From that point on, for a long stretch of time, Satie's life was split into two halves.
By day, he still went out on commissions with James and the others.
He entered the forest, walked wasteland roads, searched for missing people, helped the guild identify corpses, and occasionally joined them in dealing with low-rank monsters that were not too troublesome.
By night, the little demon took him to learn necromantic magic.
Graveyards, mass burial pits, places in the woods where beasts had died, even filthy ditches and the edges of abandoned wells that no one wanted to approach, all became his training grounds.
He learned quickly.
Because for him, many of these things were not truly starting from nothing.
With his inborn gift, he was already far more sensitive than others to presences related to death.
Compared to ordinary people, he could sense many different things.
What the little demon truly taught him was simply how to separate those mixed sensations bit by bit, how to distinguish deathly energy, how to draw it out, and then slowly learn how to control it.
That was how he learned Withering.
It was one of the most basic and easiest necromantic spells to begin with. In essence, it meant drawing out deathly energy and attaching it to the flesh and life force of a living thing, forcibly taking away part of its vitality.
At first, he only used it on plants. After struggling for quite a while, all he could do was turn branches and leaves yellow and black.
Later, however, he was already able to cast Withering on living creatures. A lively rat, once eroded by the spell, would quickly weaken and struggle, its limbs stiffening, its fur losing its shine, its tail and claws shriveling bit by bit, until at last it died in his hands as if its life had been forcibly drained away.
Necromantic Control was harder.
This was not a spell one could perform simply by releasing deathly energy. One first had to send that energy into a corpse, then maintain that connection with one's own mind, making something already dead move again.
Satie practiced for a long time before he could finally just barely control some small animals that had only recently died, making a gray sparrow flap its wings, a rat crawl along the foot of a wall, or a wild rabbit jerk stiffly forward a few steps.
According to the little demon, he was not far from the level of a true apprentice.
Once his magic power rose another step and he truly crossed that threshold, it would be able to use the Necromancer's Grimoire to carry out a baptism belonging to a necromancer for him and formally unlock his profession.
When that time came, spellcasting would become far easier for him than it was now, and many spells he could currently only barely manage would become powers he could truly wield.
Whenever he thought of that, Satie could not help but feel his chest grow hot.
Because it meant that perhaps he, too, could become like James, Ror, and Lina—someone with a profession truly his own, someone with a road ahead that he could keep walking.
And in truth, this was something he had wanted for a very long time.
In a place like Hervis Town, those who could gain a profession were already a minority. Most people, even if they lived their entire lives honestly and quietly, remained nothing more than ordinary people. Only a small number of lucky ones, those born with greater favor, were qualified to truly receive a response after baptism and gain a profession of their own.
James, Ror, and Lina were clearly such people.
So they had always believed that Satie was different from them.
In their eyes, Satie was only an ordinary person with a somewhat unusual knack. He could identify corpses, read traces, and now and then rely on that strange, hard-to-explain sharpness of perception to notice things in the dead and at the scene that others would miss. Such talent was rare, certainly, but not so rare that it would make anyone immediately think of him as a professional.
After all, there were always some people in this world with odd little gifts.
Some had noses as sharp as hounds. Some were born with an uncanny sense of direction. Some could identify herbs and beast tracks with a single glance.
To others, Satie's case looked more or less like that. Strange, perhaps, but still within the bounds of what people could understand.
And because of that, no one in the team had ever seriously asked him why he had no profession.
Because in their minds, the answer was already simple.
He just did not have the talent.
Satie himself had accepted that assumption by default, and in daily life he never explained much.
As time passed, even he himself had nearly grown used to it—used to standing behind James and the others, used to watching other people use battle aura, combat techniques, and divine arts in moments of real danger, watching them do one thing after another that he himself could never do.
But in truth, he had always envied them deeply.
Especially James's knightly combat techniques.
More than once in battle, he had watched James use those techniques to swing his sword and split apart things an ordinary man could never have cut through.
After watching for long enough, Satie had once been unable to stop himself from asking whether he could learn them too.
James had not laughed at him. He had merely wiped his sword and said in a very ordinary tone that such things were not something one could learn simply by copying the motions.
Anyone could imitate a few forms. But whether one could truly use them depended on whether there was battle aura within the body, and whether one had the power granted by a profession.
At the end of it, he had even patted Satie on the shoulder and told him plainly that he probably could not do it.
From that time on, Satie had already been thinking that it would be wonderful if he, too, could have a profession of his own.
So by day, he was still that quiet young man in Hervis Town, following behind the team and going out on jobs.
He identified corpses, helped trace clues, and whenever danger appeared, he would instinctively step back. He was inconspicuous and never drew much notice.
Anyone who looked at him would only think he was an ordinary young man with decent luck and a somewhat unusual little talent.
No one would ever guess that this same young man, who spent his days carrying things in the guild's back courtyard and helping James and the others with odd tasks, would by night follow a demon into graveyards, burial pits, and the depths of the wilderness to learn how to distinguish deathly energy and practice necromantic arts—arts that, if word of them ever spread, would be more than enough to send him to the stake.
And the original owner himself gradually became used to such a life.
After hiding it for so long, even he began to feel that perhaps this secret really could stay hidden forever.
And yet, the accident still came.
That time, the commission they accepted had seemed utterly ordinary: to hunt a first-rank Split-Fang Black-Bristle Demon Boar.
No one had expected the guild's intelligence to be disastrously wrong.
That monster's strength was far beyond the first rank.
When they finally drove it out in the depths of the forest, the original owner knew at first sight that something was wrong.
The beast's shoulders were nearly as high as a man's chest. Between its black bristles were mixed gray-white hardened spikes. When it crashed through the undergrowth, it looked like a wall wrapped in mud, rotting leaves, and the stench of blood. Its tusks scraped across tree trunks and tore away whole sheets of bark.
The team was driven into a desperate situation almost the moment the fight began.
James's proud knightly guard was smashed aside by the monster with terrifying ease.
Ror reacted at once.
Almost at the same instant James was knocked away, Ror had already used that opening to slip in, driving his dagger viciously into the lower rear of the demon boar's neck and drawing a spray of scalding blood.
That should have been a wound enough to make any normal beast collapse in a frenzy.
But it seemed not to feel pain at all. It scraped at the ground with its forelegs, lowered its tusks, and charged the group once again.
That rush did not feel like a beast pouncing.
It felt more like a gigantic stone wrapped in blood and bristles rolling straight at them, heedless of all form and giving no one room to breathe.
James gritted his teeth and blocked it head-on. Ror kept circling, searching for angles to strike. Lina's divine barriers lit up again and again, pale golden light spreading open only to shudder violently under the next impact.
After several rounds, even her face had turned pale.
The situation was collapsing fast.
It was not that they had never thought of retreating. But the demon boar had already gone mad with bloodlust. Blood covered its body, its wounds were split wide, white steam full of hot animal stink poured from its breath, and instead of weakening, it seemed like a beast driven into a dead end, clamping onto them with savage determination.
Each impact was fiercer than the last, as if it would not stop until it had dragged every living thing before it down into death with it.
The original owner stood in the rear, his hands and feet turning cold wave after wave.
He heard James shouting hoarsely at him to fall back.
But his legs felt nailed to the ground. He could not move a single step.
Because he knew very clearly that if they retreated any further, no one would leave this place alive.
In that moment, he had no time to think about the consequences. Only one thought remained in his head—
If he did not act now, they would all die.
Their trip into the forest had never been only about hunting this Split-Fang Black-Bristle Demon Boar.
Two days earlier, the beast had gored a farmer to death near the forest edge, and the body had never been brought back. When the guild posted the commission, the reward had also included recovering the victim's corpse.
Earlier, while following the demon boar's trail, they had already dragged that corpse out from a patch of rotten mud near the woods.
James and the others had to deal with the monster and had no spare hands, so naturally this filthy and exhausting chore had fallen to the original owner. That meant he had been carrying the corpse on his back the whole way.
No one had imagined that in the end, the thing that would truly prove useful would be that very corpse, which should have been brought back for burial.
The original owner violently threw the corpse from his back.
The farmer's body was already stiff. When it hit the ground, it landed with a dull thud, one arm dragging a streak of wet black mud across the earth.
But the original owner had no time to care.
He was breathing hard, his eyes fixed on the demon boar still charging in madness ahead, his fingers trembling, while something in his chest seemed to sink all at once.
In the next instant, deathly energy surged out along his hand.
First came Withering.
This was not the slow and careful version he had practiced at night on blades of grass and small animals. It came out with a kind of reckless ferocity, crashing down toward the demon boar.
Even he himself was startled that he could release such a powerful surge of deathly energy.
Invisible deathly force coiled around the bleeding wounds on its forelegs and flank, like something cold and damp drilling straight into the torn flesh.
The demon boar's charge faltered at once. The flesh around the wounds rapidly blackened and grayed, and the places where blood had been pouring out suddenly looked as though a layer had rotted away. Even the movement of half its body became obviously sluggish for an instant.
And in that instant, gritting his teeth, the original owner pressed his other hand onto the farmer's corpse.
Necromantic Control.
He had never truly used it in a moment like this before, much less on a whole human corpse.
When the deathly energy flooded in, the original owner felt his scalp go numb, as if something cold and sticky were crawling up his arm and drilling into his mind.
At first, the corpse only twitched once.
Then its shoulders and neck lifted in a horribly rigid manner, like a broken puppet whose strings had been yanked taut by force.
James and the others had obviously seen it.
But at that moment, no one had time to say anything.
Veins stood out at the original owner's temples. He was almost desperately forcing himself to maintain that fragile connection, driving the corpse forward.
A farmer long dead lurched crookedly toward the Split-Fang Black-Bristle Demon Boar just as it was about to charge again. Its movements were so stiff they were almost absurd, yet they carried a horror no living person should ever have possessed.
The demon boar had already been slowed by Withering. Now the corpse crashed into it from the side and tripped it hard, throwing its charge into chaos.
At last, the opportunity appeared.
James reacted first. With a furious roar, he charged in, swinging his greatsword in a full brutal arc and bringing it down exactly on the place Ror had wounded earlier.
Ror lunged at the same time from the opposite side, driving his dagger savagely into the old wound and twisting it.
Lina's divine art followed at once. Golden light descended, suppressing the last surge of murderous force that rose from the monster's final struggle, while also holding James and Ror together through those last moments.
At last, the Split-Fang Black-Bristle Demon Boar let out a short, violent shriek. Its massive body swayed twice, then crashed into the mud.
Only then did the original owner feel as though all his strength had been ripped out at once. He staggered half a step backward.
And the corpse he had forced to rise collapsed back to the ground at the same time, limp and twisted, its limbs crooked, its head lolling to one side, as if it had never moved at all.
The team had indeed survived.
And he had indeed dragged every one of them back from certain death.
But what he received in return was not gratitude at surviving disaster.
It was silence as dead as the grave.
James stood there gripping his still-bloody sword, his chest heaving, staring at the farmer's corpse now returned to stillness on the ground. The expression on his face slowly stiffened.
Ror stood not far away, his dagger still unsheathed, but the look in his eyes had already changed.
As for Lina, her face had gone terribly pale. Even the hand holding her holy emblem was trembling, as if she wanted to say something, only for not a single word to come out in the end.
On the way back, he tried to explain.
But no one answered him.
At first, the original owner still held onto a little hope.
He thought that no matter what, he had still saved their lives. Even if they could not accept it at once, at the very least they ought to help him keep the secret.
But that very night, temple guards still broke into his lodging.
Several guards in chainmail burst into the room. Without offering him even a single explanation, they forced him straight to the ground.
When his face struck the floorboards, he could even smell the dampness and dust that had long settled into the cracks of the wood.
And just like that, he was thrown into the dungeon beneath the temple.
When the original owner was shoved inside, his knees slammed hard against the stone floor, and the pain made his vision go black.
But what truly left him dazed was not that.
It was that James, Ror, and Lina had really turned him in.
He could not understand it the whole way there.
Inside the dungeon, he was hung up, whipped, beaten, splashed with cold water, and kept from sleep. Whenever his consciousness started to blur even a little, they used some new method to wake him again.
After two days, there was almost no part of his body that did not hurt, and his mind felt as though it were filled with freezing water, even his thoughts growing dull and heavy.
He could not understand why, when he had clearly acted to save lives, he had ended up here.
He could not understand why those three had handed him over so quickly, without even a single extra word.
Later, once, half-conscious and hoarse, he still asked.
He asked the man sitting opposite him who had betrayed him.
The man looked at him once, as if the question itself were absurd.
But still said nothing.
In truth, he had already guessed.
And then it felt as though something had suddenly gouged a hollow space out of his chest.
In that instant, he could barely even notice the pain in his body. All he felt was a terrible cold in his chest.
At first came grief, grief so deep even his breathing trembled, as though something had lodged all the way up in his throat.
But that sorrow quickly changed.
Slowly, it burned into a rage he could not suppress.
Why?
He had saved them.
If not for him, that demon boar would have smashed every one of them to death in the forest.
The more he thought, the more that fury pushed upward.
But in the end, as the rage reached its height, the original owner slowly went quiet again.
Because he suddenly understood that no matter how much he hated it, no matter how unwilling he was, none of it meant anything anymore.
He had acted to save lives, and yet in the end he was still treated as a heretic who ought to be burned.
By the second night in the dungeon, the original owner could no longer hold on.
During the first night, he had still thought perhaps someone would come explain, perhaps James would come, perhaps even with Ror's poisonous mouth, he would not simply stand by and watch him be sent to the stake.
But the second day passed, and the cell door opened and closed. The only things brought in were hard bread and half a bowl of cold water.
The people outside looked at him the same way they might look at a moving lump of filth. Even the one who shoved the bowl in was unwilling to extend his hand very far past the bars.
He did not believe he was guilty.
If even this deserved judgment, then the judgment itself was the greater joke.
So in the end, he did not wait for the temple to pass sentence on him.
He acted first.
In that freezing cell, the original owner cast Withering on himself.
His flesh, his breath, and that last little will to keep living all withered away in that instant.
And it was precisely in the moment of his death that Satie, from another world, arrived here.