"I swear I didn't do anything too much!" said Manilyn with his hands raised upward. "I just did a basic test to check if you had a curse or not!"
Luke huffed in stress and put down the old man's beard. "I'm sorry about that... My heart is still a little racing."
Manilyn combed his long beard with the own fingers of his hands. "It's okay, I understand..."
"So, am I with a curse?" Luke asked, already expecting the worst answer.
"Yes, you are cursed." The old man spoke without curling up and turned his attention to the books on another table. "I just haven't been able to determine what type it is yet..."
A sequence of memories began to run through the half-wolf's head, about all the times he could have been cursed. So, he realized with ease that, not to mention the notch in the chamber with the skull door, there were countless situations where he might have been cursed.
"Are there specific types?" Luke asked, trying not to panic because he knew so little about the subject.
"Too many for anyone to count..." Manilyn continued flipping through the thick book on his desk. "Luckily, there have been great academics who have studied curses, so there are cures for most of them."
At that point, Luke perked up; after all, his curse shouldn't be something too complex because it only made him faint a few times.
"Have you dealt with anything unusual in the last few weeks?" the old man asked as he turned to the half-wolf.
"Yeah, a little bit."
"Like, what?"
"Strange animal in the swamp, Monsters outside the Dungeon, and Demons."
Initially, Manilyn kept a skeptical look, and when he realized that Luke wasn't joking, he widened his eyes. "Not for nothing did you win the Tournament of Legends… In any of these encounters with Demons, did you seal any? I don't know if you know, but this race is very spiteful; they might have cursed you..."
"Not only did I see a sealed being, but I also killed one and swallowed its core. I gained it from here when I ingested the small sphere..."
Then, Luke summoned his Behemoth Axe to prove that he was not lying.
"There will never be a problem with ingesting a monster's core, so if it didn't cast any curses on you with words, this can't be the reason."
" With words you meant?"
Just like that, Luke remembered that the first day he arrived in Vasconcelos, early in the afternoon, he faced the Superior Goblins, and that one of them said something in an unknown language.
" One time, the leader of a band of Superior Goblins read strange words from a scroll to me, but I could kill him before he could finish. Nathalia said that if I really succeeded, there would be no problem."
Manilyn sighed in relief because if it was a demon curse, it would be pretty problematic, but since it was just a Superior Goblins curse, it could be something simpler.
"By the way, I still have some scrolls of that same leader with me. I picked them up to sell them and ended up forgetting about their existence from under my mattress, until we moved back to Oukiwa."
For a few minutes, Manilyn looked carefully at the magic scrolls Luke handed him, and this was also the first time the half-wolf had seen anyone open them. There were runes like the teleportation circles that the Sensory Mage had used and the large scroll that Livia used in Phase One of the Tournament.
"You don't have the one the leader used, do you?"
"I left it along with their bodies, because it was already useless."
"All right, that doesn't make much difference… So, I have one bad news and one good news for you. Which do you prefer first?"
"The good news, please."
"The good news is that there is a cure, just like any other kind of curse. You just need to find the creator of these magic scrolls, who absolutely is the creator of the curse scroll as well, and you need to kill him."
"Fine, but how do you know that the creator of these scrolls is the same as the one in the curse scroll?"
Manilyn walked over to the table and picked up one of the scrolls. "There is a Class of Academics that is called 'Escolar'. These people not only study the art of scrolls, but also craft them and use them in combat. The 'Escolars' usually use many patterns for different compositions of the use of scrolls."
And then the old man approached the half-wolf with one of the scrolls and pointed to a minor rune spelling that was almost erased on the outside of the scroll.
"Can you see that? That is the name of the type of composition that this scroll is part of."
When he looked at Luke and noticed that he understood absolutely nothing of the ancient runes on the man's countenance, he was surprised. After all, how had the half-wolf managed to defeat demons without knowing runes?
"Anyway, those scrolls belong to a group that has only one scroll with a curse. And along with the composition on that scroll, there is a name: Bukavac."
"I've never heard of that name... is it someone famous?"
"I've never heard of it too... Now, the bad news..."
"Wait, the fact that I had to kill him wasn't the bad news?"
On that afternoon, Luke learned of the real wickedness that a curse can bring to a person, and to his misfortune, Manilyn couldn't even tell him what might actually happen to the half-wolf. He could be doomed to continue occasionally passing out and having nightmares, as well as just going to sleep one day and his heart-stopping.
The only thing that the old principal of the Oukiwa Academy informed him was that if the curse had the same level of power as the other magic scrolls that Luke kept, it was very powerful.
Luke thanked Manilyn for his help and requested that he not tell Ayumi anything. Reluctantly he accepted the half-wolf's request; after all, telling her or not about it was the cursed one's decision.
Although Luke was shaken by the terrible news, he knew that he would not die because of the curse, at least not yet.
'Those Goblins were out of the Dungeon because of Beherith's presence, so it's not hard to imagine that the creator might be a demon also. In fact, knowing the First Servant well, that curse may have been planned by him...'
Luke began to theorize, as he walked with the Black Egg over the stone roads of the Strogueher estate. Of course, he didn't intend to die by a curse, but he had to focus on one goal at a time.
'For now, I'll focus on finding my friends and then deal with it.' He decided, determined. 'If I haven't died by now, the worse it can't get.'
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