After my agreement, the guards went away, returning to their duties. Martin stayed behind, expressing a certain degree of hesitance.

“Is something wrong?” I asked the man.

He looked at me worriedly, a spark of reluctance dancing through his eyes. “Look… James… I have no right to tell you what to do, but… becoming a guard isn’t such a simple matter,” he told me.

I raised an eyebrow. “Why?”

“It’s a tough line of work,” he said with a dark promise in his gaze. “Not just because it’s physically difficult, but because you’ll have to… You’ll have to see some sights that will strain your desire to remain good.” He paused for a long moment. “It’s one thing when you work as a paladin in the temple. They are called for a specific type of issue and primarily deal with monsters and demons. We, on the other hand, mainly deal with regular folk. Seeing the kind of horror your average person is capable of will stick with you; I promise you that.

“I can only hope that you’re willing to remain steadfast in your ways, young man,” he said without sounding like he believed I could do it. “But I wouldn’t bet on keeping the alignment forever if I were you. Be wise. You have until tomorrow to make your final choice. For now, I have to go back to work.” Martin turned around and walked towards the door. “Oh, and just one more thing.

“Have you done woodcutting before?” he asked, impressed. “This is impressive work, seriously! Keep it up. You might even get the class.”

I grinned at him and proudly raised the axe. “Sure thing, boss.”

***

After doing just enough work that it wouldn’t look like I was a reincarnated woodcutting champion, I stopped working and started pondering the prospect of becoming a guard.

The blessing was… well… quite the blessing in this case. It cleared up many fictional scenarios in my head, and for the most part, it always left at least one out for any situation I might encounter.

But one thing became exceptionally obvious before long.

If I wanted to become a guard, I’d have to display a big part of my power. Maybe not all of it, but a good amount, for sure.

Faced with an evildoer causing havoc, it would be a sin to wait on the sidelines without doing my best to stop them. I could, perhaps, get away with it if I was hiding my power for a good reason, but those reasons were few and far between.

This was a huge problem mainly because I didn’t know how magic worked. The blessing was great at moral questions, but it told me nothing directly tied to how power was acquired in this world.

Take, for example, my regenerative capabilities—was there even a realistic way for people to get S-tier regeneration? So far, none of the classes I’ve been offered have promised any passive upgrades for the basic physical skills. Maybe I just didn’t get the right classes, but it was also possible that there was a whole different way to get these upgrades.

In any case, getting access to a source of information was my primary goal.

It wasn’t long until a curious thought tickled the back of my mind.

I had been left entirely unattended here. In a house. Both its residents seemed like rather influential figures in this small town.

Their home was quite frugal. Did that really make sense? Purely logically speaking, I presumed that they had to have the money to afford a nicer place to live. That, on its own, wasn’t something I cared about. Perhaps they were locked here by sentimental value—the father-daughter duo must have had a mother in there at some point.

Still, not my problem nor my concern. But they had to be spending their money on something. Like, let’s say… books.

I had no intent to steal or damage anything, so my actions were not sinful. I scoured the entire house—well, not that there was much to search through.

For a long moment, I was worried that they’d be carrying books in their inventories, but thankfully, that wasn’t the case.

The house had two stories: the first was comprised of a tiny hallway, a small living space-slash-kitchen, and the stairway to the second floor, which had three rooms.

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The room where I was staying was mostly empty, so I went to the guard’s bedroom.

The very first thing I spotted was the large bookshelf. I summarily ignored the sappy portraits of a beautiful woman and the other memorabilia of what I presumed to be the guard’s dead wife and practically skipped my way over to the mini-library.

There were four shelves, each packed to the brim with books. My arm reached for the tallest one, and with one swift pull, I yoinked a hard-cover tome off it. I opened it. I nearly suffered a heart attack when I saw the nonsense writing. Did my language interpretation not extend to writing?

I desperately tried reading it anyway, and, to my surprise, it worked. It was a highly unusual experience, though, for several reasons.

First, there was a slight delay. It took my [Otherworlder] title a fraction of a second to decipher the writing, and that fraction of a moment was… noticeable. Scratch that; it was like trying to read while having a goddamn stroke. Thankfully, this body’s brain was nothing but a glorified decoration, so it didn’t give me a headache.

Second, I realized something pretty fascinating. Now that I was reading the language word-by-word, it hit me that, structurally, it was vastly different from English. Most of the words didn’t have an equivalent translation, but more of a description attached to it. On top of that, the punctuation was utterly different.

The coma did some heavy lifting in English, serving quite a few different functions. In this language, those functions were divided between other forms of punctuation, and I had to say, some looked pretty damn cool.

I was never much of a linguistics fan, but when provided with such an easy way to learn, I couldn’t help but appreciate how interesting it was to see entirely new features that my own language was missing. It was concerning, too, making me wonder whether the difference between the language I was speaking and the language I was thinking would cause trouble or misunderstandings, but so far, it hadn’t caused me any issues.

As I got used to this form of reading, I also got much faster. Before long, I was plowing through the pages.

It soon hit me that I was reading an incredibly shitty romance novel. This was either his late wife’s collection, or my man had some peculiar tastes.

I was worried that this meant the whole bookshelf would be fiction. The books had no markings on their spines, so I had to check each book individually to see what it was about. Unfortunately, my worries were justified. The whole bookshelf was just fiction, predominantly trash, repetitive romance stories.

But I didn’t lose hope. Once I finished checking the whole shelf here, I’d go to Amelia’s room, and I hoped she didn’t take after her mother. As I reached the bottom of the shelf, I spotted a large box resting beneath it.

Curious, I put the book I had been checking back on the shelf and pulled the box out.

Once I opened it, I found a rather large collection of books. These were quite a bit thinner, and many seemed to have been used extensively. I checked them one after another and discovered that they were precisely what I had been looking for.

They were simple, elementary texts on rather basic subjects, many holding information I was interested in.

This discovery seemed a bit too convenient until I realized that it made perfect sense—these were books for children. They were meant to teach a small child the basics and were probably used by Amelia when she was little. Then, they were likely kept here in hopes that Martin and his wife would have another child.

Kind of sad. Anyway, this was the perfect find for me.

Thus I began my journey through the books. I was surprised by how quickly I could read now that I got more into it. The texts were simple, too, making my job way more manageable.

I mostly ignored the books on mathematics and language. Those weren’t my priority. Similarly, I put the geography and history books aside. Those would be useful, but I needed stuff on magic.

Speaking of which, there wasn’t much magic-related stuff to work with. But there was one book—a text explaining classes and skills in a way that… well, perhaps it wasn’t right to say that it was entirely wrong, but I had to take the information with a grain of salt.

Whoever wrote this book believed that the classes and skills were granted to people by the gods. Judging by my conversation with one of those gods, that wasn’t the case.

While I didn’t know what I could take at face value and what I had to be skeptical of, I found quite a few exciting things about classes. In essence, classes were indeed a trial of identity. To get a class, you had to embody the identity behind it, at least to some extent.

To become a swordsman, you had to be a swordsman—you had to use a sword to fight things. Getting a rookie swordsman class with sparring alone was possible, but even amateurs had to see some actual combat.

In contrast, mages didn’t really need combat to move forward—at least not in the mainline class. The book spoke of “finding divine treasures, absorbing the energies of the world, and comprehending the secrets of the universe” as a requirement to move forward, which was quite expressive while giving me zero concrete information.

Speaking of rookies and amateurs, I finally discovered a ranking for classes.

The people recognized six ranks of classes: rookie, amateur, professional, elite, master, and supreme. The F to S rank rating on my skills also fit into this categorization. That being said, that meant that my regeneration was in a category that the world considered the peak of power, at least according to this book.

To my surprise, I was actually missing some of those basic physical skills. Not everyone had all of them; in fact, many people had no passive physical skills at all. That being said, those who excelled at specific non-combat tasks and professions could become quite powerful, but as far as I could tell, high ratings in several physical skills were usually a trait of those who fought for a living.

Scanning the page, I finally reached the part covering the collection of passive physical skills.