C177: Speculation about the Secret of Curse
What about Curses?
Let us speak of Isidora. Unlike Stagefarers, their existence, or at the very least their consciousness, would slip away once their energy reservoir ran dry.
They could not generate their energy back through natural processes, the way Stagefarers could.
Izzy preferred to call it energy. Since Izzy originated from the modern world, she found herself far more familiar and comfortable with the terms energy and mana than with spirituality.
Izzy constructed several hypotheses within her crimson theatre:
'It is either that I do not possess a Spirit Body.'
This would mean they did not possess a "soul". Or at the very minimum, their "soul" was different in nature from that of living beings.
But that idea proved too ridiculous to entertain. Izzy shook her head, dismissing it.
'Or alternatively, I do not possess essence.'
Izzy removed the small essence vein that she had created inside the chibi Spirizzy's translucent form.
Now, Spirizzy’s heart was empty. She possessed no essence there, nor any condensed essence. All that remained was the Physical body and the Spirit Body.
'One cannot become a Stagefarer without essence, nor hold their spirituality in stable containment.'
The main body, the portrait of Isidora, could absorb the green mist and the gray mist. Izzy guessed that these smokes were spirituality.
When the absorption occurred, their energy reservoir filled, and this produced some sort of intoxicating, dizzy effect upon their shared mind.
Izzy straightened herself in her velvet seat. Her intuition told her that she had drawn close to the truth.
'We possess no essence, yet we have spirituality. A Spirit Body generates spirituality and stores it within the essence as a container. But we have none of that.'
'That would mean, our soul—our Spirit Body, connects directly to our spirituality without intermediary?'
‘Or should I say, our spirituality is our Spirit Body, our very soul?'
Did that mean they had been consuming their own soul to activate their abilities? Was that the reason they could not produce their own spirituality?
‘Hmmm.’
Did that even make sense?
'In the first place, what is the definition of a soul?'
It was an abstract concept, beyond empirical capture.
Soul carried many divergent meanings across different cultures, different religions, different philosophies. One could never establish a universal definition of what it truly was.
But there existed one certain, undeniable fact: when one's soul disappeared, one would inevitably die.
'Physical Body > Spirit Body > Essence > Condense Essence.'
This hierarchy represented the architecture of a Stagefarer.
"Can an ordinary person possess Essence?" Arnold asked aloud, breaking the silence of the clearing.
"They can, it is not impossible." Davis answered, his brow pulling together in visible effort as he attempted to recall his knowledge. "I have only heard tell of such cases secondhand. Apparently, some rare individuals possess special constitutional gifts from birth.
“They are exceptionally rare. Some are born Stagefarers naturally, some possess the means to become Bless through the church's intervention, and some less fortunate die young before discovery. It is exceedingly, ultra, dupa rare to encounter one who, without becoming a Stagefarer, survives all the way to adulthood."
"Hmm."
Basically, their physical bodies at birth could not retain the essence without the potion required to become a Stagefarer.
And even when drinking the potion, a Stagefarer still faced risk of losing control and transforming into a Curse. So in many cases, it was practically a death sentence.
Becoming a Bless could theoretically solve the issue. The problem was that becoming a Bless was not something one could simply undertake on casual whim.
Not everyone knew about Stagefarers and their existence. Not everyone recognized the symptoms manifesting in their own children. Not everyone had access to the means necessary to inspect whether their child had such a special constitution or not. And most of all, not everyone could receive the blessing of the Monarch.
‘So an ordinary person can hold essence. But doing so puts their life at risk.’
They needed to partake in a potion to become a Stagefarer. And the Faction they chose also needed to align with their own essence.
‘That means essence is poisonous to a normal human.’
And partaking the potion was, essentially what Davis had described earlier: containing that essence and forcing it into a stable vein.
‘Then how does one become a Curse?’ Izzy returned to the question.
‘Perhaps, when one's advancement ritual fails, their essence vein breaks apart. This results in a loss-of-control state, eventually causing someone to become a Curse?’ Izzy deduced, constructing her theory piece by piece.
When one becomes a Curse, one loses all reason, devolving into a destructive monster that sought only to destroy.
Isidora had never been a Stagefarer in the first place. They possessed no essence, so they had never gone through the process of losing control. They were, from their very beginning, a natural-born Curse rather than a losing control Stagefarer.
That was why Izzy and Isa, the two consciousnesses residing inside the Isidora portrait, retained their reason and their minds rather than devolving into madness.
And they could sustain themselves through absorbed spirituality alone. Their continued existence depended on spirituality. First, they had been fed by that perverted old man with the life energy of dead children, and afterward, they had survived by feeding on the mice and insects gathered from the mansion's dusty corners.
Was that the complete answer?
'Is this the reason why the Demon of Dispute Order sought to create a natural-born Curse? There existed no chance of them losing control, and thus, they could be more easily controlled and commanded?'
It was strange.
Something about the theory still felt incomplete. There was still a missing piece.
For example, there were many reasons why a Stagefarer might lose control and become a Curse. Failure to advance was just one of many paths to that failure.
Just as Davis had explained in the previous iteration, recorded on the black monument's surface:
[
“If ya have already begun to walk one Path and try to drink the potion of another, ya will be Cursed. Even a Blessed would turn into a monster if they dared such a thing.”
“If ya come into contact with a specific Curse, one with the power to taint others, ya will also be affected.”
“And if ya see something ya should never see, or hear something ya should never hear… well, ya will either die on the spot, or turn into a Curse.”
“There are plenty of reasons that can turn ya into a Curse, master. That’s why the old wives’ tales warn ya not to linger when strange things happen. Run, they say. Run, and do not look back.”
“A Curse cannot be reasoned with. They have already lost their minds. The recommended action is to kill them before they show any more dangerous signs.”
]
‘The power to taint others… what exactly did he mean by that?’ Izzy promptly directed the question to Davis through Arnold's mouth, and as she had anticipated, the answer she received was empty. He simply did not know.
Perhaps she was missing some critical element, some catalyst that caused a Stagefarer to lose control and transform into a Curse.
‘A catalyst… something that breaks the essence. Something that affects the Stagefarer and causes them to lose control.’
The eagle-head cane, the ceremonial dagger, they could all potentially be Curses themselves.
They were extremely valuable. After all, Otto had offered 500 Alan coins for the silver eagle-head cane alone, the cane that was capable of amplifying one's emotions within a short range.
But they were not monsters that had lost their minds. They were not Stagefarers who had lost control. Izzy was not even sure whether they possessed consciousness in the first place.
'Is that what would happen to me if I ran out of spirituality?' Izzy's eyes widened at the sudden, chilling implication.
What if, once their spirituality was completely depleted, they became Cursed tools? In simpler terms, would that be equivalent to becoming a ‘Curse corpse?’
["The church, specifically the White Inquisitor, known as the Seal, is often dispatched when a Curse is spotted."]
'Is that the reason why the White Inquisitor is dispatched? Why the Institution was created to exterminate Curses? They wish for the complete destruction of a Curse so they can claim the corpse, using them as tools?'
'When I possess a dead corpse, because they have already died, their soul, the Spirit Body, has already departed. That is precisely why we cannot access their former Stagefarer abilities, since the body retains no essence to channel.'
Izzy deduced that even if she made them 'alive' again by resuming their blood flow and binding them as her vessels, they would not miraculously resume their status as Stagefarers. Their souls had already gone, the essential permanently dissolved, and no ability could restore what death had erased.
'What will happen if I possess a Curse tool? Or attempt to possess a Stagefarer while they’re still alive?’
Izzy knew she could possess living creatures. But for whatever reason, her other iterations had never once attempted such an experiment with a living person. By now, they had successfully possessed living rats and birds, even a horse without difficulty.
The thought was tempting, but Izzy did not try. She felt strangely uncomfortable just by thinking about it.
'My intuition strikes again.'
Izzy had no desire to risk her life in some unverified experiment that had never been tested. At the very least, not here, not now, while she was still in such a precarious position.
For the present moment, with questions piling up relentlessly and answers remaining scarce, Izzy resorted to her usual strategy.
'I don’t care! Let’s leave all of that for the future me!'
She would shelve these questions for later thought, when she had more free time and safety to explore them properly. Those questions had little to do with her current situation anyway.
It remained a dangerous time, and they still lingered at the very edge of the forest, a location that made her uneasy. The sky had darkened considerably, thick clouds swallowed the moonlight and cast the clearing into a more oppressive shadow.
Cold wind swept across the vessels' skin, carrying winter's sharp bite, and made Izzy's borrowed flesh tremble involuntarily through her vessels' nerves.
'It is really cold out here.'