His body was still rolling left and right, immediately turning the tomb chamber into a complete mess, with corpses and bones scattered all over the place.

This guy is truly beyond help. James Carter was amused by him; this lazy fellow made James Carter lose even the desire to kill.

James Carter believed these two really were out of money, otherwise that burly man wouldn’t have tried to skip out on a mug of wheat ale. What he said wasn’t any earth-shattering news either—beastmen raided almost every year, yet Wildfire City still stood strong. These matters were naturally for the city lord to worry about; as a lowly night watchman, he just needed to mind his own business.

“All right, you can go now.” James Carter sheathed his sword.

The skinny man immediately scrambled out of the tomb chamber, turning to run away.

“Wait, drag that guy from my room over here, cover up the tomb before you leave.”

The skinny man shuddered at James Carter’s voice, thinking he’d changed his mind. But upon hearing the request, he quickly set about the task, gritting his teeth through two broken ribs.

This guy was incredibly efficient at digging and burying graves—he worked like a giant mole, and in just a few minutes, the city lord’s illegitimate son’s tomb was restored to its original state, with no sign that another body had been stuffed inside.

After finishing, the skinny man pressed a hand to his chest wound, hunched over, and grinned obsequiously at James Carter: “Sir, do you think I can leave now?”

“Go on, get lost.” James Carter waved his hand impatiently.

As soon as he finished speaking, the skinny man vanished from sight, moving so fast you’d never guess he was injured—he looked like he had an engine inside him, sprinting away at lightning speed.

Tonight’s bizarre encounter left James Carter feeling quite frustrated. He stood there in a daze for a while, then turned to head back to the cabin and get through the night.

But as soon as he turned and took a few steps, he stepped on a black wooden box. The wood was already mostly rotten, and with one step it broke apart, spilling out a water-stained, badly decayed book.

James Carter picked it up and flipped through it, finding most of the writing blurred, with large yellow stains on the pages—possibly corpse fluids—which made James Carter feel nothing but disgust.

Most of the writing inside was illegible; only when he flipped to the middle did he find a single complete sentence.

But this ordinary sentence struck James Carter like a heavenly revelation, a sudden enlightenment.

“Spirit and elements resonate together—the path of the mage.”

This sentence was like a bolt of lightning, splitting apart the fog of knowledge from his previous life’s science. A brand new world unfolded before his eyes like a scroll.

Because of this sentence, the mysterious fluctuations he sensed, and many phenomena that couldn’t be explained by knowledge from his previous life, all suddenly became clear.

Spirit was no longer, as in the Milky Way, a mostly metaphysical concept; in this world, spirit was a real, tangible force!

“Hahaha... I understand now.” James Carter burst out laughing like a madman, dancing with joy. The decayed book in his hands couldn’t withstand the excitement and crumbled into flying fragments.

In the midnight graveyard, the silent dead bore witness to this moment.

Chapter 10: The Flame of Life

James Carter had suddenly glimpsed a great truth, and his mind was racing with thoughts. For a while, he just stood there, not knowing how to vent his exhilaration. His emotions surged for a long time, until the cold winter wind blew and finally snapped him out of his reverie.

James Carter hugged his arms and shivered as he returned to the cabin. The door had been kicked in by that damned brute, leaving a gaping hole, and the whole door lay on the ground. Seeing this, James Carter couldn’t help but curse fiercely, but in the end, he could only prop the door up against the wall to block some of the cold wind.

Inside the night watchman’s cabin, the justice rune stone still emitted its penetrating light. At this moment, the world in James Carter’s eyes was still bright and transparent: the cabin like crystal, the earth beneath deep and translucent like amber, golden snowflakes drifting down like elves—this world was like a fairy tale land.

Such a scene was something the former Carter could never have seen. Every time he activated the holy light rune stone before, his experience was much like that of the grave robber earlier—he just felt the environment change a bit, with less of a gloomy atmosphere.

The former Carter couldn’t see the elemental light with the naked eye. But now, with James Carter occupying Carter’s body, there was little change in the physical form, but the soul within was different.

James Carter could easily deduce the cause of this change: he possessed a much stronger spiritual power than ordinary people in this world, which had opened his vision to the elements. This was some comfort to James Carter.

But James Carter soon noticed something out of place in this perfect fairy tale world—the leather robe he’d bought from the unscrupulous merchant Kent!

The neatly folded leather robe lay there, completely impervious to the justice rune stone’s light. If everything else was like water, then this robe was a stone in the water.

“Everything really does restrain and counteract something else. Just as I see this miraculous light, something that resists it appears. I’ve never spent money so wisely in my life!” James Carter squinted with a smile.