Content warning:

Suicidal ideation. (Briefly.)

[Extreme bodily deformation detected.]

[Repairing body… Nothing in need of repair detected. Marked as an anomaly.]

[Extreme mental disruption detected.]

[Restoring brain functionality… Nothing in need of restoration detected. Marked as an anomaly.]

[Remaining brain functionality protected.]

[Analyzing anomalies…]

WHO? I’M SO THIRSTY. IT HURTS. I’M HUNGRY. WHERE ARE YOU? I’M SO COLD. BLOOD. NEED BLOOD. PAIN. IN PAIN. HUNGRY. CURSED. GIVE ME BLOOD. I’M HUNGRY. IT HURTS SO MUCH. I’M SO COLD. I… ESCAPE. CANNOT… CANNOT KILL.

Some small part of my mind was screaming at me to get away from all the food for some reason. I didn’t understand why, but I began staggering away from the city and into the forest.

AWAY FROM THE BLOOD. AWAY FROM MY DELICIOUS FRIENDS. HOW GOOD THEY WOULD TASTE.

I turned around as I thought of my food friends and began walking back to the city. The face of the redhead as the door closed and the way she screamed came to my mind. I paused, then turned back around and resumed walking away.

SO HARD. IT HURTS. FOOD IS RIGHT BEHIND ME. IT’S SO CLOSE! I NEED IT! WHY CAN’T I EAT IT? I’M SO HUNGRY! I CAN FEED… NO. AWAY. STAY AWAY. CANNOT… KILL THEM.

[Analyzing…]

I heard the voice again and a rustling noise nearby, then immediately ran toward it. It can only be the person food.

WHERE ARE YOU?! I’M SO HUNGRY! …A MONSTER IN THE FOREST. A SOURCE OF MANA AND BLOOD AND FLESH. NOT A PERSON. NOT ENOUGH. I NEED IT.

I gave in to my need and slashed my claws at its neck. Delicious blood sprayed out and all over me as I shoved my face into the wound and drank until it had nothing left to give. It scratched me with its claws and tried to escape my grasp, but it failed because it was so weak. I struggled to understand why drinking blood felt so wrong when it tasted so good.

[Analyzing…]

[Foreign energy detected.]

[Eliminating foreign energy… Unable to comply. Reason: Unknown.]

[Analyzing host’s memories for solution…]

SHUT UP! I’M HUNGRY! COME HERE! …I’M WEAK. SO HUNGRY. THE STENCH OF BLOOD. I NEED MORE. I NEED PEOPLE. NO. NO PEOPLE. DON’T.

[Foreign energy determined to be “mana” according to host’s memories.]

[Bodily deformation and mental disruption determined to be the result of a “curse” according to host’s memories.]

[Adapting to mana… 16%]

WHO? PERSON? WHERE BLOOD?

[Adapting to mana… 51%]

BLOOD. NEED BLOOD. CITY HAS BLOOD. NO. MUST STAY AWAY. GO BACK. DON’T GO BACK. RUN.

[Adapting to mana… 89%]

[Nanite adaptation to mana complete.]

[New parameters added: Power capacity and power efficiency.]

[Power capacity: 2/14]

[Power efficiency: 12%]

[Developing immunity to curse… Unable to comply. Reason: The curse is not a disease.]

[Seeking solution… Solution found. Method: Insulate host’s mana from the parasitic effect of the curse. This will deprive the curse of energy until it vanishes.]

[Eliminating curse… 0%]

MONSTER. HUNGRY. KILL. NOT ENOUGH. WHERE IS THE BLOOD PERSON?

I can’t find the person I keep hearing no matter how hard I look. Something compels me to ignore it and keep escaping, so I begin to run.

MUST RUN.

———

3rd Person POV:

“How much farther should we go, Rhem? Do you think this is enough?” A woman asked. She was short and had bark-like skin and vibrant, green hair.

“Is there even a place to run to anymore? Asallte fell. Asallte! It was one of the few major cities remaining and it’s gone!” A tall, catlike man replied. He had black fur from head to toe and a tail long enough to wrap twice around his waist, which is how he always kept it with the exception of when he was completely relaxed.

The catlike man was Rhem and the woman he was traveling with was his wife, Sarrin. They were a young couple that had known each other for several years and had married just ten months ago.

Three months ago, the city of Asallte fell. An abnormally large horde of Cursed Ones got in after one of the barriers broke.

It was chaos. People everywhere were being killed, eaten or turned into monsters. Rhem and Sarrin had only just barely managed to get out without being seen by the Cursed Ones.

“Curse this rotten shithole of a world!” Rhem spat. “There’s nothing left for anyone.”

Sarrin gently grabbed his arm. “Whatever happens, I’ll be with you ‘til the end.”

Rhem’s gaze softened and he wrapped his arms around her. “Thank you. I’m sorry for getting angry. It’s hard not to be mad at everything.”

They held each other for several minutes, just enjoying each other’s warmth, before beginning to walk again. Away from Asallte. Away from everything.

It was on this night that they heard the screaming.

“What do you hear, Rhem?” Sarrin questioned her husband. His hearing was much better than hers, and he had a shocked expression on his face while looking in a specific direction.

“I… I think it’s a woman being tortured…? She’s screaming so much!” he replied with a shiver.

“What should we do?”

“Your judgment is better than mine on weird shit like this.”

“…Let’s take a look, then. As quietly and from as far away as possible. Maybe we can help one or two other miserable people in this forest.”

He slowly nodded and they packed up their few belongings, then slowly and carefully stalked their way to the source of the screams.

Sarrin’s grimace matched her husband’s as she came to hear them, too.

The sun was currently setting, which meant that it was the perfect time for the couple to sneak around like this. Rhem had better vision in the dark, while Sarrin had better distance across long distances. Sneaking around at this time of day made it a little easier for them to stay hidden while still having good visibility.

What they saw was appalling; a Cursed One that was doing something other than the usual mindless slaughter that they usually do. Sarrin and Rhem watched with horrified fascination as the cursed woman repeatedly slammed her head against a boulder.

Slam! “WHY!”

Slam! “CAN’T!”

Slam! “I!”

Slam! “DIE!?”

She collapsed in a heap, bawling loudly and with blood streaming down her forehead and splattered on the boulder. From all the blood and carcasses in the surrounding area, it seemed that she had been here for a week or two. A pile of leaves had been created for sleeping underneath the rocky overhang.

“Izzy… Kyle… I wish you’d come. I just want to see you one last time.” Then she began screaming again. “This fucking curse! These fucking nanites! Just save me or fucking don’t! I’m already a monster…! Just please…”

The husband and wife looked at each other for a long time. Sarrin eventually nodded her head with a deliberate motion. Rhem understood. They could possibly learn something new about the curse from this tortured woman. Or they might die fighting her.

In either case, they agreed that it was better than wandering aimlessly through the wilderness, waiting for the day something they can’t fight off attacks them. Even in the relatively safer parts of the world like this area of the continent, death will still come quickly if you aren’t careful.

They readied their weapons and carefully approached the sobbing Cursed One, the only one known to speak even a single word.

They split up, and Sarrin would be the one to speak to her alone from a distance. Rhem would be nearby, but hidden. That way, if the woman attacked, they would be able to surprise her from one side.

Now as close as she dared to get and with her spear at the ready, Sarrin gently asked, “Hello?”

The woman’s head snapped up and stared at her. She began panting heavily, and managed to say, “R-Run… away… or I’ll…”

The woman was suddenly slammed in the back with a massive rock thrown by Rhem. She stumbled forward and was about to catch herself, but Sarrin rushed forward and slammed the butt of her spear down on the woman’s skull.

She was still moving, and the husband and wife team worked quickly to bind the cursed woman’s hands and legs together with enchanted rope. The enchantment only increased its sturdiness, but it should be enough to keep her bound. They could already tell that they were stronger than her, and she also wasn’t fighting back.

“Wh-Why…?” the woman pleaded. “Just… kill me…”

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“You can talk,” Sarrin said, kneeling before the woman, looking straight into her solid white eyes. The woman was panting heavily and was obviously hungry for blood, but Sarrin didn’t flinch.

“Yes…”

“How? No Cursed One has ever spoken before.”

“Nanites… dealing with curse…”

“What are nanites?” Rhem questioned, joining his wife.

She concentrated for a bit, then said, “…Things in… my blood… They fight diseases… and curses, too… apparently…”

Rhem and Sarrin looked at each other again. “Are nanites something your species has? Is it possible for other people for people to have them?”

“I’m the only… one who has them... They are… from my old world…”

“Shit!”

“Yeah… Haha…”

“You shouldn’t give up so easily, Rhem,” Sarrin said to him, putting a hand on his shoulder.

“What do you mean?” he wondered.

“There’s that medical research facility in Moriste, right?”

“Moriste!? That’s all the way on the other end of the continent! Are we supposed to carry her the whole way there!?”

“I don’t know, dear. We still barely understand the situation. But she could be the solution, no?”

He sighed. “…Yes, you’re right.” He turned his gaze to the woman. “You said you’re immune to the curse, but you’re obviously still after our blood. Why is that?”

“Only… partially immune… right now… 52%… Always… slowly… increasing… It’s so hard…”

“So you’ll eventually be completely immune?”

“I think so.”

“How long have you been cursed?” Sarrin asked.

“Don’t know… time… Cursed at… Asallte…”

“That happened three months ago.”

“That long!? …Is the… city okay!? What about… humans?”

“The city was overrun. The fighters looked like they might’ve had a chance against the ones that remained, but the majority of the city is definitely dead.

“We escaped into the forest, so we can’t say for sure. We decided we’d rather find some other end for ourselves out here rather than just waiting for a Cursed One to kill us.”

Her eyes began to water. “A-And the… humans?”

“I assume that’s your species?”

She nodded.

“I do recall seeing a few of you around the city before it fell, but I have no idea if any survived.”

She began shaking and crying. After some time, she quietly said, “Thank you.”

“There’s a medical research facility on the other end of the continent,” Rhem said, after giving her some time. “We want to take you there. With someone who’s immune, there might just be a chance to change things.”

Her eyes went wide at that. “I didn’t know… there was… such a place… I won’t… leave until… I’m completely… immune.”

“That’s probably for the best. Why do you keep pausing between words? Are you injured?”

“The bloodlust is… intense. Have to… always focus on… other things.”

He flinched but didn’t move any more than that. “Did you kill anyone?”

“No. Thankfully, no... If you’d shown… up any… earlier… I probably… would have. Monsters aren’t… enough.”

Rhem and Sarrin shared a look. “We’ll help you until then. This is too important to ignore.”

She chuckled weakly, resting her face in the dirt. “I see… I’m hungry…”

“We’ll hunt something for you.”

———

Main Character’s POV:

Weeks went by as the three of us lived in the forest waiting for my curse to die off. I spent a lot of time tied up at the beginning, and always at night. I completely agreed to doing this, though that didn’t make it feel any less strange.

It was pretty weird and annoying to spend so much time just tied up and sitting on a rock or something, but I worked on practicing my magic during that time. Or at least as much as I was able to despite my constant bloodthirst.

It’s difficult to believe that there’s an actual possibility of something being done about this curse. I wasn’t expecting a place like an advanced research facility to exist. It’s apparently a major source of medical knowledge and research, and has been for centuries. News from so far away is scarce and impossible to prove, so there’s the possibility that it may have fallen.

From what Sarrin and Rhem know, most places like that have vanished for several different reasons. A lack of people to study the curse or even the resources to do so are the two biggest ones.

There’s also the fact that many of them have been destroyed in attacks and peoples’ morale is constantly going down. They don’t know if the one in Moriste is still around, but it’s the one that is most likely to have survived all this time.

This world has lost a great deal of its technology and knowledge as a result of the past eight decades of strife, so for something like that to still be around is quite a surprise.

I don’t want there to be any possible chance of either the curse coming back because of being attacked again or me spreading it by accident, so I’ve adamantly refused to leave the forest at all until it is completely eliminated.

I don’t want to take any risks at all regarding that. Even just living as quietly and safely in this world as you possibly can still comes with a high risk of dying. I can accept that much, but I refuse to spread the curse even further if possible. Once it’s gone, we’ll all leave as a group.

Back during that initial conversation I’d had with Rhem and Sarrin, I’d said that I was immune for simplicity’s sake, but I later made sure to clarify to them that my nanites were slowly but surely getting rid of the curse altogether by starving it.

It seems that the physical changes to my body are going to stay, as my body didn’t begin reverting back to my previous appearance at all as the curse became weaker. The mental changes, though, are vanishing.

I guess it’s because even though I’m drastically different compared to how I was before, I’m still physically healthy? Or maybe it’s because it somehow doesn’t feel like much of a problem to me…

As the mental haze from the curse faded, I finally realized why I’d been feeling strangely comfortable. My current body… feels like it’s a much better shape than the previous one was. I frequently looked down to look at the changes and would get a sense of satisfaction from them. After several weeks, I finally realized why; I’m trans.

And it only took me getting summoned to another world and cursed to become a bloodthirsty monster to realize it. If my friends are still alive… well, they’ll congratulate me for the trans part at least.

The nanites are generally receptive to things that I do or don’t want them to do, even on a subconscious level, which meant that I’d had to ask myself why they weren’t attempting to change me back anymore. Because I’m healthy and no longer experiencing dysphoria, they’ve essentially written off my physical changes as a non-issue.

They wouldn’t have been able to change me back anyway, as they can’t change the structure of my body, but they would’ve kept trying otherwise. If I’d been less dense and had understood myself sooner, the nanites probably would’ve requested to begin HRT. It’s only in emergency situations that they’ll do things without asking; Getting cursed, for example.

Now that I think about it, there were a few times in the past when I’d received notifications about there being issues with my body, but I had just thought that the software wasn’t perfect or something. Maybe I should pay attention to those more from now on.

Rhem and Sarrin had also asked for my name on that same day they met me, but I couldn’t answer them then. I didn’t want to. Between experiencing gender euphoria that I didn’t understand at the time as well as bloodlust, I just thought I shouldn’t use that name anymore. I only finally gave them a name a few weeks ago.

Ivy. It’s kind of a joke because it sounds similar to ivory and my entire body is 100% white now, but I really do like it.

Damn… I would be the butt of so many white person jokes back on Earth. Whenever I wasn’t being called a demon or something anyway.

What I look like now is over two meters1 of muscular woman who looks like a marble statue. Honestly… I’m pretty hot now. If it weren’t for the fact that this appearance is associated with death, it’d be great. Those weren’t the only changes, though.

I have a tail a long and whippy tail. I have large, bat-like wings that are wind magic-powered. I have cute fangs and pointy ears. I have two horns growing from my forehead that curve backward and then slightly upward. I even have claws now. I don’t know how I can see, though, because my eyes are solid white, just like the rest of me. In fact, my vision is much better than it was before.

Getting used to having a tail and wings has been the most difficult challenge for me. The tail, Rhem has been able to help me with, but as for the wings, I had to mostly figure them out on my own. Lately, as the curse reached the lower percentages, I’ve been practicing with them. I think I have the basics down now.

I’m glad I don’t have talons or bird feet or something, though. The Cursed Ones that had those had had them before becoming cursed in the first place.

I’ve also been learning some magic from the couple. First and foremost, I wanted illusion magic. With their help, I learned more about how to cast light-related spells, but then we had to puzzle out the rest.

It’s quite tricky, but I finally got it down. I have to wrap myself in my spell, keep it skintight and make sure it stays on me no matter how much I move around. The only drawback at the moment is that I can only keep it up for around a few hours at most.

My fake appearance has black hair, dark skin, green eyes, and my wings have feathers. I hope no one tries to touch them, but people weren’t really rude or anything to winged people in Asallte. The number of body types was so varied that people would just naturally adjust to pretty much any other type of person walking near them.

I still feel incredibly surprised every day that my nanites are able to deal with this. The reason I originally got them was that I’d had a terminal illness several years ago. A company wanted to try an experimental technology on me to see if it could cure me. It did, and I got a shitload of money for it. I did keep some of it for myself, but I mostly gave it away to people that I knew needed a bit to eat or pay their rent or something.

How the nanites operate is that they monitor and analyze my body for anything amiss, and then they fix it using any number of methods. The amount of medical knowledge they have is extensive, so there are always numerous ways for them to go about resolving an issue. Whether it’s healing a wound or getting rid of an illness, they're capable of quite a bit.

I was pretty worried initially when those people from the company explained that they could affect my mental health, but they explained that it was basically like creating an internal source of whatever medications I might need. They were talking about things like antidepressants, and they further clarified that the nanites needed permission to give me any kind of medication.

Experts were brought in to confirm and explain everything as well as ask any questions about concerns they had. Going through all that was a slog, but it all turned out to be worth it.

There was also the matter of the system thing that tells me what’s going on with my body. It somehow creates and interacts with a tiny chip into my brain, then uses that for both monitoring my health and alerting me to anything I should be aware of. Given that I could completely disable the alerts if I wanted, I decided it would probably be okay.

It all turned out fine in the end. The procedure, though invasive, had tons of research and documentation to back it up. I was already terminally ill anyway, so I had nothing to lose.

I didn’t die when it was done, and I even became pretty healthy afterward. From then on, they just continued living inside of me. Then magic got involved.

From what I can gather, they didn’t initially recognize the curse as something harmful to my body because it wasn’t any kind of physical phenomenon.

Where the nanites stepped in is when I was literally losing my mind. With such an obvious change in the way my mind was working, they could tell something was wrong. So they detected the energy, analyzed it, stopped its progress, then ever so gradually began eliminating it.

I was told by the company that the nanites would gradually evolve and adapt as they came across various types of diseases, injuries and such. But with the introduction of magic, they gained a couple things.

The first is that it can now tell how much mana I’m capable of storing, so I no longer need to use a Capacity Wall. The second is that it can tell how wasteful I’m being with it, so it tells me my efficiency as well.

The system has always been able to do diagnostic stuff, but I pretty much ignored it. It turns out that your body is never, ever in a perfect state of health. So I just shut all those things off a long time ago. It was fucking aggravating. But being able to look at these two things whenever I want should be handy.

So as simple as it is, I now have an actual isekai System of sorts. I can’t wait to annoy Kyle with that fact.

It only says two things, though:

[Power capacity: 69/72]

[Power efficiency: 34%]

I can even customize it!

[Nugget capacity: 69/72]

[Nugget efficiency: 34%]

[Butt capacity: 69(nice)/72]

[Butt efficiency: 34%]

…Let’s just go ahead and change that back before I end up chortling in public like a maniac. I’m a fucking child.

Anyway, despite my poor state for several months, I did spend that time killing a lot of monsters. The biggest boost to my efficiency only came recently, once I finally regained most of my sanity.

The major thing I’m concerned about is if I can still infect people. The only way I’ll know is if I actually try to do it to someone. So basically, I’m never going to find out.

Something that had been a huge issue is that at some point between my flight from Asallte and being found in the forest, I lost all my clothes. I was naked until we fashioned some rough clothes from monster hides and plants. It felt really awkward, but neither Sarrin nor Rhem minded.

Something Sarrin said was that Cursed Ones apparently have the same lifespans as the species they were turned from, according to research. So now that I’m at 72 capacity, that means my lifespan should be a few centuries, assuming my math is correct. That was something I had wondered about, considering all my changes.

So that research facility works out, I might get to see a glimpse of what this world once looked like when society gets rebuilt. Something to look forward to.