man group yelled loudly at another man.

I've only begun to get exposed to human language for a couple of hours so as usual, I could only understand around sixty-percent of what he was saying, but through reading his expression and behaviors, I could somewhat guess what he was yelling.

"FACK YA! Ya shittin' me or wah? I was the one reported this t'ya!"

Then another man, looked to be same age with the previous man, yelled back in a strange voice that I one-hundred percent couldn't understand anything he said.

I tried to search my knowledge bank and realized that he was speaking in a heavy dialect of a countryside area in this place called Arland Kingdom.

After that the two men kept yelling and shouting at each other under the noisy encouragement for the two of them to fight of their other companions. The men that were sitting around the two raised their voices even louder as they began drinking a lot of alcoholic drinks.

Humans sure are noisy, I thought as watched the quarrel.