I Was A Scientist Studying A Curse, Now The Strongest Sorcerer Claims I Belong To Him

The humidity of a Tokyo summer clung to my skin, a persistent, sticky film that my field jacket did little to repel. Below me, nestled in a forgotten pocket of Yanaka cemetery, was the source of the anomaly. A small, derelict shrine, weathered gray wood choked by ivy. The locals I’d asked for directions had given me wide berth, muttering about a place of sorrow, a place best left alone. Superstition. I dealt in data, not ghost stories.

And the data was screaming.

My portable EMR scanner whined, the needle pushing hard against the far right of the gauge. For three weeks, I’d been tracking a peculiar residual energy pattern across the city—faint, chaotic bursts that my grant proposal had optimistically labeled "geothermal quantum fluctuations." It was bullshit, but it paid for the equipment. This, however, was different. This was no fluctuation. It was a focused, impossibly stable signature. A constant, low thrum of energy that was not only holding its form, but growing.

I adjusted the tripod for my spectroscopic sensor, my fingers tightening on the cold metal. The shrine was sealed shut. Thick, braided ropes, yellowed with age, were knotted around the doors, and slips of paper covered in calligraphy—ofuda, I believed they were called—were plastered over every crack. To a tourist, it was a piece of history. To me, it was a containment unit.

"What are you?" I murmured, my gaze fixed on the digital readout of my laptop. The energy wave was clean, almost surgical in its consistency. It didn't decay. It didn't radiate outward in messy, predictable patterns. It just… was. A perfect, contained sphere of power that was steadily, methodically expanding. Like a balloon being slowly inflated.

I dismissed the local legends of vengeful spirits and cursed grounds. There was a rational explanation. A unique geological formation, a forgotten piece of military technology, a previously undiscovered radioactive isotope. Any of these were more plausible than folklore. This wasn't a curse; it was a breakthrough. The kind of discovery that would rewrite textbooks on particle physics and make my entire career. The kind of discovery worth ignoring a few silly warnings for.

I pulled a thermal camera from my bag, flipping down the viewfinder. The shrine was cold. Colder than the ambient temperature, a deep, stark blue against the warm reds and yellows of the surrounding trees. Except for the very center, right behind the sealed doors. There, a pinprick of white-hot energy pulsed, a tiny, furious star. It pulsed in time with the low hum my sensors were picking up. A heartbeat. My own pulse quickened, a thrill of pure, academic hunger overriding the oppressive stillness of the cemetery. I was the only one who knew it was here. I was the first. And I was not going to let it go.

"That's close enough."

The voice came from behind me, casual and light, yet it made every muscle in my body lock up. I hadn't heard footsteps, hadn't sensed another person's presence. One second I was alone, the next, I wasn't. I spun around, my hand instinctively going for the heavy Maglite in my side pocket.

He was impossibly tall, a shock of stark white hair sticking up over a black blindfold. A blindfold. He wore a simple dark jacket and pants, but the entire image was so bizarre, so out of place, that my brain struggled to process it. He stood with a lazy slouch, hands shoved in his pockets, a ridiculously cheerful smile on his face.

"Quite the setup you have here," he said, his smile widening as he tilted his head toward my equipment. "Lots of little blinking lights. Very scientific."

The condescension in his tone was a physical thing, scraping against my nerves. "Who are you? This is a private research site."

"Is it?" He took a step forward, completely ignoring my question. He moved with a liquid grace that seemed wrong for someone so tall. "Looks more like a campsite for nerds. What are you hoping to find? Ghosts?"

I stepped between him and my spectroscopic sensor. "Don't touch that. This is expensive, highly sensitive equipment."

He let out a little laugh, a sound that was far too bright for the somber quiet of the cemetery. "Sensitive, huh?" He stopped a few feet away, his blindfolded face angled toward my laptop. He wasn't even looking at my gear, but at me. "The thing about sensitive equipment is… it breaks easily."

He lifted a hand from his pocket, elegant and long-fingered. With a flick of his index finger, a gesture so small and dismissive it was barely a movement at all, a wave of something I couldn't see or hear washed over the clearing.

The high-pitched whine of the EMR scanner cut out. The steady green power light on my laptop blinked off. The digital readout on the sensor went black. Silence. A sudden, complete, and total electronic death.

My breath caught in my throat. I stared at him, then scrambled back to my laptop, pressing the power button again and again. Nothing. I checked the portable battery pack. It was full, but dead. Everything was dead. Not just off. It felt… voided. Erased.

"What did you do?" My voice was low, shaking with a fury I could barely contain. That was years of grant proposals, thousands of dollars of custom-built hardware, all wiped out by a man in a blindfold.

"I saved you some trouble," he said, his smile finally gone, replaced by an unnerving placidness. "You should pack up your toys and go home. This is a bad place to play."

"Play?" The word exploded out of me. "This is my work! My career! You can't just show up and—"

"I can," he interrupted, his voice losing all its earlier warmth. It was flat and cold, an absolute statement of fact. "This 'work' of yours is going to get you killed. So take the advice. Abandon your hobby. Forget you saw anything."

He turned his back on me, starting to walk away as if the conversation was over, as if he hadn't just destroyed the most important discovery of my life. He represented every secretive, high-handed organization that believed knowledge was theirs to hoard and control. He was the wall I had spent my entire career trying to break through. And I was not going to let him just walk away.

"No," I said, my voice sharp enough to cut through the heavy air. "You don't get to do that."

He actually stopped. He didn't turn around, but the line of his shoulders went rigid. I scrambled through my pack, past the now-useless electronics, and ripped out my research binder. The plastic cover was cracked, the pages inside filled with printouts, charts, and my own frantic handwriting.

I stalked up behind him, planting myself in his path as he started to turn. I shoved the binder into his chest. He didn't even flinch, just looked down at it with that infuriatingly blank blindfold.

"This isn't a hobby," I seethed, jabbing a finger at a graph depicting the energy signature's growth. "For three weeks, I've tracked this. The signature isn't chaotic. It’s a perfect sine wave with a frequency of 1.21 gigahertz, contained within a spatially stable field that’s expanding at a rate of 0.03 millimeters per hour. It absorbs ambient thermal and kinetic energy without any corresponding decay or emission. It breaks the second law of thermodynamics. It shouldn't exist. So you tell me, what is it that's going to get me killed? Because from where I'm standing, it looks like a Nobel Prize."

I was breathing hard, my knuckles white where I gripped the binder. The silence stretched, thick and suffocating. The cheerful idiot was gone. The man standing in front of me was perfectly still, a predator assessing a new kind of prey. He didn't move for a long moment. Then, slowly, he reached up and took the binder from my hands. His fingers brushed against mine, a brief, cool touch that sent a completely inappropriate jolt straight through me.

He flipped through a few pages, his head tilted. He couldn't possibly be reading them. Not with that blindfold.

"You're tracking the output," he said. His voice was different now. Devoid of mockery. A low, serious baritone. "Not the source."

"The output is the source. It's self-contained."

"No." He snapped the binder shut. "The output is the cage. The source is what's rattling the bars." He took a step toward me, closing the space between us until I had to crane my neck to look up at him. He was a wall of dark clothing and overwhelming presence. The air around him felt thin, charged. "You're not a physicist, Dr. Thorne. You're a zookeeper who's mistaken a tiger for a house cat."

He knew my name. The realization hit me like a punch to the gut. He hadn't just stumbled upon me. He had come for me.

He leaned down, his face just inches from mine. The black fabric of his blindfold seemed to absorb the light around it, creating its own little void. I could feel the warmth of his breath on my cheek.

"Your data is precise," he admitted, his voice a low murmur that vibrated through my chest. "Impressively so. You've measured the shadow of something you have no right to see." A corner of his mouth lifted, but it wasn't a smile. It was something sharper, more dangerous. "That makes you more of a problem than I thought."