An entire gruelling July was finally drawing to a close, and Asou Akiya offered his professional review.
"I feel like I've been sealed inside a special-grade cursed object for a month."
"??"
Gojo Satoru and Geto Suguru, completely unable to pick up the dark-humour reference, fired back one after another.
"Little tangerine, have you ever even seen a special-grade cursed object?"
"Asou, our overtime hell wasn't that bad, was it?"
[To be accurate, it felt exactly like taking a one-month vacation inside Prison Realm.]
In his previous life he had seen special-grade cursed objects, Asou thought silently, and overtime really could be that terrifying.
In the original story, Gojo Satoru himself, freshly broken out of the special-grade cursed object Prison Realm, had described the sensation of being sealed as nothing less than endless, soul-crushing overtime. Time and space warped inside; from the outside it seemed only an instant, but the memory stretched into an eternity no one would ever want to relive.
…
July 30th.
Gojo Satoru took approved leave to attend a Gojo family event in the mundane world.
Hatsukaichi, Hiroshima Prefecture: the tiny thirty-square-kilometre island of Miyajima rose from the sea like a jewel. Vermilion torii gates stood directly in the water; shrines and temples dotted the hillsides, creating the famous vista that looked as though the gods of the ocean had been personally invited ashore.
Gojo Satoru was experiencing the Miyajima Kangen-sai* for the first time.
*{Note: The Kangen-sai is the most elaborate festival held on the sacred island of Miyajima. Introduced by Heike warlord Taira-no-kiyomori in the 12th century, it is held on June 17 according to the lunar calendar, which can fall anywhere between late July and early August.
Kangen is classical court music played on nine instruments; three types of stringed instrument (wagon, biwa, koto), three types of drums (kakko, taiko, shoko), and three types of flutes (sho, hichiriki, ryuteki). Kangen-sai is a floating festival, and the musicians are towed on a beautifully decorated craft, between Itsukushima Shrine and other shrines on Miyajima and the mainland, by some very energetic oarsmen in smaller boats.}
The evening sun still blazed. A lady's maid tried to hold a parasol over him for shade, only to be waved away. He followed the Gojo patriarch onto the ceremonial boat without ceremony.
Musicians and priests stood ready. Shrine attendants bustled to serve the honoured guests. The patriarch, speaking in refined Kyoto dialect, addressed the rarely seen Six-Eyed divine child.
"In ancient times, the Kyoto nobility would drift upon these waters and enjoy gagaku music from their boats. This was called kangengyū. We make merry with the gods; we travel alongside the gods."
The patriarch gently supported Gojo's wrist (never grasping the hand itself) and guided him with exquisite grace to his seat.
Gojo promptly ruined the picture by dropping onto the cushion like a sack of rice, slouching, legs splayed wide, posture so atrocious it probably gave the patriarch stomach cramps.
"Lord Satoru, there are outsiders present," the patriarch tried one last time.
"I watched a music festival in Yokohama. It's just listening to music," Gojo replied with the confidence of a seasoned veteran.
"This is refined gagaku* court music," the patriarch answered, voice thick with resignation.
*{Note: Gagaku (雅楽, lit. "elegant music") is a type of Japanese classical music that was historically used for imperial court music and dances. Gagaku was developed as court music of the Kyoto Imperial Palace, and its near-current form was established in the Heian period (794–1185) around the 10th century. Today, it is performed by the Board of Ceremonies in the Tokyo Imperial Palace. Gagaku is performed using wind, percussion, and string instruments. Each piece is based on a main melody which each instrument embellishes.}
"It's still music," Gojo declared with unshakable certainty.
At that moment the last flicker of hope that Gojo Satoru might ever behave properly died forever inside the patriarch's chest. He watched with a fond, helpless smile as the boy still in sunglasses and modern clothes, poked at everything with one finger, touched whatever caught his eye, and treated the entire solemn ceremony like a playground. The sight dragged the patriarch straight back to memories of a much smaller Gojo locked inside the estate, never allowed to run free.
The Gojo family had protected the Six Eyes.
They had also caged the Six Eyes.
The current patriarch had once been among those who voted for the cage.
Now that Gojo possessed the strength to protect himself, now that he could attend a normal school, make real friends, and touch the outside world, the patriarch was genuinely glad. He had even argued with the elders down himself.
Yet there was one growing problem: the stronger Gojo became, the harder it was to stuff him into the elaborate ceremonial robes tradition demanded.
The boy would literally tear the clothes off his back or blast through doors if pressed.
No, the divine child simply rejected the finery of mortals.
The patriarch let his gaze drift, forcibly suppressing the irreverent thought.
The sacred, joyous festival continued long into the night…
[Ieiri Shoko: Whoa! So many people! The fireworks are about to start!]
[Geto Suguru: Shoko, keep your voice down. If Yaga-sensei or Gojo sees this we're dead.]
[Asou Akiya: Too late. We've already been spotted…]
[Asou Akiya: Relax, I cleared it with Sensei. And to all assistant supervisors currently pretending they see nothing: thank you for your hard work. We'll bring back the best sake from Niigata when we return.]
[Gojo Satoru: How come EVERYONE went out to play?!]
[Geto Suguru: We are strictly carrying out missions. Definitely not playing. Thanks to Asou's meticulously planned route, we visited Ryūjin-no-mori Park, Shinraku-ji Temple, and the station square this morning, ate local kagami soba for lunch, and now we're heading straight to the Sumida River Fireworks Festival to exorcise spirits and protect the crowds.
Although reserved seats for the fireworks cost over seven thousand yen each, we sorcerers get in free. Then at nine sharp we're off to the ninth Fuji Rock Festival in Niigata. Truly exhausting.]
[Gojo Satoru: Liar.]
Gojo Satoru would swear on weird-bangs' weird bangs!
Even Ieiri Shoko had snuck out with Geto and Asou. All three of them were off having fun without him!
[Gojo Satoru: It's fun here too, you know. [photo][photo]…]
Yet no one in the chat bothered to reply.
Gojo shoved the phone back into his pocket, turned his head away, and stared out at the dark water.
The fireworks photos Shoko kept posting were explosions of colour against a sea of people, the very essence of mortal joy and noise. Nothing like the solitary grandeur of the great torii gate rising from the sea before him. That vermilion arch possessed a majestic, otherworldly beauty, but it stood far from the dust and heat of ordinary lives. Far fewer visitors made the pilgrimage to Miyajima than packed the banks of Tokyo's Sumida River.
[I almost forgot I'm supposed to be working. Might as well take it out on every cursed spirit hiding on this island.]
The Six Eyes reflected the night-shrouded island in perfect, merciless clarity.
A full three-hundred-sixty-degree sweep with no blind spot. Thirty square kilometres lay bare beneath his gaze.
Those cold, glacial blue eyes became the eye of heaven itself, immaculate and all-seeing. Everyone on the boat suddenly shivered, feeling as though they had been stripped naked to the soul.
Most of the passengers were distantly connected to the jujutsu world. The Gojo patriarch sat alone, drinking in silence, aura aloof. Yet the white-haired boy beside him outshone even that distance.
While the Six Eyes scanned the island at full power, the boy's face remained utterly expressionless, displaying a detachment that felt almost inhuman. He might have been the sea god the Miyajima Kangensai had awaited for centuries, temporarily inhabiting a mortal shell, descending to earth only to listen to gagaku with faint indifference while his gaze weighed every soul taking part in the festival below.
The white-haired boy lifted the boat's curtain with two fingers and spoke in a voice like winter itself. "I'm stepping out for a bit."
The curtain fell. His figure vanished from the sea's surface.
Every cursed spirit that had ever spawned on Miyajima in living memory met its end that night. Gojo Satoru erased them with brutal, terrifying speed. One flicker of movement, a chain of short-range teleports, and he was back aboard before the patriarch had finished even one cup of sake.
The patriarch set the cup down, drew a silk cloth from his sleeve, and gently wiped the flecks of blood from Gojo's cheek.
Blood of cursed spirits, invisible to ordinary eyes.
Any sorcerer with even a shred of talent who witnessed that slaughter would have felt ice crawl down their spine at the sheer velocity of it.
"You have worked hard, Lord Satoru."
There was no fear in the patriarch's eyes, only aching tenderness.
Even on approved leave he was forced to exorcise spirits.
How desperately short-staffed had Tokyo Jujutsu High become that they would summon the divine child himself?
Gojo: "...".
He let the cloth pass over his skin, then picked up a tangerine from the fruit bowl and rolled it idly between his fingers.
"Hey, can I leave at nine?"
"No."
The patriarch delivered the refusal in the gentle, indulgent tone reserved for a divine child he pitied.
"What is it you want to do?" the patriarch asked. "Are your classmates inviting you out to play?"
"No."
Gojo leaned back against the lacquered rail and fell silent, the divine aspect of him quietly crushing the human one beneath its weight.
The patriarch sighed, eyes distant with memory. "You remind me of the Gion Matsuri many years ago. You were still small then. You ran away from home and nearly gave the entire clan a heart attack. No one imagined you had sneaked onto the second tier of one of the festival floats and taken the place of the child acolyte."
He gave a soft, wistful smile. "If you had answered 'yes,' I might have let you go."
Gojo did not spare the man who shared his blood a single glance.
The Six Eyes, created to stand above all living things, had already seen every attitude the world had to offer.
Boring.
That was all.
Four in the morning.
The exhausted, exhilarated group finally stumbled back onto Tokyo Jujutsu High grounds. Asou Akiya and Geto Suguru had barely taken three steps toward the boys' dormitory when a figure stepped out of the shadows and blocked their path.
Gojo Satoru stood there, eyes wide and luminous in the dark like a cat's, radiating pure menace.
Asou's scalp prickled with instant dread.
Stunning and terrifying, was this the true destructive beauty of the Six Eyes?
His dorm room door was mere metres away, yet it suddenly felt as distant as the moon.
The gatekeeper spoke with flat certainty. "Don't bother explaining. I'm not listening. I'm one hundred percent sure you and weird-bangs forgot about me. You didn't even bring me a souvenir."
Asou felt a guilty pang for several seconds.
They had been so busy all day. Who had spare brain cells to remember Gojo was on approved leave?
Geto, on the other hand, was unfazed. "I'm dead tired, Gojo. Can we do this tomorrow?"
"No way!" Gojo shot back. "Tomorrow you'll just come up with another excuse!"
He announced the solution he had clearly been nursing for hours. "Right now. This instant. Take me out to play, once."
Geto refused flat out. "No."
Asou glanced at the time and offered, "It's late. There aren't many places still open. Would an izakaya do?"
Geto's neck nearly snapped from how fast he whipped his head around to stare at Asou.
In the dim corner where the corridor lamp could not reach, night draped a veil over Asou Akiya, yet the faint light still caught the gentle threads of kindness on his face. It was the look of someone who would rearrange the entire early morning if the other boy simply asked.
"Asou," Geto said, gripping his shoulder. "It's too late."
Asou answered with pure, uncomplicated honesty. "But he wants to go out."
Asou had tasted the roar of the fireworks and the pulsing heartbeat of the music festival. After all that noise, the quiet that followed felt almost sacred.
And that quiet happened to contain Gojo Satoru.
Fifteen-year-old Gojo still had time to play.
Twenty-eight-year-old Gojo almost never would.
Asou looked at him. "Gojo, do you want to sleep, or do you want to come with me for late-night food?"
Gojo's grin flashed triumphant in the dark. He strode forward. "Out."
Geto ground his teeth. "Then I'm coming too."
Sleep was officially cancelled. They would stay up with Asou and Gojo until sunrise and call it a win.
With Rainbow Dragon as transport, they found an izakaya still open in the city. Keeping it secret from Shoko, three fifteen-year-old boys claimed a large table, ordered mountains of food, and unlocked the all-night achievement with gleeful abandon.
Izakaya policy strictly forbade anyone under twenty.
But where there is a rule there is a workaround. Asou put on his most harmless, well-behaved face and told the staff, "Our parents will be here any minute. We're just ordering ahead."
The owner waited and waited for the mythical adults who never appeared, then gave up trying to kick them out. It was late, the boys were spending plenty, and the place was almost empty anyway.
He pulled the waiter aside and muttered, "No alcohol at that table. Not a drop."
Three high-schoolers. Not a single adult among them.
At the table, Gojo finished stuffing himself and immediately started clamouring for the game he had heard about forever: the Yamanote Line Game.
Asou hesitated. Geto calmly sipped barley tea and agreed without missing a beat, changing the loser's penalty from drinking to sticking paper strips on their face.
The Yamanote Line Game took its name from Tokyo's most famous above-ground loop line.
Players had to name stations on the Yamanote Line in rapid succession. Speed was everything. You had to shout the next station before the others clapped twice.
You could not hesitate, and you absolutely could not say the wrong name.
Asou Akiya, inwardly: [The heavens truly wish to destroy me.]
This game tested memory and reflexes in equal measure; the more intimately you knew Tokyo's above-ground loop line, the better your odds.
For a transmigrator, joining this game was no different from asking a random Japanese person to rattle off every single station on the Beijing subway in perfect order.
Even if he had memorised the full list, his reaction speed would still lag. The brain of someone who had not grown up riding that line would always be one fatal beat behind.
In less than five minutes Asou's face was covered in paper strips while the other two laughed without any attempt at mercy.
Neither Gojo nor Geto had ever imagined Asou would be the one to lose so spectacularly.
Gojo doubled over, howling. "Are you a directionless idiot? Hahahaha—"
Geto at least tried to be kind. "That's a little harsh. Asou's memory has always been excellent. He's just exhausted from pulling all-nighters. Even the sharpest mind eventually stalls."
Asou Akiya: "…" He crushed a paper strip in his fist.
Asou Akiya: "How about we switch to the fruit version of the Yamanote Line game instead?"
Gojo and Geto answered in perfect unison. "No way!"
Asou's shoulders slumped. For the first time in his life he had been jointly excluded by Gojo and Geto.
Damn it all, he never should have agreed to play the Yamanote Line game in the first place!
Yet even while losing round after round, Asou still found genuine enjoyment in the ridiculous chaos. He let himself be the butt of the joke, happy to play along for their sake.
His thoughts drifted to Black Flash, the technique he still could not master. Black Flash was exactly like this game. The station names were written plain as day, just like all the theoretical knowledge he had absorbed. He possessed more than enough experience on paper, yet he could not summon the reaction speed needed to make physical impact and cursed-energy surge collide within an error margin of 0.000001 seconds.
[How do you win the Yamanote Line game?]
[How do you erase the body's sluggishness and raise reaction time to 0.000001 seconds?]
[By memorising until your brain bleeds? By fighting without pause until cursed-energy manipulation becomes pure instinct?]
[Wrong. All wrong.]
[If an ordinary person ever catches up to a genius through effort alone, it is only because he has found the correct method.]
[Reference: how Itadori Yuji learned Black Flash.]
[Pure, absolute focus: forget everything else, let your mouth hang open, let drool slide down your chin if it must, but lock every fragment of awareness onto the enemy. Search for the opening. Turn weakness into overwhelming strength. Devote yourself completely to a battle that overturns the heavens.]
Another paper strip slapped onto Asou Akiya's face with a crisp "pap". There was no empty space left.
This one came courtesy of Geto Suguru.
Asou's expression vanished entirely beneath the mask of white strips.
Only Gojo Satoru noticed something strange and spoke up. "Akiya, your cursed energy just spiked hard. Planning to pick a fight?"
Asou answered flatly. "No."
The "turning weakness into strength" category definitely did not include the two of you!
After the three of them pulled an all-nighter, August arrived.
Geto Suguru was officially promoted to first-grade sorcerer, while Gojo Satoru's rank remained unchanged.
The higher-ups rejected the Gojo family's request to designate him special-grade. Their reasoning: Gojo had never encountered a special-grade cursed spirit.
Therefore his exorcism record at Tokyo Jujutsu High was deemed insufficient.
At the same time, he had not yet mastered Domain Expansion or Reverse Cursed Technique, so he lacked the overwhelming authority expected of a special-grade sorcerer.
"Rotten tangerines!"
Gojo stormed the headquarters in Kyoto, trashed the place, and swaggered out again.
The conservative old elders at Kyoto ate a bitter loss in silence.
The Gojo family stepped forward, issued a formal apology on Gojo Satoru's behalf, paid generous reparations, and used money and raw authority to gag every mouth that wanted to protest.
Yaga Masamichi remained blissfully unaware that his student had just committed another earth-shaking outrage. Gojo never breathed a word to his teacher; he only bragged to his classmates.
The very next day, Yaga strode into the classroom and announced, "Next month marks the seventeenth annual Sister-School Exchange Event between the Tokyo and Kyoto campuses. The venue this year will be Kyoto."
Cold sweat broke out on Geto Suguru's forehead. "Kyoto?"
Gojo's little rampage was no longer a secret.
Asou Akiya swallowed hard, forcing himself to stay calm. "Gojo, what do you think about the Exchange Event?"
Gojo fell silent for a heartbeat. The principal of Kyoto Jujutsu High was one of the Higher-Ups, the single most notorious leader of the conservative faction.
He had literally trashed their headquarters and now had to walk straight into the rotting elders' nursery where they raised their precious little tangerines?
Wow, this was going to be fun!
He could slap them across the face twice in a row!
Gojo lifted his chin, eyes gleaming with predatory delight. "What's there to be afraid of? We'll just crush them flat!"