Blessed be the Bomdidour entire bloodline for their strong trust in their defences to the point that they did not bother with more security measures on the inside! Well, considering that all of their servants were bound by several curses, it made sense that they would have faith in attacks not coming from inside the manor… That was their mistake, though.

  I quickly slipped into the storeroom, closing the door behind me before bearing witness to the most glorious buffet of my entire life. I had been to parties with a nice assortment of food before, but it simply did not compare.

  The sheer volume of goods. The sheer quality of some of them… And of course, it was a buffet that only I was to enjoy. As a strong and tall girl, I had always had a bit of an appetite. It was easy to see the difference compared to other girls.

  When I was younger, I thought for sure that girls my age were starving themselves. It turned out that I was just the only one who ate like two and a half grown men whilst my age was still in the one digits.

  I may be made of steel and useless clumps of flesh now, but my strong appetite was still going strong. After making sure that the doors were properly shut, I pushed the closest heavy thing in front of them.

  It would be suspicious if someone tried to enter and noticed something in the way, but considering what I was going to do, there would be no hiding my larceny if someone got in anyway. So, might as well confuse them a little bit instead.

  Frankly, it wasn’t unlikely that they wouldn’t think too much of it anyway. One should not underestimate the sapient’s mind capability to rationalise and play things down. During my slaughter through the countryside, I had witnessed many times how people would rather go to the nicest or simplest explanation for something.

  Blood on the floor? Must have been the work of some animals.

  Wife is missing? She must have gone to sleep early.

  The front door is wide open? Must have forgotten to shut it, letting the wind open it.

  I wouldn’t say that they were stupid, just that they were pleasantly optimistic.

  As such, I felt that it was not unlikely that if a guard pushed the door to find it obstructed, they would just assume that something had fallen from one of the huge shelves instead of thinking that an intruder had evaded every single obstacle seamlessly and gone into the storeroom.

  The former was wrong, but it was still the most logical and plausible one. Funny how that works, doesn’t it?

  In any case, once that was done, I instantly went to gorging myself like I was a duck soon to produce foie gras. Cursed items of all kinds were crushed in my maw. Pieces of debris soon littered the floor around me, as many of these items were not made of steel or flesh, so they couldn’t be devoured and absorbed by me.

  Such debris included many shards of glass, as a lot of the curses were also stored inside glass vials.

  I moved as quickly as possible to consume as much as I could in the shortest amount of time possible. The room was large, and the shelves had to be scaled to get everything possible out of them.

  Though the shelves were also cursed themselves, with what sort of curse? I had no clue, but once one was cleared, I would eat it as well. There was no mercy for the furniture.

  It did not take long for Nara to inform me that I could pick a new upgrade, but I did not pay much attention to this for now. I always thought long and hard about the upgrade I picked, but there was no time to waste right now. I needed all this food to get in my belly.

  Still… Some of those cursed items were a bit bizarre. It made me wonder if they had been naturally cursed over time, as was apparently often common with objects, or if members of the Bombidour bloodline had just trained on random items, ending up just stashing the results in the storeroom.

  I was literally holding a cursed spoon right now… A spoon cursed to never be loved…? There was no way that sort of thing naturally occurred. A specific curse had been thrown at this thing–Wait a minute, did I just casually identify the nature of the curse by just looking at it?

  Oh boy… It’s working. I am getting better at curse slinging!

  I looked around the main storeroom.

  I had been at it for four hours at this point, and large swats of the room were now empty, the floor covered in a thick layer of glass shards, splinters, and other remnants of materials that I couldn’t ‘digest’.

  By now, night had thoroughly fallen, and if my calculations were correct, it should be two hours past midnight right now. At this point, the odds of a stay guard or servant coming by were extremely slim. They all needed to sleep after all, and the few that would still be around would have better places to be than the storeroom.

  For another two hours, I endlessly devoured until the main storeroom was left deserted, the once sprawling labyrinth of shelves and stacks of cursed objects was no more, and throughout this all, I clearly felt the fruits of my labour.

  I was able to clearly sense individual curses around me, and even without looking at them, I was capable of getting a good feel of their purpose and specific capabilities. Not to mention that partway through, I became capable of drawing the curses toward me.

  It was rather subtle, but it seemed that my constant feasting had somehow made me into an even more ravenous creature to the point that I naturally pulled curses toward me for consumption, and if I focused, the effect was even stronger.

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  This allowed me to eat even quicker and get done with the main storeroom ahead of schedule.

  That went without mentioning the upgrade opportunities I acquired thanks to the dire amounts of experience this was all bringing me. I was going to come out of this a changed woman–Well, it depended on the sort of upgrades I would be given a choice to pick. There might be nothing too groundbreaking.

  Anyway… I moved on to the smaller storerooms containing more precise curses. I had been worried about dealing with them since Heltna had told me that they had a small amount of protection, but as it turns out, being able to draw curses toward me was an incredible boon since everything was curse-based in this place.

  The cursed magic circles and whatnot were disarmed and gobbled easily, allowing me to stuff my face with curses strongly aligned with various elements. I could feel the heat radiating from the flame-aligned curses, the cold from the frost-aligned curses, and even the breezes from the wind-aligned curses…

  Nothing was spared.

  It seemed that I truly did not have a limit, as even now, I felt insatiable. I could tell that the lesser curses were no longer as nourishing as they once were. They are only beneficial in great amounts, and even the greater curses lost some of their splendour.

  Things were not so easy, it seemed. The only curses that seemed to truly retain their value regardless of their ‘quality’ were the more unique ones. It seemed like the effects of a curse were taken into account alongside their overall quality.

  So, the more original, the more nourishing.

  But the vault containing the Living Curse, who had caused the death of Heltna’s mom, remained as attractive as it was before to me–Rather, the Living Curse itself remained just as tantalising to my imaginary taste buds.

  Breaking into the vault area was more arduous, but I still had plenty of time to spend, so I slowly peeled down the curses stacked around the place, and I devoured the steel that was supposedly incredibly effective at restraining curses of all kinds.

  Unfortunate for you, but I was a Living Curse who treated all manner of iron as a snack.

  Mmh… Seemed like her father had lied, the vault only contains the Living Curse… The rest that I was sensing were actually the curses that were working to ensure that it wouldn’t be able to leave, even if it left its… Seal, I guess?

  To me, it looked like a mundane bottle, just like those I had seen before, containing nought but weak maledictions and lesser jinxes.

  The instant I took a step toward the bottle, everything around me turned dark and red. I recognised the sensation, it was just like when I was transported to a nightmare to deal the final blow to an unsuspecting victim…

  This was no nightmare, however.

  “Ah… At long last, someone is here!”

  “Welcome, my fellow! I am yet to bear an official name, but the human has referred to me as Anathema due to the way I use my powers. I don’t know why we suddenly got dragged into some sort of cursed realm, but I appreciate being able to speak!”

  In front of me, there was what looked like a shadow given form. Said form was that of a short, young girl wearing a puffy dress, but everything was uniformly dark like ink. The only things that cut into this blackness were dark red eyes that popped out randomly all over… Anathema’s body.

  I looked down at my own body. I looked very much the same, the only difference was that I was taller and… Didn’t get to have shadow clothes for some reason? My hair was long and floated about randomly. My body was rather lithe and petite as well, much different from my human self.

  I was shorter as well, it seemed, even if not by much. Unlike the one in front of me, though, my purple eyes were present and glowing right where they should be.

  Is this… The ‘Pure Curse Form’ I theorised existed after being introduced to the ‘Pure Spirit Form’?

  I am… So damned hot like this! Holy moly!

  Hold on. I need to focus… The Living Curse, Anathema, seemed to be under the impression that I was here on friendly terms.

  “I was not expecting to be having a discussion today”

  I simply responded, but the little curse simply started speaking. Clearly in dire need of social interaction.

  “How did you grow so big? I was only able to kill a few people before that handsome guy trapped me in this bottle!”

  “You only killed a few?”

  I was fairly certain that I had heard that she had used some absolutely insane abilities and techniques. So why was she speaking like she was a young Living Curse who had barely gotten to do things before being sealed?

  Are Living Curses supposed to be powerful from the get-go? Did I get cheated or something?

  “Yup! I totally could have slaughtered everyone. I got very lucky with the handsome man, but he was too experienced and beat me up pretty badly… My ability is to cast curses that take on the form of a weakness of the target, hence why he called me ‘Anathema’. I suppose you could tell that’s the name of my personal curse”

  “I started with that knight lady, I was just a newborn when she stumbled upon me, a little girl… The form the weakness, my curse, and I, as an extension, took was annoying as hell! I was able to trick the people who tried to diagnose me into thinking that she would die at a specific age, but really, the curse was that she would die at the moment she reached the height of her happiness and fulfilment”

  “I was stuck with her for so damned long, it was obscene! And the moment I finally took care of her, I just had to end up stuck with an expert curse slinger! Man, I was with your wife the entire time, do I not have a spot in your little heart or something?”

  “I was only able to rack up some more kills because his ‘Anathema’ was to have to face himself, you see? I got to be so strong for a little while… Alas, he was more experienced with his own abilities than I and kicked my ass… Here I am now”

  “Come on! Break this damned bottle, and together, we’ll curse the very gods! We are a superior existence! We should be worshipped, don’t you agree?”

  I walked–Floated, actually–Closer to Anathema.

  “I must tell you something first. It is of dire importance”

  “...What is it? Do you really need to whisper it in my ear?”

  Anathema was completely relaxed and not on her guard at all as I grabbed her shoulder and pulled her closer.

  “Anathema. You’re so cute I could just gobble you up…”

  “...Pardon…?”

  She barely even had time to react as her inky form began to just sink into mine. I only heard her muffled and distant voice before silence.

  When I came back to my senses inside the vault, the bottle was still intact, but no curses were to be found within.

  I didn’t devour her completely in one go… It might take a while to fully digest this one.