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Unlike my previous plan to sneak away under the cover of night, I took the opportunity of the Harpy Queen gathering all her minions and going away from the mountains in search of me to do so.

And seeing that it was going to be dark soon, which would most likely force the harpies back to their nest, I threw caution to the wind and dashed through the valleys at a full aura-powered sprint.

***

It seems like when the Harpy Queen calls, all harpies listen, because I reached my stash unmolested and in record time, and after digging up my loot, I ran through the night in the direction of the nearest town that I knew had a Stewards’ Guild house. And after two days of traveling on foot, I was lucky enough to meet a merchant caravan going in the same direction and hitched a ride.

When I got to the Stewards’ Guild house, I turned in the heirloom dagger, and when I got my recipe of compilation, I used their courier service to send all my loot back home to my parents with a letter to tell them that I was doing fine and what the loot was for.

Afterward, I used the gold I acquired from the loot to check myself into a high-class inn that featured fluffy beds and a goddanmed bath with hot water. I had been roughing it for the past few days, and my nose had grown numb to my own stench. However, from the look on the innkeeper's face, I could tell I smelled offensive, though she was trying to be polite.

After I got my room and was about to hop into the bathtub to soak, I called for someone to run an errand for me, and an errand girl showed up. “How may I help you, My Lord?”

“I am going to need you to get me a list of things, especially some new clothes, because my current ones are dirty and ruined,” I said, starting to rattle off a list of what I needed for my next job to deal with a Death Knight and the other undead.

Despite being a young teenage girl, she seemed to have a good head on her shoulders as she took out a notepad and pencil and started jotting down my request. When I was done, I passed her an overestimation of what I thought I would spend on what I listed. “This should be enough, come find me if it is not, and if there is any change left, it is yours to keep.”

She beamed a smile, thanked me, bowed, and scampered off. I just smiled at her enthusiasm as I retreated to the bathroom to get myself clean.

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***

As evening fell and I was digging into my room service dinner provided with my accommodations, there was a knock at the door, and I heard the muffled voice of the errand girl through the door. “My Lord, I have the things you requested.”

Dressed in a bathrobe provided by the inn, I greeted the girl, checked the sack she passed to me, and once everything on my list was accounted for, I thanked her for the work and tipped her an extra gold piece as I carried the sack into the room. From behind the closed door, I could hear her happily humming as she skipped down the hallway.

With that, I was clean, well fed, and the supplies I needed were handled by the errand girl. That just left me one last thing to do, and that was to sleep on an actual bed instead of the hard ground or when tied to the branch of a tree.

***

A week later, I arrived on the outskirts of the Davron fiefdom, where my undead cleanup job is, and the first thing I do is go to the nearest village to the abandoned graveyard to check in with the locals to see if there is any information left out of the info packet provided to me.

When the villages caught wind of me being a mercenary who was going to attempt to clear out the abandoned graveyard, they gave me a pitying look but thanked me for taking up the job all the same. By their reaction, it was clear that they knew how much of a penny-pinching bastard their local Lord was.

The village elder invited me over for a drink while talking about what their local hunter had reported when he went past the abandoned graveyard. After the elder’s wife brought out some drinks and snacks, we got to talking about the graveyard.

True to the information packet, nothing ever emerged from that graveyard. This also included the local wildlife. According to the hunter and other witnesses, before the discovery of the Death Knight, any game or wildlife that wandered into the graveyard easily evaded the shambling undead. However, now, anything alive that enters does not make it out, and the strange part about it is that everything is silent. So, if wildlife goes inside and dies, nobody knows because there’s no noise of animals in their final throes of death. And everyone was content to leave the situation as such if the graveyard stayed the way it was.

That was not telling me much, which means I was more or less going in blind, but I had a rough plan moving forward. The first of which was containment.

On the off chance that I royally screwed up and somehow caused the undead to spill out in all directions, I had to first do something that the local lord was either too cheap or too lazy to do, and that was build a wall around the graveyard.

After making a round around the outside of the graveyard and doing some mental math, I started weaving a simple but wide-scale earth magic spell, because no way in hell I have the mana to pull off creating a wall around the graveyard using just instinctive magic. That would burn through my mana too fast when the graveyard was just over a hundred meters wide. This calls for slower but more mana-efficient traditional spells.

So I got to work, knowing that it was going to be a long day.