Chapter 4: The Targeted Cemetery

Before the two summoned creatures disappeared, Donald, protected by the infantry soldier Clinton, successfully hunted two level-two magical beasts and five level-one magical beasts. It was already 10 a.m., and as dusk approached, Donald decided to head back home immediately.
Even with Clinton’s formidable strength—enough to confront level-three magical beasts with black-iron-tier capabilities—Donald still didn’t dare stay in this dangerous forest overnight. After all, in both his past life and this world, most wild animals were active at night, especially those carnivorous ones.
Following the path he had taken, Donald rushed back to his family’s house in town before night fell. Butler Cord, who had been worried all day, rushed to greet him.
“Young master, you’re finally back!”
Donald comforted him with a smile, then pointed to the infantry soldier following behind him. “This is Clinton, a knight servant I picked up along the way. Cord, prepare a room for him. From today onward, Clinton will be one of our family’s retainers!”
Although the butler couldn’t determine a warrior’s strength, the man before him, clad in steel armor weighing at least 300 soles yet moving with such ease, must be quite powerful.
The only concern was his loyalty. Though the young master seemed confident in him, the butler didn’t dare object and decided to observe him for now. After all, the Merlin family was currently too weak, and having such a strong warrior at their side could deter villains.
Still, Cord questioned Clinton thoroughly about his background. But Clinton was originally created by Donald himself. Though essentially no different from the native humans of this world, he could even marry women from this world and have children.
The difference was that from birth, his soul had pledged absolute loyalty to Donald—ready to die for him without hesitation. When the Book of Truth created him, it only granted him basic common sense and a strong fighting instinct; it didn’t waste energy on trivial aspects.
As a result, Clinton spoke in a somewhat dull manner, showing little interest in anything other than his master and combat.
After questioning him for a long time with no results, it was Donald who assured them, allowing the butler to put his doubts aside and prepare dinner.

The secrets of the Book of Truth were not something Donald intended to reveal, even to those closest to him like Kord. After all, a secret remains a secret precisely because no one knows it. The more people are aware of it, the greater the risks, with no benefits at all. As a knight’s squire, he was already qualified to dine with his master, especially since he possessed the necessary strength. Clinton followed Donald’s orders and methodically put the food in his mouth. Even when Donald spoke, he would only respond with words like “Yes” or “As you command.” Dining with such a person was utterly unenjoyable, so Donald quickly finished his meal. The butler came to clear the dishes, and at that moment, two bell chimes sounded from outside the town. “Night has fallen. Young master, rest well. I’ll go prepare the bath water!” “Go ahead! Kord, you too, rest well. You’ll need to sell the magical beasts we hunted tomorrow!” Donald nodded, knowing it was the night watchmen at the cemetery outside the town ringing the bells to remind the townspeople that night had arrived and they should not venture out casually. The wilderness at night was often dangerous, especially in towns like Red Maple Town, which was located near the edge of the Green Cloak Forest. That’s why towns and villages usually had alarm bells to warn the people. Thinking of the night watchmen and then the cemetery outside, Donald suddenly clapped his hands excitedly. “The cemetery? Right! How could I have forgotten this?” In this world, just as in his past life, cremation was not practiced; instead, people hoped the dead could rest in peace underground and their souls return to the land of the deceased. Therefore, whenever someone died in the town, the only priest in town would be summoned to pray and bless them. Then, the deceased would be buried together in the cemetery outside the town. This led to a situation where the bodies in the cemetery were easily corrupted by negative energy, giving rise to undead and other monstrous creatures. Usually, the local lord would fund a priest from the church to conduct rituals at the cemetery, soothing the undead and purifying the site to prevent the emergence of mutated undead creatures that might harm the townspeople. Red Maple Town’s altar was guarded by only one elderly junior priest, who was responsible for spreading the teachings to the people in the town and the two surrounding villages. He also performed funeral rituals and healed the sick. In this world, the church institutions were divided into temples and altars. Apart from the main temple, which was usually built at the sacred site where the deity they worshipped first descended, other temples of various sizes were located in towns and villages across different districts, built with donations from local believers or funded by the lords.

The altar beneath the temple is one engraved with the sacred symbols or statues of deities. It requires simple construction and little cost, and it also has some of the functions of a temple, so it is generally built in towns and villages. In a place as remote as Redmaple Town at the edge of the Northern County, despite its decent development, only one altar has been built—constructing a temple is too expensive; even a small temple costs more than five times that of the Redmaple Town lord’s manor. Such a high cost made it impossible for the stingy Barons of Redmaple to invest heavily in building one. As Donald knew, the merchant noble worshipped not a true god but the great Goldthorn! For this reason, both the temple in Giantstone City and the old priest in the town were dissatisfied with this merchant noble. The former disapproved of the Baron of Redmaple’s attitude toward temples, while the latter was upset to be exiled to a place with little profit and faced by a stingy lord. “I remember the last time the cemetery was purified was before last autumn’s harvest festival. Given Old Colliford’s attitude toward the Baron of Redmaple, it probably wasn’t cleaned very thoroughly. Nearly a whole year has passed, so the cemetery must have changed. I need to go take a look!” It wasn’t that Donald cared about the safety of the cemetery; his goal wasn’t to purify the dead but to collect the souls’ fire of the undead, with eliminating them being just a side effect. So he quietly gave Clinton a few instructions. When the Silver Moon rose high and most people in the town had fallen asleep, the two of them, carrying the butler Kord, sneaked away from the old manor, climbed over the wooden wall, and headed toward the cemetery outside the town. Human fear of the dead remains the same in any world. The vast cemetery of Redmaple Town was guarded only by an elderly night watchman, so with Clinton’s help, Donald easily avoided the watchman at the entrance and sneaked in. The atmosphere in the cemetery was quiet and gloomy, giving Donald the same feeling as when he encountered undead in that desolate area in the forest. “It seems there’s a high possibility of undead here, Clinton. Let’s head over there. If we encounter undead, just defend yourself and try not to attack!” “Yes, master!” With Clinton as his infantry, Donald carefully made his way toward the older parts of the cemetery.

The two generations of lords who ruled Red Maple Town established it over fifty years ago, making it a relatively young territory. However, its origins can be traced back a hundred years, when Red Maple Town was just a small village. Still, there are countless graves in the cemetery; many commoners were buried in simple pits without tombstones, and most of them decayed over time.

Relying on the Truth Book’s ability to sense energy, Donald found a place with the highest concentration of negative energy. There, there was only a small number of broken tombstones, resembling a mass grave—the earliest burial ground in the cemetery.

“That’s the place!”

Donald took out a first-tier magic core and opened the Truth Book’s summoning list.

“Come out! Sand Worm!”

A two-foot-long tan-colored creature appeared at Donald’s feet.

Covered in a layer of soft yet tough skin, it had a grotesque head and a body shaped like an earthworm, resembling a combination of a cobra and an earthworm.

This was the Sand Dune Worm, a wild creature from the Warcraft expansion, commonly known as a pest killer. Living in desert areas, it could shoot sand and stones at its enemies. Its attack power wasn’t outstanding, but it had a powerful digging ability, making it excellent for ambushes.

Donald summoned it precisely because of its digging skills.

To test whether there were any undead creatures here, he couldn’t possibly dig through graves himself, right?

Watching the Sand Worm burrow around in the old graveyard, occasionally tossing out one or two rotten bones, Donald thought to himself, “Don’t blame them. They’ve been dead for so long—their souls must have returned to the Land of the Dead. Maybe they’ve already been reborn. There’s no need to worry about these bones!”

Surprisingly, after the Sand Worm’s activities, an undead creature did appear.

But this undead creature looked pitiful—just a skeleton with half its bones, which had barely climbed out of the soil before losing two ribs and almost falling apart.

Under Donald’s sympathetic gaze, Clinton quickly dismantled the skeleton, leaving only the skull with a spark of soul fire for his master to collect.

After obtaining this broken skeleton, which contained only twenty units of soul power, no further movement was seen in the cemetery, no matter what the Sand Worm did. Donald had no choice but to leave.

“Never mind. I wasn’t holding out much hope anyway. Tomorrow, let’s go to the large graveyard outside Giant Stone City. The resources there will definitely be richer!”

He actively dispersed the sand worms, allowing the Book of Truth to reclaim its remaining energy, after which Donald and Clinton planned to head back home. As they passed by a newly built tomb, a dark and cold aura suddenly hit them. The attacker was fast, and Clinton, who had been on high alert, reacted instantly, slashing at the shadow with his sword. If it were a normal creature, it would have been split in two by Clinton’s strike, but the shadow split into two after being hit, then recombined unharmed and continued its attack. This unexpected turn left Donald with no time to avoid it; he could only dodge head-on, only to be pierced in the left shoulder. “Damn it!” After being attacked, Donald finally saw the enemy’s true form—a vague figure floating in mid-air, ready to strike. “It’s a ghost!” To his surprise, instead of finding an immortal creature as expected, he encountered a ghost. Ghosts, also known as phantoms or spirits, are essentially the same thing. They are undead, not immortal creatures. Although both immortal creatures and undead share the term “immortal” and belong to the same category, they differ fundamentally. Unlike tangible immortal creatures such as skeletons and zombies, whose souls return to the underworld while their remaining soul imprints mutate due to negative energy, turning them into beings of negative energy with little memory of their past lives, ghosts are undead entities whose souls remain in the main world due to resentment or unwillingness after death, forming aggregates of negative energy. Without a physical body or combat strength, they hate the living and can drain vitality from living beings through negative energy. Powerful undead even possess eerie abilities that magic users cannot resist. Fortunately, this was just an ordinary ghost. After being attacked, Donald felt a chill throughout his body, and half of his arm went numb. However, his summoning ability didn’t require the casting gestures of a mage; otherwise, he would have been completely helpless against the ghost’s sudden attacks. “Summon an Undead Harpy!” As soon as Donald spoke, a figure very similar to the ghost appeared in front of him, blocking the ghost’s subsequent attack.

That figure resembled an illusory shadow, surrounded by a dark, blue-black aura of cold energy. Its once beautiful elven features were twisted, as if suffering endless pain—it was a Level 2 undead spellcaster, a banshee.
Banshees used to be beautiful female elves who were cruelly killed by demons when the continent of Kalimdor fell. Due to inhuman torture, these soulless beings remained in this world, wailing in pain and resentment.
Their terrifying voices, heard as utterly pitiful and incessant by living beings, were regarded as the howls of death. Later, banshees became warriors in the undead army, using their mournful cries to attack enemies. Their horrifying screams could be heard from miles away.
Seeing the banshee about to attack the approaching ghost, Donald quickly shouted, “Don’t attack! Control it!”
The banshee obeyed and immediately used its innate ability to take control. The ghostly figure froze on the spot.
Any enemy unit that was not magically immune—whether living or undead, except for alchemical puppets and mechanical units—would be controlled by this skill. When used, it first paralyzed the target for a few seconds, during which the banshee took additional damage. Then the banshee disappeared and took over the target’s body without causing harm to it. Of course, this ability wasn’t invincible; it had little effect on creatures of Level 5 and above or heroes—those considered Silver-level and above in this world. For targets below Bronze level, its success rate depended on the opponent’s willpower and soul strength.
Fearing that any attack might harm the ghost and cause it to lose energy, Donald decided that using a banshee, which was itself a ghost, to deal with its own kind was the perfect solution.
The ghost, now under the banshee’s control, continued to struggle. Donald summoned the Book of Truth and spoke to it in a sympathetic tone, “Give up! No matter what you went through in life, or whatever grievances or resentments you have, you can’t achieve anything like this. Even if I don’t intervene, you won’t escape the priest’s purification—you’ll just become energy for me to use!”
With that, both the ghost and the banshee turned into streams of black light and were absorbed by the Book of Truth.

Then, using the communication artifact to check their gains, Donald couldn’t help but smile broadly and say, “Amazing! A single ghost actually possesses over 300 units of soul power—ten times that of a low-level skeleton’s soul fire. This is far better than killing skeletons!” Just from this one ghost, Donald felt the trip was already worth it. Unfortunately, the Book of Truth wasn’t designed to store souls, so it couldn’t absorb the residual soul power in the graveyard. Otherwise, even without undead or other such creatures, they would have reaped great benefits. In such a situation, the Book of Truth suggested exchanging for a sub-legendary artifact, the Soul Sphere, which could specifically absorb souls—both from living beings and dead undead—and even draw upon the faint residual soul powers lingering in space. With that, they could simply go to a place where many creatures had died, like an ancient battlefield or a large graveyard, and gather a substantial amount of residual soul power without going through such trouble. As for the conditions required to obtain the Soul Sphere, they were utterly unattainable for him at the moment. Even if the Soul Sphere could be split into ten fragments as described in the game’s plot, each fragment would still be at the level of low-tier legendary magic equipment—far beyond what he could exchange for now, not to mention that creating a complete sub-legendary artifact also required infusing it with divinity. After dealing with that ghost, Donald kept searching the graveyard several more times before leaving at night with his men, having found nothing else. As for the eradication of the undead and ghosts in the graveyard, no one would know unless he mentioned it. People would likely assume that the graveyard had remained stable after previous purifications. As for the old priest who might have noticed something, Donald hardly had to worry about him! Most priests sent to remote areas were low-ranking and unimportant within the church, so they wouldn’t put much effort into fulfilling their duties—especially since he didn’t get along well with the local lord. So even if Colliford found out that Donald had done what he should have done, the old priest would probably just thank the goddess for sparing him the trouble, without raising any suspicions.