Cursed System-Chapter 37: Gaining Knowledge

The following years of my childhood were not as easygoing as the time when I was a baby.

I was finally allowed to ask questions—endless questions—and through them I slowly filled the gaps in my vocabulary and corrected my broken grammar.

Unknown to me at the time, this was part of a quiet plan my parents, John and Elina, had agreed upon. As they felt they were getting closer to their goal, they believed this was the best time for me to begin learning about my family and the world around us.

They were careful, though. They couldn’t rush my young mind or force any kind of ideology on me, so they chose to move slowly, introducing only things they thought might interest me. They started with where we lived. That was how I learned the name of my village—Wortham.

It was one of the many villages under the jurisdiction of a minor noble, who in turn answered to a distant kingdom.

Even though I could tell they wanted to say more, they always held back. For safety reasons, they said.

Because of this, I realized early on that my parents never gave clear explanations about neighboring villages or even cities.

The only thing they emphasized was caution. They warned me to be wary of villagers and never speak to anyone we didn’t know—especially those who seemed like "weirdos."

Most of all, I wasn’t allowed to go outside. Everything I knew about the world beyond the village came from John, who often traveled outside Worthom. Even then, he rarely talked about what he saw, and I didn’t push him much. He didn’t seem to care about anything beyond his work, and I learned not to pry.

From my parents’ perspective, the villagers were bad people, and the so-called king was more like a mythical figure, shrouded in mystery and distance.

The only person they trusted and could be said to be the only one they placed their faith and worries in—was the village head. They spoke of him as someone who was fair and just. Even as a minor noble, he paid taxes like everyone else.

On top of that, he collected intricate works of art and displayed them during the Wortham Festival, where he appeared as the guest of honor.

There were many things my parents never told me. They never mentioned the rare land disputes, the wars, the robberies, or the killings that supposedly occurred. Instead, they told me vague childish tales that I had long dismissed as nonsense.

I was deeply dissatisfied with how little I knew. I wanted to understand everything about my surroundings. I wanted to know if there were organizations out there—places or groups meant for beings like me.

But no matter how much I asked, my parents seemed ignorant of the things I expected them to know. I didn’t expect much from them, but I also hadn’t expected it to be so bad that they barely knew how to differentiate left from right within the village itself.

As I grew older, another realization shattered one of my long-held assumptions. Every member of my family was human—completely normal. They had no abilities like mine.

Whatever race I had imagined us to be, that hypothesis slowly fell apart.

I came to understand that I had been expecting too much from them, especially when it came to matters they were unlikely to have any knowledge of. Even if they did knew something, I guessed they would either be dead by now due to how grave it was or would have taken the secret to their graves out of fear.

Still, I wanted to learn more—anything about history, anything that could give me an edge in understanding this new reality I found myself in.

Unfortunately, it became clearer that they knew little and cared even less. To make matters worse, there were questions I wasn’t supposed to voice, thoughts I wasn’t allowed to let escape my mind. And asking the system was pointless—it would simply ignore me.

At least my family tree was simple enough to understand. John and Elina married at the ages of thirty and twenty-eight. By village standards, they were already considered late.

John was his mother’s only child, while his father had been the seventh child of his own seventh wife.

After his parents’ deaths, John inherited a small portion of land, which he and Elina later used as a farming spot after they got married.

She was considered the most beautiful woman among her peers. She became pregnant soon after their marriage and gave birth to their first son, who mysteriously passed away. Two years later, she gave birth to Ada. A year after that came Oge. Finally, seven years later, I was born.

That meant Elina and John were now forty and forty-two years old. Ada was nine, Oge was eight, and I was two years and a few months old.

Even then, some of that information might have been wrong. They often claimed old age had made them forget certain details. Most of what I learned came from constant pestering, and my questions were usually limited to things like.

"What’s this?" and "Why is that?"

Spending more time with my family—and overhearing their hushed conversations—I eventually discovered something unsettling. I was called a Cursed child. Not just by a few people, but by the entire village and the society we currently lived in. 𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺

That was the reason I had been attacked when I was only nine months old.

From their explanations, I learned that the village lived in an age where cursed children were occasionally born, regardless of a family’s background or status.

They were born like normal children, but their defining traits were unmistakable: two to three pairs of eyes and an ouroboros-shaped demon mark hidden somewhere within their bodies.

When I first learned this, I was stunned. For several seconds, I had no reaction at all. No one knew what I was thinking—perhaps not even me.

No matter how much I tried to make sense of my situation, it remained difficult to understand. Still, John and Elina had clearly decided they could no longer delay. And so, on that particular morning...

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