Despite having moved some belongings to Alois’s mansion previously, when she actually prepared to hand over the cabin, there were still quite a few things that needed her personal attention.

Olivia began organizing the small rooms of the cabin that had been used as storage. It was mainly a place her mother had used as storage during her lifetime, so Olivia hadn’t used it much. The small room containing her mother’s old memories was filled with old books and outdated tools that seemed difficult to use now.

“Wow, are these things my mother used when she was young?”

Inside a box hidden in the corner were old travel tools and a potion-making set. They appeared to be items her mother had used before meeting Olivia, when she lived a nomadic life without a place to settled.

“Did Mother travel alone? It couldn’t have been easy……”

Imagining her mother’s distant past that she didn’t know, Olivia felt somewhat heavy-hearted. She regretted not having had deeper conversations with her mother while she was still alive, as Olivia had been too young then.

“This is quite heavy.”

After taking out various items, she noticed books stacked neatly on the floor. She picked up one of dozens of notebooks and dusted it off. Since it had been stored carelessly in the corner of the storage room, it wasn’t in good condition, so she carefully opened the cover with gentle hands to prevent the paper from crumbling.

“It’s a diary?”

She had expected her mother’s potion formulas, but something unexpected emerged. Olivia sat down in the corner of the storage room and slowly read through the traces her mother had left behind.

The book, more like an adventure journal, was filled with stories of her mother traveling here and there, meeting new people, and living as a healer.

She really saw many places and met many people.

She had thought she was living a life similar to her mother’s, carrying on her will. But now she realized that what she knew was just a small fragment of her mother’s life. It seemed her mother had traveled not only throughout the Empire but also across various parts of the continent, more extensively than she had vaguely imagined.

Her mother’s story, which began a few years before settling in this village, rewound further and further back in time. With each page Olivia turned, her mother’s timeline moved toward an increasingly younger age.

“Hmm?”

Reading the story with a cozy feeling, like listening to a bedtime story on a lazy winter night, Olivia’s eyes caught something strange.

“Incurable disease?”

Suddenly, along with the appearance of an incurable disease, the story of her mother’s first love unfolded. She glanced up at the sky, wondering if it was okay for her to read this. But as stories of others’ love are usually the most interesting, Olivia read through her mother’s innocent first love story as if reading a novel.

However, the record was more depressing than expected. As her first love began suffering from a unique incurable disease, the record changed from mostly a love story to that of a patient and healer.

“If the person I loved had an incurable disease, I would have found it hard to bear too.”

Though not a disease, thinking of Alois bearing his curse, she naturally empathized with how her mother must have felt. The mother Olivia had known was someone who had devoted her entire life solely to her work, showing no particular interest in the emotion of love, so she had no idea her mother had experienced such a passionate romance.

[…… I can now predict the roughly established cycle. But being able to predict doesn’t mean being able to prevent it. The experience of losing rationality regardless of one’s will tormented both the person and those around them. He told me we should break up, but I couldn’t leave his side. Whether as a lover or a healer.]

The diary, which meticulously recorded the symptoms of the incurable disease and the combinations of medicines she had concocted to solve it, showed how desperately her mother had struggled to cure the hellish incurable disease. Reading the text with a sympathetic heart, Olivia slowly traced the sentences with her finger.

“Wait a minute….. With these symptoms, could it be?”

Fever. Increased aggression. Violence. Increased s*xual desire. Loss of control. Difficulty in rational judgment.

The symptoms that appeared without fail in every record of the disease outbreak were similar to Alois’s heat cycle. There was a slight difference in that, unlike Alois, there was a fixed cycle, but the similarity in uncontrollable rampaging aggression and s*xual desire was very striking.

The faint note at the end of the page, “It’s like he’s become an animal in heat……” further solidified Olivia’s suspicion.

‘But Alois has a curse, and Mother called it a disease…..’

Looking through the records before and after, there was no mention of a curse in her mother’s diary. It only stated that heat-like symptoms suddenly appeared upon reaching adulthood. A strange condition considered an incurable disease because no one, neither healers nor priests, knew the cause.

“They’re too similar—could there be a connection between them?”

Or perhaps what was referred to as Alois’s “curse” didn’t mean the heat cycle symptoms themselves, but rather the “onset of the disease” that was difficult to cure, like what her mother had experienced.

‘If the curse isn’t the heat cycle itself but something that causes the disease, couldn’t we just cure the disease regardless of the curse?’

Until now, they had only been looking for the past history of the cursed necklace, but when a completely different perspective appeared, Olivia’s eyes blazed with fire.

“Mother must have found a cure.”

Failure, failure, more failure. Flipping through numerous failed formulas, Olivia didn’t lose her thread of hope.

“Found it!”

She ran out of the small room with the notebook in hand. Under the bright light, sitting at the desk and reading the book in earnest, her hands trembled slightly. With each word she read, her heart began to pound as if it would burst.

According to the records, her mother successfully developed a medicine that had the effect of suppressing the symptoms. After taking it consistently for a year, the symptoms completely disappeared, and she stopped the medication. Then, for another year, she monitored whether the symptoms would return after discontinuing the medicine.

After experimenting with the drug directly for about two years, she finally declared her lover cured.

Taking medicine consistently for a year is not an easy task. But what mattered was that afterward, the heat cycle no longer returned even without medication. Although it was the clinical trial result of just one person, the successful record of the symptoms eventually disappearing was significant.

“I need to tell Alois right away.”

Olivia, who had been shouting excitedly as if about to run out immediately, suddenly frowned. Did she read it wrong? Her trembling eyes read the same words over and over again.

The most important medicine formula. The method itself wasn’t difficult, but all the necessary ingredients had unfamiliar names.

There were some ingredients she vaguely recognized from somewhere, but most were unfamiliar plants not commonly used in preparing medicine. Some ingredients she couldn’t even identify or figure out where to obtain them. This wasn’t a standard medicine formula.

But how could there be such unfamiliar ingredients and combinations when she had worked as a healer for several years? Olivia calmed her excitement and opened her mother’s encyclopedia, which she had practically memorized.

“It’s not here either.”

She couldn’t find information about the unfamiliar ingredients in the encyclopedia. If her mother had used and obtained these ingredients, there would be no reason not to include them in the encyclopedia, so why?

She couldn’t tell if they were accidentally omitted or deliberately excluded from the dictionary. Olivia looked for more diary entries before and after the recorded formula.

“Please, just a little more information……”

Biting her lip, Olivia roughly shook the notebook.

Flutter. As if to rescue the anxious Olivia, a memo fell out from between the pages of the notebook.

[Island of escaped beast-people. Hostile to humans. Krofon waters? Outsiders, will it be okay…?]

The memo, filled with words whose exact meaning she couldn’t understand, contained rough sketches of the unfamiliar ingredients that had confused her. As she muttered the written words, Olivia suddenly lifted her head.

“If Krofon waters, wait, that’s Kanil?”

Like lightning, Seron’s voice flashed through her mind.

The most notoriously dangerous waters in the Kanil region were precisely Krofon.

* * *

Alois repeatedly fingered the notebook in his hands. Despite Olivia’s excited repetition of the same story, it didn’t feel real. A way to treat the heat cycle?

‘Does it make sense to ‘treat’ a curse?’

Even Seron, who had been tracking the necklace’s history in reverse to find the person who cast the curse, hadn’t yet identified anyone specific. And now they’re saying the curse might be treatable with medicine?

He wasn’t doubting her, but Alois generally didn’t believe that good fortune could come to his life. Olivia said the world was kinder than he thought, but even so, for such luck to come twice? He couldn’t help but feel a pessimistic skepticism.

“The symptoms recorded here are similar to my curse, but there’s no guarantee that the two conditions are the same. There’s a difference in periodicity to begin with.”

“But isn’t it worth checking? Above all, didn’t you say the records show that the necklace’s curse first occurred in the Kanil region? Isn’t that too perfect to dismiss as coincidence?”

“The problem is that what’s written on this note doesn’t inspire much confidence.”

“Do you know what the words on the note mean?”

“Island of escaped beast-people. Remember the painting we saw at the exhibition?”

Olivia searched her memory for the painting they had glimpsed in passing. She was sure it had been related to mythology. As she nodded, Alois continued his explanation to make it easier to understand.

“Beast-people were a race among non-humans that had high compatibility with humans. They also suffered the greatest damage in wars, as the story goes. I’m not saying they’re all extinct. In fact, I’ve heard there are still people who illegally buy and sell beast-people as slaves.”

“Then that makes it more credible.”

“Beast-people have higher demand in human society compared to other non-human races. If there were an island where beast-people lived together, someone would have discovered it by now. That’s why it’s suspicious.”

Unlike Alois, who shook his head in disbelief, Olivia’s eyes shone brighter.

“Doesn’t that make it more connected? You’re human too, Alois, but you were cursed to transform into an unidentifiable beast. Perhaps the person who first created the curse used legends of beast-people.”

With continued persuasion, Alois’s mind began to waver between possible hope and inevitable disappointment.