A painful twinge pulled my awareness back to my side, where Olivia was carefully healing me, or at least that was what I thought she was doing. The pain was contra-indicative of that, as Divine Healing was supposed to be painlessly perfect, a miracle of power that no mortal could ever mimic or something like that. Sadly, it looked like she had bugged Eleutheria once too often and was now on some sort of divine do-not-disturb list, because that healing seriously hurt.

“A little careful, please, that hurts.” I chided her, simply in too much pain to play tough and pretend I didn’t hurt.

“The curse makes healing you difficult. I put up a stop-gap measure earlier, now I need to expunge it. That is what hurts.” she explained and I focused inwards, pushing past the pain because curses were inherently part of Darkness-Magic, so having an example to study was great. If only it wasn’t on me, I’d be utterly thrilled but that was the hand I had been dealt.

Finding the curse, now that I was looking, was utterly trivial, creeping into my flesh from the wound cut into my side. The wound itself was painfully deep and might even have killed me without magical healing but manageable. Reaching out with my Blood Magic, I tried prodding the flesh a little, only to let out a pained gasp the moment my magic came into contact with the area, the curse welling up, wrapping around my magic and devouring it, surging in strength as it did. At the same time, I noticed my health-bar drop precipitously, blood spurting from my side to take me into uncomfortable territory. Not to the point of making me keel over instantly, but one or two more surges like that and I’d be in trouble, respawning in a distant cave. That realisation brought up the reminder that I needed to get better at establishing base-points or maybe figure out if my Hallow within Lenore could somehow be declared my home, or I might find myself in trouble at some point.

“Don’t prod it, it’s bound to your magic. I warned you, didn’t I?” Olivia grumbled, before continuing her chanting, now even more focused than earlier. Passively looking at the curse, I would have flushed if I had the blood to spare, realising that I had just made her work harder by feeding the curse additional magic.

Instead of being an idiot and prodding the curse again, I mentally settled back, simply watching, observing how my body reacted and, more importantly, how it interacted with my magic. A curse that could prevent magical healing, even if only partially, sounded like a great ability to learn. So far, we had mostly avoided getting into fair fights with any sapient enemies, mostly using ambush, surprise and overwhelming force to make sure our enemies never had a chance to fight back but that wouldn’t always work out. Hell, so far, we hadn’t really faced enemies that used healing magic, the closest to that had been the Lycantroll near Carinthia, but a single healer managing to keep their people alive might be devastating.

Another advantage of my intense focus was that the pain drifted into the back of my mind, no longer pressing as hard as it had, the headache even subsiding a little, probably because neither Lenore nor I tried to engage with the other.

Over the next hour, I could watch Olivia switch between Lenore and me, using her magic to slowly drive the curse back and was able to make up something of an idea for the way it worked. I even had knowledge of the concepts and runes, to the point that I considered using it against the next applicable enemy in the future, simply to see if it worked.

By my understanding, the Curse was in two parts, the first a combination of Blood, or maybe Flesh or something similar, and Devour, essentially a simple damage-effect that took some power and dealt damage to the afflicted enemy. But that was merely the boring part, the interesting part was the Curse-Effect that actually stuck, clinging to the Blood, or maybe Flesh, and feeding off the magic inherent to it. That feeding-off was essentially another part of a Devour-effect and it was that devour-effect that was the crux of it. It was strong enough to make the curse perpetual against a foe with enough magic in their body, unless you had the ability to draw your magic out of a living part of your body, something I couldn’t do, just the idea made me shudder. It was akin to trying to draw your blood out of a part of your body, without using Blood Magic. I couldn’t even conceptualise doing so, though I briefly considered the idea to drain all your magic, before using Blood Magic to overdraw it to the point that the body was devoid of magic. Painful, depending on the wound, lethal all by itself, but it might starve the curse. Possibly, maybe. Not that I wanted to try.

Outside magic directed at the flesh was drawn in, something as I could watch as the curse was slowly devouring the stop-gap measure Olivia had put into place, even the Divine Magic unable to actually withstand the curse, not while it was bound in my flesh. Once within the curse, it made sure that the wound couldn’t heal by itself and any left-over power was dedicated to worsen it. Against a sufficiently powerful foe, it would be a perpetual wound, unhealable and killing them rapidly, unless they had the power to simply overpower the curse’s ability to Devour magic and having enough left-over to deal with the super-charged effect, either by directly dispelling it or by out-healing it all. The Grandmother might be able to brute-force it but I wasn’t certain. If it was on somebody else, she would be able to, but when directed at her, the curse would be attuned to her magic, raising the difficulty by an order of magnitude. No, she, too, would have to do what Olivia did, putting in a stop-gap measure to staunch the wound before slowly unravelling the curse.

Finally, after an hour of pained waiting, Olivia let out a sigh and her magic swelled, the flow different from before, and healing magic flooded over my side, re-knitting my parted flesh and filling the gaps with a magical substitute that would slowly be absorbed as my body truly healed.

“We are done.” she announced, having finished with Lenore just earlier.

“Thank you.” I replied, feeling truly appreciative. Without her, I would be dead and Lenore would likely be, too, unless I had managed to pull the effect on her apart, while dying from my own wound. Not a nice way to go.

“What happened to the weapon it used? I’d like to take a look.” I asked, trying to push myself up only to get stopped by Sigmir who had been hovering around me, especially after my mind had pulled back from reality to focus on the curse.

“It crumbled, just like the rest of it.” she told me, but the hand on my chest made it obvious that I wasn’t going anywhere to check anything. With a frustrated sigh, mostly at the inability to figure out more about the curse by studying the weapon that had delivered it, I simply rested, letting myself slowly heal.

“Say, could you do that again? I could feel the bound souls fading, their existence returning to the Cycle, to be born anew some day, somewhere.” Olivia quietly asked me a while later, once I was cleared to sit up and have dinner. It had been decided we would camp here, the undead destroyed by the earlier attack and any nearby beings unlikely to investigate in the dark. I had to consider her question for a moment, would we be able to make a ritual like the earlier one again? That was easy, sure we could. But destroying the final boss, that was a more difficult question.

“No, we can’t.” Lenore spoke up, stopping my considerations dead in their tracks, “You forgot, we acted in Mortal Hubris.” she told me and I needed a moment to understand, but once I did, I shuddered a little. What we had done, devouring the power inherent to the souls and binding it in the Skull shouldn’t have worked. Not with our current level and stats, hell, even the wound we had taken would be a lot worse if it hadn’t happened in a moment of ‘Research’ as we tried to increase our knowledge by doing something possibly ill-advised. In that moment, Mortal Hubris allowed me to succeed, by boosting my attributes by fifty percent, giving me those massively increased attributes that I normally wouldn’t have.

Trying to replicate it might work, as replication was an important part of research but I couldn’t be sure and I wouldn’t know until it was the moment of truth, which could very well kill me right after.

“No, she is right. I doubt we’ll be able to do that again.” I admitted, a part of me crying at the amount of EXP we wouldn’t get. Hell, if the quest-log of the system was right, we had earned sixteen silver for killing undead, equating to a grand total of sixteen hundred destroyed undead. Sure, the individual EXP was bad, the vast majority simply too low to give any, but still, two, almost three levels had been awarded for emptying the area, bringing me from some two-percent of level 108 to almost ninety percent of level 110.

And we couldn’t grind it, certainly not safely.

Letting out the sad sigh of a gamer, unable to harvest the glorious EXP nearby, I got back to eating my stew and trying to come up with a way to safely dispose of the boss-level undead. If we could manage that, our power would soar.