Chapter 30
1 May, Sunday.
8:00 a.m.
Something completely unexpected happened.
The Six Eyes detected a presence at the door. It was his sworn rival.
Gojo Satoru shot out of bed, bared his teeth in a deliberately ferocious grin, and yanked the door open.
Geto Suguru stood there alone, bangs perfectly straight, posture ramrod erect.
Was this a declaration of war?
Satoru's cursed energy flared; his fingers rose instinctively, ready to strike.
Suguru swept his gaze over him with unprecedented focus, an attitude far more terrifying than mere rivalry.
"Gojo," he said evenly, "come out with me today. I want us to hunt Grade-1 and Special Grade cursed spirits together."
Satoru stared. "No thanks."
Suguru snapped his fingers.
Black vortices blossomed behind him like blooming nightshade, and a grotesque parade of cursed spirits poured out.
"Play with as many of my spirits as you like."
"Deal."
For one delirious heartbeat Satoru heard "play with me as much as you like," and there was no universe in which he would refuse.
Ten minutes later he was practically bouncing at Suguru's heels as they left campus, grinning from ear to ear.
The streets teemed with groups of laughing teenagers.
He had a classmate walking beside him.
From the shadows near the school gate, Asou Akiya watched Suguru finally succeed in dragging the walking natural disaster away.
With the greatest variable safely removed from campus, Akiya's heart settled at last. The nightmare of social execution faded into memory.
9:30 a.m.
After an eternity of silent begging, the Tokyo postal courier arrived.
Tears pricked Akiya's eyes as he accepted the envelope addressed in his own handwriting. He pressed it gently. Yes, exactly the thickness of the novel he had written.
Thank you, dependable postal service.
The letter had not gone astray.
He forced his face into calm neutrality, hugged the envelope to his chest, and hurried back to the boys' dormitory. No suspicious behaviour in public.
Only when the door clicked shut and the room was truly belonged to him alone did the grin break free, wide and villainous.
He drew out the lighter that had once served to light Ieri Shoko's cigarettes, flicked it open with theatrical relish, and held the flame to the corner of the envelope.
Time to burn the root of all disasters.
The flame kissed the paper.
He froze.
A faint, almost imperceptible trace of cursed energy clung to the surface.
A sorcerer had touched this letter.
…A sorcerer has touched this letter?
In an instant, Asou Akiya's face drained of colour and raw fear flashed across his eyes.
The instincts of a sorcerer flared awake, and he saw it clearly: a thin, unnatural film of cursed energy coated the envelope's surface.
His mind raced through every possible suspect in a heartbeat. Lord Tengen. Kenjaku. The faculty at Jujutsu High. Every source of dread this world held ballooned inside him until it threatened to burst.
Mercifully, the terror did not last long. As the cursed energy rippled and shifted, he recognised its signature.
It was his own.
His heart lurched. He realised with stunned clarity that he himself had cursed the letter.
The long, agonising wait and the dread that had gnawed at him for months had condensed into this dark residue.
"Thank the heavens Gojo isn't here," was his second, almost frantic thought. Cursed energy born from the same source as his own would never escape the Six Eyes. If Satoru had seen the envelope, curiosity would have dragged him straight to it.
At Jujutsu High, exorcising cursed energy was basic coursework.
Weak curses could be crushed with brute force.
Stronger ones required precision: find the knot at the heart of the curse, untie it, and the affliction vanished like smoke.
Akiya flicked the lighter open and closed, lost in thought. His mind cooled and sharpened.
His first impulse was to calculate the letter's value now, and the strange, intimate bond between himself and the cursed energy clinging to it.
What exactly was the nature of this curse?
Fear of the novel itself?
Fear of the future?
Fear that his foreknowledge would be exposed?
Or fear of death?
His gaze turned frigid, thoughts drifting far from the orthodox path of a sorcerer.
If this curse were to take shape as a cursed spirit, what grade would it reach?
What technique would it possess? Could it be commanded? After all, he lived beside a Cursed Spirit Manipulator who could bend any spirit to his will, and the possibility burned bright in his mind.
Toji Fushiguro had once tamed a low-grade cursed spirit called Inventory, a rare spatial-storage type that functioned like a walking armoury.
The official records stated plainly that Toji had never trusted Inventory.
He had trained it like a dog, beating obedience into its instincts until it obeyed without question.
Akiya weighed profit against loss.
This cursed energy had gathered because of him.
Exorcising it would be a terrible waste.
Before entering Jujutsu High, he had been nothing more than a failed sorcerer, untrained, unguided, leaking cursed energy like a cracked vessel whenever fear took hold. That leakage had fermented, month after month, until it produced this frail, trembling curse that was as weak as he himself had once been.
If he let it continue…
If a cursed spirit were born from it…
It would strike him first, without question or mercy.
Yet Asou Akiya had always been skilled at turning crises into opportunities. His mind reversed direction. What if this became a hidden card outside the original plot? A cursed spirit born from his own terror, shaped by his own hand. If he could master it, might it grant him a cursed technique of his own?
Like the bond between Yuta Okkotsu and Rika Orimoto in the original story, where the curser and the cursed were bound by unbreakable causality.
This was entanglement at the root of cause and effect itself.
He whispered to the empty room, voice trembling with awe, "What do I fear more: death itself, or never living loudly enough to shake the heavens?"
"Good heavens," he breathed, a low, delirious laugh rising in his throat as though he had unearthed a treasure meant for no one else. Madness flickered in his eyes. "It's a knife. A knife forged for me alone… pressed right against my throat."
"It was born from one insignificant human's terror of death."
"This is a curse that should never have existed."
In the world of jujutsu, love is the strongest curse of all. It birthed the special-grade vengeful spirit Rika Orimoto.
Hatred is the most powerless curse. Yet from hatred arose the King of Curses himself, Ryomen Sukuna, strongest in a thousand years.
Every conceivable flavour of curse has spawned its own spirit. The four great natural-disaster special grades were born from humanity's primal dread of the earth, the sea, volcanoes, and mankind itself.
Yet in the entire millennium-long history of sorcery, there has never been a curse born from "human fear of death."
Is death not the ultimate terror of all living things?
The one thing the world treats every creature equally to is death.
In the original story, Ryomen Sukuna could revive Itadori Yuji only because Yuji's body still clung to a thread of life.
Kenjaku has lived a thousand years only by stealing new bodies, piloting fresh vessels with the same ancient brain.
True resurrection (pulling the dead back across the boundary) has never once appeared.
Does that mean the world itself fears any human or curse gaining the power to shatter the wall between life and death?
To mock mortality.
To trespass into the domain of gods.
"You're thinking too far ahead," Akiya muttered, forcing his soaring expectations back to earth.
To birth a curse truly that terrifying, the one who cursed would need to be terrifyingly powerful himself.
Even Gojo Satoru, born to shatter balance itself, had not provoked the cursed spirits' side into producing anything beyond the established order.
The leader of the four great disasters, the special-grade spirit Jogo, could not defeat Gojo Satoru.
The leader of the four great natural-disaster spirits, the special-grade cursed spirit Jogo, could not defeat Gojo Satoru.
The negative energy supplied by Asou Akiya alone fell far short of the minimum threshold required to birth a special-grade cursed spirit embodying humanity's fear of death.
Even if every sorcerer in the entire jujutsu world pooled their terror, the result would be the same.
He had mailed the letter before the Indian Ocean tsunami struck. Under the laws of cause and effect, the subsequent deaths of two hundred and ninety thousand people and the tidal wave of mortal dread that followed did not flow into this envelope.
One could only imagine how extraordinarily rare and precious this cursed residue truly was.
"I cannot bear to destroy you," Akiya whispered to the envelope in the softest voice, tender as a father addressing his child, "not before you have the chance to destroy me."
"Come, curse me. I will curse you in return."
"I need your technique."
"I will tame you, nurture you with my own power, raise you into existence…"
"Ha ha ha ha ha!!" Laughter burst from him like shattering glass. Without a moment's hesitation he tore the letter to shreds, stuffed the pieces into his mouth, and chewed savagely.
He reinforced his stomach with cursed energy, swallowed the cursed residue that shared his own bloodline, and crushed every last trace of negative emotion. "Did you really think I would say that? That I would let you be born? That I would allow a special-grade cursed spirit harmful to humanity to crawl into the world?"
"The reason a secret remains a secret is that no one knows it. That is the safest way!"
"What does it matter if I have no technique of my own!"
"I am the classmate of Gojo and Geto. How could I commit the foolish mistakes of lesser men!"
After devouring more than twenty thousand words of his own draft, Akiya clutched his aching stomach. A wave of icy nausea rose inside him.
He stared out the window with cold, empty eyes and laughed again, the sound of a child who rips the wings off a dragonfly in front of adults.
[I made the right choice. I am a sorcerer. I will never step onto the path of a curse user.]
[You agree… don't you?]
[You who have watched over the Six Eyes and the Star Plasma Vessel for a thousand years…]
[Lord Tengen.]
Deep beneath Tokyo Jujutsu High lies the Star Rope Palace. Through centuries of changing eras, its master has observed the jujutsu world from the shadows yet rarely intervened.
At the very core of the barrier, an ancient being whose form was no longer human furrowed its brow deeply.
This was a person it had never anticipated.
Not an enemy, but a sorcerer with clear boundaries.
Besides Fushiguro Toji, who had disrupted fate and causality with his Heavenly Restriction, another existence capable of throwing destiny into chaos had appeared.
The future of the jujutsu world…
A faint spark of anticipation kindled in Lord Tengen's heart. One piece of jade had already shattered, two more were growing, and now a fourth piece of jade had entered the board. What ending would this change, unseen for a thousand years, ultimately bring?
…
Sunday night. Asou Akiya slipped into another fantastical dream.
The dream had been seeded by the thought he carried into sleep: [If, in some future world, I had not destroyed the novel but instead published it openly and everyone simply laughed it off with good humour, that would be true release.]
["Do you like me, Akiya?"] The twenty-eight-year-old spicy-teacher asked with wicked amusement.
["I wouldn't mind,"] the cult leader in saffron robes declared with perfect solemnity, ["as long as you both lie down first."]
From a god's-eye view, he beheld the adult version of "Asou Akiya."
Tall, features blurred yet undeniably handsome, standing relaxed and fearless between his two old classmates, presence in no way inferior to theirs.
He heard the words spill from "his" own lips, intimate and low.
["Not a chance."]
["I am a man who has read countless books and survived baptism by every possible fetish."]
["And now, I am a card-carrying pure-love supremacist."]
In the dream, Akiya smiled with perfect understanding, wholeheartedly approving of everything the adult "self" had said.
After exorcising the demon in his heart, he lay on his Jujutsu High dormitory bed in utter bliss. His soul floated like a white camellia on the open sea (exactly the sort of camellia Zhang Ailing feared: better to burn brilliantly than fade into mediocrity).
I do not yet know what kind of love I will meet.
My heart is monstrously selfish. It wishes only to pour everything into one person, to offer one person a love vast and tidal.
All of you… are nothing more than phantoms.