The manuscript about the curse of the princes from the noble house of Cantacuzen was made by an official of the detective department, Stepan Andreevich Volkov. While still quite a young man, this official was appointed by his superiors to conduct an investigation in the noble house of Prince Antiochus Cantemir, who on his father’s side belonged to the glorious Moldavian family of Cantemir, and on his mother’s side to the family of the Cantacuzin princes. And then a strange incident happened in the said house. After all, the Cantacuzenes were from Wallachia and brought with them to Russia the dark knowledge of their ancestors. And so it happened that his dead slave, who had risen from the grave, showed up in the house of Prince Antiochus, and this led to a chain of mysterious events. At first, it seemed to everyone that the ancient legends about ghouls who rose from the dead had become a reality. Indeed, in fairy tales that can be heard to this day in Wallachia, Serbia, and Dalmatia, the ghoul is a dead sorcerer and he kills people by sucking their blood. But then the matter became more complicated, because even more ancient secrets appeared in it, connected with the mysterious composition known as the “Water of Life.”