"Is it mainly the lack of roads that has you isolated? Creating roads from whole cloth isn't really my skillset, but I may be able to find something that would help."

She's curious whether and how the priestess will talk about the monsters Weiss mentioned.

"It's not so much the physical construction of the roads as warding and patrolling them against Curses. I can't keep up a hundred miles of road ward all by myself. The village itself has been purified often and long enough that they don't bother us here, and they're less dense in this region than in the worst cursed lands anyway, but... It means you mostly get adventurous young people or big caravans."

"I see! My planet has monsters too, but they're not usually so populous as to require warding the entire road network, and I don't think we have a generalized way to make them uninterested in an area. How does purification work, exactly?"

"Purification is... A magical act that is available to chosen priestesses of the Light Gods. The inner experience of it is fairly difficult to describe. There are rituals, and it's debatable what the purpose of different elements of the rituals are. To make our request visible to the light gods? To help with habit forming and the correct state of mind? To attract curse energy to oneself so it can be handed off to the gods for filtering? Simply to give us faith that it can, will, and does work?"

Shrug.

"It works. With focus priestesses can feel cursed energy, like oily sand covering the land and mixing in the water and hanging like dust in the air, and so can a few other types of beings like kitsunes, and wizards if they care to learn the spell to, and purification slowly cleanses all that. Cursed energy is what curse monsters are made of. If you simply stab them, they will dissolve back to that miasma and return some other season. Purification can get rid of the stuff permanently, and also draw ward lines and talismans that curse energy is weakened and dispersed and repelled by."

"Huh, alright then. So if I do run into and kill a monster, I should consider going and getting a priestess so that it will stay down? Or do you mostly just keep populated areas purified, and figure that will eventually get rid of all of the cursed energy? Or is it being generated from somewhere?"

"If you run into a monster, you should tell the travellers' house so they can add it to the data they collect for statistics on these things. Ah- Communication from the gods is rare, but past messages from them said that we will eventually get rid of all the cursed energy."

She looks uncertain for a moment. 

"...I'll be more direct since you're an otherworlder. The short version is that during the Cataclysm, the Light Gods could have chosen to mostly prevent the Cataclysm, or to permanently destroy the Dark Gods. And they chose the latter. This was long long ago by now, though. Cursed energy is decidedly non godlike remains of the Dark Gods. It is strongly forbidden to attempt to manipulate, gather, or influence it, anything that could possibly look like godbuilding. There is an inquisition dedicated to preventing study and use of cursed energy, and I and most people should very much appreciate their work. Incidents are rare but bad."

"I'm all in favor of statistics! It's good that things will eventually be cleaned up. I promise to leave cursed energy alone until I know more about it; maybe one of my more experienced teammates will recognize it and know how to help clean it up faster."

"In the mean time — curses are an important topic, but we sort of wandered away from what there is to see and do in Namoshed. Are there any local attractions or delicacies that I should make sure to experience?"