Warning - The scenes described here might not be apt for some readers. Please read at your own discretion.

"It's a hieroglyph sorta thing," Jungkook muttered, stashing his phone into his pocket. "Related to some curse."

"What curse?" Iseul's nerves had been placated by then, her shivering fingers winding down into each other.

"The Ethereal Scourge, I think..." he trailed off. "I don't know what that is though. It has never been taught anywhere. And what's even weird is... There are no excerpts about it."

"So it's practically impossible to know anything about it?"

Jungkook hadn't noticed, but there had been a slight smile tugging at the end of her lips. Her eyes, too, appeared outlandish. A bizzare concoction brewed in the depths of the abstruse abyss within her pupils. Brown wisps and smoke-like tendrils arose from it, the hues tainting her eyeballs.

"Seems so," he frowned, looking down at the dead man. "He's dead, anyway... Why bother cursing him?"

"I think he died while he was being cursed."

Jungkook nodded. "Possible," he suggested, skimming his eyes over the man.

The charred skin should've never had such a colossal amount of blood, within the mere confines of the attenuated dermis. It flummoxed him more than the curse theory, which he would just as lief eat a pincushion.

The rubber gloves grazed across the mark along the course's arm. The lines were jagged, the circle wasn't nonpareil but it had served its purpose, howbeit. His finger skimmed along something else, though. Another crusty layer of skin had starched atop each other, the cardinal layers having been slit open.

"There's another one here," he announced. "Another symbol."

Iseul rushed forth, scrambling towards him. "What?" she asked. Jungkook feigned to have no reaction towards the tone of her voice that had gone a few pitches higher. It wasn't worth the speculation, her higher tonality might not have been anything substantial to cognizance.

He placed the man's arm straight, turning it so that she could view the inside of his wrist. Even with the symbol barely even discernible, it was there.

It had been labyrinthine, the pattern so intricately carved onto the skin that had it been a canvas, the artist would've hit a jackpot in an exhibition. The triangle would've been incised first seeing how all the other lines crossed over it, a series of parallel lines encircling the whole of the man's wrist. Small yet obscure shapes filled the triangle... It might have been obliterated while he burned to his demise, however.

"How did y-" Iseul started, her words dissipating into thin air as she looked down on what he had left pregnable.

Jungkook could apprehend the density, the profundity in her responses, as she gulped; her breaths becoming more facile as she faced him. It could effortlessly pass as unpretentious perturbation. But, a sole glance into the depths of her eyes revealed to him that... The story that they held had been persuasively cribbed. For garnering to any benefit of doubt.

"It seems so weird," Jungkook reiterated. "I never thought anyone would've been into curses." He paid not much heed to the suspicion that had been bubbling at the surface of his mind.

"There may be a few..."

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❝ There is an ocean of silence between us... I am drowning in it. ❞

- Ranata Suzuki