Chapter 10, Episode 20: Final Touches of Cleansing

That night, the sky was clear and full of stars, although the moon wasn’t full. Now that we’d cleared the place of trees, there was nothing blocking the moonlight and starlight on this patch of flat land.

On a spot in the clearing, I’d prepared a table with a metal container—a reflective one I’d had an iron slime create for me. It was shaped like a traditional jelly mold: a bowl with a raised bottom. On the raised portion of the bowl, I’d place the cursed object—today, that was a ring I had borrowed from Rosenberg—and pour purified water around it. Back in the day, when those documents were written, they amplified the moonlight with a metal mirror and the reflective surface of the water. Since it was our first attempt, I conducted the experiment exactly as described...

“But no results,” I grumbled.

“Hmm. It doesn’t seem entirely ineffective...” Rosenberg mused.

Despite repeating the ritual several times, there was barely any progress towards breaking the ring’s curse. “The curse on the ring is an easy one?” I asked.

“It is our first attempt,” Rosenberg confirmed. “Just to verify the ritual’s effect, I gave you an object of level 1 difficulty according to the standards set by the Cassiels.”

“That’s what I thought... By the way, whatare the guidelines for those...curse-breaking difficulty levels? I remember that my curse was level 7, which was the highest.”

“I suppose I never explained. There are eight levels of curses, marked by how difficult it is to b