Prologue: The Curse Eater
Ten years into my rebirth, I was living a perfectly ordinary life—until the day I awakened as a curse-wielder so terrifying that the mere sound of my name struck dread into people's hearts.
Unlike my past life, this body was small, with no muscle to speak of—soft and squishy all over.
Just as I was agonizing over how anyone was supposed to climb the Tower with a body like this, I made a discovery: I could grow stronger by absorbing curses.
And as it happened, plenty of climbers were out there suffering under curses of their own. So I approached them in secret, quietly siphoning away their afflictions and freeing them from their torment…
That was all it took.
"You are nothing less than our salvation."
Somehow, they got it into their heads that I was some kind of savior—and from that day on, they began to obsess over me.