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The day my curse was discovered, my mother cried and fainted.
The Leeuwenhoek curse never manifested in more than one person at the same time. It also came in various forms; some family members inherited the same curse as the previous generation, while others were subjected to new effects.
I was the latter category, and my case was by far the most repulsive that had ever been seen. Anyone I touched with my hands would be drained of mana until they died, and as if that weren’t bad enough, they would also be cut to shreds.
As far as I was aware, tragedy had befallen the majority of people who had sustained the Leeuwenhoek curse in the past. For example, the previous bearer’s curse had been relatively light: Their body had become immune to healing magic, and the only way for them to recover from wounds and illnesses had been to drink monster blood. One case had included the curse consuming the bearer’s body every time they used mana, gradually turning them into a monster, while another cursed its bearer to suffer the same injuries they afflicted on others, including monsters.
Before those, the Leeuwenhoek curse had been kept a strict secret. No other past details had been recorded, so the exact nature of the curse was unknown. However, all of those cases had been linked to the curse placed on the land itself. For example, logs from the generation before mine showed that the curse on the land had grown stronger every time the bearer drank monster blood.
For quite some time after inheriting the curse, I wasn’t aware of this correlation. The previous bearers hadn’t known about it because they had avoided triggering the curse as much as possible. It had affected their own well-being, after all. However, that was very problematic. The more one accepted their curse and tried to coexist with it, the worse the curse on the land grew, ultimately to the detriment of everyone who lived there.
It was as if the curse had been designed to ensure its bearer’s suffering.
Still...since it was the bearers who’d been subjected to the most pain, I assumed the Leeuwenhoek family had sympathized with them and tried to protect them, even if they felt a bit uneasy about it. Their attitude only flipped when it was discovered that my curse harmed and could potentially kill others, rather than just myself.
My mother changed her tune first. When she found out that the curse had manifested in her own son out of everyone in the family, she despaired, and when she realized it could harm her as well, she began treating me as if I myself were the curse.
“A curse that drains other people’s mana until they die? That’s disgusting! No child of mine would ever have such demonic power! That monster is not my son!”
Despite distancing herself from me, her heart still couldn’t bear the shame of it, and she fell ill. She now lived a quiet life in another remote territory that was owned by the Leeuwenhoek family.
My father, who loved my mother, didn’t treat me as she had, but as soon as I obtained the bare minimum skills to act as marquess, he abandoned me to join her.
Luckily, I had my childhood friend, Kain, who I’d known since before my curse manifested. He came to serve the Leeuwenhoek family after his parents passed away. At first, he was bewildered by my curse and the changes in my environment that it had caused, but his attitude toward me remained the same.
“It’s not your fault you’re cursed,” he said, continuing to stay by my side.
If it weren’t for Kain, I might not have been able to do my job as marquess properly.
The reason I was kind to Alice at first was that she, too, was in pain because her family didn’t need her. Although her burden was completely different from mine, I saw myself in her and couldn’t ignore her plight. Since her own household didn’t treat her as family, Kain and I doted on her like a younger sister to make up for them.
However, Alice began to look at me with expectant eyes. She thought I might be a Champion of Destiny.
Foolish as I was, it was only then that I realized that Alice was seeking salvation. Something that would be impossible to grant her, as it was a guaranteed fact that I could never fulfill her expectations and would betray her hope in me eventually.
After that, I decided to distance myself from her. Alice was confused by the change in my behavior, but I knew that the longer I let her expectations grow, the more it would hurt her in the future. I thought that if being nice to her would only lead to my existence bringing her despair, then it would be better to push her away and make her hate me now, even if it also made her feel sad.
I wasn’t the champion that Alice wanted me to be. I was...a monster.
That was why I felt that having servants was a blessing. I didn’t expect them to respect me as their lord, but at the very least, they were required to treat me as a human being. Still, for a marquess, I had very few people under my employ.
So went the story of my curse, feared and scorned by my parents and relatives alike. And yet, Lucille looked at me with sadness and compassion.
“It must’ve been traumatizing to experience such a thing at the tender age of five. If only I’d been there to give you a hug...”
When I’d drained that first monster’s mana dry, everyone had been aghast at the sight of the corpse. They’d regarded me with horror and kept their distance, afraid that if they touched me, they would meet the same fate. Even when they found out that it was fine as long as I didn’t touch them with my bare hands, they still avoided me.
My own mother called me disgusting and left me, but you say you would give me a hug?
When the Leeuwenhoek family, who had sympathized with the curse’s victims thus far, found out that my curse only affected others, they suddenly ostracized me, saying, “Why does this generation’s bearer only bring disaster to those around him?” They believed that if I had been the sole martyr to suffer from the curse, everyone else could have lived in peace.
“So you aren’t in physical pain or anything, right? That’s great!”
And yet...Lucille smiled brightly and said she was glad as long as I myself wasn’t suffering. Even after she’d just had her small pale hands torn up by my curse.
Stunned, it took me quite some effort to squeeze out my next words.
“Aren’t you...scared?” I asked. “My curse hurt you.”
Even if her kindness made her sympathize with me, it was inevitable that she would fear me. Pain was a memory etched in both heart and body. It was something that people unconsciously remembered. Her mind might have pitied me, but it was only natural for her to instinctively hate me.
Lucille tilted her head. “The wounds healed, didn’t they?” she asked as if she didn’t know what was supposed to scare her.
“Even so, it doesn’t mean that the pain of receiving them never occurred. Also, if you’re straining yourself even the tiniest bit, please tell me right now. Are you sure you aren’t feeling any physical discomfort after giving me your mana?”
For some reason, she looked offended when I asked that.
“Do you really think I would be afraid of something like that?” she scoffed. “Is that how frail and cowardly I look in your eyes? How awful! If you want to scare me, you’ll have to at least get a dragon to— Wait, I’m not afraid of those. Hmm, what would be scary if it attacked me...?”
Lucille began to contemplate what would scare her, and Kain burst out laughing as if he couldn’t hold it in anymore. Meanwhile, I was desperately trying to suppress something that was welling up within me.
Is this warm feeling what people call love?