The True Nature of the Curse (3)
1.
The place I headed for was the Seoul National Library, right here in the city. Inside it lay the Monster Records.
The Monster Records were compilations of hunters' testimonies and researchers' findings, bound into books. The catch was that ordinary people were kept from learning too much about monsters, so only those with mana could access them.
And dolls count among the creatures that can get in.
A doll was a mana-engineering life-form wrought by magic, after all.
An ordinary doll would have been limited to borrowing magically copied books, but I could absorb every scrap of information from within without breaking a sweat.
Deep in the library, in a room that was practically a sealed chamber, you activated a magic circle and stepped into the true sealed space. That was how you entered the Monster Records.
There was, of course, a staff member checking people at the door. I played the part of a doll on an errand.
Once the clerk confirmed I was a doll, he waved me through without suspicion. Dolls running errands to fetch materials from the Monster Records were common enough.
Beyond the threshold, a library lit by soft, subdued light revealed itself.
The Monster Records were nothing more than a magically staged space, not a place that truly existed in the physical world…
I'll analyze that later.
I had work to do first.
"Search. Incubus."
Ssshhh—
Mana flowed. Streams of violet, green, and blue power raced out and stacked books neatly at my side in an instant.
Nineteen volumes in total. Considering the staggering wealth of information the Monster Records held, it was almost shocking that there were only this many.
"Tch."
I clicked my tongue without meaning to. The difficulty of gathering real information was already showing its face.
Still, I would have to go through these nineteen books before I could hunt for anything further.
Flip-flip-flip.
I turned three books at once with magic, speed-reading as I went. I had studied hard to master magical techniques, so speed-reading was one of the things I was confident about.
"These are worthless."
Three books. Six. Nine. Twelve.
I opened them one after another and tore through the pages, but the contents of every single volume were pathetic.
Incubus. The male counterpart of the Succubus; a dream demon.
A dream-eater that devours the dreams of women.
Said to feed primarily on erotic dreams, and at times to couple directly with its prey to absorb vital essence.
That was the extent of it. Useless phrases, every one of them. Worse still, none of it came from actual research or testimony—just secondhand hearsay.
"Comprehensive Curse Case Files. 2037 Edition, Volume II."
I turned at last to the thick volume that remained. The "II" in the title suggested they had split the work because there was too much material—and if it was still this fat after that, I at least didn't have to worry about a thin collection of cases. The last edition I had looked at had been the 2027 version, ten years ago.
Hunters were required to undergo an annual inspection called a Check. This book gathered and organized the curse cases confirmed during those examinations. With so many different curses catalogued inside, it looked roughly three times thicker than anything I had read so far.
I poured mana into the pages and flipped them so fast the flip-flip-flip echoed through the library.
Found it.
Level-draining curses. Cases of Incubus-ification.
Zhang Lixian — Cursed; reduced to Level 1. Lamented that his level would not rise, then died in a dungeon.
Kim Seok-ho — Cursed; reduced to Level 1. Lamented that his level would not rise, then retired.
Lucas Valentin — Cursed; reduced to Level 1. Reached Level 10, then died in a dungeon.
Kamiya Ren — Cursed; reduced to Level 1. Retired immediately.
…
..
.
"We're screwed."
Not a single case of anyone overcoming it.
Roughly seventy percent of the records ended in death; the remaining thirty percent were retirements. And every single retiree had never climbed past Level 1.
I wanted to slam the book shut on this grim anthology of Incubus-ification outcomes.
"Ah… wait a second."
Right beneath the Incubus cases, the Succubus cases continued without a break.
There had been that line about Incubi and Succubi forming a pair, hadn't there? Maybe the Succubus side had success stories!
Amamiya Miki — Cursed; reduced to Level 1. Retired immediately.
Wang Ling — Cursed; reduced to Level 1. Reached Level 17, then died when her party collapsed.
Sophia Blake — Cursed; reduced to Level 1. Reached Level 11, then retired when her party collapsed.
Eva Sterling — Cursed; reduced to Level 1. Reached Level 17, then retired after marrying a party member.
…
..
.
At least… the Succubus side had a higher survival rate. What was the difference from Incubi?
In the end, plenty still died when their parties fell apart or simply retired—and retirement was the more common outcome. Even in cases where marriage wasn't specifically noted, odds were good that was what had happened.
And then—
Park Ji-hye — Cursed; reduced to Level 1. Recently confirmed at Level 25.
—among those who had undergone Succubus-ification, there was still an active hunter. When I had reviewed the Incubus-ification cases, nearly everyone had either died or retired. But here, on the Succubus side, someone remained.
And more than that…
I knew the name Park Ji-hye. We had never met face-to-face, but still.
Wasn't she supposed to have retired and taken a desk job?
A different person with the same name, maybe?
Park Ji-hye had been a hunter active in the same era as me. She had never been directly connected to Sung-jun or me, but she had made enough of a name for herself that the rumors reached us all the same.
From what I had heard, unlike Sung-jun and me, Park Ji-hye had operated as part of a guild-based group. As a mage she had performed well enough for her guild—until, at some point, all word of her exploits simply stopped.
The next rumor to circulate was that she had been cursed, turned into a wanton woman, and that the guild was looking after her as a unit. I had assumed that "looking after" was just the usual mix of innuendo and dirty jokes, but…
Could that care have been for her Succubus-ification?
Lined up against the passages I had seen in the other books, the claim that she had become a wanton woman suddenly fit.
And when you added the keyword "dream demon" into the mix…
…so last night wasn't just some ridiculous nightmare after all.
It also explained why a female Succubus found it easier to level up than a male Incubus.
Hunters, when you stripped everything else away, were a high-risk profession where people put their lives on the line. Naturally, men vastly outnumbered women—and if a Succubus truly was a lust demon the way Park Ji-hye's rumors suggested, seducing the men in her own party would be child's play.
Come to think of it, I think I heard Park Ji-hye's personality changed, too.
I had dismissed it as idle nonsense at the time, but people said that after the curse she had become obsessed with men.
Maybe this curse—whether it forced Incubus-ification or Succubus-ification—was the kind that could even forge a whole new personality.
"Then the reason he's still himself…"
The differences between him and Park Ji-hye.
Gender, and level.
"…so, what—he's so strong that the curse's personality got stuck as a split personality?"
Or maybe Incubi and Succubi simply shared similar habits and ought to be classified as entirely different species. Either way, that was as far as the information I had would take me.
As long as everything was pure inference, chasing the logic any further would only dump me into a maze.
"Haa."
I had gathered so little, and not a single piece of it was solid.
No confirmed sighting of an Incubus as a monster. No active hunter who had survived Incubus-ification and was still in the field.
I'll have to settle for having a rough sense of the shape of this.
From here on, the only option was to check things against him, side by side.
…All right. Time to do what I needed to do today.
I would try teaching him magic. It was part of the contract—and maybe, just maybe, magic would give him a way to keep that thing under control.
2.
"All right. Class starts now."
After our midday training session.
He called me over, saying he had finished prepping the lecture.
A rolling rattle of wheels reached my ears, and there he was, hauling a whiteboard into place. In classic fashion, he did it with mana.
Did that even count as magic…?
Or was it simply a knack for handling mana? I watched him work, half in a daze.
"Well. Honestly, I'm not going to write everything out carefully. But atmosphere matters."
"……"
If I thought about how that "atmosphere" was part of what the twenty million won was paying for, I wanted to give him a piece of my mind.
But he looked genuinely happy for once, so I let it go.
"I'll start with the definition of magic."
He flicked his fingers and scattered multicolored mana into the air. As his hands moved, strands of power of every kind swirled free and, in moments, dressed the room like a party hall.
"Magic is a technique that uses mana to produce special phenomena."
The instant he finished speaking, the mana embroidering the air gathered and condensed. The concentrated streams formed magic circles of every color and shape, completing more than ten spells in the blink of an eye.
"So for you, there are basically two paths."
Bang!
The completed spells burst into life—a fluorescent charm that floated up light, a sonic charm that spread sound, an ignition charm that kindled a tiny flame, a current charm that spun a whirl of water, a freeze charm that forged a sharp icicle, and a final spell that wiped every last one of them clean away.
"You can study it as a proper discipline—become a true technician of magic and raise your mastery the pure way."
He snapped his fingers.
Mana stitched the air again, and without so much as drawing a magic circle, the fluorescent charm from before flared to life once more.
"Or you can learn only the know-how that works in a real fight—and treat it as practical, half-assed fieldcraft."
Heh-heh. He grinned with the most insufferable arrogance imaginable.
"Which one do you want?"