Curse technique: Aurum. (Latin word for Gold)

This is pretty cool concept but since the idea is the most un-unique thing EVER, it overlaps with a few other techniques I’ve Alr seen some amazing people make.

But I can’t lie this technique gets better the more you read it, but trust me I had the same amount of fun writing it and out as I did making it. You’ll like it if you give it a chance. I think…..

CURSED TECHNIQUE: AURUM

Aurum is an inherited cursed technique based around gold and the ridiculous amount of meaning humanity has attached to it.

At its most basic, the user can create and manipulate gold using cursed energy. They can melt it, move it, stretch it into thin sheets, pull it into wires, compress it into heavy chunks, coat things in it, etc.

And if that were the whole technique, it’d honestly be pretty boring.

The important part is that Aurum doesn’t just recognize gold as a metal.

It recognizes what humans have spent thousands of years using gold for.

Gold has been money. Tribute. Religious offerings. Jewelry. Royal decoration. Inheritance. Treasure. Currency reserves. Status symbols. Burial goods. Something people crossed oceans looking for and killed each other trying to possess.

Eventually, humanity basically looked at this weird yellow metal that doesn’t rust and collectively decided:

“Yeah. This stuff means value.”

Aurum takes that relationship literally.

Its gold can hold value.

That’s the entire technique.

Everything else comes from figuring out increasingly weird things you can do with that rule.

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The easiest way to understand Aurum

Think of every piece of cursed gold as both gold and a bank account.

The user can put value into it.

The gold remembers that value.

Then they can spend it later.

So the entire cursed technique follows three steps:

Invest → Store → Spend.

For example, the user could sacrifice some of their cursed energy into a little golden coin.

That energy isn’t simply lost. Its value has been stored inside the gold.

Later, they could take that stored value and dump it into an ordinary knife.

Gold crawls across the blade.

For however long that investment lasts, the knife becomes much more dangerous than it has any right to be.

Once the stored value is exhausted, the gold flakes away.

And underneath?

Still the same shitty knife.

That’s Gilding.

And that’s basically how you should think about the entire technique.

The user isn’t creating value from nowhere.

They’re constantly moving it around.

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Cursed Gold

Before getting into all the historical bullshit, there’s an important detail:

It’s still gold.

Aurum’s gold retains most of the actual metal’s properties.

Gold is ridiculously heavy for its size, extremely soft, incredibly malleable, doesn’t corrode easily and conducts energy extremely well.

That gives the user some surprisingly practical options.

A tiny amount can be beaten into gold leaf and spread across a huge surface.

It can be drawn into extremely thin gold wire, which the user can run cursed energy through like circuitry.

Or they can do the complete opposite and concentrate it.

Gold is dense as hell.

So instead of making a giant golden sword—which would look awesome but be a terrible use of gold—the user can make small, extremely heavy objects and launch them.

Sometimes the ancient inherited technique representing mankind’s obsession with wealth really does boil down to:

throw brick.

And brick hurts.

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The Rules of Investment

Aurum has existed for a long time.

That matters because previous users gradually discovered ways to strengthen it through binding vows.

Rather than letting Aurum vaguely decide what counts as valuable, the family essentially imposed rules on its economy.

The biggest one is simple:

You cannot spend what you don’t have.

Aurum cannot counterfeit value.

If the user wants a huge effect, something has to pay for it.

Their cursed energy.

Gold.

An object.

A cursed tool.

Something stored by a previous user.

Whatever it is, the books have to balance.

That restriction is part of what makes Aurum so powerful.

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There’s another rule that makes things stranger:

Something willingly given is worth more than something taken.

Steal someone’s expensive watch?

Useful.

Someone willingly gives you the cheap watch their father left them?

Potentially much more valuable.

Because Aurum doesn’t understand value purely as market price.

It recognizes investment.

That person cared about the watch.

They surrendered something that meant something to them.

Human beings have been doing exactly this with gold for thousands of years—offerings to gods, tribute to rulers, gifts between families, dowries, inheritances.

So Aurum gives voluntary exchange additional weight.

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Then there’s ownership.

Something genuinely belonging to the user is much easier for Aurum to manipulate as value.

Stolen objects are inefficient.

Purchased objects are cleaner.

Gifts are extremely clean.

Inherited objects are particularly strange because their history doesn’t disappear when ownership changes.

Which leads into the really dangerous part.

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The Hoard

Aurum isn’t scary because its current user is unbelievably powerful.

Aurum is scary because people have been saving for a very, very long time.

The technique can preserve stored value between generations.

Every inheritor receives the accumulated wealth of the previous ones.

So somewhere belonging to this family is an absolutely bizarre collection of human history.

Ancient coins.

Bullion.

Jewelry.

Cursed tools.

Religious offerings.

Weapons.

Wedding rings.

Teeth.

Treasures.

Gifts.

Payment.

Things bought legally.

Things stolen during wars.

Things nobody remembers stealing.

Things whose original civilizations might not even exist anymore.

Some objects are financially valuable.

Some are historically valuable.

Some were incredibly meaningful to one random person 300 years ago.

Aurum remembers all of it.

That’s the Hoard.

And every generation is taught the same thing:

Don’t waste it.

Because when the current user spends something accumulated by their great-great-grandmother, they’re not getting that back.

Their strength is therefore partially borrowed from dead people.

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Extension Technique: Gilding

This is probably what you’d actually see the user doing most often in a fight.

Gilding takes value stored inside Aurum and invests it into something else.

Gold spreads across the target as that investment occurs.

The more the user spends, the more absurdly effective the object becomes.

Take a normal coin.

It’s worth practically nothing.

The user could put an enormous amount of stored value into it and flick it.

For a couple seconds, that stupid little coin is carrying generations of accumulated investment.

It hits accordingly.

Then—

crack.

The gold covering breaks apart.

And somebody just got their ribs demolished by pocket change.

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But Gilding works defensively too.

Cheap jacket?

Invest in it.

Gold threads spread through the fabric and temporarily reinforce it.

Broken weapon?

Invest enough and squeeze another fight out of it.

Weak cursed tool?

You can temporarily push its performance far beyond where it belongs.

The important part is that Gilding never truly improves what something is.

It only makes it perform as though it were worth more.

That’s why the name matters.

Human beings have covered ordinary materials in gold forever because suddenly they look precious.

Aurum just makes the lie temporarily real.

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Extension Technique: Midas

And eventually someone in this bloodline asked the obvious question:

“If we can put value into something… can we just buy the whole thing?”

Unfortunately:

Yes.

Midas allows the user to completely purchase something through Aurum.

If the transaction succeeds, the object is converted into cursed gold and absorbed into the technique.

But Aurum first determines its price.

A rock?

Basically nothing.

A building?

Getting expensive.

A cursed tool?

Potentially very expensive.

A living human?

Now we’re talking about an enormous investment.

A powerful sorcerer actively reinforcing their body with cursed energy?

Good fucking luck.

That’s why Midas isn’t an instant-kill touch.

The user doesn’t touch you and declare:

“Gold.”

They touch you and Aurum essentially goes:

PRICE: ¥—

Then the user has to decide whether you’re actually worth buying.

And sometimes the answer is simply:

“Absolutely not.”

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Debasement

This one isn’t actually part of Aurum.

It’s something sorcerers started calling the experience of fighting Aurum.

Because an experienced user becomes horrifyingly good at thinking in terms of expenditure.

You throw an enormous attack.

They spend very little avoiding it.

You use RCT.

They immediately realize how much cursed energy that probably cost you.

You destroy one of their weapons.

They decide repairing it would cost more than replacing it and simply abandon it.

You prepare another huge attack.

And they smile.

Not because they’re stronger.

Because they know you can’t afford to keep fighting like this.

Eventually opponents start feeling strangely poor.

They become stingy with their own cursed energy.

“Should I heal that?”

“Should I use my Domain yet?”

“Can I afford another maximum-output attack?”

Nothing supernatural is happening to them.

Aurum isn’t draining their confidence.

The user has simply forced them to start thinking like they do.

Veteran sorcerers call that feeling Debasement.

You’re still just as wealthy as you were five minutes ago.

You’ve only now realized how quickly you’re spending it.

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MAXIMUM TECHNIQUE:

GOLDEN CALF — LIQUIDATION

This is probably my favorite part of Aurum.

Because the user’s family has spent centuries teaching one lesson:

Preserve wealth.

Don’t waste the Hoard.

Add to it.

Protect it.

Pass more to your successor than you received.

Golden Calf is what happens when an Aurum user says:

“Fuck it.”

And begins spending everything.

The accumulated Hoard is poured into a single manifestation: a small, immaculate golden calf.

Not a giant bull.

Not a monster.

Not some armored Egyptian god.

Just a beautiful little golden calf.

And while it exists, the normal financial restraint of Aurum effectively disappears.

The user still has to pay for everything.

They just stop caring about the price.

Need ridiculous reinforcement?

Buy it.

Need a huge amount of gold?

Buy it.

Midas says converting that enemy would normally be prohibitively expensive?

Buy them anyway.

The calf keeps liquidating the Hoard to fund it.

But the money isn’t an abstract meter going down.

Actual history is disappearing.

That necklace an ancestor received as payment 200 years ago?

Gone.

A treasured cursed tool?

Gone.

Ancient offerings?

Gone.

Grandmother’s inheritance?

Gone.

Centuries of people carefully saying “save this for whoever comes after us”—

spent in five minutes.

That’s why it’s the Golden Calf.

The biblical Golden Calf represents people turning away from what was genuinely sacred and worshipping an object they created themselves.

Aurum’s version takes that insult even further.

The user sacrifices things with real history, sacrifice and meaning to create an idol representing their monetary worth.

They’re destroying everything valuable—

to become unbelievably “rich”.

For a little while.

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DOMAIN EXPANSION: False Heaven, Gilded Scales.
​Kanji concept: 偽天金秤 (Giten Kin'hadkari — "False Heaven Golden Scales")

And then we get to the strangest part of the technique.

Because you’d expect Aurum’s Domain to be the ultimate treasury.

Mountains of gold.

A palace.

A vault.

El Dorado.

Maybe the user sits on a giant throne.

Instead, Aurum does something almost embarrassingly pretentious.

The barrier closes.

Everything turns white.

The light is blinding.

The user’s clothes disappear beneath enormous flowing white robes and silk that seemingly grow directly from their body.

Gold dust covers them.

Gold embroidery.

Jewelry.

Little golden ornaments.

They suddenly look like someone trying way too hard to look divine.

That’s intentional.

Because this place isn’t Heaven.

It’s wealth pretending to be Heaven.

The Domain surrounds them with monuments from completely incompatible civilizations and religions, all thrown together without much concern for what they originally meant.

Shrines.

Columns.

Obelisks.

Religious architecture.

Royal imagery.

Monuments.

Everything is slowly being drowned beneath excessive gold.

You can barely tell what some of the original objects were.

Their meaning has been covered by their value.

And towering over everything is the centerpiece.

A gigantic golden idol resembling a crude interpretation of Ra.

Except it holds an enormous set of scales decorated with jackal imagery, clearly borrowing from Anubis and the weighing of the heart.

Historically?

It’s a mess.

That’s the point.

Aurum doesn’t believe in Egyptian religion.

It has taken things associated with gods, death, kings, judgment and wealth and mashed them together into something that looks expensive and sacred.

It isn’t worship.

It’s idolization.

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Sure-Hit: Weight of the Heart

And then this incredibly gaudy Domain does something genuinely miraculous.

It measures the value of a human life.

Everything.

What you’ve accomplished.

Who loves you.

What you’ve created.

What you’ve sacrificed.

What you own.

What you’ve lost.

People you’ve helped.

People you’ve hurt.

Your influence.

Your history.

Your potential up until this moment.

The Domain somehow understands all of it.

The scale moves.

And Aurum takes this incomprehensibly complicated portrait of an entire human existence…

…and converts it into money.

That’s it.

You might receive the most impossibly precise assessment of your entire existence:

¥4,871,392,551

Cool.

What the fuck are you supposed to do with that information?

Almost nothing.

It’s intentionally absurd.

The technique that can supposedly understand the worth of your entire existence still can’t resist putting a price tag on you.

But there’s a second measurement.

And that one matters.

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Greed

The Domain weighs how deeply the target idolizes possession.

Not simply money.

A poor person can be incredibly greedy.

A billionaire could theoretically score almost nothing.

It’s looking for that desire to have.

Money.

Power.

Status.

Beauty.

Recognition.

Objects.

Authority.

People.

Anything someone would begin sacrificing themselves or others just to possess.

Essentially, the scales ask:

How much of yourself would you sell to obtain what you want?

And however much of your heart Aurum determines has been consumed by that desire—

is how much of your body becomes gold.

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A tiny amount of greed?

Maybe your fingernail turns gold.

That’s awkward.

Moderate?

An arm.

A leg.

Patches of your torso.

More extreme?

Organs begin transforming.

Bone.

Muscle.

Face.

And someone whose entire life revolves around possession and wealth?

The scales tip.

Their whole body shines.

And they’re transformed into a solid golden statue.

They finally become the thing they valued most.

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And here’s the mechanical part that makes this belong to Aurum rather than being some random morality Domain.

Normally, Midas costs money.

If the user wants to turn you into gold, they have to buy you.

Inside the Domain?

Your greed pays the bill.

The more completely you’ve surrendered yourself to possession, the less Aurum’s user has to spend to purchase your body.

At the absolute extreme:

you pay for the entire thing yourself.

You literally buy your own execution.

Which also makes this Domain hilariously situational.

Against someone enormously powerful but genuinely uninterested in possession?

The user could spend all that cursed energy opening their Domain just to give the guy a golden pinky toe.

Against someone like Mei Mei?

…

Yeah.

Terrible day to be Mei Mei.

Thank you for reading all of that nonsense and hopefully you liked it, if you did say something you liked about it. Honestly means the world when I can share my ideas with some awesome people. 🌟