The Villain's RE:Life

Chapter 179: Harlow’s Choice

There is something that I find comfortable about waking up in nature. I don’t know what specifically about it I like, but be it the brisk, chilly wind on my face or the birds chirping, when I awoke the following morning, I felt fully rested and relaxed.

Sitting up on the branch I had made my bed for the night, I noticed the sun cresting over the horizon, and with a glance at my display panel, I knew it was a little after 8:00 am and that I had only been asleep for four hours at most.

’Gotta love 6C bodies; the amount of rest you get by sleeping is at least triple effective, so by sleeping only 4 hours, it’s the equivalent of, say, around 12 hours of rest.’ Storing my blanket and pillow in my inventory, I stood up and did a few warm-up exercises before sitting back down and meditating.

Although I had come up with a few ideas about how I was going to deal with Harlow, each one required a lot of setup and a plotted course of action if it were to work.

If I’m being honest, one choice was far more difficult to achieve, and that was the one I had a feeling Harlow would pick.

Faking a person’s death, while vastly easier in the 1990s, was still no easy feat. As the UK began using DNA fingerprinting in forensic science around 1986, it was a decade-old technology still in its infancy.

Regardless of how young it was, the problem I would be forced to deal with was finding a suitable body that could be used as a replacement for Harlow.

Sure, I could probably find an item or two in the Arkadia Shop to help out with replicating his DNA. Still, my main idea was to get a mold of his teeth and recreate them on a corpse before burning it so badly that it was impossible to recover suitable DNA cultures from them.

My reason behind burning the body is simple: for an extracted DNA sample, which would come from the corpse bones, to be useable, the fire would have to be under 250 degrees Centigrade (482 degrees in Freedom Units).

Anything over that threshold and the DNA becomes increasingly less clustered to the point that it is unusable, so the goal would be to have a fire that is hot enough to destroy the Corpse’s DNA while also not breaching the 1500-degree F mark where it would cremate the body instead.

By doing so, I would make it so the only way to identify the corpse as Harlow would be using Dental Records, thus a mold of his teeth.

However, even with his death faked, there was still a secondary issue, one that also tied into the other option I had given the man yesterday, and that was disappearing.

The problem is he would need a new identity, along with proper documentation that would allow him to continue practicing as a doctor wherever he chose to move.

Finishing up my morning meditation, I rolled off the log and gracefully landed thirty feet below before dusting myself off and casually strolling back west.

Around an hour later, I found myself back in Manchester, having bypassed Hyde, and now I stood before a large old stone building with a large GRO (General Register Office) written on the sign.

The GRO was the first stop of many when it came to falsifying Harlow’s new identity; if I wanted to get any other documents, I’d need to get him a new birth certificate first.

Armed with my Talent and a couple of pictures I had sneakily swiped from Harlow’s desk while he wasn’t looking, I set about collecting proper documentation and creating a brand-new identity for the man.

From his birth certificate to a new NI Number, the British equivalent of a Social Security Number, one document after another, I was able to successfully acquire what I needed by using Coersion on the proper people until soon enough, my inventory housed all the appropriate paperwork for a completely fake person who shared a face with Harlow.

My next task was a bit darker, however, as I found myself wandering the streets of Manchester, primarily back alleys and such, in

"I have put quite a bit of thought into what you have asked of me, Lord Rehpix, and as it is, Milord, I believe the best course of action would be to fake my death." Sitting in his chair ramrod straight, Harlow began explaining himself to me as I formed a satisfied smirk under my mask.