1 Chapter 1: The Naked Corpse

When Leonard Churchill woke up, he found himself in a completely unfamiliar room.

Two thoughts instantly sprang into his mind.

The first one; Kidney theft.

The second; Honey Trap scam.

It was an enclosed room, with walls all the color of cement. Apart from a bed and what looked like a toilet compartment, there were no furnishings. No windows, no furniture, it looked like a prison cell, an escape room, or some kind of themed pleasure room.

Definitely, not a regular room.

Leonard Churchill was lying on the bed, naked, and not in a good mental state.

Next to him, a woman, also naked.

After a few quick glances, yep, absolutely nothing concealed.

It was a stunningly beautiful body, with enchanting, delicate skin, full breasts, and a strangely beautiful face.

"What... What is going on?"

The unexpected sexual encounter didn't arouse Leonard, but rather instinctively made him alert.

He struggled to recall if he had blacked out from drinking, or perhaps been hit on the head. But his memory was clear- last night he had gone to sleep as usual, and woke up in this strange room.

...

Not a dream.

Leonard quickly confirmed this.

Although he could barely straighten his sore waist, there were no wounds, so the kidneys were still there.

There also wasn't a group of bulky tattooed men rushing in demanding money.

So, it probably wasn't a Honey Trap scam or a Kidney theft plot.

Looking again at the unresponsive pretty woman beside him, Leonard reached out to touch her, hoping to wake her up and find out what was going on.

But that touch immediately caused him to furrow his brow.

The sensation was unusual.

"Something's wrong!"

Leonard's expression turned serious in an instant. He carefully reached out and touched her skin again, which was full, delicate, and elastic.

But strangely enough, it was very cold.

This was not the body temperature of a living person.

Dead?

A hint of surprise flashed in Leonard's eyes.

After a moment's contemplation, he reached out to check the woman's neck pulse. As though he had discovered something unusual, his expression grew heavier.

Indeed, he couldn't find a pulse.

At this moment, he confirmed that this was a corpse.

"This is strange..."

As Leonard looked at the corpse in front of him, the heaviness in his eyes gradually turned into doubt.

It wasn't that he hadn't seen a corpse before, nor was it that he felt revulsion for having spent the night with a corpse.

Rather, it was because he had never seen such a "strange" corpse before.

Compared to the transient shock, this bizarre scene made him get the feeling that something wasn't right.

Leonard checked again carefully. This woman had no visible injuries.

Except for the absence of a heartbeat and colder body temperature, the rest of her physical characteristics were almost identical to that of a living person.

That was the mystifying part.

Normally, a person's body temperature would continue to drop by one degree per hour within ten hours of death, and then halve after ten hours. In other words, it would take about a day for the body temperature to become the same as the ambient temperature.

When Leonard first touched her, he confirmed that the body temperature was almost the same as the room's.

With this to estimate, her time of death was roughly twenty hours ago.

But here's the problem.

A body would begin to stiffen within half an hour after death and completely rigid between 9 to 12 hours.

But the body in front of him had normal softness, full and elastic skin, and the joints were not stiff.

This was baffling.

If nothing was wrong with the environment, temperature, then what might be the problem?

For the first time, Leonard questioned his own judgement.

Could there be other factors affecting rigor mortis?

Or perhaps,

This was not a human to begin with?

...

"A prank?"

Just as the thought came to him, Leonard Churchill meticulously checked the body once more.

He prodded the body from top to bottom, examined the details of the hair, verified that it did indeed have normal skeletal and organ structure, even the mouth was positive for bodily fluids.

This means, what was before him was not some prankster's realistic silicone doll, or any other kind of weird thing.

It was truly a human corpse!

Leonard was truly at a loss now.

How is it that I woke up here after falling asleep?

Why was there this strange corpse next to me?

Leonard's eyes darted around, lost in thought for a moment.

His gaze no longer lingered on the body, but took in the strange environment within the room.

The room was quite peculiar as well.

The rusty iron door was tightly shut, with no lock on the inside to open it. It looked like a prison cell.

However, considering the queer heavy thickness and the intricate structure of the lock, it seemed more like a vault door of a bank.

Or perhaps... a laboratory that held some high-risk entities?

Pondering upon the rust, it seemed long abandoned.

However, as he was observing, a line of text appeared out of nowhere before his eyes that seemed to echo his unspoken thoughts, adding to the already strange situation.

"You have touched the extraordinary and have gained Enlightenment."

Leonard could hardly believe his eyes as he looked at the sentence that appeared.

After blinking, it was still clearly visible.

He then looked back at the corpse on the bed, this time he saw another line of text.

"Fallen Witch Sect"

Description: First Tier B-level Catastrophe; a Mental Contaminant, a distortion of desire that controls witches, it is adept at spirit attacks, and survives by absorbing the spirit and soul of human beings; If you can't kill it, it's not a bad choice to indulge it at the end of your life;

...

Shit!

It really wasn't a person!

On seeing this, Leonard slightly narrowed his eyes.

Although he didn't quite grasp the details of this "Enlightenment", he felt like he understood.

Since he couldn't interpret his current situation with ordinary reasoning, he decided to take another approach.

The numerous anomalies combined seemed to indicate an alternative explanation.

In that moment, he had a strange thought: "What if... I have traveled through time?"

The signs all indicated that this was probably not the world he used to know.

A momentary shock from this thought quickly fled from his face, replaced by a contemplative look in his eyes as he mulled over whether this time travel hypothesis held water.

Obviously.

With the hypothesis of time travel, all previous puzzlements suddenly made sense.

Only this could perfectly explain why he was here, and why the corpse on the bed was so odd.

Oh,

Right.

It's not a corpse!

What did "B-level", "Catastrophe" and "Mental Contaminant" mean?

Could they be monsters?

Or alien life forms from another world?

Leonard started scrutinizing everything around him with a new perspective in mind.

He didn't know what these text enlightenments were that the mysterious power had provoked, but things were clearly developing in an ever-increasingly bizarre direction.

Seeing that the description mentioned a creature that could absorb human spirits, he knew that staying with it wasn't a good choice.

Better to leave and then think later.

He glanced around, noticing his scattered clothing under the bed.

Leonard stood up intending to put on his clothes, open the door and look around, perhaps he might find some other clues.

However, as soon as he stood up, a wave of weakness washed over him. His legs suddenly gave way and he fell hard onto the corpse next to him.

"Smack!"

Heavily undulating, he felt something full and soft as his hands landed.

Leonard made an effort to brace himself in that delicate touch, the corner of his eyes twitched, and he realized something.

Looking at his ribs protruding from his body, he finally understood why he had arrived here.

And at this glance, he even saw his own body data.