Almost anyone will say yes to this job. That is the difficulty.
My name is Ren Kagetsuki, and I am one of the people you are trying to judge, so take the following with that in view.
Five things get said to people in your position. Two of them I used to say myself, in the fifteen years I was paid to lay curses rather than take them off.
“Someone very close to you has done this”
Said before anything has been looked at, this is not a reading. It is a sentence that is true of almost everybody, because almost everybody has one relationship that has gone wrong.
Watch what it does to you. You go away and start sorting your family and your friends into suspects, and by the next conversation you have supplied the name yourself, and it will come back to you as confirmation.
A reading that is worth anything produces something you did not hand over.
“This is the strongest one I have ever seen”
Sometimes followed by a larger figure, sometimes by a second rite that was not mentioned at the start.
Severity is real and it varies. What should make you stop is severity that is announced rather than described, and that arrives at the same moment as a new price.
“It has to be done tonight”
Nothing in this work has a deadline that falls inside the window in which you could think about it.
Things get heavier over months, not over a Tuesday evening. A date that lands before you can sleep on it was chosen for what it does to you, not for what it does to the working.
“I can tell you exactly who it was”
This is the first of the two I used to say.
A name is the most saleable object in this trade. It is what people want more than the removal, it can be produced out of nothing, and it can never be checked. I gave names out for years and I was paid well for it.
Some of those names were wrong. I know what a wrong one costs, because it is not paid by me. It is paid by a sister who stops being spoken to, a colleague who is quietly cut out, a marriage that does not survive the suspicion.
I will tell you the direction a thing came from when a reading shows me one. I will not hand you a person, and you should be careful of anyone who will.
“I will send it back and make them suffer”
The second one, and the one I sold the most of.
It works because it is offered at the exact hour a person is angriest, and because it sounds like justice rather than what it is, which is a second curse being sold to someone who came in to have the first one taken off.
A return is not that. What was sent goes back down the line it came along, and the sender receives what they made. Nothing is added to it. I do not add anything to it, because adding something is the job I stopped doing.
Anyone offering to build you something extra is not removing what you have. They are starting a second one in your name.
Who can remove a voodoo curse, and how to test them
Tradition matters less than people expect. Once a thing is on a person it is a line running from an anchor to a body, and a line has no dialect, which is set out here: why the tradition does not change the removal.
What you can test instead is whether they are looking. Do this before you pay anybody.
- Write down one concrete detail and keep it back. A specific date something began, an object involved, a room it is worst in.
- Send everything except that detail. Your name, your date of birth, what has been happening.
- Offer no names and no theories. Do not say who you suspect. Do not say what you think it is.
- Read what comes back for anything you did not give them. A direction, a period of time, a place. It does not have to be the withheld detail. It has to be something that did not come out of your own message.
- If everything in the reply is a rearrangement of what you sent, you have your answer, and it cost you nothing to find out.
While you are deciding
Coarse salt in a hot bath, fifteen to twenty minutes, rinsed off from the head down. No bath is not a problem, and most of the world does not have one. Salt in a bowl of hot water over the shoulders, or worked in wet palms over the neck and wrists, rinsed downward.
Then coarse salt dry-fried five minutes until it stops crackling, in two small cones by your door, changed each morning.
Three nights of that takes the weight off and buys you the room to choose properly. It will not close the line, but nobody is asking you to decide tonight.
What happens when you write to me, what it costs, and the cases I turn away: how I work.
Ask me for the name of the person and I will tell you the same thing I have told you here.
