There is a difference between someone hating you and someone working on you.
Both reach a person. Only one of them keeps a calendar.
My name is Ren Kagetsuki. For fifteen years I was the one being paid to keep it, so the thing I look for first is not a symptom. It is a schedule.
A bad situation cannot keep time. A practitioner has to.
A curse and a spell are not the same thing
Ill will on its own does reach people. Held long enough and aimed precisely enough, it arrives. We call that nen, and it is ordinary.
It behaves like weather. It comes in when the person is dwelling on you, and it thins when their attention moves.
A working is different. Somebody sat down, prepared, and did something in a sequence.
And once it is built, it runs whether they are thinking about you or not.
That is the whole difference, and it changes everything about how it comes off.
The first sign: something of yours left your hands
A working needs a stand-in for the person. In Japanese it is katashiro, a substitute body.
Your full name and your date of birth will do. So will a photograph, a few hairs, a piece of clothing worn against the skin, or something you handled often.
So the question I ask is not what you are feeling. It is what has gone missing.
- A photograph taken from an album, or asked for and never explained
- A scarf, a shirt, a hairbrush that never came back
- Someone asking for your date of birth in a conversation that had no reason to need it
- A gift you did not ask for, from somebody with no reason to give one
That last one runs the other way. Not something taken, something planted.
People remember these immediately when asked, and almost never mention them unprompted, because at the time it seemed like nothing.
The second sign: it arrives in waves
This is the one that cannot be faked by a situation, and it is the reason I asked you to think about a calendar.
Rites are not done once. They are done in counts.
Seven nights. Twenty-one days. The same day of each month. Whatever the tradition, the work is repeated on a schedule, and the pressure follows the schedule.
So what people describe is not a steady decline. It is a bad stretch, then a quiet fortnight, then another bad stretch.
And the stretches are roughly the same length, and the gaps are roughly the same length.
Illness does not do that. Money trouble does not do that. A difficult marriage does not do that.
Write down the last six months in weeks and mark the bad ones. If a rhythm appears on the page, bring it to me.
The third sign: an hour
Here, work of this kind is done in the small hours. The traditional window is between two and three in the morning.
It is not superstition about clocks. It is the hour with the fewest people awake and the least attention in the air.
People under a working wake in it. Not every night, and not for any reason they can name.
If you have been waking at the same time for months and have stopped mentioning it because it sounds like nothing, mention it.
How a worked curse behaves differently
It is narrower. Hate spills everywhere, and a working goes where it was aimed and mostly nowhere else.
So a life that is failing in one specific area while the rest holds together is often craft rather than feeling.
It also ignores cleansing.
Ordinary ill will lifts for a while when you clear the residue, because there is nothing holding it in place. A working resumes on its next date as if nothing had happened.
If you have cleansed, felt the relief, and then watched it come back on a schedule, that is not you doing it wrong. That is the shape of the thing: the six signs I weigh heaviest.
If someone put a spell on you
You do not need to get it back. People ask me this constantly and the answer is no.
Retrieving an object means going near the person who took it, and that is the one thing I would ask you not to do.
The work is done on the line, not on the object. Cut the line and the object becomes a photograph in a drawer.
And what was sent goes back along the line it came down: how a curse is returned to its sender.
You perform nothing, you face nobody, and nothing comes back on you. I remove. I do not send.
What to bring me
Three things, and none of them require you to be certain of anything.
The last six months marked week by week. Anything of yours that went missing or arrived unasked. And the hour you wake, if you wake.
From that I can usually tell you whether you are dealing with a person’s feeling or a person’s work, and those are taken off in different ways.
Write it to me badly, out of order, however it comes. I will sort the order.
