The girl was seven years old, and she was dying from the inside out.
Zeke Morrow could see the curse wrapped around her like a snake made of smoke — black, oily tendrils that coiled through her small body, squeezing organs, poisoning blood, whispering obscenities into her developing mind. It had been placed three days ago, according to her parents, by a curse-wielder who'd wanted money and hadn't received it. A punishment curse. The kind that killed slowly, painfully, and with maximum suffering for everyone who watched.
The girl's name was Lily. She had pigtails and a stuffed rabbit and the kind of enormous brown eyes that made Zeke want to find the curse-wielder and introduce him to a very steep cliff.
"Can you help her?" Lily's mother stood in the doorway of the hospital room, gripping her husband's arm with both hands. Her face was a geography of exhaustion — three days of no sleep, constant crying, and the slow erosion of hope. "They said you're the only one who can. Please."
Zeke looked at Lily. Looked at the curse. Looked at the black marks already crawling up his own arms, visible beneath the rolled sleeves of his jacket — the accumulated evidence of every curse he'd ever eaten, tattooed into his skin like a record of other people's suffering.
**[CURSE DETECTED: Withering Hex (C-Rank)]**
**[Type: Biological Degradation — Progressive organ failure over 7-day period]**
**[Target: Lily Cho, Age 7, Non-Awakened]**
**[Cure: None (Standard)]**
**[Curse Consumption: Available]**
**[Estimated Power Gain: +3 Curse Points]**
**[Estimated Saturation Increase: +0.4%]**
**[Current Saturation: 67.2%]**
**[Post-Consumption Saturation: 67.6%]**
**[WARNING: Saturation above 50% increases risk of Curse Collective manifestation.]**
A C-rank curse. Moderate — strong enough to kill a child, weak enough that a competent curse-eater wouldn't even feel the digestion. The problem wasn't difficulty. The problem was the number: 67.6%. Every curse he ate pushed the percentage higher, and at 100%, Zeke Morrow would stop being a person and start being a problem on a civilizational scale.
But the girl was seven. And she was looking at him with those enormous brown eyes, and the stuffed rabbit was clutched to her chest, and the curse was killing her right now, not in some theoretical future.
"Yeah," Zeke said. "I can help."
He sat on the edge of Lily's hospital bed. The monitors beside her beeped their mechanical dirge — heart rate low, blood pressure falling, liver function declining. The curse was efficient. Professional, even. Whoever had cast it knew their craft.
"This might look weird," Zeke told Lily, because he'd learned that honesty was the best policy with kids. Adults wanted reassurance. Children wanted truth. "I'm going to touch your hand, and you might see some dark stuff come out of you. Don't be scared. That's the bad thing that's making you sick, and I'm going to eat it."
Lily's nose wrinkled. "You eat bad stuff?"
"Yep. It's my superpower. I eat bad stuff so other people don't have to."
"Does it taste bad?"
"Terrible. Like broccoli mixed with nightmares."
A ghost of a smile crossed her pale face. "I hate broccoli."
"Me too. Ready?"
She nodded, squeezing the rabbit tighter.
Zeke took her hand.
The curse reacted instantly — sensing his ability, recognizing the threat. The oily tendrils tightened around Lily, digging deeper, trying to anchor themselves beyond his reach. Curses were semi-sentient — not intelligent, but possessed of a survival instinct that made them fight extraction.
Zeke didn't extract. He *consumed*.
His ability activated like a drain opening beneath dark water. The curse was pulled from Lily's body — not gently, not surgically, but hungrily. His power grabbed the Withering Hex and *ate*, drawing it through their connected hands, through his skin, into the network of curse marks that covered his body.
Lily gasped. Her monitors spiked — heart rate climbing, blood pressure normalizing, color flooding back into her cheeks. The curse unwound from her organs, her blood, her bones, pulled free thread by thread.
Into Zeke.
The Withering Hex hit his system like swallowing acid. He felt it integrate — not as power, not as strength, but as damage. The curse's biological degradation effect ricocheted through his body, weakening tissue, attacking cells, doing in seconds what it had been doing to Lily over days. His regeneration — built from hundreds of consumed curses that included healing-type hexes — counteracted most of the damage, but not all. A small piece of the Withering Hex settled into his liver, adding its damage to the accumulated weight of ten thousand other curses.
The marks on his arms darkened. New lines branched from existing patterns, black veins of consumed misery spreading half an inch further toward his shoulders.
**[CURSE CONSUMED: Withering Hex (C-Rank)]**
**[Power Gained: +3 Curse Points]**
**[Total Curse Points: 14,847]**
**[Saturation: 67.6%]**
**[Physical Status: Liver damage (minor, chronic). Added to existing damage catalog.]**
**[The Curse Collective stirs.]**
Zeke released Lily's hand and leaned back, blinking away the black spots in his vision. The digestion was quick for a C-rank — the discomfort would fade in minutes. The damage would not.
Lily sat up in bed, eyes wide, color bright, pigtails bouncing. She looked at her hands, her arms, felt her face, and then threw her arms around the stuffed rabbit with the vigor of a child who'd just been returned to life.
"The bad taste is gone!" she announced.
"Yeah." Zeke smiled. It was the genuine one — the one he saved for moments that made the accumulated damage worth carrying. "The bad taste is all gone."
Lily's mother was crying. Not the exhausted, hopeless crying of the past three days — this was relief, joy, the kind of tears that rebuilt instead of eroded. She rushed to her daughter and pulled her close, holding on like she'd never let go.
"Thank you," she said over Lily's shoulder, looking at Zeke with an intensity that was almost religious. "Thank you, thank you—"
"Just doing my job." Zeke stood, tugged his sleeves down to cover the fresh marks, and headed for the door. "She'll be fully recovered within twelve hours. The curse didn't have time to cause permanent organ damage. She's going to be fine."
"What do we owe you?"
Zeke paused at the door. In the early days, he'd tried charging for curse removal — a man had to eat, and not just curses. But somewhere around the two hundredth consumed hex, when his saturation hit 40% and the marks had spread from his hands to his shoulders, he'd stopped.
It felt wrong, charging people to save their lives while slowly destroying his own. Like a firefighter billing for each floor of a burning building.
"Nothing," he said. "Tell Lily to eat her broccoli. If she can survive a Withering Hex, she can handle vegetables."
He left the hospital room, walked down the corridor, entered the stairwell, and sat down on the concrete steps.
The Curse Collective stirred inside him.
It wasn't a voice — not yet. At lower saturations, it had been background noise, a hum of accumulated dark energy. But at 67%, it was developing... personality. Fragments of awareness cobbled together from ten thousand curses, each carrying the intent of whoever had cast it. Malice, jealousy, hatred, revenge — every curse was an emotion weaponized, and Zeke carried them all.
*Let us out*, the Collective whispered. Not in words — in urges. The urge to spread the curses instead of containing them. The urge to let the Withering Hex do what it was designed to do, but on a larger scale. The urge to stop being a container and start being a weapon.
"Shut up," Zeke said to his own chest. "You're indigestion, not a personality."
The Collective subsided. For now.
His phone buzzed. A text from the Hunter Association's Curse Division — the government agency that tracked curse incidents and dispatched Zeke like a particularly grim ambulance.
**NEW CASE: A-Rank curse detected in Gangnam district. Multiple victims. Curse type: Despair Plague — infectious, spreads through physical contact. Current victim count: 34 and climbing. Requesting immediate response.**
An A-rank curse. Infectious. Thirty-four victims and growing.
Zeke looked at the message, then at his arms. The curse marks pulsed gently, anticipating the meal.
67.6% saturation. An A-rank curse would push him to at least 70%. Every percentage point above 50 made the Collective stronger, the physical damage worse, the marks harder to hide.
Thirty-four people. Infected with despair severe enough to qualify as A-rank.
Zeke stood up, pocketed his phone, and started walking.
Some math was simple. Thirty-four people alive versus Zeke Morrow a few percentage points closer to becoming a monster.
He'd eat the curse. He'd eat the next one, and the one after that. He'd keep eating until there was nothing human left or nothing cursed left — whichever came first.
The marks on his arms pulsed in the stairwell light.
The Collective whispered.
And Zeke Morrow walked toward the next meal he didn't want but would swallow anyway. That was the job. Take the poison so no one else had to.
Eat.
Keep going.
Try not to think too hard about what happens when the plate finally fills up.
