The storm had passed, but the vibration in Leo's right hand had not.
He sat on the edge of his cot in the tool shed, the air smelling of wet ozone and failure. Outside, his 3x3 grid was a muddy ruin, a testament to the Witch Princess's chaotic hypothesis. Inside, in the dim light of a kerosene lamp, Leo slowly unwrapped the bandages covering his right hand.
The skin wasn't burned, but it looked sickly, pale and translucent against the dark, necrotic metal fused to his palm. The Cursed Hoe didn't just sit in his grip; it nestled there, humming with a low, hungry frequency that traveled up his radius and settled in the marrow of his bones.
It wanted to work. It was screaming to be used.
Leo closed his eyes, and the memory of how he acquired this parasite washed over him, sharper and colder than the rain.
It had happened two days ago, shortly after his discharge from Dr. Hardy's clinic. Desperate to pay off the debt, Leo had climbed the mountain path to the Excavation Site, hoping to scavenge enough scrap metal to stay solvent.
He remembered the smell of the cave—dust, ancient stagnation, and something metallic that tasted like a battery on the tongue. Carter and Flora had been there, sifting through the upper strata for fossils. They had warned him.
"Don't dig past the clay line," Flora had said, adjusting her glasses. "The ancients buried their mistakes deep for a reason."
Leo hadn't listened. He was a man of science, and to him, "cursed" was just a superstition for "misunderstood technology." He had dug until his shovel hit a pocket of air. The ground had collapsed, dropping him into a lower chamber that hadn't seen light in a millennium.
There, resting on a pedestal of grey stone, was the hoe.
It hadn't looked dangerous. It looked efficient. As a student of engineering, Leo appreciated the curve of the handle, the balance of the head. It was a tool designed for maximum output. He had reached out, intending to weigh it, to analyze its metallurgy.
The moment his skin brushed the leather grip, the analysis ended.
It wasn't a magnetic pull; it was a biological fusion. The leather had constricted, tightening like a tourniquet. A shock of absolute cold had spiked through his chest, stopping his breath. He remembered gasping, trying to pry it off with his other hand, but it was like trying to peel off his own fingernails.
Carter had slid down the embankment, his face pale. "You touched it," the archaeologist had whispered, terrified. "It's a kinetic siphon. It converts biological lifespan into mechanical force. It eats time, Leo."
Now, sitting in his shed, Leo looked at the black metal.
The Witch Princess had mocked him for not using it. Why didn't you shield the crops? she had asked.
It was a valid question. With a single swing of this tool, Leo knew he could have raised an earthen wall to block the water. He could have tilled the entire field in seconds. He could have generated enough heat to evaporate the flood.
He had the power of a god strapped to his wrist.
But he also remembered his visit to Vesta's farm. He remembered Marlin standing in the perfect, weed-free rows, holding a simple iron hoe. Marlin hadn't used magic. He had used leverage. He had used an understanding of the soil's density, the root structure, and the wind patterns.
Marlin had data. Leo only had force.
"If I use you now," Leo whispered to the cursed tool, "I learn nothing."
That was the crux of the problem. If he used the Cursed Hoe to till the land, the crop would grow, but he wouldn't know why. He wouldn't understand the soil drainage. He wouldn't understand the nutrient cycling. He would just be a battery powering a machine he didn't comprehend.
And when the machine eventually killed him—because the energy cost was absolute—he would die ignorant.
"You are the experimental variable," Leo murmured, re-wrapping the bandage tight around the metal. "But I don't have a baseline yet. I don't have a control group."
He couldn't manipulate the curse until he understood the reality it was distorting. He needed to know what "normal" farming felt like, down to the calorie, so he could measure exactly what the tool was taking from him. He needed to replicate Marlin's results with iron before he dared to exceed them with magic.
Leo stood up. He felt the heavy drag of the tool on his arm, a constant, nagging hunger.
He walked to the corner of the shed and picked up the cheap, rusty Iron Hoe he had brought from the city. It was heavy, unbalanced, and crude. It blistered his hands and strained his back.
It was perfect.
He walked out into the rain-soaked night. The mud sucked at his boots. The 3x3 grid was gone, washed away by the Witch's lesson.
He found a new patch of grey, unbroken hardpan. He positioned his feet. He adjusted his grip on the iron handle, ignoring the black parasite pulsing beneath the bandages on his right hand.
He swung the iron.
Clank.
The shockwave rattled his teeth. He had moved a pebble.
Leo swung again. And again.
He would break this valley with his own sweat first. He would earn the data points one blister at a time. And one day, when he understood the equation of the earth perfectly, he would unwrap the black tool.
But not tonight. Tonight, he was just a man in the mud, gathering the evidence he needed to survive.