"Suguru, are you going home for the vegetarian Obon feast?"
As they walked toward the dormitory that afternoon, Asou Akiya, who had just learned the basic dietary customs of Obon in Japan, asked with a light smile.
Psychology teaches that humans form their deepest impressions from the smells and tastes of childhood.
Yet psychology also admits that this varies from person to person. Asou Akiya had observed that Geto Suguru was particularly sensitive to flavour.
The nature of Cursed Spirit Manipulation made him recoil from anything hard to swallow, so his palate had settled into a preference for light, refreshing dishes.
Some longings lie quiet for years, unnoticed until a classmate gently tugs at the thread.
Geto gave an awkward little sigh. "I never said I was going home."
Asou pretended not to notice the way Geto always sidestepped talk of family. "Really not going home? Or are you planning to copy Gojo's style and just loaf around campus with me, turning the three of us into honorary orphans?"
Geto choked on his own breath.
Gojo's earth-shattering declaration during class had reminded Geto that he, unlike Gojo, still had living parents.
Geto fired back. "You rarely interfere with my decisions, Asou."
Asou rested his chin on his palm. "Am I interfering? No, I'm just talking to myself."
Geto turned his gaze silently toward the Gojo family's self-proclaimed orphan.
Gojo caught the look with uncanny instinct. "What are you staring at me for? Two people are enough to game all holiday. Weird-bangs isn't stealing Little Tangerine. I couldn't care less what kind of people your parents are."
Geto whispered to himself in his heart: [You don't care what my parents are like? You only care about me?]
His lips felt dry. He scrambled for an excuse not to go home. "I'll call them later and ask if they're off work. If my parents are still busy, there's no point in going back alone…"
Asou Akiya decisively pulled out his phone and fired off a private message to Gojo Satoru.
Gojo read it with a baffled expression, only half understanding, yet the words felt perfect for the moment. "Akiya told me to tell you—"
"No matter what choice you make, that choice has meaning."
Bullseye.
Delivered in Gojo's own brash, carefree tone!
Geto Suguru had just been hit by an Asou-enhanced, deluxe-edition Gojo verbal critical strike!
For the second time that day, Geto fled the scene. He muttered some excuse and bolted back to the dorms alone, abandoning the usual after-school stroll with the other two.
Gojo suddenly grasped the exquisite power of words. He spun in an excited circle around Asou. "That was hilarious! Weird-bangs' heart rate spiked like crazy. My Six Eyes could see his emotions boiling over. How did you do that? Teach me, teach me!"
Asou gave a mysterious smile. "A secret of the heavens cannot be revealed. Next time it happens, just send me a message on the spot and read whatever I tell you. Works every time."
Gojo scratched his cheek. "I'll play it by ear."
What goes around comes around; karma never misses.
The line Geto Suguru, at seventeen, would one day hurl at Gojo in the streets of Shinjuku to infuriate him had now been gently returned to its sender by Asou Akiya.
Inside the boys' dormitory, Geto stared at his reflection, still shaken. He despised the blank, rattled expression looking back at him.
[Geto Suguru, snap out of it. You can't let yourself be helpless against Asou's wisdom and then let Gojo pin you down too!]
After a fierce internal battle, he finally dialled his father's number.
The boy with the neat top-knot, who had once defied his parents' wishes to enrol at Tokyo Jujutsu High, now spoke stiffly about the upcoming break.
His father listened quietly, asked only whether he had enough living expenses, confirmed his son was healthy and receiving the scholarship, then said in a calm, warm voice, "Come home for the festival. Your mother and I miss you very much."
Geto Suguru was utterly defeated. He bowed his head in surrender. "All right. I'll buy a ticket for tomorrow."
His spirits wilted.
He was going home to face the reality he had dodged for so long.
On the morning of August 15th, Geto paid extra to secure a last-minute ticket. With only a single sling bag over his shoulder, he slipped away from Tokyo Jujutsu High without a word to Asou Akiya or Gojo Satoru, unable to maintain his usual pose of the mature, independent high-schooler in front of them.
Asou learned Geto had already left only when he brought breakfast to Gojo's room.
Gojo grabbed his wrist and tugged. "Akiya, hurry up and game with me!"
Asou, who had no plans to leave campus over the break, was fully prepared to indulge. "Your room is too bright and empty for serious gaming. Let me set up the perfect environment first."
He began with the gauzy curtains, drawing them to soften the harsh sunlight, then switched the television to game mode and adjusted every picture setting.
Next came thick, plush cushions arranged just so, the low table repositioned within easy reach, throw pillows scattered for maximum comfort, milk tea lined up like soldiers, snacks in neat piles, a desktop trash bin for wrappers, and phone chargers plugged in and ready.
Drawing on the hard-won experience of a past life, Asou transformed Gojo's barren dorm corner into a fortress of gaming luxury.
"Now we can start."
One sentence, and Gojo's affection meter shot upward.
Morning melted away in the calibration period of their two-man team. Gojo was the type who spoiled everything aloud and never held back in games either. Asou had not touched these ancient titles in years; he needed time to shake off the rust.
Yet once the rust fell away, his reflexes sharpened with terrifying speed. He understood official design philosophy inside out, especially for Nintendo-era games, and could predict traps several screens ahead.
The Gojo family's phone assault began after two in the afternoon: a relentless barrage of calls that could have raised the dead.
Gojo refused to pick up. He simply powered the phone off.
Minutes later Yaga Masamichi's name flashed on Asou's screen. "Akiya, is Gojo in the dorms? Tell him to answer his damn family's calls. They've already tracked me down and they're furious."
Asou knew perfectly well that Gojo's moment of triumphant mouth-cannon bliss would be followed by a mountain of consequences.
"If you don't pick up soon, someone's going to show up at the door in person."
"Tch. You're not gonna side with them, are you?"
Gojo shot him a sideways glare loaded with meaning: nod once and I'll block you right alongside them.
"Of course not. Whatever makes you happy." Asou leaned back, content to watch the fireworks from the sidelines.
"Don't finish the game without me. Wait up." Gojo's bark lacked its usual bite. He hit pause, reopened his phone with visible irritation, and waited for the pale-yellow flip phone (the latest model on the market) to boot up at its leisurely pace.
The call log was a solid wall of missed calls from the old tangerines: Old Tangerine No. 1, Old Tangerine No. 2, Old Tangerine No. 3…
"Lord Satoru, if you do not return, we cannot properly conduct the farewell rites."
Gojo took the call from the Grand Elder first which is a rare restraint on his part.
In truth, the one who truly held power in the Gojo family was not the patriarch but the Grand Elder who operated from the shadows. He was the previous patriarch, a full generation older than the Zen'in head, well into his seventies.
"I heard you," Gojo drawled. "I'm not coming back. Just slap something together for Sugawara no Michizane and call it a day." As a thoroughbred sorcerer who had never encountered any resentful spirit besides cursed ones, Gojo had zero respect for one of Japan's legendary Three Great Onryō. "If he can actually hear you, tell him I said good luck rising from the grave!"
Gojo let out a bright, crystalline peal of laughter. A pure demonic sound, that's guaranteed to spike blood pressure on the other end.
The Grand Elder of the Gojo family observed a golden silence, sighed once, and hung up.
The next brave soul to ring in deserved at least three seconds of pity, as far as Asou was concerned.
"Lord Satoru." The patriarch's voice cut in.
"Let me guess, ancestral rites again?" Gojo countered every thrust with effortless parry. "I don't know who my parents are. The moment I was born I was the Gojo family's Six Eyes. I've never been a normal human being. Why don't you lot sort it out internally? Manufacture another heir and make him deal with all this boring crap."
Silence stretched so long on the other end that Asou thought the patriarch had been KO'd.
Then the man recovered and spoke with quiet, unshakable conviction.
"There will never be another heir."
"You are the one and only young lord of the Gojo family. No one is worthy to be your parent or your sibling. From the instant a bearer of the Six Eyes is born, his status towers above every other member of the clan. You are the singular existence of your era."
"Lord Satoru, your own ancestor was also a Six Eyes, not some ordinary sorcerer among the Three Great Families. For the sake of the generations who have protected the Six Eyes with their lives, will you not return just for tonight? Preside over the rite, bid farewell to the ancestors tomorrow, and once the Gozan Okuribi of Kyoto's Obon is complete, you may leave as you please?"
The patriarch's words sounded eminently reasonable, yet they stirred not a ripple in Gojo Satoru's heart.
The previous Six Eyes had lived centuries ago, too distant to matter.
Gojo's voice was flat. "It's the same tiresome ritual every single year. Can you guarantee that once I become family head no one will ever bother me with this nonsense again?"
The patriarch's breath caught.
After a long moment of weighing the cost, he answered with iron resolve. "I swear it. The day you become head of the family, it will stop."
Gojo lowered his lashes. The Six Eyes gazed coldly, judging something only he could see.
Asou guessed the identity of the caller on the second line: a man young enough to dare make such a promise, yet senior enough to keep it.
Ancestral rites for ordinary Gojo dead? Gojo had endured that farce for years and hated every second. Anyone who brought it up was asking for trouble. He considered himself parentless, peerless, the most exalted person the Gojo name had ever produced.
But asking him to pay respects to a previous Six Eyes…
A flicker of transferred tenderness brushed Asou's heart.
In the thousand-year history of the clan, several infant Six Eyes bearers had been murdered before their gifts could fully awaken, cut down by Kenjaku's hand. The Gojo family had lived in terror of losing this one and had guarded him with obsessive paranoia.
Yet word of a new Six Eyes birth had still spread like wildfire through the jujutsu world, instantly turning a helpless baby into half the community's public enemy.
To outsiders, the Six Eyes appeared once every five hundred years.
Only the successive generations of Gojo elders knew the blood-soaked truth: the heartbreaking tally of how many had died too young.
A Six Eyes who was weak would be murdered by his enemies.
A Six Eyes who grew too strong would be ensnared in schemes that ended in mutual destruction.
Asou Akiya had no right to speak, yet the bewildered glance Gojo cast his way made him feel as though he had somehow earned a false qualification to do so, perhaps because his face had betrayed a sympathy he had no claim to.
"Gojo."
Asou turned his head, pretending to study the curtains. "Go see them."
The patriarch on the other end of the line heard a stranger's voice and froze in astonishment.
Gojo asked with pure, unfiltered curiosity, "Why?"
Asou answered softly, "No one wants to be forgotten. Not even a Six Eyes."
Gojo tilted his head.
Not even… a Six Eyes?
Asou immediately regretted opening his mouth and added in embarrassment, "Forget I said anything. I don't want to cause you trouble."
Gojo leaned in close, as though truly seeing the little tangerine for the first time.
"So you worship the Six Eyes too?"
Asou pushed the handsome face away. All that overflowing collagen was useless against him.
"No. . . No. I admire unshakable humanity."
The quiet certainty in Asou's voice, an emotion that rang clear even to the Six Eyes convinced Gojo the words were sincere. Whatever thoughts passed behind those pale lashes remained hidden. In the end he simply accepted the patriarch's plea. "Send a car to pick me up."
He flopped back onto the cushion as if nothing had happened, picked up the controller, and resumed the game. Then, out of nowhere, he added, "I'm wearing a yukata tomorrow. Should I send selfies to the class group?"
Asou nearly steered his character off a cliff in shock. "Huh?"
"You guys love looking, don't you?" Gojo flashed his tiger-like canines in a grin.
"No, I don't." Asou denied at once, but Gojo barrelled on regardless.
"You don't worship the Six Eyes, you don't care about my face, and you won't spend a single yen of my money. It's like there's nothing I can give you at all."
He tilted his head. "Want a cursed sword tool?"
Asou shook his head.
Gojo stopped asking and focused on the game, studying the boy beside him from the corner of his eye.
Wow. A totally chill player. The desireless, demandless type.
…
Deep into the night of August 14th, Gojo wandered idly through the ancestral grounds during the rites and noticed something he had overlooked before.
Sorcerer clans normally practised cremation and burial of ashes, reducing the chance that an enemy could turn a corpse into a cursed tool.
Yet here, in the Gojo family mausoleum, stood several special coffins containing intact bodies.
"These coffins…"
All of them held the remains of children who had never reached adulthood, wrapped from head to toe in cloth inscribed with ancient incantations.
The spells were so old that only the unique properties of the ancestral land had preserved them. Gojo read the faded characters carefully: rebirth, blessing, farewell, love.
Suddenly Asou Akiya's quiet words echoed in his mind: "Gojo, go see them."
This was the sorrow of the Gojo family.
They could not bring themselves to cremate children who should have been showered with every honour.
The eyes of a dead Six Eyes bearer held no special power. Limitless vanished with the user's life.
If the corpse did not belong to a living inheritor of Limitless, it had no value as a cursed tool. The other Gojo techniques were mediocre at best; the clan's seat among the Three Great Families rested entirely on the shoulders of the Six Eyes.
The calm on the white-haired boy's face shattered. A storm rose behind his eyes. His brows drew together; he bit the inside of his cheek hard enough to hurt.
The calm on the white-haired boy's face vanished without a trace. A storm surged behind his eyes; his brows knotted tight; he bit down hard on the inside of his cheek.
A chill crawled up his spine like frost, and rage followed it, white-hot and roaring.
"Which bastard did this?!"
Gojo family, were you all starving back then or what?!
Why are there so many Six Eyes dead?!
—
Just giving our carefree high-school Gojo a tiny taste of the urgency that comes with Kenjaku's name.
The original canon states clearly that Kenjaku has killed multiple bearers of the Six Eyes, only to discover they are endless. Kill one and another is born soon after.
…
Sendai City.
Kenjaku, in the middle of nursing a baby, suddenly sneezed.