Chương 311: Well-Cooked Curses

Mmh… Remember Me? - Those bearing this curse will emit an aura of gloom, promoting negative emotions within the target and those around them. All of which are redirected to you, regardless of whether the negative emotions had anything to do with you or not. Those affected can also become hosts of nightmares Forever Bonded Together - Those bearing this insidious, quiet curse will have their souls and alike bond to you.

Not only will all of their negative emotions be stored by the curse and given to you upon their demise or the destruction of the curse, but additionally, if they die while accursed, their souls will also belong to you regardless of how and where they met their end. Lesser Curse Of Endurance Loss - Reduces target's endurance by a set amount. The curse remains upon the target for forty-eight hours.

This curse can not be recast on the same target if the target is still bearing the curse Curse Of Fragility - Reduces target's durability for thirty minutes, can be reapplied to refresh effect, effect persists after being struck. The curses will affect the target and all of their items Minor Curse Of Berserk - At the sight of a bleeding ally, the target will enter a short stage of uncontrollable rage and try to attack their bleeding ally. The rage only lasts for a few seconds.

The curse can only be cast on a target every hour Ailment Curse Of Hunger - Inflicts target with hunger, empties their stomach, and drains a significant amount of nutrients from the body on impact Minor Curse Of Feral Rage - Causes the target's mind to regress to a feral state for a certain duration of time, depending on their willpower.

A good hit on the head will make them recover Great Hide-Behind Curse - This curse conceals the presence of one other curse for one month I must admit, I have run into a bit of a bog when it comes to cooking curses… I have been working to the best of my abilities to try and upgrade the curses that I already owned, trying to pierce the mystery of how exactly curses could be enhanced.

For the most part, it felt a lot like it was random, and since every recipe I tried would go straight into the cookbook, it meant that it couldn't be tried again, as it would just yield the exact same result–Unless I had really botched the recipe, but I was a real virtuoso of the kitchen… Not that I meant to brag, or anything. It just isn't every day that you run into a beautiful, strong woman like myself with so many skills… …

Anyway, I did manage to enhance quite a lot of my curses, and I also managed to learn a nifty trick that paired especially well with the 'Ailment Curse Of Hunger'. The best result of my endeavour so far was the 'Hide-Behind Curse', which had grown into a great curse. Perhaps my expectations had been slightly skewed when it came to enhancing these things. The version of curses without any adjective in front of their names was actually considered the standard variant of a curse.

Meaning that they were a typical curse a curse slinger would be capable of casting, so anything beyond this was actually quite impressive, especially when curse slinging was a rather rare domain of expertise. You were either geniuses at it like the Bombidour family, or you were filthy no-names doomed to die in obscurity and only ever work for random customers who wanted to cast petty curses for petty reasons. All in all, I was actually in a pretty good spot as a curse slinger.

However, I am a bit greedy, and I don't just want to stay in a good spot. I want to reach the best spot eventually. I wanted to crack the code for this reason, but I wasn't opposed to just randomly cooking my way there either. I wonder just how many innate curses I can get…

'Remember Me?' and 'Forever Bonded Together' weren't normal curses by any means. I acquired them through means other than via the Kitchen of my Mindscape, and they were both powerful curses. The former because it truly weaponised my ability to infest people with nightmares, and the latter because it was simply a very useful tool. I had cast it on a lot of people, including people whom I knew I wouldn't be able to easily defeat, if I could even defeat them at all.

When their time came, I would be able to reap their souls free of charge, and with all the progress I made with the Mindscape equipment, I knew how valuable strong souls were. I could barely wait for some of the people I had cursed with it to die so that I could get to work on their souls… Also, since I mentioned nightmares, it reminded me that there was still that mini nightmare crisis going on that was totally out of my control.

I had been hoping to gain more forms from the final trials that would ensue, but a drawback of having a pre-final trial that actually killed people was that pretty much everyone saw their run end there instead of at my hands, which prevented me from getting to see what nifty powers or looks I could get. Stolen novel; please report.

This prompted me to see if there was anything that I could do about it inside of the Dreamscape, but whilst looking around at the handful of people currently fighting for their lives against my beautiful creations, I discovered something rather worrying.

"... The furnace clown will try to turn up the heat inside the security office, but it is slow and sluggish beyond belief. When it gets inside of a room where it can increase the heat, wait for it to start, and then go and spray it with the extinguisher–It is the red thing mounted on the wall to your right…"

"... By doing so when it has already started, you'll buy yourself more time as it will need several more minutes to recover, and with how slow it is, you won't have to worry about him again for a little while, giving you room to deal with the other two…" Is that fucking Gilepre's voice? But I have him right there! Soul, mind, body, and whatever the hell there is about a person! What is this?!

Somehow, the fucker managed to become a part of the pre-final trial, acting as a helper using his experience with all of my gorgeous automatons and establishments to feed intel to people that they normally would have needed to figure out or find for themselves. This is clearly a breach of my artistic vision. I'll need to rein this in… This must be why there were a few people who did get to the final trial. Alas, they were just regular folks by themselves, so I hadn't gotten any nifty forms to deal with them.

I need to limit how much this… Remnant of Gilepre can intervene, and I should make him give bad intel as well. This is still my world, a little anomaly can not just be allowed to run rampant. I suppose I'll tie him into the little narratives I have created as well. Apart from this… Ah, yes, I wanted to see how I could get more people to actually reach the final trial. Should I create some sort of chance for people to skip the pre-final trial? Or maybe… As I had just said, this was my world.

If I wanted, I could just handpick someone and make them move over to the final trial directly if I wanted. I need to pick someone with some skills, though. A regular person will just have me manifest as my regular human self without anything special… Well, I suppose having a lot of people at once also usually yields something special. Can I put people on hold? Wait, I should just create a super-easy pre-final trial that is exceedingly long, but where dying is impossible.

I'll just move people there with my will, and boom! I can send a big batch all at once whenever I want. Of course, I need to abide by some limitations. A person who has been moved forcefully to another pre-final trial, or to the final trial, can not be moved back, or even moved again, for that matter. It was a drawback I was fine with.

Although the issue of those screens and such popping up everywhere and infecting people with my nightmares was a widespread issue, at this point, people knew not to get close to these anomalous apparitions.

So the victims were mostly the young and elderly who didn't know any better, the curious idiots who never heard what happened to the cat, and people who were unfortunate enough to either accidentally stumble upon one that was already playing on its own or people who would have one of such oddities appear inside of their homes directly. Leou kept me updated on such matters, and it was seemingly possible for these things to appear anywhere.

They just popped into existence without regard for barriers or protective arrays. I even heard that one manifested inside a king's castle. Alas, it didn't result in me getting a royal prey. Whether it was because the royals of that castle avoided being cursed with nightmares, or simply because they had someone at hand capable of removing it, I had no idea, but the result was the same for me anyway. Well, I don't have enough people right now, so I'll wait a while longer before trying to force a final trial.

I was probably going to be going on a new mission soon–Apparently, Ergonip decided to push things back after learning that Leou and I were a thing now. This skeleton, who had probably killed more people than the days he had been around in this world, was truly oddly caring. I suppose he settled down with age, especially when some of the stories he would tell of his youth were about how he turned entire cities into undead nests because some guy stepped on his shoe and was a jerk about it.

It gave me time to go through my routine a few more times. The order I did things in wasn't set in stone, but I would try to do a little bit of everything every day. The cooldown for cooking curses was still as big as ever, so that was often skipped, but I would spend some time in the Mindscape, experimenting with souls, checking my collection of creations, and making cute clothes for everyone.

Nara often talked about how beautiful beaches were–I had never seen any of those myself, but my unseen little sister seemed to hold such places in high regard. As such, under her guidance, I had taken to trying to create what she called 'swimsuits'. I struggled to fathom why anyone would wear such things when going into an untamed body of water, but she assured me that some beaches were actually completely safe–I found that concept to be dubious.

I only knew that any deep body of water that wasn't one-hundred per cent transparent was definitely home to creatures that even devils from Hell would rather not stare in the eyes. Even then, I had also heard about the invisible aquatic horrors that were able to hide in plain sight even in water that seemed completely safe. If there was one thing that truly gave me chills, it was the idea of finding myself standing in water without even any land in sight.

Of course, I was confident with some of my forms that I could stand up for myself even in such a dire environment, but I did not like it one bit. I only liked it in my nightmares. I am the boss there, after all. Anyway… As much as the idea of dipping my toes in wild water was a more than odd idea to me, I had to admit that swimsuits were actually quite a nice idea. They ranged from cute to alluring, and I suppose the idea of spending time under a warm sun was quite nice as well.

Maybe I should try to create a beach inside the Mindscape instead of finding a real one. It would probably be safer… Also, what kind of swimsuit should I wear if I ever do get to set foot on a beach? It definitely has to show my abdominals…