The retired agent lived in a house that looked like it had been nice fifteen years ago and had been slowly losing the argument with entropy ever since. Peeling paint on the facade, a garden that had given up on being a garden and was now just dirt with ambitions, roof tiles missing in patches like teeth knocked out in a bar fight. Hwaseong wasn't the kind of city that made the news. It was the kind of city where people went to disappear quietly into the slow erosion of suburban life.
Two Curse Division vehicles were parked outside when Zeke arrived — a response van and a containment unit. The containment unit was overkill for a B-rank, but then again, the curse was listed as UNKNOWN, and unknown meant unpredictable, and unpredictable meant bring the big truck.
Soo-Yeon's voice came through his earpiece. She'd stayed at HQ — multiple incidents to coordinate, she'd said, though Zeke suspected she was also running parallel analysis on the weaving patterns. The woman multitasked like a supercomputer with a grudge against inefficiency.
"The victim is Baek Sung-Ho, age sixty-three. Retired from the Hunter Association's Curse Suppression Unit seventeen years ago. Rank at retirement: B-plus. Currently non-active, no awakened abilities of note remaining. He was found by a neighbor at approximately 6 AM this morning, sitting in his front yard, unresponsive."
"What was his unit? What'd they do?"
"The Curse Suppression Unit was a predecessor to the current Curse Division. Disbanded in 2012 after funding cuts. Their primary function was containment and neutralization of curse incidents through conventional awakened methods — barriers, sealing, forced dissipation. Before your time."
Before his time. Before Zeke existed as a solution, curses had to be fought with blunt instruments — lock the curse in a barrier, try to break it apart with raw awakened energy, seal it into objects and dump those objects somewhere deep and dark. It worked on low-rank curses. On anything above B-rank, the failure rate was catastrophic.
"And Baek was part of that?"
"For twelve years. His service record includes forty-seven successful curse suppressions and three incidents classified as 'partial containment failures.' The details of those failures are restricted."
"Restricted how?"
"Classification level exceeds my current authorization. I've submitted a request. Response time is estimated at seventy-two hours."
Three days. Bureaucracy didn't care that people were being cursed.
Zeke ducked under the cordon tape and crossed the dead garden. Two field agents stood at the front door — both C-rank awakened, both wearing the expression of people who'd drawn the short straw for assignment. One of them, a woman with her hair pulled back so tight it looked painful, gave Zeke a briefing nod.
"He's in the living room. Hasn't moved since we arrived. Hasn't spoken except — well, you'll see."
The house smelled like dust and soju and old newspapers. A hallway cluttered with shoes that hadn't been organized since the Joseon Dynasty led to a living room that told a story without anyone needing to narrate it. Military commendations on the wall, framed but crooked. A photograph of a younger Baek Sung-Ho in a Hunter Association dress uniform, shoulders back, jaw set, the picture of institutional pride. Beside it, a gap where another frame had hung — a rectangle of paint slightly less faded than its surroundings, the ghost of something removed.
Baek sat in an armchair in the center of the room. He was a big man gone soft — broad shoulders that had slumped, large hands resting on his knees, a face built for authority that had collapsed into something grey and hollowed. His eyes were open but unfocused, staring at a point on the far wall that held nothing of interest.
The curse was wrapped around him like a second skin.
Zeke stopped in the doorway. This was wrong. Not dangerous-wrong — he'd eaten thousands of curses and knew what danger looked like. This was structurally wrong. The curse that coiled around Baek Sung-Ho was unlike anything in Zeke's catalog of consumed hexes.
Most curses were single-purpose weapons. A Withering Hex withered. A Despair Plague spread despair. They were arrows — pointed, directional, designed to do one thing. This curse was a tapestry. Multiple threads of curse energy woven together in patterns so complex they folded over themselves, creating layers within layers, a three-dimensional lattice of interlocking malice that was simultaneously attacking Baek on at least four different vectors.
Physical degradation. Psychological torment. Memory disruption. And something else — a fourth thread that Zeke couldn't identify, something that pulsed with an energy signature he'd never encountered. It was this fourth thread that made the system classify the curse as UNKNOWN.
*Oh*, the Collective said, and its voice carried an emotion Zeke had never heard from it before.
Curiosity.
*Oh, this is new, new, new. Little eater, look at this. Look at the craftsmanship. This is not anger. This is not spite. This is — artistry. Someone spent weeks building this. Months, perhaps. We have never tasted anything like it.*
"Baek." Zeke entered the room slowly. The curse reacted to his presence — the lattice tightened around its host, pulling closer, the way a parasite contracts when a predator approaches. "Agent Baek Sung-Ho. Can you hear me?"
The old man's eyes shifted. Found Zeke. Something moved behind them — recognition, maybe, or the memory of recognition. His mouth opened, and sound came out in fragments, like a radio catching pieces of a signal through static.
"...told them... told them it wouldn't hold... the family... three months..."
"Baek, I'm here to help. I'm going to remove the curse."
"...wouldn't listen... said it was contained... sealed and buried... but curses don't die..." His voice cracked. The old man's massive hands trembled on his knees. "...they don't die, they just wait..."
Soo-Yeon's voice in his ear: "He's been repeating variations of that since he was found. Fragments of what appears to be a personal recollection. The content references containment procedures consistent with the old Suppression Unit's methodology."
Zeke knelt in front of the chair. Up close, the curse was even more complex — the woven threads vibrated at different frequencies, creating a harmonic dissonance that made his teeth ache. The fourth thread, the unknown one, pulsed with a rhythm that was almost biological. Like a heartbeat.
"Look," Zeke said, keeping his voice steady, "I'm going to eat this thing. But I need to go slow. It's woven tight and I can't just rip it off — it's integrated too deep. If I pull too hard, pieces might stay behind and regrow."
Baek's eyes sharpened. For a moment — one clear, terrible moment — the old man was fully present, fully lucid, and what looked out from behind those eyes was not confusion.
It was guilt.
"You're the eater," Baek said. His voice was rough, raw, but suddenly coherent. "The one who swallows them."
"Yeah."
"Then swallow this one. And when you do —" His hand shot out, grabbed Zeke's wrist with a grip that had no business being that strong in a sixty-three-year-old body. "— when you taste it, you'll know what we did. What I did. Don't let them tell you it was the right call. It wasn't. None of it was."
Then the lucidity drained out of his face like water through a cracked bowl, and he was gone again, back to fragments and repetition and the looping wreckage of a mind under siege.
*He knows*, the Collective whispered. *He knows what's inside the curse. He knows what he did. Guilty, guilty, guilty. The curse didn't find him by accident, little eater. It came home.*
Zeke kept his grip on Baek's wrist and activated the consumption.
Eating an unknown curse was like eating in the dark. You couldn't see the food, couldn't smell it, couldn't prepare for the taste. You just opened your mouth and trusted that whatever went in wouldn't kill you. Zeke had done it four times before — three had been manageable, one had put him in the hospital for a week. The odds weren't great.
The first thread — physical degradation — came free relatively clean. B-rank, nothing exotic. Systematic organ stress, designed to weaken but not kill. Zeke consumed it and absorbed the damage the way he always did: the curse's intent echoed through his body, probing for weakness, finding the liver damage from the Withering Hex, the hip nerve damage from six months ago, the accumulated minor failures of a body that had been taking punishment for years. It added its contribution to the pile and settled in.
The second thread was psychological — a targeted assault on specific memories, amplifying trauma related to professional failures. This was a precision instrument, not the blunt force of the Despair Plague. It had been designed for Baek specifically, calibrated to his particular regrets, his specific ghosts. When Zeke consumed it, he got echoes — fragmented images of containment operations gone wrong, barriers failing, curses breaking free, and somewhere in the chaos, screaming that didn't sound like it was coming from the victims.
The third thread was memory disruption — a clever piece of work that degraded short-term memory formation while preserving and amplifying long-term traumatic memories. It trapped the victim in their worst moments while preventing them from forming new ones. Zeke ate it and tasted the engineering — someone who understood cognitive architecture had built this component.
Then the fourth thread.
The unknown.
Zeke's consumption ability engaged and immediately something pushed back. Not resistance — the curse didn't fight him the way most curses did. Instead, it opened up. Unfolded. Like a letter being unsealed, the fourth thread of the curse peeled apart and revealed what was inside.
A memory. Not Baek's. The caster's.
The vision slammed into Zeke's mind with the force of a car crash.
A house. Small, modest, in a neighborhood that looked like Hwaseong twenty years ago. Night. Rain on the windows. Inside, a family — a man, a woman, a girl of maybe eight or nine. The girl was in bed. The woman sat beside her, holding her hand. The man paced in the hallway, phone pressed to his ear, speaking in the clipped, desperate cadence of someone begging for help from people who had decided not to give it.
"You don't understand — it's getting worse. The sealing didn't work. She's getting worse every day. The curse is still—"
A voice on the other end. Calm. Official. The words were muffled, but the tone was clear: *We've determined that the curse has been adequately contained. The case is closed.*
"Contained? She can't eat. She can't sleep. She screams at night — my daughter screams until she bleeds from her throat and you're telling me it's contained?"
*The Suppression Unit's assessment is final. Resources have been allocated to higher-priority cases. We recommend consulting with a private medical—*
The man threw the phone. It hit the wall and left a dent in the plaster beside a framed photo of the girl — gap-toothed smile, school uniform, a face that had no business belonging to a dying child.
Time jumped. The same house. Weeks later — the hall was dirtier, the man thinner, shadows under his eyes that looked carved. He sat beside the girl's bed. The girl was different now. Smaller. Curled in on herself like a leaf drying in the sun. The curse was visible — a dark smear across her small body, pulsing, feeding, very much not contained.
The woman was gone. A half-empty closet in the bedroom. A note on the kitchen table that the man had read once and then burned.
The girl died on a Tuesday. The vision didn't spare Zeke the details. The sound she made at the end — not a scream, not a cry, but a small, surprised exhale, as if death had been unexpected despite everything. The father held her and the sound he made was the inverse of his daughter's — not small, not surprised, but enormous and inevitable, the sound of a person breaking along a fault line that had been forming for months.
Then the vision shifted. Years. The man was older. Different. The grief had alchemized into something harder, something with edges. He sat in a room surrounded by books on curse theory, curse construction, curse architecture. His hands moved over diagrams and formulas with the focused intensity of someone building a weapon.
Not building.
Learning to weave.
The vision faded. Zeke was back in Baek Sung-Ho's living room, on his knees, still gripping the old man's wrist. The fourth thread was consumed. The entire curse was gone. And Zeke understood.
The wielder — whoever was placing curses on infrastructure, whoever had escalated from B-rank to A-rank in a month — was the father from the vision. The man whose daughter had been cursed, whose family had been destroyed, and whose request for help had been denied by the very Curse Suppression Unit that Baek Sung-Ho had served in.
The curse hadn't just been placed on Baek randomly. It had been addressed to him specifically. A letter written in malice and grief, sealed with the memory of exactly why Baek Sung-Ho deserved to suffer.
*Justice*, the Collective said, and its voice carried something that made Zeke's stomach turn. *That was justice, little eater. A father's justice. We know the taste. We carry thousands of them. Do you think we are all monsters? Do you think every curse we hold was cast in evil? Some of us were born from love. From loss. From the desperation of people who had no other weapon.*
Zeke released Baek's wrist. The old man slumped in his chair, unconscious — the curse's removal had dropped him into a deep, immediate sleep that was either recovery or shock. His breathing was steady. He'd live.
But Zeke stayed on his knees for a long time, because the vision was still playing behind his eyes — the girl's surprised exhale, the father's breaking sound, the phone hitting the wall — and the forty-one despairs he'd consumed yesterday were harmonizing with this new grief, creating a chord of sorrow so complex and layered that for a moment he couldn't tell which pain was his and which was borrowed.
"Morrow." Soo-Yeon's voice in his ear. Careful. Measured. "Your biometrics indicate elevated distress. Report."
"The curse had a message in it."
"A message?"
"An emotional imprint. The caster put a memory inside the curse — their own memory. I saw it during consumption." He stood. His knees ached. "Soo-Yeon, this wielder — they're not testing weapons for fun. Twenty years ago, their daughter was cursed. She was dying. They asked the Suppression Unit for help. Baek's unit. And the unit refused. Called it contained. The girl died."
Silence on the line. Then: "I see."
"That's why Baek was targeted. He was part of the unit that let a child die. This wielder isn't escalating because they're developing weapons — they're escalating because they're building toward something. The infrastructure curses were practice. But the real targets are people. Specific people who were part of that unit."
"If that's accurate, then the wielder's target list would include every surviving member of the former Suppression Unit." Keys clicked on her end. "I'm pulling service records now. The unit had fourteen members at the time of disbandment. If we cross-reference with the estimated timeline of the daughter's death..."
"Soo-Yeon."
"Yes?"
"This person watched their daughter die because the system decided she wasn't worth saving. I'm not saying what they're doing is right. But if I'd been in their place..."
He didn't finish the sentence. Didn't need to.
"I see," Soo-Yeon said, and this time the two words carried more than their usual clinical weight. "I'll have the list of surviving unit members within the hour. In the meantime, your saturation—"
"Don't."
"—has increased by 0.4 percentage points. 70.5%. I am noting this for the record regardless of your preference."
Outside, the Hwaseong afternoon was grey and still. Zeke walked past the dead garden, past the containment vehicle, past the field agents who stepped aside without being asked. The neighborhood was quiet — retirees and families, people who went to bed early and woke up early and lived lives that didn't involve eating other people's suffering.
Somewhere in this country, a man who'd lost everything was weaving his next curse. And every target on his list had a name, a face, and a reason to be afraid.
But the part that made Zeke's hands clench in his jacket pockets — the part he couldn't shake, couldn't digest, couldn't consume — was that the Collective was right. The memory embedded in that curse wasn't evil. It was grief. The purest, most devastating grief he'd ever tasted. And he'd tasted ten thousand curses.
In two weeks, Zeke would learn the name of the man who'd lost his daughter. He'd learn that the girl's name was Yuna, that she loved drawing cats, and that the father had kept every drawing she'd ever made in a box under his bed.
But right now, standing in a dead garden in Hwaseong, all he knew was that someone was building a weapon out of heartbreak, and he had no idea how to stop a person whose worst moment had already happened.
