The original owner's little talent was, in truth, far more valuable than it appeared on the surface.
It was not as if no one in the guild understood this. Jobs like finding bodies, determining causes of death, and following the traces left behind on the dead to piece together clues were usually done well only by veteran high-rank hunters.
Those people were truly capable. Their skills were solid, and their eyes were sharp. Once a corpse was dragged back, they could read a great deal from the wounds, the mud stains, the stage of decay, the tears in the clothing, even the direction in which bones had broken.
But the problem lay there as well.
High-rank hunters were expensive to hire, and they were not people one could easily ask for help. In a place like Hervis Town, most commissions did not pay much to begin with. Employers were unwilling to spend heavily, and the guild could not possibly invite such people to step in every single time.
More often, the task would simply be left pending for a while, or handed over to ordinary adventurers to investigate little by little. They could spend two or three days going back and forth and still fail to get any result.
But the original owner was different.
He had no profession, and he had no right to accept commissions on his own like a formal adventurer.
In the guild, he was little more than a menial worker, and most of the time even keeping himself fed was a struggle.
Yet when it came to finding bodies and identifying clues, he possessed a skill no one else could match.
Many tasks that only high-rank hunters could normally handle cleanly and efficiently, somehow fell into his hands and still yielded a direction very quickly.
So naturally, he thought of another path.
Since he could not accept commissions himself, then he could go out with a team that could.
Others would take the job, deal with the guild, and shoulder the risks of the wilderness, while he would be responsible for the part he was best at.
In this way, the team could save the money they would otherwise have spent hiring a high-rank hunter, and they could also complete those troublesome missing-person, corpse-identification, and clue-tracing commissions much faster. And the original owner no longer had to keep living off the miserable wages from guild odd jobs.
In the end, it was simply a mutually beneficial arrangement.
The team needed his skill.
And he, too, needed to rely on someone else's name if he wanted to truly turn that skill into food on the table.
The team he joined had four people in total, counting the original owner.
If one excluded the original owner himself, who did not even have a proper profession and in most cases could only handle corpse identification and clue finding on the fringes, then the remaining three were the real members this low-level adventurer team could put forward to hold up its name.
The leader, James, was a human knight.
Calling him a knight sounded grander than it really was. In a borderland like this, he was simply the most common sort of formal professional one could find.
He had received baptism, learned a few respectable knight techniques, had a sturdy enough build, and held a sword steadily. If they really ran into gray wolves, mountain-maned jackals, or even first-rank monsters, he could at least stand at the very front and keep the team from collapsing on the spot.
The scout, Ror, was a human scout.
Truth be told, he was not especially impressive as a scout. In terms of the real fundamentals of tracking, reading routes, and finding traces, he was far from outstanding.
Once they entered the forest, whenever they had to search for a person, a corpse, or a missing item, it was often still the original owner who first had to give them a rough direction before Ror could continue the search from there.
Compared to a scout, Ror was more like an assassin.
Hiding in the shadows, slipping close, and striking hard when people least expected it. That was what he did best. Once he vanished into the forest or pressed himself behind a rocky slope, he seemed to disappear entirely.
In his own words, he was a man who lived by his brains and his craft, not the same kind of brute as James, who only knew how to carry a sword and push forward.
Then there was Lina, a formal priest from the Imperial Church.
Unlike James and Ror, who made their living rolling in mud and grime, she should not have been mixed up with a low-level adventurer team like this in the first place.
After all, a priest was considered a respectable profession no matter where one went.
James had once remarked in private that Lina probably did not come from an ordinary family. Whether she was nobility was hard to say, but she must at least have been the daughter of a well-off and respectable household.
Leaving everything else aside, one only had to look at the way she stood and sat in daily life, and the unconscious manners and habits she carried, to know she was different from people who had grown up in a place like Hervis Town.
Even when she merely sat by the campfire drinking water, her back was always straight.
When she ate, her movements were light. Even the way she broke bread was nothing like Ror, who tore into it as if he were stripping bark off a tree.
When she bandaged people's wounds, she would first wipe her hands clean. Even the way she folded medicinal cloth and wrapped bandages carried a kind of delicacy that spoke of education.
Ror's own opinion on the matter was more direct.
He said that a person like Lina had obviously not suffered much in childhood. At the very least, her family had servants, or someone had specifically taught her proper behavior.
Otherwise, there was no way someone raised in a borderland like this could fold a strip of cloth as neatly as though preparing sacrament for a church ceremony.
But there was not much malice in those words.
Because although Lina's background seemed very good, she had little arrogance in her temperament.
She was generous with people, spoke briskly and openly, and when she smiled there was even a bright vitality about her. It was unlike the restrained, self-conscious air many priests tended to carry.
When the original owner first began following the team, he was so cautious he hardly dared speak at all. But Lina was the one who took the initiative to show concern for him and ask after his condition.
She was beautiful as well.
Her long golden hair always looked especially bright in the light. Her features were vivid and lively, and when she smiled her eyes curved slightly, making her whole person seem all the more alive.
Even though the priest's robe she wore was already somewhat old, standing inside an adventurers' guild thick with the smells of sweat, mud, and cheap liquor, she still seemed different from everyone around her.
That team was not strong.
If one had to put it plainly, they were simply the most common sort of low-level adventurer team around Hervis Town.
They could not afford to take on caravan escort work for major merchants, nor would any worthwhile bounty ever fall to them. Most of the time, the jobs they picked up were poorly paid, dirty, troublesome, and time-consuming.
Searching for missing people, examining corpses in the wilderness, scouting the road ahead for merchant caravans, and now and then dealing with some small trouble left behind by low-rank monsters.
For example, perhaps the sheep in some village had been bitten to death one after another, and people suspected gray wolves had appeared near the forest.
Or perhaps a rotten corpse had been found in a ditch, its face too ruined to recognize, and someone first had to confirm whether it was the driver who had failed to return some time earlier.
These jobs were neither respectable nor lucrative.
But precisely because of that, they were the kind that reached a middling team like theirs.
The original owner did not need to fight at the front.
Most of the time, he simply followed behind, examined the scene, identified traces, touched a corpse for others, and then tried his best to explain what he had seen as though he had inferred it from footprints, wounds, and the surrounding environment.
He had no formal profession in the team, and no one regarded him as a real member who could step forward and risk his life.
If danger truly came, he still had to stay in the back.
But when it came to searching for people, identifying corpses, and examining traces, James and the others genuinely valued him.
Any corpse only needed a brief look from him, and he could easily deduce the cause of death and the course of events.
After a job, if he had only gone along for the trip and helped identify a corpse, he could usually get three or four silver coins.
If it was truly through him that they found the place where the missing person had died, or if he followed the clues left on the corpse and helped the employer recover something, James would sometimes slip him two extra coins. It was nothing compared to what a real professional could earn, but it was still much better than doing odd jobs alone in the guild.
At the very least, for the few days after they returned from a commission, he could eat hot food.
More importantly, the people in the team were all fairly decent.
James, the captain, was steady and quiet. When it came time to divide the payment, he never shorted him, and he would not use his strength to bully the original owner.
When they had to spend the night in the wild, who would take the first watch, who would fetch water, who would clean the game, he arranged everything clearly. He never simply dumped the dirtiest and hardest work on the original owner just because he was the weakest.
Ror the scout had a sharp tongue and loved teasing him most of the time. On mountain paths he would complain that his footsteps were too heavy. Crossing muddy ground, he would curse that he moved like a sheep bogged down in rotten sludge. Even if he breathed a little too loudly, Ror would say that sooner or later he would draw everything in the forest straight to them.
But when something truly happened, Ror was never vague about it.
Once, when they entered the forest to search for someone, the original owner lowered his head to study blood droplets and broken grass on the ground and failed to notice where he was stepping. He nearly planted a foot straight into an old animal trap hidden beneath fallen leaves.
Before he could even react, Ror had already grabbed the back of his collar and yanked him back by force.
Ror crouched down, used his dagger to sweep aside the rotten leaves, and exposed the rust-black iron jaws beneath. In a low voice, he cursed, "If those eyes of yours don't know how to work, you might as well dig them out."
After cursing him, however, he still tossed the dagger over and told him to use it to probe the path ahead.
And through the hardest stretch afterward, Ror quite obviously slowed his pace. He looked as though he was merely annoyed at having to drag dead weight along, yet he still casually pushed aside the branches jutting out in front of him.
As for Lina, the way she cared for him was different from the other two.
The first time the original owner followed them on a long journey, the soles of his feet had been rubbed raw and bloody. He sat by the fire gritting his teeth without making a sound. Lina was the first to notice, and she called him over to sit down.
As she murmured a prayer softly, she placed a hand over his ankle. Pale golden divine light spread slowly outward, and the wound soon stopped bleeding. Even the piercing pain was gradually pressed down.
When Lina did these things, her expression was focused, but her tone remained light. She even smiled and scolded him a little, asking why he was trying so hard to endure it. At that time, the original owner kept his head lowered and hardly even dared look at her. He only felt that the place she had touched was burning hot.
At that age, the original owner was right in the years when first feelings begin to stir.
And besides, the other person was Lina.
He had been young, had seen very little of the world, and had lived in hardship and embarrassment. In daily life, what he usually received from others was little more than orders, contempt, and impatience.
But Lina was different. She would smile when she spoke to him. When he was at his most embarrassed, she would still leave him a little dignity. When he was at a loss, she would hand something over as if nothing awkward had happened at all.
So he almost fell for her very quickly.
It was a feeling that came easily, yet burned with intensity.
He could remember for a very long time what she looked like when she cast healing magic on him.
At those times, Lina would always incline her head slightly, her expression focused, softly murmuring prayers under her breath while pale golden light slowly spilled from her fingertips, softening even the outline of her profile.
The original owner could not hear clearly what she was saying, yet his eyes would always linger on her lowered eyelashes, the faint movement at her lips, and that face lit at once by firelight and holy power, until he stared blankly without realizing it.
She was beautiful even when she stood in the morning light arranging her hair.
Under the sun, that golden hair seemed almost to shine.
When she raised a hand to tuck it behind her ear, or lowered her head to tie up the ends again, a few loose strands would slip through her fingers and fall beside her cheek. The original owner would often watch without reason, unable to move his eyes away.
And just like that, he stayed with the team for two years.
To the original owner at that time, such a life could already be counted as a good one.
He could fill his stomach, had a place to stay, and had people to travel with.
The commissions were dangerous, but once one trip was finished, he could at least sit down in the guild, eat a bowl of hot soup, and listen to Ror complain about how many copper coins the employer had pinched this time, instead of curling up alone in the tiny back-room storage space as he had before, listening to rats scramble in the corners while worrying whether there would even be work tomorrow.
At first, that was all he had wanted.
He had only wanted to stay alive, have food to eat, have somewhere to sleep, and not freeze or starve to death outside the town. By then, he would already have counted himself fortunate.
But the longer he followed the team through wilderness and woodland, the more the thoughts in his heart slowly changed from what they had once been.
He began to truly see these people as his companions.
And he also became more and more clearly aware that he and they were, in the end, not the same kind of people.
James was a knight. When danger came, he could draw his sword and stand in front.
Whatever else one might say of Ror, he was still a baptized scout. When the time came to risk his life, he could slip into the shadows to kill, and he could also stand in front and hold the line for a while.
As for Lina, there was even less need to mention it. Her divine arts could not only save lives, but when necessary, they could protect the entire team.
Only he was different.
He had no profession, no baptism, no true combat skill or spell he could bring out.
Even if he could see more from a corpse than anyone else, even if he could trace clues for them with far greater clarity, once danger truly lunged before his eyes, he could still only stand at the back.