Chapter 302

Chapter 302: Chapter 302

The Curse of Ankhseram wasn’t entirely unpredictable.

As Zeref had explained, the curse was more likely to erupt when its bearer recognized the value and beauty of life.

Conversely, when someone became indifferent to the lives around them, the curse tended to remain dormant.

Marshall had initially suspected Zeref was talking nonsense, mainly because the explanation sounded so fundamentally absurd.

Could a person’s attitude toward life really change that easily?

Marshall certainly didn’t think so.

His own views on the subject had remained remarkably consistent throughout his life.

He didn’t want to die, he considered the life he’d lived so far to be a good one, and he naturally cherished the people and living things he cared about.

Life was beautiful, but it was also ordinary.

The lives of his friends and family were incomparably precious to him, while the lives of enemies who wanted to harm them meant practically nothing.

That distinction had always been clear in his mind.

If Zeref’s explanation were entirely correct, wouldn’t Marshall’s curse be erupting almost constantly simply because he valued being alive?

And wouldn’t it remain completely dormant whenever he stood among enemies whose lives he didn’t particularly care about?

Yet that wasn’t what happened.

Marshall’s curse erupted at irregular intervals, apparently without caring whether there were people nearby.

Sometimes it activated when he was completely alone, while on other occasions it remained quiet even when he was surrounded by living creatures.

He’d already attempted to trigger it deliberately.

On one occasion, he went into a forest and spent a considerable amount of time admiring the natural scenery.

He watched the trees swaying in the breeze, listened to the wildlife, and repeatedly reflected on how beautiful and wonderful life truly was.

According to Zeref’s theory, that should have been an excellent opportunity for the curse to activate.

Instead, absolutely nothing happened.

Marshall waited and waited, trying his best to appreciate every living thing around him, but the curse stubbornly refused to respond.

Then, just as he grew irritated by the mosquitoes buzzing around his head and decided he wanted to kill the annoying little pests, the curse suddenly erupted.

That made no damn sense.

If the Curse of Ankhseram possessed some kind of trigger, Marshall couldn’t figure out where the switch was, much less how he was supposed to operate it.

At least, that had been the case until he met Mavis.

During their first encounter, Marshall had looked at the future First Master of Fairy Tail and thought that she was an incredibly adorable little girl.

Almost immediately afterward, his curse activated.

He hadn’t paid much attention to that particular detail at the time, but the incident had left him with a faint suspicion.

During their subsequent interactions, Marshall deliberately changed the way he thought about Mavis.

Instead of dwelling on how adorable she was or wishing he could keep the little troublemaker around, he began treating her mentally as an overly familiar younger relative.

You know the type.

A little cousin who showed up at your house every day, demanded your attention, asked endless questions, and refused to leave you alone when you were trying to work.

Mavis certainly fit that description.

And strangely enough, after Marshall adopted that attitude, the curse stopped erupting during their encounters.

That observation led him toward a rather unconventional hypothesis.

’What if Zeref misunderstood the actual trigger?’

’What if the curse doesn’t activate because you cherish life, but because you want to possess or take something for yourself?’

The more Marshall considered that possibility, the more sense his previous experiences began to make.

When he admired the forest and reflected on the beauty of nature, he genuinely appreciated the living things around him.

However, he didn’t particularly want to own the forest or claim everything within it as his personal property.

The curse remained dormant.

When he encountered those irritating mosquitoes, on the other hand, he’d wanted to take their lives.

Here he was, a human being struggling with questions of life, death, and immortality, while those little bloodsuckers were happily going about their business without a care in the world.

’Oh, you think you can just fly around and bother me? Give me those lives of yours!’

The curse erupted.

Then there was Mavis.

During their first meeting, Marshall had found the little girl so charming that he’d briefly wished he could keep her around as part of his own family, someone he could fuss over whenever he wanted.

The curse erupted.

But after spending several days with her, Marshall had started viewing her as the kind of troublesome younger relative who never stopped pestering him.

’Good grief. Why are other people’s kids always so exhausting?’

The curse stayed quiet.

Seen from that perspective, a great many seemingly random outbreaks suddenly became much easier to explain.

Marshall found himself considering an even more radical possibility.

’What if the Curse of Ankhseram isn’t contradictory at all?’

’What if it’s actually responding to the most natural desires of the human heart?’

People were drawn to beautiful and desirable things.

Whenever they encountered something they liked, it was only natural that they might eventually want to keep it, obtain it, or make it their own.

Perhaps the curse simply responded to that desire.

Whenever its bearer experienced a sufficiently strong urge to possess something, the curse would activate and forcibly seize the lives within its reach.

You wanted something?

Fine. The curse would help you take it.

Viewed that way, there was nothing particularly contradictory about its underlying mechanism.

It was simply an extraordinarily sensitive and catastrophically excessive response to an ordinary human desire.

Once that idea took root in Marshall’s mind, he couldn’t stop thinking about it.

He immediately began conducting a new series of experiments, deliberately approaching the curse from an entirely different angle.

Rather than concentrating on how much he valued life, he began observing whether specific desires could provoke a reaction.

When he saw a beautiful little bird perched on a branch, he thought about how nice it would be to keep such a lovely creature as a pet.

The curse erupted.

When he watched a magnificent sunset spreading across the horizon, he simply admired the colors and appreciated the beauty of the scenery.

The curse remained dormant.

When the mischievous First Master came running over to bother him again, Marshall mentally classified her as an annoying little relative and resolved not to indulge her demands too much.

The curse remained dormant.

Then, one afternoon, he happened to notice 2B bending over while cleaning the house.

The sight briefly stirred his appreciation for his newly completed mechanical maid.

The curse erupted.

Marshall stared at the aftermath of that final experiment, stunned.

’Holy shit.’

’I think I’ve actually figured it out!’

All those strange, seemingly random outbreaks suddenly made sense.

No wonder the curse had continued activating from time to time even when he’d been living on his isolated artificial island.

He hadn’t truly been alone there.

Virgo and his little Apostles had still been living alongside him, and Marshall had always been deeply attached to his companions.

His desires hadn’t disappeared simply because he’d removed himself from ordinary human society.

And why had the curse become noticeably more stable since he traveled into the past?

Because he’d been miserable!

He’d spent his first days on Tenrou Island feeling lonely, frustrated, and thoroughly depressed about having nobody to look after him.

Between missing his friends, worrying about Acnologia, and struggling to manage his own household, he’d hardly been in the mood to appreciate or claim anything.

His life had become so depressing that even the Curse of Ankhseram apparently had fewer opportunities to act up.

What an absolutely ridiculous discovery.

Unfortunately, the implications of his hypothesis weren’t remotely funny.

If Marshall was correct, and the Curse of Ankhseram activated whenever its bearer experienced a subjective desire to possess or seize something, then he was in considerably more trouble than he’d originally imagined.

It meant his earlier concerns had been entirely justified.

The moment he returned to Fairy Tail and reunited with the girls he cared about, the curse would probably begin erupting constantly.

Marshall had never pretended to be free of possessiveness when it came to the girls he loved.

He wanted them close to him, wanted to protect them, and had no particular intention of denying his desire to keep them in his life.

Under normal circumstances, those feelings would have been perfectly understandable.

But if his theory about the curse was correct, even the ordinary wish to hold someone close could become deadly.

Whenever he spent time with the girls he loved, the likelihood of triggering the curse might approach one hundred percent.

The realization made Marshall feel physically ill.

He took back everything he’d previously said about the Curse of Ankhseram not being particularly malicious.

This thing was absolutely vicious!

No wonder Zeref had described it as a curse that punished people for loving life.

The more someone loved and cherished another person, the more likely they were to want that person close to them.

And the stronger that desire became, the more readily the curse would activate.

Conversely, someone who felt completely indifferent toward everyone around them would have little reason to experience such possessive feelings.

The actual trigger might have nothing to do with a person’s philosophical attitude toward the value of life.

It could be something much more fundamental.

Desire itself.

Marshall couldn’t help feeling a chill as he considered how thoroughly malicious that mechanism would be.

How was anyone supposed to defend against something like that?

The Curse of Ankhseram really could drive a person to abandon their humanity.

After all, human beings couldn’t exist without desires.

Wanting things was part of what made people human, whether that desire involved food, companionship, safety, affection, achievement, or any of the countless other things people pursued throughout their lives.

People wanted things, so they reached out and tried to obtain them.

A person who genuinely wanted absolutely nothing would no longer resemble an ordinary human being.

Such an existence would be closer to... A god.

That thought prompted several new suspicions about the origins of the curse itself, although Marshall quickly set them aside.

Speculating about Ankhseram’s intentions might be interesting, but it wasn’t going to solve his immediate problem.

What he urgently needed was a method of controlling the curse.

If he allowed it to continue operating freely, he might never be able to return to an ordinary life with the girls he cared about.

The longer he remained near them, the greater the chances of an outbreak, until even something as simple as embracing someone could become an unacceptable risk.

Marshall absolutely refused to accept such a hopeless future.

He had studied so many different forms of Magic, developed countless spells, and accumulated an enormous amount of magical knowledge.

What was the point of all that effort if he couldn’t use it to solve the one problem threatening everything he valued?

Now that he had a plausible explanation for the curse’s activation mechanism, he could finally begin investigating ways to counteract it.

After careful consideration, Marshall identified three possible directions for his research.

The first was controlling his own desires.

This was the most direct approach.

If his hypothesis was correct, he could prevent outbreaks by maintaining a sufficiently calm state of mind and avoiding possessive thoughts toward the things around him.

As long as the curse’s accumulated vitality remained sufficient, it should theoretically remain dormant whenever he experienced no desire strong enough to trigger it.

Unfortunately, this method was also the least appealing.

Marshall knew himself far too well to believe he could permanently suppress every desire that entered his mind.

He wasn’t some enlightened sage who had transcended worldly attachments, and he had absolutely no intention of becoming one.

Even if disciplined mental training reduced the frequency of outbreaks, relying on perfect self-control for the rest of his life was hardly a practical solution.

The second possibility was restricting the curse itself.

If Marshall now understood the circumstances under which it activated, perhaps he could construct magical restrictions designed specifically to interfere with that process.

He might be able to delay an outbreak, redirect its effects, or seal the curse’s activation mechanism entirely.

In theory, this approach was perfectly reasonable.

Magic was capable of manipulating extraordinarily complicated phenomena, and Marshall already possessed considerable experience with seals, magical formulas, and conceptual abilities.

The difficulty was finding somewhere to begin.

Although he had identified a possible trigger, he still didn’t fully understand how the curse converted desire into the extraction of Life Points.

Without knowing where that process originated or how its internal mechanisms were connected, attempting to seal it would amount to blindly interfering with something he barely understood.

He needed more information before he could make meaningful progress.

The third approach was to make the people around him immune to the curse.

This possibility was particularly interesting because Marshall already knew that his Apostles could survive exposure to the Curse of Ankhseram.

If he could understand why they were immune, perhaps he could reproduce that protection in ordinary humans.

That wouldn’t necessarily give him control over the curse, but it could greatly reduce the danger it posed to the people he cared about.

Naturally, such a breakthrough would be extremely difficult.

The Apostles were artificial life-forms whose underlying existence differed significantly from that of ordinary humans.

Simply transferring their immunity to someone else wasn’t a matter of copying a defensive spell.

Still, Marshall suspected that Zera might offer a useful starting point.

Something about her strange existence gave him the impression that she might be immune to his curse as well.

Her Life Point was sustained through Mavis’s Magic, while the body Marshall had constructed for her existed as a separate magical manifestation.

That arrangement bore certain similarities to his Apostles, whose unusual life structures protected them from the curse’s lethal effects.

It was possible that Zera possessed the same protection.

However, Marshall had no intention of testing that theory carelessly.

What if he was wrong?

If he deliberately exposed Zera to the curse and ended up draining her remaining Life Point, he might kill the poor girl all over again.

Considering that she had already died once and only continued to exist through an extraordinary magical accident, there was no guarantee Marshall would be able to restore her a second time.

He wasn’t going to gamble with her existence simply to satisfy his curiosity.

For now, that avenue of research would have to remain theoretical until he could develop a safer method of testing it.

Nevertheless, even without solving the problem completely, Marshall’s discovery had already produced one encouraging result.

Ever since he began monitoring his desires and consciously avoiding the thoughts that seemed to provoke the curse, its outbreaks had become noticeably less frequent.

He could now spend much longer periods working, studying, or interacting with his unusual little neighbors without worrying quite so much about a sudden wave of death erupting from his body.

The improvement wasn’t perfect, and he certainly hadn’t gained complete control over the curse.

But it was progress.

And for someone who’d spent so long struggling against an apparently unpredictable divine punishment, even that much was worth celebrating.

Marshall couldn’t help feeling that he’d somehow transformed his secluded life on Tenrou Island into the sort of spiritual retreat where an old hermit cultivated inner peace and freed himself from worldly desires.

Apparently, the secret to suppressing the Curse of Ankhseram was to keep his heart from being stirred by anything around him.

As long as he remained completely unmoved, the curse had no reason to activate.

’So this is what my life has come to, huh?’

Marshall sighed.

’Fourteen years of training my heart to resist worldly temptation.’

And here he’d thought he was supposed to be getting stronger so he could punch Acnologia in the face.