Chapter 842: Invigorating Horror
Her life had once been ordinary.
At least, as ordinary as the life of an orphan on the outskirts of a town at the edge of a continent on a random planet in some corner of one of many galaxies could be.
She had been found as a baby by a hunter on his way home one evening and taken to a church, which then sent her to the town’s main orphanage, where she grew up.
She wasn’t the most amiable child, but she had a small circle of close friends and few problems with the orphanage director, matrons, or patrons.
For 14 years and 11 months, her life had been normal.
But on the first day of the 12th month, the first winds of change blew.
First, she fell ill. She had been the one child in the orphanage who had never caught any of the diseases that young children were prone to, not once falling sick or even running a fever.
But that day, she inexplicably became severely ill, so much so that the doctors claimed her life was at risk.
The orphanage director called for a priest, but the priest’s healing blessing did nothing to ease her pain.
Her friends, worried for her and helping take care of her, also began to weaken, so the orphanage director, fearing she might have contracted some contagious disease, prohibited them from seeing her and handled things personally.
She stayed like that for almost a week, and just when it seemed all hope was lost, she made a sudden recovery, astonishing both doctors and priests.
She could care for herself and complete her assigned chores without issue.
Her friends were overjoyed at her recovery, and so was she, as she never again wanted to feel the pain of that mysterious illness again.
She thought it was over until the day after her recovery, when she went out to play with her friends and the other children in their part of the town.
They decided to play tag first, and for the first game, she was ’it’, chasing the others around and eventually catching one of them by grabbing his arm.
But the moment she grabbed his arm, the boy suddenly flinched, began shaking, fell to the ground convulsing, and before everyone’s eyes, his skin turned ashen and shrivelled as if all the life had been drained from him.
Eventually, the boy died.
It was a traumatic incident for the children, to say the least.
They screamed, and nearby adults rushed over, saw the collapsed boy, and tried to help, calling a doctor from nearby.
But nothing could be done as the boy was already dead.
His mother wailed through the night for her lost child, and people began wondering what had caused his sudden death.
The doctors could find no explanation, and when science offered none, people quickly turned to spiritual causes.
’What if it was some kind of divine retribution for something his family had done?’
Rumours like that began circulating through the district by the next morning.
Meanwhile, the girl, having just witnessed one of her friends die, was in shock and had cried herself to sleep.
When she saw the funeral rites beginning the next day, she thought back to the incident and noticed something she’d missed when her friend had suddenly collapsed.
The invigorating sensation that had filled her, like she’d just eaten a full meal.
She didn’t understand the feeling, and her mind naturally didn’t connect it to her friend’s sudden death.
That day, she and some of the other orphanage children were on duty to care for the goats and chickens the orphanage raised.
Although the director had considered letting them take a break, they eventually allowed the children to continue as usual, hoping their chores would distract them from the pain of loss.
While tending the animals, someone had left the chicken coop open, and one wandered into the goats’ shed. Upon seeing this, she rushed over to get it out, pushing past the goats as she moved.
She eventually reached the chicken and grabbed it, but when she turned around, she saw that all the goats she’d pushed aside on her way over had collapsed, their bodies withered. When she screamed in shock and accidentally dropped the chicken, it fell silently, its tongue hanging from its beak.
Once again, she was filled with that strange invigorating sensation, and the fatigue from crying all night vanished instantly, her dark circles disappearing as energy coursed through her body.
In stark contrast, her blood ran cold, and a chill gripped her heart.
Her scream had drawn attention, and when the other children saw the fallen goats, they ran to call the nearby matron, who then summoned the orphanage director.
When they arrived and saw the goats, which had been perfectly fine just minutes before, they immediately noticed how the animals’ bodies had withered and aged just like the child who had died the previous day.
The orphanage director, who had previously believed the child’s death was divine punishment, immediately changed his mind and concluded that some sort of plague was killing both people and animals, and that the child might have just been the first victim.
The director quickly gathered the children and called the church priests to have them bless the kids, hoping to protect them from disease.
At this point, the orphanage director still hadn’t suspected the girl. She, however, had already begun making an instinctive connection and was terrified by what she realised.
The final nail in the coffin was hit when the priest tried to bless her.
The veil of divine power he attempted to place over her shattered with a loud crack, a sound that drew everyone’s attention. The dumbfounded priest confirmed his divine power reserves and tried again, but just like before, the blessing failed.
Frowning, he moved on to bless the other children, all of whom were fine, but on her, the blessing wouldn’t work.
This immediately drew all eyes to her, and everyone was curious why the blessing failed.
Then one of the other children innocently mentioned that the boy who’d died yesterday had collapsed right after she touched him, and the goats that had died that morning had also perished after she pushed past them with her hands.
Hearing this, the priest’s eyes widened, and pointing at her, he declared her a ’Cursed Child’ and shouted for the town guards to apprehend her.
Frightened, the girl ran without thinking, fleeing to the nearest place she could, a small forest behind the orphanage.
The news spread quickly across the town district, and though shocked, some of the town guards rushed out to capture her.
With several adult men chasing her, it didn’t take long for the girl to be caught, but there was one problem.
The guards only knew she was a ’Cursed Child’ and didn’t know her touch could kill. When they grabbed her to pin her down, their life force was drained just like the others.
They died instantly, and the girl felt invigorated again, her exhausted stamina from running and crying was restored immediately.
At that point, she could no longer hide behind self-denial.
The realisation that she had really killed her friend dawned on her, and the priest’s claim that she was ’Cursed’ took root in her mind.
She ran out of fear of being caught, and it didn’t take long for the dead guards to be discovered, spreading the news and causing more people to learn about her ’Curse of Death’.
The church’s knights intervened, and the leader of the town’s hunters, enraged at the deaths of their friends among the guards, joined the knights in the search.
The hunters knew the forest like the back of their hands, and it wasn’t difficult for them to set traps, follow her trails, and corner her into them.
With the priests’ blessings on the knights, they managed to apprehend her and bring her to the church, where the priests tried everything from blessing rituals to exorcisms, all to no effect.
Anything done with divine power proved useless, regardless of how little or how much was used.
The slightest unprotected physical contact would drain a person’s life, and it was even more potent against the priests attempting to exorcise her ’curse’.
In the end, the church, powerless to stop her supposed curse, branded her a witch and tried to burn her at the stake.
It was in that moment, with her life hanging by a thread, that help came from the heavens above, though this intervention was not divine in nature.
A powerful gust of wind lifted her blindfold, and she saw everyone on the ground, screaming in pain.
For a moment, she feared her curse might have caused it, but her curse needed physical contact, and there was no way she could have touched all those people.
Her eyes then caught the shadow cast on the floor, and she looked up to see a man floating in the air, backlit by the sun.
His presence invoked an instinctive reverence in her, and so, she questioned if he was a god.
However, he claimed not to be a god, but a being with the power to kill gods.
And he also claimed that she was just like him.
