Editing CubexCursedxCurious:Volume4 Chapter4 (section)

===Part 6===

&mdash;She had killed her uncle.

In context of the overall picture, this was nothing unusual. Due to economic poverty, her whole family had committed suicide. Left as the sole survivor purely by chance, she had been adopted by the relative she hated. That uncle was not worthy of being called human. For many years, a good many years, she suffered from his peculiar abuse.

No one stood on her side. She had no other relatives in the entire world.

In terms of results, having survived suicide, she was nothing more than a corpse anyway.

With neither the courage to resist nor the courage to strike back, she was just a corpse doing nothing but enduring.

When did she start to resurrect? When was the decisive turning point?

Even she had no idea herself.

Was it the moment when she was returning home from middle school and suddenly stopped in front of an antique shop?

That object displayed in the window, its name is so similar to mine&mdash;Was it the moment when this trivial remark crossed her mind?

Was it the moment when she went into the shop, intrigued, and listened to the old shopkeeper's stupid story about its origins?

Was it the moment when she was back in her room, staring at the knife she had bought, suddenly feeling a surge of courage to resist the oppressor? Was it the moment when she faced her uncle who was brandishing the kitchen knife as usual, accompanied by the liberating feeling she experienced as she swung her concealed knife?

If she still had not resurrected by the time she finished the act, there was only one possible turning point remaining.

That was after spending several years confined in white walls.

When she was mercilessly released from those walls, arriving in this lonely world, the moment of their encounter.

The moment when he extended his helping hand to her&mdash;



"Hmm..."

Upon waking up, the first thing to strike her was the smell of tatami, causing Kururi slight confusion, but immediately, she remembered she was a prisoner.

The light on the other side of the sliding door indicated that the sun was already high up in the sky. The house was quiet without any noise at all. Recalling the commotion last night, Kururi concluded that the home was probably deserted right now.

Indeed, last night. The noisy bustling of dinner and tea after the meal could all be heard from this prison of a room. It was a mixture of several people's voices. Meaningless chatter. Disorganized conversations.

Very family-like, these voices she had never heard before were causing a stinging pain somewhere deep in her heart&mdash;

Kururi stopped thinking at this point. Family. Relatives. For her, the only remaining family she had was over there.

"Patriarch..."

The first image she recalled was that of the man waiting for her at the juvenile penitentiary's exit. The man who had provided a new place to live for her who had no one to depend on.

To be honest&mdash;She became infatuated with him.

His wife... Kururi did not hate the woman who was like a wife to him. Although she was indeed eccentric, she had welcomed Kururi with gentle eyes. Worlds apart from the real mother who had thrown Kururi off a cliff... She was a mother.

Kururi decided she must go see them. Something&mdash;There was a vague sense of unease and nausea occupying her mind, but she deliberately ignored it. She had to see them. She only had to see them.

Because she was part of the Family. She was his family.

There was only one requirement to join the Bivorio Family: deep love for the transcenders known as Wathes.

Naturally, Kururi loved deeply. Whether him or the object that had given her courage and saved her from everything. Without that, she would have died long ago. She would still be a walking corpse. Hence, Kururi had offered her resurrected self without hesitation.

The Patriarch had helped her steal back the object that had been confiscated as evidence. This was Kururi's first opportunity to experience its curse because she had been arrested as soon as she committed the murder. Nevertheless, she did not feel any revulsion or contempt. As long as she regarded it as the reward she offered in exchange for granting her courage, it was nothing&mdash;Hence she has continued to savor the curse even now.

"Leaving a captive alone and running off happily to the sports festival, aren't they underestimating me too much? How incompetent."

The cross-shaped pendant that was merely a concealed knife had fortuitously pulled the wool over her enemies' eyes.

While frowning from the pain in her hands that were tied behind her back, Kururi moved her lower body and slightly raised her lower back. After taking a deep breath&mdash;in other words, preparing herself to endure pain&mdash;

"«Returning Kukri of Childbirth»...!"

Instantly, a sense of dissonance penetrated her body. To experience the ejection of a foreign object from one's body, that must be quite a rare sensation? Slowly dragged out, accompanied by a grating sound, pangs of convulsions, a symphony played by her own muscles, the blade emerged from the back of her thigh. Clenching her teeth, she endured the pain of her body being sliced open and the discomfort as though her brain had been thrown into a blender.

"Gah... Ah... Huff... Guh... Ahhh!"

Then&mdash;Freeing itself from the flesh where it was buried, the blade stabbed into the tatami with a thud. She did not bleed a single drop of blood. Confirming the "く"-shaped and bent design of the knife, Kururi exhaled and relaxed from the disappearance of the pain, with tension leaving her face.

The «Returning Kukri of Childbirth». She remembered the name that the old shopkeeper had told her many years ago along with the story.

Once upon a time, there was a mother whose newborn baby was mercilessly killed by a feudal lord. This was the knife the mother used for her revenge. In a cautious process to get close to the feudal lord, the mother spent a long period of time to become his mistress. Hiding the knife within her own body, she seduced the feudal lord and assassinated him in bed. But after suffering the lord's counterattack, the mother also died with regret...

Simply stated, hidden in the mother's body for the sake of approaching the feudal lord, the knife was the crystallization of her vengeance and a substitute for the baby that was taken away from her. Hence, in a certain sense, it was only natural that the knife would slip into the user's body as part of its curse.

Whether slipping into the body or when taken out of the body that served as its sheath, only pain was produced without leaving any wounds behind. But Kururi understood that the knife would gradually bury itself deeper into the body. Very likely, she would die once it reached her heart. Even so, it did not matter. Through this knife, she had obtained the courage to kill her uncle, thereby liberating herself from the life of a walking corpse.

"In order to strengthen the curse, I guess I really have to kill more people? I won't curse this curse..."

Muttering to herself, Kururi began to rub the electrical binding her wrists against the knife's blade.

Suddenly, her gaze landed on the plate that had been placed by her side. Covered with plastic wrap, it was a plate of rice balls. Recalling she ended up eating nothing last night&mdash;as well as the strange girl who had wanted to feed her hand to mouth, Kururi could not help but click her tongue.

Inside the quiet room, even louder than her tongue-clicking, were the noises made by her stomach.