If one had to say why the original owner had fallen to such a state, then that little demon truly was the root of it.
The creature had attached itself to him half a year ago.
At that time, the original owner had been following James and the others into the forest, hunting a necromancer who had fled all the way down from the north.
That was not the kind of job a low-level team like theirs would normally ever come across.
The man in question had originally been a highly troublesome high-rank necromancer. Before that, he had already been hunted for a long stretch of time by the Imperial Knight Order, fleeing all along the borderlands.
It was said that several teams sent to suppress him had suffered losses, and even the knights themselves had taken serious casualties. Later, though the man had been badly wounded, he still managed to tear open a path through the encirclement and flee into the wilderness forest near Hervis Town with his injuries.
And on that journey of escape, he had not been sparing with murder.
Villagers he passed on the road, caravan hands dragged down from wagons, hunters who happened to stumble across his trail, even a few unlucky drifters on the border paths—all of them had become material for him to prolong his life and drive the dead.
In only a few short days, several corpses had already been turned up from the nearby woods and wasteland roads, each in a more horrible state than the last.
That was precisely why both the temple and the guild had raised the bounty so high.
High enough that even a man like James, who ordinarily avoided serious trouble whenever he could, had gritted his teeth and taken the job.
Of course, they were not stupid enough to think they could truly face a high-rank necromancer head-on while he was at full strength. Everyone knew perfectly well that a figure like that was far beyond what their little team could handle.
But by the time the news reached Hervis Town, the man had already been hit hard by the knights and other pursuers earlier on. Most likely, he was already a spent force.
Whoever could follow the traces and find him first, if luck stood on their side, might truly pick up that enormous reward dropped from the heavens.
And in the end, it was the original owner who actually found him.
Along the way, the necromancer had left many corpses behind. Some were drifters dumped in ditches after their blood and flesh had been drained. Some were hunters with gaping holes torn through their chests, dead among the roadside woods.
To others, those corpses only meant that the fiend was still alive and still fleeing onward. But after the original owner touched them, he could piece together a direction bit by bit from the scattered emotions and images they had left behind.
Panic-stricken flight. Blood-streaked tree shadows. Marks in the mud where something heavy had been dragged. And the fleeting hem of a black robe deep in the forest.
And it was precisely by relying on those clues invisible to anyone else that they tracked their way into the depths of the wilderness forest and finally found the necromancer beneath a half-withered old tree.
By the time they truly saw him, the man really had only his last breath left.
Half of his body had rotted beyond recognition. His black robe and his flesh were stuck together in one foul mass. Leaning under the dead tree, his chest rose and fell so slowly it looked like a dying ember not yet fully extinguished.
And yet even so, the cold and filthy aura on him—the stench that felt like the fermented mingling of countless dead breaths—was still so heavy that it made one's scalp crawl by instinct.
That fight was brutal.
Though the necromancer was already at the end of his strength, he was still someone who had not died even after being hunted all the way by the Knight Order. Even with only the last scraps of strength left, he was not an opponent a low-level adventurer team like theirs could deal with lightly.
By the time they finally killed him, every member of the team had been wounded to some degree.
The original owner stood in the back, watching as the necromancer finally collapsed for good, and only then did the tightness in his chest slowly ease.
But in the final instant, right after the man breathed his last, something on his body suddenly moved.
A tiny black shadow, as if it had been forced out from the foul blood and rotting flesh at his chest, fluttered its thin wings, spun once in the air, and then vanished in an instant.
James and the others saw nothing.
Only the original owner felt a chill crawl down his back in that moment, as though something had leaned close to his ear and blown softly against it.
From that day onward, there was something extra by his side.
At first, it was only a voice at night.
Thin and sharp, now there and now gone, as if someone were crouching in the shadows of the room, whispering strange nonsense to him.
Later, the thing even began to appear directly. It was no bigger than a palm, with short horns, thin wings, a slender tail, and a pair of crimson eyes that always carried a kind of sly mockery.
Only then did the original owner realize it was a little demon.
According to what it said, it was the guardian of the Necromancer's Codex.
Its reason for existing was to seek suitable inheritors for that forbidden book and pass down the knowledge and power within it from one generation to another, so that it would not disappear entirely.
And the reason it had left the original necromancer and turned instead to cling to the original owner was simple enough.
The original owner possessed the potential to inherit the Book of Death.
At first, he was terrified.
But he did not dare tell anyone about it.
In the place where he lived, the witch hunts had never truly ended.
According to the teachings of the Church, anyone connected to demons, necromancy, or heresy was an evil being deeply stained by darkness. Once discovered, the usual end was to be tied to a stake and burned alive.
So he could only keep it hidden.
From that day on, the thing clung to him almost all the time.
By day, when he was hauling things around the guild's back courtyard, it would squat on the edge of a wooden bucket and swing its tail.
When he followed the team into the forest on commissions, it would flap its thin wings and trail alongside him the whole way, sometimes landing on branches, sometimes crouching behind his shoulder, muttering absurd nonsense into his ear.
At night, it was even more impossible to get rid of. Either it lay sprawled on the windowsill watching him, or it curled up in the shadows by the foot of his bed or in the corners of the room, like an especially irritating little imp.
At first, the original owner thought others could see it too.
But later he gradually realized that no matter how the little demon flew around, laughed, or mocked him aloud nearby, James and the others showed not the slightest reaction.
Even when it deliberately shrieked right next to Ror's ear, or sat directly on the medicinal cloth Lina had laid out, no one ever looked up at it.
This thing could be seen only by him.
And because of that, he became even less willing to speak of it.
In the beginning, he did not pay much attention to it at all.
Partly because he was afraid.
Partly because he distrusted it by instinct.
No matter how lightly it spoke, or how much it resembled some reasonable living creature, it was still a demon in the end.
It looked exactly like the demons the priest had told him about in stories when he was a child, or like the demon figures painted in temple murals.
That alone was enough to make him wary of it to the highest degree.
What was more, he had heard far too many church tales about demons since childhood. How they led people astray, tempted them into forbidden acts, offered a little sweetness first and then dragged them into the abyss afterward—he could practically recite those stories in his sleep.
So at first, no matter what the little thing said while crouching on his windowsill, the original owner treated it all as nonsense.
Until later, when the things it said grew more and more numerous, and sounded less and less like nonsense.
It began by talking about the original owner himself.
It could tell what kind of ability he was using when he carried out commissions.
"No wonder Zane got found by people like you."
"A talent like yours is rare."
It said that an ability like [Death Reading] would, in a place like the Empire, of course be treated only as heresy and ill omen.
Because this land was the strongest domain of the Light's theocracy. The Church had ruled here for too long—so long that most people had long since forgotten that the powers of this world had never been limited to one kind alone. Anything not belonging to holy light, anything not recognized by the temple, was simply branded filthy, evil, and heretical, without even the slightest attempt to distinguish one thing from another.
Whenever it spoke of this, the little demon always sneered.
It said that people confined to one corner of the world were best at treating everything they did not understand as taboo.
At the time, the original owner heard this and only thought the creature was trying to sow discord, so he paid it no mind.
But the little demon was not in any hurry.
It seemed to know that what it was saying was bound to move him sooner or later.
So night after night, it whispered such things into his ear.
The original owner deeply hated how the little demon would climb onto his bed while he slept, but even though he could see it, he still could not touch it in the real world.
He had tried to drive the thing away.
But his hand always passed cleanly through it, as if it did not exist at all.
Only after realizing there was truly nothing he could do did he finally let it have its way.
It told him that the Empire had never been the whole world.
And the God of Light was not the only god.
According to it, in those old tales more ancient than the border forests, more ancient than Hervis Town, and even older than the entire Empire itself, the world had not originally looked anything like it did now.
Back then there had been no Empire, no Church, and no territories later divided up by different gods.
At the beginning, there had been only one true Creator God.
Later, he fell. Not in the way mortals died, but by breaking apart entirely. His body sank and became mountains and earth. His breath became rivers, seas, and wind. And the will and divinity he left behind seeped into the deepest rules of the world itself.
Only afterward were the newer gods born one by one out of those remnants of old divinity.
Some governed flame. Some governed ocean. Some governed life. Some governed shadow, death, and sleep. Each of them grasped a part of divine authority, and each set down an order of their own.
The God of Light was only one among them.
And the Empire was only the land where the authority of the God of Light had sunk the deepest and stood the firmest.
The little demon said that beyond the sea were city-states that worshipped sea gods and storm gods all year round. When sails were raised, priests in the harbors would pour wine into the waves, asking the sea fog and thunderstorm not to swallow an entire fleet in one night.
In the older kingdoms to the south, priests who served the god of death did not need to hide themselves at all. They conducted burials, guided the souls of the dead onward, closed the eyes of corpses, and guarded the boundary between life and death on behalf of the living.
In the western lands of mountains and furnaces, the most honored god was the god of mountains and flame, and all forging, smelting, oaths, and iron fell under their authority.
And in the deeper forests, many older polytheistic beliefs still survived, older even than the Empire itself. Trees, moons, beasts, springs, and the night all had their own names and their own rites.
There were even city-states where scholars gathered together, places that no longer placed the gods at the highest point at all, but instead attempted to directly study the exposed rules at the base of the world itself, using formulas and deduction in place of prayer and divine grace.
Whenever it spoke of such things, there was always a trace of mockery in its tone, as if laughing at the original owner for being a frog in a well.
But he did not believe it.
Not that he completely disbelieved the stories themselves.
He simply did not believe those places could truly have anything to do with him.
Because for people from a place like Hervis Town, the world beyond the Empire's borders had always been too distant—so distant that it felt like a story. What really stood before one's eyes were checkpoints, mounted patrols, watchtowers, and the wanted notices and corpses hung on the town board year after year.
Those who fled the Empire's borders almost never returned.
Some said they had died in the wilderness. Some said they had been shot by border cavalry. Others said they had fallen into the hands of foreign lands and their bones were never even recovered. As for those who tried to slip through the borders in secret, most met ugly ends. The guild and the town had seen enough examples. Just a few years earlier, a caravan hand had tried to escape with a smuggling group. Before he had gone far, his corpse was hung back on a border stake, a rope around his neck and blood dripping from his feet, obviously meant as a warning for those who came after.
The only ones who could truly cross the border freely were the Knight Order.
Or messengers of the Church, envoys of lords, and people carrying proper documents.
For someone like the original owner, let alone leaving the Empire, even approaching the border line might be enough to get him seized as a suspicious character and interrogated.
So every time the little demon spoke of the city-states across the sea, the ancient kingdoms of the south, the forging realms in the mountains, and the old faiths in the deep forests, the first feeling that rose in his heart was not longing.
It was absurdity.
Those places might be vast, distant, and real, but they had nothing to do with him.
He was only a young man in the back courtyard of Hervis Town's adventurers' guild, one without even a formal profession. Whether he could earn a few silver coins today, whether he could drink a bowl of hot soup tonight—those things were far more real than sea gods, death priests, or scholar city-states.
So at first, he always felt the little demon was only trying to tempt him with things he would never be able to reach.
In his understanding, the God of Light was the god worshipped in the temple, and holy radiance was the most orthodox form of power. As for everything else, it was either heresy, rumor, or those dubious evil tales whispered in the wilderness.
And yet, what the little demon said sounded too much like the truth.
It was not the kind of liar who only exaggerated wildly and poured sweet poison into people's ears.
It spoke in fine detail.
It described how followers of different gods, through prayers, insignia, sacrifice, and long devotion, received the strength of their respective deities.
It said that the reason divine arts worked was not merely because of the grand and righteous words the Church liked to repeat, but because clerics themselves were acting by borrowing the authority their gods had left in this world.
At the bottom of it all, casting divine arts was nothing more than borrowing the rules that already existed in this world.
It even used Lina as an example from time to time.
It said that whenever that little priestess cast her spells, the original owner always stared blankly, yet had never truly understood what he was seeing.
When she spoke her prayers, holy light did not appear from thin air. Rather, through prayer, breath, and sacred insignia, her spirit gradually aligned itself with and received that side of the rules left behind by the God of Light.
She could stop bleeding, heal wounds, and dispel foulness because the authority of the God of Light naturally leaned toward purification, healing, and order, and she was simply drawing down a small portion of that power at the proper moment.
Whenever it reached this point, it would tilt its head and ask him with a grin:
If she can borrow the rules of her god to heal wounds, then why is it that when you borrow another set of rules to sense death and command deathly energy, it must be more evil than what she does?
Every time the original owner heard words like that, his first instinct was that something about them must be wrong.
And yet, he could never say exactly what was wrong.
But in truth, he knew in his own heart that the things he had seen over the years had already made it impossible for him to believe, as easily as he had when he was a child, that everything the Church said was absolute truth.
He had seen poor people begging for medicine at the temple gate only to be turned away, while priests first treated the caravan guards who could afford to pay.
He had seen a seemingly innocent man, merely suspected of having come into contact with something unclean, hanged at the town entrance as a heretic without even being given the chance to defend himself.
He had also seen nobles who truly treated human lives like dirt, and yet so long as they could afford indulgences and donate a few more chests of gold to the temple, they could still be lightly absolved.
These were things he had not dared think too deeply about before.
But the little demon always dragged them out one by one.
And by the time it had dragged enough of them into the light, even the original owner had begun to dimly realize that many things in this world were perhaps never as clearly divided as the temple claimed.
And the thing the little demon most loved to repeat was still that same sentence.
It said that necromancy and holy light arts were not, in essence, so different at all.
One drew upon the rules belonging to death, the other upon the rules belonging to light. The former withered flesh and stirred again the lingering power within corpses; the latter healed wounds and let order prevail over chaos. They looked as though they stood at opposite ends of the world, but in the end they were both only forms of borrowing rules and directing power.
What truly decided what they became was never the power itself.
It was the person using it.
If such reasoning were ever to reach the ears of the temple, there would be no need for debate. Those first few lines alone would already be enough to nail someone with blasphemy and seduction into heresy.
And yet the original owner had to admit that what the thing said was not entirely without reason.
And as their time together grew longer, the little demon came to understand the original owner more and more.
It could see that, in his bones, the boy was not truly a docile sort.
On ordinary days he said little, followed others out on commissions, never argued over money when it was divided, and usually only lowered his head and endured it when he was scolded, looking as though he had long since accepted his fate.
But that was only because he knew too clearly that he had no right to fight for more yet.
Truthfully, that breath in his chest had never once gone down smoothly.
He was unwilling to accept being only a menial without a profession. Unwilling to accept that even though he went out with James and the others and risked his life beside them, in the end he could only ever stand at the very back.
While the others in the team fought desperately for their lives, he could only scrape out a living by touching corpses and identifying traces, like a somewhat clever helper.
The little demon saw that resentment very clearly.
And it could also see that the boy possessed more than resentment.
He had ambition, and pride.
He longed for power.
He wanted that one day he would no longer have to live under the names of others. He wanted to be able to stand at the front when real danger came.
He wanted no longer to be beneath everyone else, no longer to be merely that little drudge in Hervis Town's adventurers' guild whom anyone could order around.
And yet he was also a sentimental person.
A casual remark from others he might not remember. But if someone truly treated him well, even just a little, he would remember it in his heart for a very long time.
James quietly sparing him a little hard work. Ror cursing him with his mouth but still reaching out to pull him back when something really happened. The strand of Lina's golden hair that fell when she lowered her head to cast a spell for him.
He never spoke of those things, but he remembered every one of them clearly.
And precisely because he remembered them so clearly, he could not bear it all the more that he could only stand behind and watch.
The little demon still persisted in telling him of that forbidden knowledge.
From gods, to rules, to the Necromancer's Codex, to the magical traditions long buried in the old age—it always seemed to have endless things to say.
At first, the original owner ignored it.
Occasionally, when he grew too annoyed, he would only frown and tell it to shut up.
But one night, as usual, the little demon was perched on the windowsill, swinging its tail and speaking slowly to him about necromancy, about rules, about how he ought to follow his own gifts down their proper path, when the original owner suddenly spoke and cut it off.
"Then teach me."
The little demon paused.
The original owner sat at the broken wooden table in the room, head lowered, his voice not loud, but very clear.
"Haven't you been saying all this time that I have the talent?"
"Then teach me."
The room fell silent at once.
Outside the window, the wind was still blowing. The oil lamp on the table, nearly burned out, flickered slightly, and its light threw the shadows long, then short again.
The little demon stared at him for a moment.
Then it slowly smiled.
It had known all along that sooner or later, such a day would come.