From the memories left behind in this body, Sati quickly realized that the original owner had been different from other people since he was very young.
That ability was even written clearly on the panel that only he himself could see.
[Death Reading]: By making physical contact, he can briefly sense the lingering soul of the dead and read fragments of the emotions, images, and memories left behind at the moment of death.
In this world, not everyone had the right to become a professional.
Most people remained ordinary for their entire lives.
Only a small number of people would show some kind of talent in childhood. When they reached the proper age, they could go to the temple and receive baptism, and only then could they truly set foot on a path that matched their innate gift.
Knights, scouts, priests, mages, and even craftsmen and hunters mostly came into being this way.
So-called baptism was the receiving of a god's blessing.
Only after this step could a person's still-unformed talent truly become a profession recognized by the temple.
When the original owner was little, the old priest had tested his aptitude once as well.
That had originally been one of the most ordinary things in the temple.
Once the children in town reached the right age, they would always be tested to see whether there was any chance the gods had taken notice of them.
But when that silver piece engraved with the holy emblem was placed in his palm, the faint light upon it suddenly flickered once, then dimmed away.
The old priest's movement stopped at once.
At first he simply froze, as if he had not reacted in time. Then he abruptly pulled the silver piece back, lowered his head to inspect it again and again, and his brows slowly drew together.
Having no aptitude was not unusual.
Most children in town showed no reaction at all when tested.
But a case like this, where the holy emblem darkened the moment it was touched, was something he had never seen before.
The old priest stared at the boy for a long time, and his face gradually grew pale.
He clearly did not understand what this meant either.
After a long silence, he finally lowered his voice and told the child never to mention this to anyone again, and never to casually touch the objects in the temple that were used for prayer and blessing.
The original owner had been too young then to understand much of it. He only felt that the old man's hand gripping his wrist was tighter than usual, and even his voice carried a stiffness that was rarely heard.
It was as if even the old priest himself had felt some unexplainable unease.
The first time he noticed his own abnormality was in the winter when he was ten.
That year the snow had fallen heavily, and the stone steps in the temple's back courtyard were covered in a thick layer of it.
While sweeping snow early one morning, he found a sparrow frozen to death in the corner by the wall.
The tiny thing had curled into a hard little lump, like a twig split open by the cold.
He had grown up in the temple. Whenever the old priest saw a dead bird or beast, he would casually bury it in the soil behind the courtyard.
The original owner had seen it often enough and learned to do the same.
So when he saw that sparrow frozen to death in the corner that day, he simply reached out, intending to pick it up.
In the next instant, a feeling that did not belong to him rushed into his mind.
It was almost as if he had suddenly become that sparrow.
The sensation of falling from a height seized him at once. Cold wind poured through feathers, tiny bones stiffened bit by bit in the freezing air, and though the wings still wanted to struggle open, they no longer obeyed.
The last thing it could see was only that gray-white, empty sky above its head.
It lasted only a moment, yet it was so clear that it made his scalp go numb.
At first, he thought it was only a hallucination brought on by the cold.
But later, whether it was a wild dog that had died by sickness in the ditch, a rat drowned in a wooden bucket, or a chicken whose neck had been snapped by a weasel, as long as the thing had died not long before, once he touched it, his mind would always fill with things that did not belong to him.
He was frightened badly enough that in the end he secretly told the old priest about it.
The old man's expression changed at once after hearing it, and he only warned him sternly that he must never mention it to anyone else again.
From then on, the original owner buried the secret deep inside himself. He no longer dared to casually touch things that had only recently died, nor did he dare show the slightest trace of abnormality in front of others.
But a secret was the sort of thing that could be hidden for a while, not for a lifetime.
Especially when even staying alive was becoming harder and harder.
After the old priest died, the original owner was driven out of the temple and barely managed to find work doing odd jobs at the adventurers' guild.
He had to crawl out of bed before dawn every day to scrub away the wine stains, muddy footprints, and vomit left in the corners of the hall the night before.
During the day he ran errands and delivered messages, copied all kinds of trivial records no one else wanted to handle for the front counter, and when things got busy, he also had to carry drunken adventurers, move crates, lead horses, and feed dogs.
If someone came back from the forest with blood and mud all over their leather armor and boots, he would have to carry a bucket to the back courtyard and squat there, rinsing them off bit by bit.
And yet the pay was pitifully small.
On good days, it was barely enough for a few pieces of black bread and a bowl of hot soup with chopped vegetable leaves floating inside.
On bad days, he could only chew on cold, hard rations and force down a few gulps of cold water at night, enduring until the next day.
The guild naturally would not spare a room for him alone. Most of the time he slept in a tiny storage space in the back courtyard, with old burlap sacks for bedding. Wind leaked in from above, and rats often darted through the corners of the walls.
When winter came, a thin blanket did nothing against the cold. He could only curl himself into a tight ball and inch as close as possible to the stove ash while some warmth still remained.
When he woke the next day, his hands and feet were often stiff.
Worse than poverty was the feeling of being beneath everyone else.
Adventurers, in the final analysis, were just a pack of drifters with no fixed place.
Some apprentice adventurers who could never get a proper commission would sit in the corner of the hall after two cups of cheap liquor and brag loudly. Whenever he passed by carrying a tray, they would deliberately stick out a foot to trip him.
If the wine spilled, they would slap the table and burst into laughter, cursing him for not even being able to carry a tray properly.
There were also those old hands who had once worked caravan escort jobs. If they lost at cards and were in a foul mood, they would casually flick a copper coin against his forehead and tell him to get lost and buy wine from the street corner. If he came back even a little late, they would curse him out.
There was even an old scout missing two fingers who always said he brought bad luck. Every time he saw the boy crouched in the back courtyard cleaning boots, he would spit out some sneering remark, saying that a temple-raised little bastard naturally carried the smell of the dead, enough to make people sick just standing too close.
Once, someone hurled an empty cup at his shoulder. He spun around immediately, eyes red.
But the people across from him were only laughing. One of them even rose deliberately and patted the short blade at his waist, asking what exactly he intended to do.
In that moment, he understood.
In a place like this, for a menial without even a profession, even anger was a mistake.
Because he knew that if he could not even endure this kind of humiliation, then not just his dignity, even this tiny wage would be lost.
The guild often took on troublesome commissions involving murder cases, corpse identification, and missing persons whose bodies were later found.
That sort of work was the biggest headache.
If the cause of death could not be determined, or if the body had been dragged back from a wasteland, the edge of a forest, or a ditch, people often had to be sent back to the original site to search for traces all over again.
If someone had died and the goods they carried had gone missing as well, the matter became even harder.
A life had to be investigated, and the missing goods had to be found too. Going back and forth for two or three days might still lead nowhere.
And every extra day of delay meant the guild had to spend one more day paying for manpower.
If nothing could be recovered in the end, they would have to endure the employer's anger too.
Once, a body was dragged up from a gully west of town. It belonged to a cart driver from a merchant caravan.
The corpse had already started rotting badly, and half the face had been chewed by wild dogs, but the sack of goods he was supposed to have been carrying was nowhere to be found.
The dead man no longer mattered. What the employer demanded was help in recovering the lost goods.
The employer was frantic, insisting that the missing items were worth a great deal and demanding that the guild recover them as soon as possible.
But several adventurers stood around the corpse and argued for half the day without reaching any conclusion.
Some said he must have run into robbers on the road. Some said he had fallen to his death and only afterward been torn apart by wild dogs. Others suspected he had gotten greedy, tried to run off with the goods himself, and ended up dying out in the wasteland.
That day, the original owner had only come along to help with the work.
While lifting the corpse, his fingers accidentally brushed the stiffened arm of the dead man.
And that single touch was enough for what remained from the dead man's last moments to slam into his head.
At once, all the clues became clear.
He could only pretend to squat down and examine the wound, then use a branch to stir at the blood and mud on the ground. After a while, he spoke vaguely, saying that this gully did not look like the primary scene, and that if they wanted to find the missing goods, they had better search through the dead forest farther west.
The adventurers had no better lead anyway. Hearing him say that, they went with the mindset of giving it a try and searched the place.
And in the end, they actually found something.
First they found the dead man's bundle beneath a bush at the edge of the withered forest. Inside were a few pieces of dry food and a money pouch, and underneath them was the missing sack of goods.
After that matter was settled, the guild counter gave the original owner an extra silver coin.
It was not much, but it was worth several days of his usual hard labor.
From then on, whenever the guild ran into this sort of filthy, exhausting work again, they would often bring him along as a matter of course.
Sometimes an unidentified corpse would be found near the forest, and they would take him to see whether the person had died there or somewhere else.
Sometimes a missing person would leave behind nothing but a bloodstained outer garment. Others would have no idea what to do, but he could always vaguely point out which direction they should continue searching.
At other times, someone from a caravan would die on the road and their goods would vanish. The guild men would spend half a day turning things upside down without finding any clue, and in the end it would still be through him that they avoided many wrong turns.
As time passed, even the people at the front counter came to accept it by default: this little temple-raised drudge always had a few more inexplicable insights than anyone else when it came to corpses and missing-person cases.
Of course, he never directly admitted that he could read anything from a corpse.
Whenever people asked, he always had an explanation ready.
Sometimes he said he had seen many funerary matters while following the old priest as a child.
Sometimes he said it was intuition.
Sometimes he simply said that after seeing so many corpses, he had become more sensitive than others to the dead and the smell of blood.
After hearing it often enough, people half believed it and half did not, but they accepted it anyway.
For the people in the guild, whether he truly understood something or was simply lucky was not all that important.
What mattered was that if they brought him along, many dirty jobs that would otherwise take two or three days to sort through could often yield a direction within half a day.
If he merely went out with them and helped identify a corpse, he could usually get two or three silver coins afterward.
If he truly helped find the final place where a missing person had died, or recover something important for an employer, the guild would sometimes put down an extra payment for him as well.
On the good days, it could be half a gold coin.
The most generous reward he ever received came when he helped a small merchant caravan recover a lost account pouch and seal. The employer was delighted and directly rewarded him with an imperial gold coin.
That single gold coin was enough to buy him black bread and hot soup for quite a long time, and enough as well to get himself an old blanket in winter that did not let the wind straight through.
And because of that, the original owner slowly came to understand something.
This ability of his, something that could never bear the light, was not only a deadly secret in a place like Hervis Town. Sometimes it was also the very thing that could earn him a few silver coins and let him keep on living.
Later, it was precisely because of this talent that the original owner caught the attention of an adventurer party.