I turned away and wandered the shelves, trying to work out where to start.

  All right. I still had no real idea how magic actually worked — enchanting a skeleton didn’t count. That had been accidental. A fluke. A one-time miracle I hadn’t even understood myself.

  Still, today I’d learned something important.

  Magic wasn’t just words and gestures. It wasn’t about shouting the right phrase and waving your hands convincingly. Spells were woven. Made from threads of magical force, drawn from a mage’s own reserve and tied into specific patterns. Every spell, every curse, every magical interaction had its own weave.

  Which meant Weil’s curse had one too.

  It wasn’t just there. It had structure. Knots. Direction. Internal logic.

  To remove it, I’d have to unravel that weave — and, at some point, use my own magic to cut a key knot. The problem was, I still had no idea how to actually access my magical reserve. Let alone control it.

  Still. Problems should be solved in order. First, understand the curse, how it was woven and where it could be undone. Only then would I worry about calling up my own magic — however that was supposed to work.

  A hazy glow caught my eye across the library. Without hesitation, I called softly,

  “Librarian?”

  A pale figure emerged from the shadows — a ghost in old-fashioned library attire, faintly glowing and radiating cold. He stared at me as if expecting a full confession.

  “Sorry — sir,” I cleared my throat. “I’m looking for a book. Or books. Something on curses. Preferably on removing them.”

  The ghost glided forward and led me to a section of shelves so ancient they looked ready to crumble. Gilded symbols, runes, and pentagrams adorned the covers, and magic seemed to seep from the pages themselves. He gestured to the curse-removal shelf. I pulled out the first book, feeling its weight.

  “Thank you,” I said, but he had already vanished.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  The book nearly slipped from my hands. Inside were runes and diagrams that made absolutely no sense. The explanations seemed written for geniuses or necromancers with far too much free time.

  “Well…” I muttered, brushing dust from the cover as I put it back. “That’s a bit much.”

  The next book was devoted entirely to classifications of curses, with exactly one line on removal: Reversal is theoretically possible, but exceedingly rare.

  Wonderful. Still, I kept it — just in case.

  The third was more promising, though still daunting. Active curses, passive curses, distance-based, contact-based… I sighed heavily, grabbing yet another volume, fully aware that reading alone wouldn’t be enough.

  Ten minutes later, on the verge of giving up entirely, I finally selected three books that looked at least somewhat comprehensible — or at least less terrifying.

  Now all that remained was the small matter of finding an answer to my problem.

  An hour passed.

  The problem wasn’t that I was stupid.

  The problem was that magic wasn’t flat.

  Every book tried to force it onto paper — symbols, seals, diagrams, tidy lines of ink. Everything reduced to two dimensions.

  What I was actually looking at were projections. Cross-sections. Simplified schematics meant for people who already knew what the full structure looked like in real space. Abbreviated notations that skipped entire steps because, apparently, everyone else had already done their homework.

  I hadn’t.

  Trying to understand these diagrams felt like being handed a university textbook on higher mathematics — complete with limits, converging series, and differential equations — and being told to “just work it out,” when you’d barely learned multiplication tables.

  Technically, all the information was there.

  Practically, it might as well have been written in blood.

  I read on anyway.

  I leaned back wearily in my chair, studying my crooked legs. A personal vendetta, clearly. What exactly had they ever done to Weil? In my world, she’d be charged with grievous bodily harm for this. Here, it was perfectly normal — just make sure you learn the “anti-recipe” afterwards.

  Fine. To hell with it. This was officially beyond me. I needed Elvira.

  But before giving up completely, I grabbed one last book from the pile. Dispersive Magic. The title sounded promising. Practical, even. Leafing through it, I finally found something that resembled hope: a description of a magical puzzle.

  To successfully remove a curse, one must trace its magical pattern and then select the correct symbol that disrupts that pattern.

  Sounds easy, doesn’t it? A lie. A beautiful, well-written lie.

  I studied a diagram — a tangled nightmare of symbols and seals woven into a dense pattern. The key was there, somewhere. It had to be. I traced the lines with my finger, muttering to myself.

  “Right. Destruction first. Then protection. Then… diversion? Or is that interdimensional linkage? What if I reverse it? Or add something here…”

  “If you do it like that,” a calm, mildly amused voice said behind me, “you’ll tangle the curse even further. At that point, you’d need an Archmage to untie it.”