Resolve (2)
“Kkuk, hah……!” As soon as I opened my eyes, I clutched my chest and let out a beastly groan. The deadly poison and monster blood etched near my heart. The cursed pattern I had forcibly crammed in last night at the cost of my life force still radiated a horrific burning sensation, as if my skin were being seared by a red-hot iron even after dawn. With every breath, the poison seemed to course through my veins, making the world spin before my eyes. My stats might have risen by a fraction, but if this continued, my heart would burst from the spell’s backlash long before anyone else’s blade could reach me.
“Haa, haa…… Fuck, this is really goddamn awful……” Wiping the cold sweat from my brow, I pushed myself up from the straw pile. I desperately needed a way to mitigate this terrible recoil. I grabbed the worn pouch I had filled by skimming beast bones and hides from the disassembly yard over the past month and selling them cheap to a back-alley apothecary, then left the shack.
After dumping ice-cold water from the village well over myself to wash off the lingering stench of blood, I headed for the library at the center of the village, a place I had been eyeing for some time. When I slipped a few copper coins to the stern-looking attendant as an entrance fee, he shot me a look as if I were an insect from the stinking slums and irritably gestured inside.
My goal was clear: to find knowledge that could break through the limits of my meager weapon, Primal Magic.
The interior of the library was a space that visually proved the inequality of this world. The central, spacious shelves held elemental magic and holy magic tomes used by orthodox mages, their gold-leaf covers emitting a faint glow of mana. In contrast, the books on primal magic and the occult that I sought were shoved into the deepest, dampest, most neglected corner of the library. They were bound not in proper parchment but in rough animal hide. Dried bloodstains, blackened with age, marred their covers, and every time I turned a page, the stench of rotting mud and bone dust assaulted my nose.
I frantically flipped through those foul-smelling fragments of the non-mainstream until a crude illustration finally caught my eye.
Substitute Doll
A cursed doll crafted from the practitioner’s blood and hair mixed with beast bone powder. When the practitioner suffers a fatal blow or their body is on the verge of collapse due to magical backlash, it “absorbs a set amount of damage in their place and is destroyed.”
“This is it.” My lips went dry. If I could transfer the horrific pain and penalties of the tattoos that gnawed at my flesh onto this doll, I could minimize the risks while remodeling my body into a monster. I crammed the crude diagram from the book into my mind and focused my will to activate the skill at once.
Curse Art.
Yet a dull sensation, as if a massive iron gate had slammed shut inside my head, pushed back with an unpleasant resistance. The flow of mana tangled, and a splitting headache tore through me. Failure.
‘……My level is still too low.’
With my current meager Curse Art proficiency (Lv. 2), the most I could manage was giving someone a headache or engraving the most basic tattoos that devoured my own flesh. The vessel of my skill was far too small to realize advanced curse techniques that twisted the causality of life force to transfer damage.
I ground my teeth in frustration, but I had no time to sit idle. Now that I had a goal, all I needed to do was raise my proficiency by bathing in blood however I could. I left the library vowing to grind relentlessly.
And that very night, after finishing my grueling work at the disassembly yard and heading back to the shack in the slums, something happened on the dim main road untouched by the lights of the commercial district. In a damp alley where only rats would normally scurry, a sticky, explicit friction sound echoed wetly.
“Haa, aah! Ugh, uungh……!”
It was not the cry of a beast. It was unmistakably the moan of a human female whose reason had been paralyzed. I instinctively hid in the shadows of the wall and turned my gaze toward the source. In the middle of the road, at the entrance to a back alley littered with crude barrels and wooden crates, a large mercenary in leather armor was thrusting his hips like an animal. And the one taking every violent thrust from below was the former Pilates instructor who had once looked at me with desperate eyes in the clearing.
Her state was more wretched than any street whore. Naked on the filthy dirt, her legs were mechanically wrapped around the man’s thick waist.
“Puhaha! Fuck, these foreigner bitches might have trash stats, but their cunts are goddamn tight. Ain’t that right?”
Thud! Thud! Squish! Every time the mercenary slammed his hips upward with brutal force, her ample breasts bounced and slapped against the ground. There was no caress or intimacy—only violent, piston-like thrusts meant for excretion and conquest. His massive penis mercilessly tore into her narrow entrance, pounding against her cervix without mercy.
“Aaaah! Ahk, ughiiit……!” A scream mixing pain and pleasure burst from her torn lips. After witnessing her comrades being torn apart in the swamp days earlier and enduring endless rape by the mercenaries, her sense of self as a civilized person had completely shattered. When the mercenary grabbed her hair with his thick hand and twisted his hips mercilessly, the grotesque outline of his enormous glans scraping along her inner walls protruded clearly against the thin skin of her belly. Her eyes had already rolled back white, past the limit of pleasure, and only saliva and beast-like moans bubbled from her mouth.
“Haa, haaang! More, more…… deeper…… fuck me harder……!” Her completely corrupted body no longer cared about the despair in her mind. Whenever the man’s penis withdrew, sticky fluids dripped in strings from her ruined hole, and she thrust her own hips upward, greedily swallowing him deeper, craving stronger stimulation. The sight of dust from the road and the man’s sweat mingling to defile her pale skin was a cruel pornography proving the lowest ecosystem of Shedborax.
It was in the moment I watched that miserable, disgusting scene with a blank expression that it happened.
‘……Ugh!’
Suddenly, the deadly poison tattoo carved into my heart and the Fang Wolf imprint on my thigh began to pulse hotly, as if burned by fire. My reason had frozen in horror and disgust at the rape scene before me, but the “beast blood” flowing through my veins was different. The wolf’s wild instinct, upon catching the raw mating and the thick female scent unfolding right in front of it, crushed its master’s reason and forcibly erupted a violent breeding urge.
“Kkuk……” I clenched my teeth, but hot blood rushed uncontrollably to my lower body, swelling it to a terrifying degree. The sensation of my pants threatening to tear. Disgusted by the grotesque disconnect of my body being completely devoured by the primal magic’s beast, I struck my thigh with my fist until it bled, barely suppressing the urge to rut.
“Hey.” At that moment, the mercenary’s murky eyes met mine exactly where I hid in the darkness. Grinning, he continued thrusting even more roughly into the woman’s pelvis and opened his mouth. “Skinny guy hiding in the shadows. Don’t just drool—want a turn too?”
Slap! Slap! The explicit sound of flesh colliding echoed through the alley as the mercenary let out a leering smirk. The woman’s unfocused eyes, rolled back white, trembled and tangled with mine in the air. There was no plea in her gaze asking me to save her. Only the chillingly empty eyes of a living onahole waiting for the next male like a beast.
“Fifty coppers and I’ll let you have her cheap. This bitch goes crazy lining up to get fucked. Hahaha!”
Fifty coppers. While forcibly suppressing the heat of arousal, my mind coldly calculated the currency value of Shedborax. One hundred coppers equaled one silver coin. Ten coppers bought one hard loaf of bread. In other words, fifty coppers was five loaves. That was the price at which the body and soul of a woman who had once cried out for the bare minimum of human dignity and rights in Korea were being sold. A mere five loaves of bread.
“……” I coldly swallowed the unpleasant lust given by the beast tattoos and gave no reply. Should I take this woman’s blood or flesh as material for the Substitute Doll? No. Though I wore a ruthless mask and acted thoroughly selfish, the timid modern-day Mokwon still inside me was not yet a perfect monster capable of butchering a fellow countryman as a sacrifice. Instead, a far colder and heavier “resolve” was freezing over in my chest.
Losing power did not simply mean starvation. It meant the complete ruin of tumbling in the mud of the streets as a beast’s cum-dump or meat shield, losing one’s self, with a price tag of five loaves of bread. ‘That cannot become my future.’
Leaving the mercenary’s mocking laughter and the woman’s moans wetly behind me, I turned into the darkness without looking back even once.
From that night onward, I began madly hunting every living creature around the slum shack. Once my stats rose and my agility exceeded 12, I could easily snatch rats rummaging through filth or sick stray cats. To lay the foundation for the Substitute Doll, I split open the bellies of captured rats, drew their blood, and stripped their meager bones to use as the most basic cursed mediums.
‘……Curse Art.’
Every time the cracked voice left my mouth, the rats tied to the floor convulsed and vomited blood. I spent the entire night devouring the lives of beasts to raise my proficiency.
> By using living creatures as offerings, understanding of 'Curse Art' deepens.
> 'Curse Art (呪術)' skill proficiency has increased slightly.
Days and nights of horrific slaughter repeated without pause. But at some point, the system notification that always appeared changed into an ominous red message that filled my vision.
Lower-grade offerings (small rodents and low-grade livestock) no longer increase the skill's 'proficiency'.
Greater life force, or 'higher-grade offerings' with a clear sense of self, are required for further growth.
The growth of proficiency as defined by the system had slammed into a massive wall and stopped. No matter how many thousands of rats I killed, my level would not rise. Yet as I withdrew my blood-stained hands from the rat corpses scattered on the floor, I curled my lips coldly in the darkness. Though the numerical value (Lv) had stopped growing, the structure and flow of Curse Art I had internalized through hundreds of cuts and bindings of flesh and blood had already taken perfect root in my mind. The skill was merely an aid; the “essential understanding” of orchestrating primal magic and carving beast bones with my own two hands was instead sharpening without pause.
Only one thing remained. The time had come to obtain the true materials—not rats, but the bones and blood of an “apex predator”—to complete my Substitute Doll and seize perfect control over this cursed beastly yoke.