The flow of the world can never be predicted completely. Every time humanity tries to guess the direction of its future, new variables appear along the way. Among the countless possibilities that may arise, dead ends and failure almost always become the heaviest obstacles standing in the path of the future people dream about. Those variables are so common that they cling to human life like ants gathering around something sweet.
Yet not everyone sees failure as something purely negative. Many people interpret it as a natural part of their life experience.
They say, "Every time someone fails, there is always meaning behind it. Failure carries experience and the process that leads to future success. Learn from that past, and you will continue to grow until you reach the peak."
Of course, not everyone agrees with that idea.
Some individuals would immediately respond with a short sentence.
"Nonsense."
A group of people cannot simply blame those who hold the opposite view. The road toward one's dreams rarely runs smoothly. Still, for those who reject the notion that failure is a valuable experience, their reasoning is not entirely without foundation.
That was how James viewed the past he had long left behind.
He did not regret the fact that he had failed to achieve his deepest desire. At the same time, he never mocked the years of effort he had poured into it with sweat and persistence.
After all, no matter how hard someone tries, if the world does not permit it, or as people often call it, fate, then all that effort can end in nothing. Anger or regret would only waste energy without changing the outcome.
Even so, he never liked people who treated failure as a stepping stone toward the next success. For someone like him, who had lived in poverty since childhood and only managed to graduate from university because of a government scholarship, dreaming about a much better future sometimes felt no different from simple fantasy.
His foundation had been fragile from the beginning. No matter how hard he tried, turning his situation around was never an easy task.
He was not the child of wealthy parents. For people who already possessed everything, failure might only mean starting again from the beginning, using it as a form of tempering that would shape them into more mature and experienced individuals.
But he never had that kind of luxury.
For him, failure often meant the end.
Once he failed, starting over from the beginning was almost impossible.
James had experienced that reality firsthand. In the end, he gave up chasing the dream that had once burned so brightly inside him, becoming a billionaire and building the wealthiest family.
A dream that, when he thought about it now, was not much different from an unrealistic fantasy.
Even so, the determination and persistence he once showed still deserved recognition. He had truly tried with everything he had before failure finally forced him to stop.
Although he had let go of that dream, his will and mental strength did not collapse completely. He had stopped chasing his old ambition, but he had never truly given up on his life.
Eventually, James changed direction from the dreams of his childhood toward something far simpler.
Building a family.
Getting married, then having a handsome son and a beautiful daughter.
A simple dream, yet one that felt warm.
Unfortunately, the world always seemed to snatch his wishes away.
That was the conclusion he reached while standing at the edge of death.
Because he had spent too much time working relentlessly in the past, he had neglected the most valuable thing a human being possessed.
Health.
Cancer.
That single word became the diagnosis from the doctor, and at the same time, his death sentence.
He felt a small sense of relief that he had never had a lover. If he had, this suffering would only have become a deeper wound for someone else, and an additional burden on his own mind.
Perhaps hope still existed, but the illness consuming him was too severe. The scale of hope slowly lost against despair.
"What an unlucky life I've had. I couldn't even reach a small dream."
He cursed quietly at himself.
Lying on a hospital bed with no one around him felt unbearable during the final days of his life. Silence became a companion that never left.
He found himself recalling the past.
The most precious memories for him came from his university years. At least that had been the time when students stood at the threshold of the real professional world.
Many beautiful memories were left there. From time to time, a quiet longing surfaced, a wish to return to those days.
But that feeling always faded when he remembered how harshly he had fallen because of a dream that had been too large to reach.
Several days passed without a single visitor.
James felt lonely, but there was nothing he could do.
Lying down became his daily routine. The pain from his illness continued to eat away at his body from within. All he could do was endure it and let time pass slowly.
"I really can't hold on any longer."
"Getting married and having children turned out to be something I couldn't achieve. But maybe this is better."
"How terrible would it be if I died after leaving behind a family that loved me?"
"I don't want to leave any attachments in this world. I came into this world alone, and I will leave it alone as well."
"My greatest wish was never to become the richest person. I only realized that at the end of my life."
"I just wanted to get married and have a handsome son and a beautiful daughter."
"Building a family. In short, that was the dream of someone who had never felt the warmth of a family."
"I only hope that wish can come true, wherever and whenever it may be."
Several days later, his life finally came to an end.
He died peacefully.
But there was one thing he never realized.
No matter how small someone's influence might be in the lives of others, there will always be someone who feels the loss when that person is gone.
His friends.
The people who had once felt the warmth of his character.
They mourned the passing of someone they might never meet again.
The sadness did not last long, yet it still left a small wound in each of their hearts. A faint memory that would occasionally surface in their thoughts.
Not much.
But that is how the world works.
That is how the world shows that every human life actually has value.
You are valuable too.
It is just that many times, you never realize it. To truly understand that truth, sometimes a person must first leave this world.
Your story may have ended in this world.
But it never truly ends in the hearts and memories of others.
———
Two years had passed since he arrived in this world. It took time for James to adapt to an environment that felt completely foreign, a world with an ancient civilization that reminded him of medieval Europe. Perhaps this world was slightly more advanced, but it was difficult for him to judge and compare it accurately with any specific era from his previous life.
In any case, he had never studied European history in depth. His knowledge only covered broad and general impressions.
At one point, he even regretted not learning more about such things. Still, one fact had already become certain in his mind.
This world was not his.
Even though many aspects resembled Europe in the past, there were simply too many differences to ignore.
This world was filled with intrigue, deception, and powers that made no sense by the standards of his former world. The existence of knights with extraordinary abilities and mages was the clearest example.
In this world, all of it was real.
Unlike his previous world, where such things were treated as legends whose existence was still questioned, not even worthy of serious study by respected scientists.
For rational scientists, science was the only form of miracle that could be accepted.
Anything capable of moving an object, whether visible or invisible, would ultimately be explained through the laws of science.
Magic?
For them, it was nothing more than nonsense.
There were indeed arguments claiming that magic and science had no fundamental difference. But if the discussion referred to magic as ordinary people imagined it, scientists would almost certainly reject it. They would demand concrete proof first, then break down the phenomenon through scientific explanation, dismantling the simple logic used by the general public.
Then what about ghosts?
The answer was not very different.
For scientists, the concept of ghosts as believed by the wider population was merely the result of hypotheses shaped by dominant beliefs within certain communities.
Those beliefs were passed down, reinforced through stories, and eventually accepted as truth by many people.
When considered calmly, the explanation actually made sense.
Throughout his entire life in the previous world, James had never truly experienced anything supernatural. From his school years to university, he often heard friends discussing mysterious events and ghost stories.
But he had never taken them seriously.
There was one incident that almost made him believe.
One night he heard strange noises coming from the kitchen in his house. The sound was clear enough to wake him from sleep.
Someone once said that ghosts preferred places close to water, dark areas, and damp environments.
His kitchen fit all those conditions.
But all of those suspicions collapsed the moment he checked it himself.
"It was just a cat. I really wasted my energy being scared."
He only shook his head at the time, feeling that his thoughts had been unnecessarily exaggerated. Being afraid of something that did not even exist felt like a step backward for common sense.
After that incident, he never took anything related to supernatural matters in his former world seriously again.
But in this world, everything was different.
Here, such things were not just stories.
The problem was completely real.
If someone refused to believe it, the consequences could end in a miserable death.
James still remembered clearly the early days after he first arrived in this world.
When he first heard the servants whispering about ghosts, he nearly thought everyone in this place had lost their minds.
How could they show such intense fear just from talking about ghosts?
Their expressions looked as if a sickle of death was already hovering near their necks, ready to cut them down at any moment.
I almost thought they were all insane.
Thinking about it now, perhaps I was the insane one for refusing to believe it.
However, just like the ghost legends in his previous world, not every ghost could directly harm humans.
The same rule applied here.
Weakness always appeared when they attempted to physically harm a human being.
There were ghosts with relatively high ranks, but to truly injure a person they still needed a human body as a vessel.
By possessing a human, they could display their true strength.
Without a human body, most of them remained supernatural entities that were not physically dangerous. More often than not, they tormented humans mentally rather than harming their bodies directly.
Of course, there were also ghosts with far higher levels.
Some of them were capable of directly influencing the physical world.
However, their weakness was also clear.
Once a ghost entity reached that level of power, physical objects could also harm them. Their existence became more tangible, and because of that they could be eliminated more easily by superhuman knights or powerful mages.
That was why such entities rarely revealed themselves.
Besides possessing immense strength, they also had enough intelligence to control the negative emotions that formed the source of their existence.
In this world, ghosts were born from a mixture of human negative energy and the mana present in the surrounding environment.
Human negative energy carried hatred, despair, and many other dark emotions. As a result, most ghosts naturally behaved in destructive ways toward intelligent beings in this world, whether humans or other races.
All of that knowledge came to him after he had spent some time here.
But two months after he first arrived in this world, he did not know any of it yet.
Because he did not believe in ghosts, James often moved freely at night. He wandered through the manor corridors, the gardens, and many corners that still felt new to him.
His curiosity was far stronger than his fear.
Unfortunately, that boldness almost led him into serious trouble.
One night he walked into the garden and casually approached a servant who happened to be standing there first.
Because he was still unfamiliar with the information of this world, James did not consider the strange details surrounding that servant.
He simply approached without hesitation.
His hand lifted, then lightly tapped the servant's shoulder.
From the appearance, the servant was clearly a woman.
Yet even before she turned around, something already felt wrong.
Even so, James still opened his mouth and spoke after tapping her shoulder.