Chapter 3
I’m translating the chapter now and shaping the prose into natural English paragraphs, while preserving the required HTML formatting and the glossary terms.CHAPTER_TITLE: Chapter 2
The Forbidden Area that supposedly held the curse was, unlike the records, remarkably clean.
There was no blood, no flesh, nothing of the sort described in the book the duchess had brought with her.
It was a little strange that not even moss grew here, but Korea already had a cave like that in Gyeongju, so even that felt merely unusual rather than grotesque.
Was this really the kind of place that could kill a person?
Or was that just prejudice?
Thinking about it carefully, something that killed people was nothing unusual.
If anything, the objects that looked dangerous at a glance were the ones people avoided, and so they probably killed fewer people.
Death was already a certainty, so there was no point getting worked up. I might as well go in.
Maybe because this was the Forbidden Area, where the curse passed down through a family that had endured even as kingdoms changed, the straight corridor went on for tens of minutes with no end in sight.
Even allowing for the dim light and the narrowness of vision, the depth was absurd.
What’s more, the ceiling behind me felt strangely harder to see than the one ahead, which gave the unsettling impression that the passage itself slanted downward.
As I kept moving inward with that thought in mind, I gradually became aware of a breeze.
Was it wind coming in through a ventilation shaft?
Come to think of it, a structure more than a thousand years old would need some device like that if it was to stay free of moss.
With that thought, I went deeper inside, and intricate grooves began to appear along the walls.
They were artificial and smooth, as if cut by chisel and hammer.
The wind flowed along those grooves.
Some carried air outward, some inward.
It was too precise to call an accident, and in a world where I understood neither fluid dynamics nor even the nature of pathogens, how had they made something like this?
Fluid dynamics?
No, Seokguram had been built in an era without fluid dynamics too; maybe this was made by trial and error.
“Nnh.”
The deeper I went, the stronger the wind became.
My hair flew about, and with the feeling that my body temperature was dropping rapidly, I slipped a hand under my arm without thinking and pushed onward into the depths, where a vast cavern greeted me.
Unlike the corridor, the cavern walls were covered in murals.
“Ordo.”
A mural depicting the head of the family and the siblings beside them.
They stood beneath the banner of the Ordo Family, and beside them was written what kind of house the Ordo Family had once been.
The Ordo Family had been a knightly house.
Unlike the present-day Blium Family, which won everyone’s admiration, it had once inspired fear in everyone—a family of human slaughterers who butchered their enemies.
A family of marauders who won every war through murderous techniques built on obsessive research into the body and a metallurgy that analyzed captured weapons.
The first head of the Blium Family and those siblings were the final generation of that house, and at the same time the only ones in the Ordo Family who had not seemed like people of that name.
They had become fascinated by the methods of healing people.
Assembly is the reverse of disassembly, they said, and they set broken bones and stitched torn flesh.
Knowledge of which vein to sever to kill a person was used when removing arrowheads, and their knowledge of poisons was used to make medicine.
They took the slaughter methods their house had accumulated and, using them as a cautionary counterexample, learned medicine instead.
This mural was that record.
How they had learned, and how enjoyable that learning had been.
Information about a happy childhood.
It was only information preserved in images and writing, but it was obvious that they had truly been happy then, which only made me feel stranger.
This information didn’t belong in a place like this.
What was the point of recording when they had been happy in a place that devoured human lives to suppress a curse?
Did they need memories of happier times in order to place a curse?
Like those posts you see on the internet, saying that to truly understand what happiness or sorrow is, you have to experience the opposite first?
For a place that eats people alive, it had rather refined tastes.
While I was thinking that, I examined the cavern and noticed another path. The moment I recognized it, I heard a voice.
It sounded young—less like an adult than like a middle school or high school student.
“I regret it.”
But unlike that age would suggest, the voice was heavy.
It didn’t sound like someone inhaling and exhaling words; it sounded more like someone scrubbing at the bottom of humanity until it crumbled into fragments, then inhaling and exhaling those fragments…… a voice like that.
A voice that knew no feeling except regret.
That desperate purity carried a sort of magic that made the listener catch the feeling, and however much I might say otherwise, I was ultimately just an ordinary human being. I couldn’t escape that magic, and I was dragged along in the emotion of the voice.
“Ugh……”
“I regret everything. I regret the time I laughed with those children, the time of learning filled with realization, the time of service filled with the nobility of life.”
My knees bent of their own accord.
I forced strength into my trembling legs so I wouldn’t collapse, but every time the wind brushed past me, that regret-soaked voice shook my skull from within.
And each time my emotions wavered like that, pain followed.
Starting with a headache, then spreading to my stomach.
“Khh……”
And when the pain reached its peak, hallucinations began to appear as well.
In them, I was speaking warmly with the people of House Blium, and as I watched that scene, the voice carried by the wind changed into my own and kept shaking my mind apart.
The head of the family and the duchess were good people.
If I hadn’t lied all the time about not wanting to die—if I had simply clung to those people instead—wouldn’t I have been spared this?
If I was going to die anyway, couldn’t I at least have treated other people kindly?
When the servants hurled abuse at me and dumped their work on me, if I had gone to those so-called brothers and told them, wouldn’t I have been able to live a little more easily?
Why had I kept spouting lies about wanting to die soon, when all I really wanted was to get away from people?
The hallucination and the voice in my head shook me back and forth, and I clenched my eyes shut before bracing my back and legs again.
“I regret it.”
“Ghh…….”
Yes, I would regret it.
But I was trying to kill myself because I was scared.
I didn’t want to be hurt by other people, or by anything at all, so long as it carried feeling.
I didn’t have the courage to die by my own hand, and the truth was, I didn’t want to die. And yet I still tried to do it quickly because I was afraid.
Would it have been better if I had treated the servants kindly?
Would it have been better if I had poured affection into the people of the ducal house?
Where was the certainty in that?
What human being would give affection to a curse doll made out of a concubine no different from a breeding slave?
Rather than thinking like that, it was better to quietly think of a way to die.
That was far more peaceful and stabilizing.
So thinking, I crawled toward the door at the far end of the cavern, and the hallucination began to press down on my body entirely. I retched again and again, but somehow managed to force my way into the corridor beyond the cavern.
Apparently the regret from before could only be felt inside the cavern, because once I left it, the pain that had been squeezing my stomach and stealing my breath vanished as if it had been a lie, and in its place another emotion began to fill the void.
Self-loathing.
I had tried to live with all my might, when I was the one who had tried to kill myself.
Even though I wanted to die.
Well, if I really wanted to die, I could have done it several times over in the last ten years, but I hadn’t even managed that because I lacked the courage.
That shame, which somehow resembled guilt, and that self-loathing began to take the place of regret, and irritation started to rise at the spiral corridor in front of me.
Why was it going up?
If it had been descending, I would have pretended to lose my footing and rolled straight down.
……No, I probably wouldn’t have even managed that.
Even though I hated it, I had been too afraid of hurting myself to kill myself in my past life, and in this one I was just a piece of trash who waited for someone else to kill me.
In the end, I had no choice but to pass through this corridor.
Gnashing my teeth at that thought, I braced a hand against the wall and began to climb.
The walls of the stair-like passage were covered from end to end in paintings and writing, unlike before.
The content told the story after the family escaped the slaughter-obsessed Ordo house.
Unlike the three siblings who had wanted to heal people, the house only deepened its wars, and the siblings who went about treating people gained enemies simply because they were of the Ordo Family.
At first, they tried to understand those enemies.
Their own family had gone around killing people, so it wasn’t strange for others to take out their resentment on them.
It was unfair to have to accept it, but what else could they do?
They decided that if they saved more people, they would prove they were different.
They had sworn to that.
But when they were young adults in their prime, an incident happened.
After they treated a man who had built his reputation as a knight of monster hunts, he immediately stabbed their younger sister.
The reason was that someone from the Ordo Family had attacked a house at war with monsters, and the knight’s lover had died.
They knew they had nothing to do with it, but emotions were not something anyone could control, and their younger sister collapsed, blood pouring from her body.
That was the beginning of the curse.
The second child, the first head of the family, threw herself into healing her younger sister.
But the eldest resented the knight and wanted to kill him.
As an heir of a knightly house, she had learned killing arts and the structure of the human body. She had also accumulated mana and all manner of magic while working as a healer.
She wanted to use all of it to kill the knight who had stabbed her younger sister, and after that, the nature of her mana permanently changed.
It became something that could no longer save people, only kill them—like a murder weapon in human form.
And when that story ended, a second cavern appeared, and the instant I stepped into it, I heard the voice again.
“I was jealous.”
They were jealous of the younger sibling, who unlike them had been born with the nature of a person who saved others from the start and had completely escaped the shadow of the family.
They were jealous of the sibling who, unlike their own self shattered by even the lightest murderous intent, stood firm through everything and earned people’s respect.
They were jealous of the sibling who, unlike themselves, had truly become a new person and thrown off the shackles of the Ordo Family.
“And I was truly jealous of the sibling who accepted even such a vile me.”