August 15th.
The first-year class group chat was completely flooded with photographs.
Gojo Satoru's selfies grew more perfectly framed with every shot, his photography skills leaping forward at dizzying speed, the kind of progress that made others green with envy.
In one picture the white-haired boy flashed a bright V-sign at the camera. His forearms looked strong and defined, yet the summer missions had left no trace of tan on his skin (he had wrapped himself from head to toe every time). The dark-indigo short yukata fluttered lightly around him while, behind, the roaring flames of the Gozan no Okuribi blazed against the night sky.
[Ieiri Shoko: Don't be stingy. Give us more.]
[Asou Akiya: Gojo, how did you manage to get paler over an entire summer?]
[Geto Suguru: I'm lying around at home doing nothing and my arms are already darker. Too bad we can't copy you; we'd boil alive and break out in heat rash if we dressed like that.]
[Yaga Masamichi: Stop it! If you want to chat, make your own group!]
[Asou Akiya: Someone create it?]
[Geto Suguru: You do it, our beloved class rep.]
[Ieiri Shoko: Ready when you are.]
[Asou Akiya: Done. Check Mixi; I've sent the invites.]
[Jujutsu High First-Year Squad of Four]
[Gojo Satoru: Feast your eyes on my masterpieces [photo][photo]…]
Nothing in the world could stop Gojo Satoru once he discovered the selfie bug had bitten him, especially when his classmates egged him on so enthusiastically.
Ieiri Shoko had assumed she was only being polite and that the other two would tease him mercilessly.
[Geto Suguru: Hm. Not bad.]
[Asou Akiya: It'd be even more fun if you learned to use phone filters.]
[Ieiri Shoko: Something's off with you guys.]
In the infirmary on standby, the short-haired girl sensed the shift immediately. Geto Suguru and Gojo Satoru were getting along better, and even Asou Akiya had stopped tripping Gojo up at every turn?
The three boys in her year had been apart for less than a day and were already acting like the best of friends?
"Is this what boys are like?" Ieiri asked Iori Utahime, who had dropped by to hang out. "When they're together they cause chaos, the moment they're separated they get lonely and start saying nice things. What kind of tsundere nonsense is this?"
Utahime's impression of high-school boys was rock-bottom. "Among them only Asou-kun is normal."
Ieiri gave a non-committal hum. "Yeah… probably."
She handed the remote to Utahime. The channel instantly flipped to a sports competition.
Utahime settled in with pure, uncomplicated joy to watch with her junior.
The Jujutsu High girls were enjoying their holiday too.
…
Kyoto. The Gojo ancestral grounds.
Gojo Satoru, clad in yukata, presided over the rite to bid farewell to the departed ancestors. Those crystalline, detached Six Eyes saw no lurking wraiths or monsters, yet somehow they caught countless details he had never noticed before.
The Gojo elders had hidden many things from him.
They had wanted the divine child of the Six Eyes to bear less pressure, to discover the family's incompetence a little later in life. The millennium-long history of the Three Great Families had never been smooth sailing. Every generation of the main branch suffered casualties. The Six Eyes were the single tear the Gojo family had shed across centuries. The children of heaven who never once lived to die of old age.
They did not know that Gojo had already glimpsed fragments of that history. He had not reacted with worry, only with genuine, stunned surprise.
The old tangerines really were useless, but their love for the Six Eyes was undeniably real.
Gojo Satoru felt an inexplicable urge to return something for all the devotion that had been poured into him.
It came from a feeling he could not quite name.
In front of every assembled member of the clan, he announced without warning, "If I die, don't bother making a coffin for me."
He ignored the patriarch's and elders' startled protests and continued as though issuing an imperial decree.
"Cremate me. Put the ashes in a jar."
Clean in, clean out.
He had no interest in becoming another shrouded corpse for future generations to mourn over. The Gojo family would never forget him anyway.
[No one wants to be forgotten by their own people, not even a Six Eyes.]
The thought made him grin, the old mischievous spark lighting up his face until he no longer looked like the divine child at all.
"Add it to the house rules," he declared. "Every future Six Eyes has to come here and pay respects to the ancestors. I want them to taste exactly what I'm tasting right now."
[I didn't get my five full days of gaming, so none of you get to enjoy your holidays in peace either!]
[Curse me all you like!]
When he finally left the estate, Gojo stopped by the storehouse on his way out and helped himself to a sword. He ignored the special-grade cursed tools that would have made the elders weep and instead took a perfectly ordinary first-grade blade whose inscribed technique was simple combustion, just right for a sorcerer taking his first stumbling steps into kenjutsu.
Little tangerine had turned it down.
Heh. The Three Great Families and Tokyo Jujutsu High were partners, after all.
On the day he returned to campus, Gojo tossed the sword to Yaga Masamichi with casual indifference. "Lend this to one of the Tokyo students."
Yaga frowned. "The school storehouse already has—"
Gojo cut him off. "But getting anything out of there is a pain. I've seen how reluctant you are to let little tangerine touch even a practice blade."
Yaga Masamichi let out a long-suffering sigh. "Normal sorcerers can't afford high-grade cursed tools. They'd rather rent than buy. The school storehouse only has so many rental slots, and even after graduation most sorcerers still want a reliable weapon that actually boosts their strength."
Gojo shrugged. "I don't care about any of that. This blade is reserved exclusively for current students. No one else gets to borrow it."
Yaga pulled out a sheet of paper, scribbled up a rental contract, and slid the pen across. "Sign."
Gojo scrawled the Gojo family name with a flourish.
"I'm borrowing it," Yaga declared bluntly. "I'll return it in five years."
Gojo waved a hand. "Whatever."
Yaga scratched his head, then asked with a sheepish grin, "Mind lending me another one?"
Gojo blinked. "Huh?"
Yaga gave an embarrassed chuckle. "I'm training Akiya. When two blades clash, the ordinary sword will shatter…"
He immediately produced his credentials to prove he wasn't trying to scam the Gojo clan. "I'll put my first-grade certification up as collateral. Market rate rent, paid in full. Just six months for the second blade, and I'll deliver it back to the estate personally next year."
Gojo realised his plan had been too simplistic. He should have grabbed two swords while he was there.
He pinched the bridge of his nose and made the call. "Hey, old tangerine. Lend me another long sword."
The patriarch's voice was mild. "Is it for your classmate?"
"It's a loan, not a gift!" Gojo corrected instantly. "They won't accept anything from me as a present."
The patriarch remembered the boy who had once persuaded Lord Satoru to return the favour and answered warmly, "Of course. Just take care not to damage it. Someone will deliver it to Tokyo Jujutsu High shortly."
Gojo hung up, having successfully strong-armed free sponsorship for the school, and shot Yaga the smuggest "See how reliable I am?" look imaginable.
Yaga stared at him. "You… really are spoiled rotten."
Gojo could not sit still a second longer. He bolted from the faculty office like a startled cat. "I'm going to game!"
Back in the boys' dormitory, Asou Akiya opened his photo album and scrolled through the folder dedicated to Gojo Satoru. The newest pictures showed Gojo in a dark-indigo yukata, not the pale, dragonfly-patterned one that had become iconic in Jujutsu Kaisen.
More than ten years earlier.
A tiny divine child walked with eyes closed beneath falling snow, a lady's maid holding a crimson umbrella over his head. The red umbrella could not hide the child's unearthly, crystalline beauty. Barren winter branches and scattered dead leaves framed the scene with desolate elegance, and the pale dragonfly yukata had stunned the years themselves.
The younger he was, the more inhumanly beautiful.
The older he grew, the more refined and magnetic he became.
Every stage of Gojo Satoru carried a completely different allure, tempting anyone to keep looking.
By the time Gojo burst back into the room brimming with energy, Asou had already set the phone aside. His heart was perfectly calm, betraying nothing as he refilled his coffee.
No question about it, the two of them were about to pull another all-night gaming marathon.
After twelve straight hours, the controllers were slick with sweat, night had fallen deep and heavy, and their young bodies gave them the reckless capital to keep going. Still, Asou forcibly called a halt and demanded at least four hours of sleep.
Gojo was nowhere near tired and decided that the Akiya trying to make him sleep was suddenly annoying again.
"Sleep, sleep," Asou muttered, wrestling the thrashing Gojo down.
Gojo stopped struggling and looked straight at him. Little Tangerine couldn't actually pin him if he didn't want to be pinned. "I went to see them."
Asou blinked. "What?"
Gojo Satoru never bothered dissecting the meaning behind every sentence. Once he had said what he wanted, he shook off the lingering traces of the Obon mood and declared with childish pique, "Little tangerine's playing dumb? Fine. I'm ignoring you. I'm going to sleep."
"Thank you, Gojo," Asou answered politely, pulling the blanket up to his chin.
Gojo, hating the heat, kicked it off again and again, legs thrashing in open defiance of any attempt to control him.
Asou sighed in exasperation. He didn't care about the provocation itself, but even with the air-conditioner running you couldn't sleep like that.
"Hm?"
Asou noticed the only splash of colour Gojo had worn— the thin red cord一 was gone. He caught the pale wrist before it could vanish under the blanket again.
Gojo answered the unspoken question without prompting. "Threw it in a drawer."
Asou asked what the cord was for.
Gojo shrugged. "No cursed energy. Probably just one of those blessing charms or whatever."
"Can I borrow it? I'd like to research Kyoto traditions a bit," Asou said, genuinely curious about the simple red string.
Gojo knew Little Tangerine loved chasing down the roots of things. "Keep it. It's yours."
"Thank you. I really like this gift."
Asou dipped his head. His fingertips brushed the bare wrist that never wore jewellery. Beneath the skin beat a strong, steady pulse, the kind of living warmth that let him breathe easier in a world full of curses and sudden death.
He took the cord, switched off the light, and left the room.
Gojo lay in the dark feeling the spot Asou had touched tingle unbearably. He rolled restlessly, the sensation growing larger in his mind until it filled the whole room.
He frowned. "Am I allergic to little tangerine now?"
The Gojo family physicians had checked his pulse countless times. Nothing like the feather-light touch just now.
To kill the itch, Gojo brought his wrist to his mouth and bit down, grinding his teeth gently against the skin.
"There."
The sharp sting cleared his head at once.
Growing pains of adolescence had taught him one useful trick: pain always made the brain forget everything else.
On the other side of the country, Geto Suguru sat at home staring into space, thumb flicking restlessly across his phone screen, hoping for new messages.
But the "Jujutsu High First-Year Squad of Four" chat had gone quiet except for the game screenshots Gojo had posted hours earlier. The two of them were probably still pulling an all-nighter.
The next day, 11:46 a.m.
A magnitude-7.2 earthquake struck off the coast of Miyagi Prefecture on Japan's main island of Honshū. The hypocentre lay forty-two kilometres beneath the seabed. The quake triggered a tsunami reaching twelve metres in height. More than a hundred people had already been injured.
Geto was eating lunch when the news broke. He watched the television in silence while his parents reacted with the calm born of long experience.
"This one brought a tsunami too, huh."
"Sounds dangerous. Stay away from the coast for a while."
Their conversation was the ordinary talk of ordinary people faced with yet another natural disaster.
Geto's thoughts drifted elsewhere. If his classmates were here, Asou would immediately start analysing what kind of cursed spirits an earthquake might spawn and speculate on the technique of any quasi-first-grade or higher born from it.
Then he pictured Gojo's Blue and its power of attraction.
A twelve-metre tsunami suddenly did not seem so impressive.
Blue could probably just suck it all away, right?
If he said that out loud his parents would stare at him in horror. No, they simply would not believe him.
Geto absently picked at the vegetarian Obon dishes with his chopsticks. Even the fresh, crisp vegetables seemed tainted with the lingering stench of cursed spirit orbs. Nausea rose in waves, and only sheer habit forced the food down.
[Asou.]
[I really love that line of yours: sorcerers are gods, but we're not lifeless statues locked away in shrines.]
[Next time we meet I'll tell you…]
[The cursed spirit orb I made from Rainbow Dragon tastes exactly the same as all the others.]
[It's just as bitter.]
Cursed spirits are cursed spirits. Every last one of them is a repulsive monster. The mission of a cursed-spirit manipulator is to exorcise those walking disasters.
Will people ever be able to smile again?
Geto clung to a thin thread of hope and glanced silently at his parents, but their faces wore only the indifferent expression of those who feel untouched by calamity.
They lived ordinary, bustling lives, yet there were far more humans who could not see the disasters than there were cursed spirits themselves.