The rain soaked through Adaeze’s secondhand

Oxford shoes as he walked out of Lagos

University’s Senate Building, his expulsion

notice clutched in a hand that still smelled of

palm oil and burnt incense. Three weeks prior,

he’d passed his final exams with top marks — but

the registrar found his fees paid in crisp Naira

notes folded inside a goat’s skull, left on the

bursar’s desk with a single feather from a raven.

The university didn’t ask where the money came

from. They only asked: who blessed it?

He’d thought the curse was buried with his

grandfather’s bones in Umuahia. But the old

man’s last words — “E go use your hand for what

you no dey carry” — had been whispered over a

shrine of crushed chalk and kola nut, before the

pastor from Onitsha burned the whole thing down.

Now the curse had teeth. Every Naira he stole

from the underground “spiritual financing” rings

began to bleed black at the edges. The bills

turned brittle. The coins rang like broken bells.

His landlord’s son woke screaming every night,

whispering about a man with no eyes who counted

his teeth.

The university’s expulsion wasn’t just paperwork.

It was a spiritual contract broken. The curse

demanded balance. That night, Adaeze walked into

the abandoned chapel behind the Faculty of Law,

where the old altar still held the rusted iron

cage his grandfather used to trap ancestral debt.

He didn’t pray. He laid down his last five

thousand — the one note that still smelled like

fresh earth — and broke his left pinky with a

hammer he’d kept since secondary school. The

bone cracked like dry yam. The blood pooled. And

from the shadows behind the broken stained glass,

a woman in a faded Ankara wrapper stepped

forward. She didn’t speak. She took the

bloodsoaked note. Then she handed him a single

page — his original admission letter, signed in

his father’s handwriting, dated 1962.

The curse didn’t vanish. It changed shape. The

next morning, the university’s records corrected

themselves. His name reappeared on the roll. The

money? Gone. All of it. The goatskin scrolls,

the charms, the oilstained ledgers of the

“spiritual lenders” — each one found smouldering

in their owners’ rooms, no fire started, no

smoke left. Adaeze didn’t graduate with honours.

He graduated with silence. And in the compound

of his uncle’s house in Surulere, his mother

wept not for his expulsion — but because he

finally came home without a single naira in his

pocket, and the ghosts stopped calling his name

at midnight.

The rule was never spoken: you cannot buy

knowledge with blood you didn’t spill yourself.

The second rule? The ancestors don’t care how

rich you are — only how clean your hands are

when you hold the book.