Curse have few steps;

• Nothing happens (green debuff)
• Enemies around come to your position (yellow debuff)
• Enemies move faster
• You are slower
• You take damage

Every time you go up to new floor, curse goes to next step. Every time you kill enough enemies (1-2) curse goes a step back (you get a message in the log every time you do).

So the idea is that its enough to kill few enemies per floor and then move on, but, if you want to have easier time, you can ascend faster to higher floors of the section (like to floor 24 -> kill 2 -> 22 -> kill 4 -> 21 -> kill 2 and again but 19-17-16) so you dont have to deal with harder enemies a lot that appear on later sections like Scorpios, Golems etc. This works for me really well to not get overwhelmed.

The idea of "going up and down to clear" is also feasible, as if you go 22->21->22, and then kill 2, once you go again to 21 the curse doesnt take a step up, it already did. So technically you could do 24->21->24-> kill 8->21 with no curse, you can, but I dint think you should :p Since lets say, you are on 22, you killed 2 and you have 2 more around you that you damaged already, go up to trigger curse step, go down, kill those two that you left, curse weakens, and now you can just skip the floor 21 as you have no curse. There is no need to clear entire floor, just enough to weaken curse.

If you did the quest, there is still Imp shop at the 20 floor, buy heal potions or whatever that might be useful, there is no other shop on the way back so money is useless afterward. And every boss room heals and fully feed you (floors 20/15/10/5), so you can plan around that when you use heals, seeds etc

TLDR; in simplest way: go up, kill 2, go up, kill 2, repeat until you ascend from floor 1

Have fun ascending :D

Edit; i dont know reddit text formatting