Year 427 of the Holy Radiance Calendar, deep winter.
Hewis Town, dungeon.
Satie woke from the cold.
When he opened his eyes, his back was pressed against an icy stone wall.
He had just tried to move when a burning pain shot through his wrist.
Looking down, he saw an iron chain locked around it. The skin had already been rubbed raw, and blood was seeping from the wound.
Then a flood of unfamiliar, fragmented memories rushed into his mind.
Trial. Necromancy. Execution by fire.
As he gradually pieced together what was happening, Satie's expression turned darker and darker.
And at that moment, a pale gray panel, visible only to him, quietly appeared before his eyes.
[Name]: Satie, sixteen years old.
[Class]: None.
[Equipment]: Necromantic Grimoire.
[Abilities]: Death Reading (Innate Talent), Withering Touch (Apprentice Rank), Necromantic Manipulation (Apprentice Rank)
Satie stared at the panel for a long while before finally forcing out a sentence.
"So I transmigrated just to sit here and wait to die?"
The moment he said it, the back of his throat carried a dry, metallic taste of blood.
The dungeon was freezing. Every breath felt as though a blade were scraping across his lungs.
Dirty water that had collected in the corner for who knew how long reflected a dim gray sheen. The air was thick with mildew, along with a faint stench that he could not quite tell was rust or blood.
Satie was an unlucky soul who had only just transmigrated into this world.
In his previous life, he had been sickly to the core.
Ever since he could remember, he had either been lying at home or lying in a hospital bed.
Over more than ten years, his life had seemed trapped inside a narrow, pale hospital room. His only companions had been all kinds of strange medicines, IV tubes, and stacks of fantasy novels worn soft from repeated reading.
And when death finally came, what occupied his mind was not how much he had suffered in that life.
It was the worlds in those books.
Towering walls. Wastelands. Dragons. Dungeons. Gods. Magic.
His own life had been too narrow, too dull.
So before he closed his eyes for the last time, his final thought had been this:
If only he could walk through a world like that himself.
Then he died.
And when he opened his eyes again, he had already arrived in another world.
More precisely, his soul had entered the body of a sixteen-year-old boy who had only just died.
That boy was also named Satie.
A mass of unfamiliar, fragmented memories poured into his head like a tide. After the first haze and confusion had passed, he was finally able to piece together the life this body had once lived.
In his last life, he had often felt guilty toward his parents because of himself.
With such a frail and broken body, he had consumed nearly half of their lives and strength.
More than once, he had even thought that if they had never had him, perhaps they might have lived much more easily.
This time, the original owner of the body had it even simpler.
He had been an orphan from the start.
He had been a foundling left at the entrance of the town's temple, picked up and raised by an old priest.
To be honest, in a world like this, a nameless abandoned baby being taken in by a solitary old clergyman did not sound especially reassuring.
Fortunately, although the old man was poor, stubborn, and always coughing whenever he recited the holy texts, he had at least been a decent man.
He had not sold the child. He had not thrown him back out. He had not raised him halfway only to decide he was too troublesome and leave him in the mountains for wolves.
On the contrary, he had given the boy a name, a bed, and food to eat. Along the way, he had even taught him a few words.
And many of the original owner's earliest memories and understandings of this world had all come from that shabby little temple, and from that penniless old priest who never seemed able to stop coughing.
For Satie, something like transmigration should have belonged only in the fantasy novels he had read to pieces in his previous life.
But judging from the memories left behind by the original owner, this place truly was just like the worlds in those stories, a world where gods and magic genuinely existed.
When the boy had been young, he often saw the old priest treating the wounded in the temple.
Whenever someone in the village was injured, fell ill, or got hurt while working in the fields or in the woods, they would always be brought to the temple.
The old man would stand before the statue of the god and pray in a low voice, then place his palm over the wound. A soft white light would begin to shine little by little.
The bleeding wounds would gradually stop, and even the groans of pain would slowly soften.
But such miracles were never meant for the original owner.
He had no talent to become a priest. At most, he could only remain in the temple and help with chores.
Every day, he followed along for worship, memorized those awkward, long-winded prayers, swept the floor for the old priest, hauled water, wiped down the benches, carried bread, and sometimes had to tend the half-dead medicinal herbs in the yard and the tiny patch of vegetable soil behind the temple.
From the memories he had inherited, those first thirteen years had actually not been too bad.
At the very least, compared with the useless body he had possessed in his previous life, this body could run, jump, and carry buckets full of well water all the way back from outside the yard. It could bend over in the vegetable patch and work until both hands were covered in mud.
That alone was enough to make the newly arrived Satie feel a trace of envy.
But when he was thirteen, the old priest suddenly died.
The original owner lost his only support in an instant.
The temple was no longer his home.
Before the old man's bones had even gone cold, the people who came to take over the temple's affairs had already thrown him out.
That day, the boy stood helplessly at the temple entrance with only a few old clothes, washed so many times they had nearly turned white. He had not even been allowed to take the straw mat he had slept on for years in the woodshed.
Fortunately, the old priest had still carried some reputation in life. Roland, the president of the Adventurers' Guild, had been an old acquaintance of the priest. Seeing the boy alone and destitute, he simply brought him back with him.
It was only by relying on that bit of old goodwill that the original owner had managed to find a job doing odd work at the Adventurers' Guild in Hewis Town. Living on those pitifully meager wages, he had stumbled and scraped his way all the way to today.
And then came the trouble that had dragged the current Satie into it as well.
His thoughts were interrupted by a voice.
"You're a strange one, kid. A moment ago, I could clearly tell your breath had vanished completely, and now you're alive again."
"Still planning to kill yourself? Need me to strengthen your Withering Touch so you can die a bit faster?"
Satie's eyelid twitched. He lowered his head toward his knees.
There, by his side, was a little demon no bigger than a palm.
Short horns. Thin wings. A slender tail. And a pair of crimson eyes that always seemed full of ill intent.
Before Satie could answer, the next moment, a series of heavy footsteps suddenly came from outside the dungeon.
One step.
Two.
Accompanied by the crisp clink of metal armor brushing together, the sound came closer and closer.
Satie's whole body tensed at once.
Then came the harsh scrape of chains dragging across the floor outside the cell door, followed by a cold voice:
"The time has come."
"Bring this heretic out."