"I want to learn Black Flash."
"I want to learn Simple Domain."
"Teacher Yaga, I want to beat them up."
The black-haired boy stood in front of the desk, his face numb and expressionless as he calmly declared ambitions grand enough to sound utterly insane.
Across from him, Yaga Masamichi, who had always looked after this particular student, stared in astonishment. "Akiya… you're not running a fever, are you?"
Anyone in the jujutsu world who heard those words would immediately understand just how absurd they were. You—a Grade Three sorcerer, of civilian background—who exactly are you planning to beat up? The heir of the Gojo clan with the Six Eyes, and a cursed spirit manipulator, no less!
Asou Akiya clutched his head and squatted down on the spot.
"I can't go on like this… I really can't…"
His voice was weak, almost broken. "They bullied me. They used a Special Grade cursed spirit's Domain Expansion just to toy with me. Shoko got scared and ran away, leaving me alone to face that kind of thing by myself!"
Yaga Masamichi felt something ache sharply in his chest—his heart, hardened as steel and utterly unsuited for emotional subtlety, nevertheless throbbed with pain.
"…Sigh." Yaga Masamichi didn't know how to comfort him. "Akiya, those two brats went way too far. I've already made them stand as punishment. Are you hurt? I'll have Shoko check you over again."
Asou Akiya withdrew completely into himself.
His dream of making money had been mocked.
It had been recorded on video.
And his mind had been toyed with inside the domain of a Special Grade cursed spirit.
"Don't be so upset," Yaga Masamichi said. "Their strengths lie in their cursed techniques. You should aim to defeat them in close combat."
Seeing Akiya grow even more dejected, Yaga Masamichi clenched his teeth. "So what if it's Black Flash and Simple Domain? There have been students in past generations who managed to learn them. You're in good condition right now—I'll do everything I can to help you learn Black Flash. And if you want Simple Domain, that's not impossible either. I'll go speak with Principal Gakuganji at Kyoto School. With my reputation, I should be able to secure at least one opportunity for you."
The first-year homeroom teacher's office was spacious and brightly lit, and within it, this exchange between teacher and student unfolded in full.
Outside the door, two students were being punished to stand in the hallway, backs pressed against the corner of the wall as they shamelessly eavesdropped on the sounds coming from inside.
Gojo Satoru clicked his tongue. "Yaga's totally playing favorites~."
Geto Suguru replied calmly, "You can't really put it that way. He doesn't even have the capacity for bias. He's just a middle-aged man who loves knitting wool sweaters—how could he possibly withstand Asou Akiya's once-in-a-blue-moon show of weakness? At this point, he's already treating him like a kid."
Gojo Satoru grinned. "See, Suguru? We really are ridiculously strong! No matter how many tricks Akiya has up his sleeve, it's useless!"
"Shh," Geto said. "Lower your voice."
Despite his words, Geto's face was full of laughter. He raised his hand and high-fived Gojo, openly celebrating the joy of teaming up to bully someone.
The two of them had suffered from Asou Akiya's brainpower for far too long.
When dealing with a clever person who excelled at verbal maneuvering, you absolutely could not give them any chance to wriggle their way out on the spot!
Suddenly, the door was pushed open from the inside.
Yaga Masamichi stepped out with a darkened expression, catching their behavior red-handed.
"You two made your classmate cry, and you still have the nerve to laugh?!" Yaga Masamichi thundered.
Gojo Satoru dug a finger into his ear, convinced he must have misheard. "Huh? Crying? Is Yaga blind or something? Someone like Akiya wouldn't cry even if he were dying."
Geto Suguru offered his assessment with objective seriousness. "On that point, I agree with Gojo. Asou is a very resilient person."
Yaga Masamichi nearly choked on his own anger. "You two—!"
Gojo Satoru waved toward the doorway. "Akiya! Help me out here, will you? Say something nice for me—I really don't want to keep standing here as punishment under Yaga!"
Geto Suguru instantly became well-behaved and polite. "I'm sorry, Asou. We were just joking around—we didn't expect things to get this serious. Are you okay? Gojo and I will treat you to dinner tonight."
Asou Akiya passed by the two of them with a cold snort, walking straight ahead without sparing them a glance.
Those pitch-black eyes held no trace of moisture at all—he hadn't cried in the slightest. Instead, they gleamed with a ruthless, wordless promise: just you wait.
Behind him, Gojo Satoru suddenly muttered, "Hmm, I have a bad feeling about this. I'm eating out tonight." He then looked at the completely unsuspecting Geto Suguru and felt a shared sense of impending doom. "I'd advise you not to eat anything Akiya cooks anytime soon."
Geto Suguru was puzzled. Who could possibly refuse food personally cooked by Asou Akiya?
Gojo Satoru couldn't be bothered to explain. Time would prove everything.
Yaga Masamichi shot them a sharp glare. "Consider this a lesson. Keep standing there. Don't even think about leaving before dismissal."
Gojo Satoru and Geto Suguru immediately answered listlessly, "Yes, we heard you."
This was the price bad students paid for offending the teacher's model student.
Inside the classroom, the afternoon turned into a self-study period.
Two chairs were placed facing each other as Ieiri Shoko conducted repeated examinations, eliminating any hidden physical issues for Asou Akiya.
"Your body is extremely healthy—far beyond that of ordinary high school students your age."
"How does it compare to Gojo and Geto?"
"…Those two are strong, feral gorillas that grew up without restraint. Are you sure you want to make that comparison?"
"..."
Asou Akiya squeezed the muscle in his arm, keenly aware of just how difficult it was to chase after his classmates' footsteps.
Physical training had begun in March and continued without interruption until late September. In the blink of an eye, roughly half a year had passed, and he had gone from a frail, easily bullied civilian orphan to a jujutsu student who still looked frail and easily bullied.
As he was now, he could use cursed energy to exorcise Grade Three cursed spirits, and with agile, refined close-combat techniques, he could contend with a near–Grade Two cursed spirit without falling behind. Placed in an ordinary school, he could easily take on a whole group of delinquent troublemakers by himself. And yet, compared to the twenty-eight-year-old Gojo Satoru of the original timeline who could casually send a one finger Ryomen Sukuna flying with a single punch, the gap between them was still immeasurably vast.
There was a wall between ordinary people and jujutsu sorcerers.
And there was another wall between ordinary sorcerers and Gojo Satoru.
They did not exist on the same plane at all.
He knew this.
And he was also astonished by his own transformation.
He had originally intended to keep his distance from Geto Suguru, yet without realizing it, he had been swept into the affairs of two classmates hailed as "the strongest."
After leaking part of the information regarding the Cursed Womb: Death Paintings, he could no longer stand aside. He could not allow Geto Suguru to die. He could not allow Kenjaku to take over Geto Suguru's body and obtain his memories.
Once again, he had cut off his own retreat, all for the sake of the most beautiful youth of the four classmates.
They had become a true community of shared fate.
Even if he alone knew what kind of price had been paid—nearly binding his very life to a chariot charging toward war.
"Shoko, there's something I want to ask you."
Asou Akiya showed her news on his phone related to mad cow disease. "If an incident like mad cow disease were to give rise to a near–Grade One cursed spirit, would it be better for us to take preventive measures in advance, or to wait until it happens and then immediately deal with the cursed spirit? The cost of the former would be an enormous sum of money, while the cost of the latter would be the lives of some people."
Ieiri Shoko instinctively calculated her savings and said, "As for casualties, my stance is to avoid them as much as possible. But our strength is limited. If the cost stays under one hundred million yen, I'll choose to help you with prevention."
Because she had awakened her Reverse Cursed Technique only after her entire family had died, this was all the money she had—beyond that, there was nothing more she could do.
Asou Akiya said bitterly, "I'm afraid it won't be enough."
The villa described in the original work had been lavish enough.
A debt large enough to drive the entire family of a yakiniku restaurant owner to their deaths was by no means a small sum; the other party had not even been forced to sell the villa.
Ieiri Shoko did not smile. She calmly accepted the reality that some things could not be saved. "Asou, you've never participated in this kind of mission with Teacher Yaga, so you don't know what the remuneration is for exorcising a near–Grade One cursed spirit in the jujutsu world."
Ieiri Shoko continued, "A near–Grade One cursed spirit possesses a cursed technique and falls into the category of high-level cursed spirits. The mission reward depends on the difficulty of the technique, the casualties caused, and the extent of its social impact, but even at its highest, it does not exceed thirty million yen."
Ieiri Shoko went on, "To spend more than one hundred million yen to prevent an incident that could be resolved for a reward of thirty million?"
"We are jujutsu students," Ieiri Shoko said evenly. "Not saints."
In order not to discourage Asou Akiya, she deliberately used the words jujutsu students, emphasizing their youth and the fact that they should not bear excessive responsibility—just as she herself had once heard over the phone, that minors should not be made to shoulder the pressures of adults.
"Yeah." Asou Akiya felt a measure of relief.
"When you were lecturing Geto, you seemed to understand all this perfectly well," Ieiri Shoko teased.
"The meaning was different, and the perspective was different. I also have immature parts that need Shoko to correct me," Asou Akiya admitted to his only friend and female classmate. "I didn't think things through properly and ended up placing extra psychological burden on you."
Ieiri Shoko shook her head. "How is that a burden? People die every day. I don't see myself as a savior."
Ieiri Shoko added, "Anything else? Say it all at once."
Asou Akiya fell silent. If even the opening events of next year's storyline were already this difficult to alter, then just how crushing would the pressure be later on?
The weight of destiny pressed heavily against his heart. He wanted to struggle. He wanted to twist it, to overturn it…
The advantage he held from knowing the plot was steadily diminishing with time, and his wishes were secrets he scarcely dared to voice aloud, each one akin to a notice of intent—a mortal's declaration of war against fate.
"Shoko, I still want to try, at least within the limits of what I can do."
"Do your best."
"You're not going to try to talk me out of it?"
"There's no need. You're the one doing this. You're Asou—I trust your capabilities."
"…Yeah. The one doing this is me."
Asou Akiya was no longer someone with nothing to his name. He had cursed energy, he had classmates, he had friends he could speak to.
Ieiri Shoko teased him, "How about I help you borrow money from Gojo?"
A wave of embarrassment washed over Asou Akiya. He suppressed it without letting it show. "Shoko, isn't my relationship with Gojo even worse?"
"You definitely wouldn't be willing to lower your head to him," Ieiri Shoko said with clear-eyed pragmatism. "Don't push yourself too hard."
Asou Akiya covered his face.
Ieiri Shoko asked calmly, "So—how many hundreds of millions do you want to borrow, and how long will it take you to pay it back?"
A flush spread across Asou Akiya's face; his lashes trembled, and in the depths of his eyes lay a visceral resistance to owing favors—an innocence so pure it was almost unbelievable. He began to stammer, not the breathless kind brought on by exertion in physical training class, but the genuine, unmistakable embarrassment of asking to borrow money, and worse still, having to do so through a female classmate, to approach the one person he found most mortifying and most impossible to speak to directly.
What made it truly infuriating was—
That person's black card was still in his own possession.
Round and round it went.
Had he gone through all this trouble only to borrow nothing at all?
While Asou Akiya was lost in these tangled thoughts, Ieiri Shoko quietly admired the breathtaking bashfulness of the fifteen-year-old boy, sincerely thinking that if Asou were to grow a few more years older, that quality hovering between tenderness and emotional detachment—the subtle masculinity of it—would only become more captivating.
Asou Akiya spoke haltingly, "I—I'll go investigate first and then give you a number."
He added, "I might not even need to borrow the money. But if I do, I'll do my best to repay everything within three years."
Next year would be 2006, an era when Asia's real estate industry was poised to surge.
He rapidly ran the numbers in his head: obtain fifty million yen next year, then take advantage of the incident where Fushiguro Toji gambled on motorboat races, place his bet on the winning boat, and earning ten times the return would be no problem at all. Of course, that assumed the race organizers did not rig the outcome; to be safe, it would be better to take the fifty million yen as seed capital and partner with Miss Mei Mei, investing in real estate, medical aesthetics, and online e-commerce.
"I'm going to ask for leave—I don't want to stay for self-study!" Throwing out those words, Asou Akiya bolted out of the classroom to investigate the amount needed to save lives.
"Wow, he's really in a hurry," Ieiri Shoko muttered after he left, slipping a cigarette between her lips.
She leisurely exhaled smoke, tapped her fingers against the spotless desk, and pulled out her phone to contact Mei Mei from the third year.
Asou didn't want to borrow money from Gojo.
[Senior, I need to borrow a sum of money. I'll repay it within three years. You can set the interest rate.]
[The purpose is to save lives.]
There was no rule stating that the only wealthy person at Tokyo Jujutsu High who could come up with such a sum was Gojo Satoru.
…
Shizuoka Prefecture, Hamamatsu City. Asou Akiya deliberately removed his school uniform jacket and draped it over his arm, appearing near the shuttered yakiniku restaurant in a white shirt and black trousers. He asked the surrounding restaurant owners about the situation of the barbecue shop's owner.
"The impact of mad cow disease is just too severe. I heard the yakiniku place's cash flow collapsed—no one dares to come eat anymore."
"He owes a huge amount of money and has holed himself up at home."
"The exact figure? Who would know something like that? You could try asking the bank's debt collectors."
"Any industry related to beef is really out of luck…"
Only after asking around did Asou Akiya realize just how many businesses had been dragged down. It wasn't just the unlucky restaurants—the surrounding livestock industry had been hit hard as well. Japan's entire beef market had sunk into a prolonged slump, causing local suppliers and distributors to run into trouble one after another. Under the compounded impact of these negative effects, the owner—who had once run several yakiniku restaurants—was now bearing immense financial pressure, unable to see a way out, enduring in bitter agony, with nothing to cling to but the hope that the mad cow disease crisis would pass sooner rather than later.
Asou Akiya knew all too well that mad cow disease was a long-term problem; even by 2024, it had never been completely resolved.
If the pressure became unbearable, the best option would be to pay off the loans, change professions, and stay far away from the food industry.
Asking for directions, hailing taxis, chatting with drivers, gathering information—Asou Akiya spent the entire afternoon in constant motion, determined to find a concrete and effective solution before sunset.
Heaven does not disappoint those with resolve. At last, he found the luxurious mountaintop villa described in the original work.
A massive accumulation of negative emotions had converged upon the head of that household.
Flies swarmed in chaotic clouds.
Cursed spirits born of low-grade curses coiled around the man's head, feeding on those negative emotions—the cold, hopeless prelude to something far worse.
"Hello. I apologize for coming so abruptly, but I'd like to conduct some inquiries regarding mad cow disease and your yakiniku restaurant." Asou Akiya's face was youthful and tender, steeped in the air of a student. Though this was his first visit as a complete stranger, he was nevertheless received with unexpected courtesy by the homeowner.
Asou Akiya observed quietly and swiftly, matching what he saw before him to the identity of the deceased he remembered.
This was a very happy family of three: a loving couple, an adorable daughter, and even a small dog at home.
Before he entered, the puppy had barked loudly, yet the moment it saw him, it fell silent and began circling around his legs, tail wagging. It was as though animals understood better than humans where salvation lay, and the dog's closeness gently smoothed some of the anxiety weighing on Asou Akiya's heart.
His carefully chosen words did not have much immediate effect on the male head of the household, who stood on the brink of collapse. Still, Akiya was young, brimming with youth, with a future and hope ahead of him, his manner warm and his speech sweet; in a short span of time, he significantly raised the goodwill of the family members other than the man himself.
"May I ask how much your household is currently short of? How much in government loans would be enough to see you through this crisis?"
He crushed a fly that buzzed past with his fingers.
"I'm just a student. I won't be your business competitor."
He gathered cursed energy, flicked his fingers, and shattered the Grade Four cursed spirit hovering above the man's head, lessening the aura of despair clinging to him.
"Please look—this is my student ID. I'm actually a student at a private religious academy. Our school places great emphasis on humanistic care and maintains excellent relations with Shinto institutions. I noticed your complexion seems poor and that darkness has gathered between your brows. Just now, I silently recited a short Buddhist sutra for you—do you feel any relief in your body, sir?"
"You mentioned that the United States is a major beef-producing country, and that you're worried the government will open import permits at the end of the year, dealing a heavy blow to the domestic market?"
"Honestly speaking, I don't think things will remain static—either they'll get worse, or they'll get even worse."
"It's inevitable that Japan will open up import permits, and those who suffer losses won't be limited to just you." Asou Akiya held no optimism toward the market as a whole. If the other party insisted on placing all their hopes on the government, then his trip today would have been in vain. "Your daughter is so lovely, and the puppy is so attached—why not turn your gaze elsewhere? Start over."
Asou Akiya's sincerity and gentle guidance appeared strange to this family of three shrouded in gloom.
Yet it was a kind of strangeness that made one want to cry.
The man said miserably, "I built everything I have from nothing to reach my current status. How could I not want to start over? But debt collectors come knocking every day—this place is already the last refuge I have left."
Having coaxed him into changing his tone, Asou Akiya asked softly, "How much would it take to buy back your happiness?"
The man was stunned.
His wife remained silent, having already sensed earlier that this young man's background was anything but ordinary.
Asou Akiya said again, "Can you tell me?"
The man refused to answer such a painful question, nor did he believe that happiness could be bought again. His wife clutched the hem of her skirt, her voice trembling as she spoke, "Can you help us? Three hundred million… no, no—if we sell all our fixed assets, two hundred million yen would be enough to repay the loans."
Asou Akiya looked straight at them. With a jujutsu sorcerer's eyes, he could see the source of curses: human negative emotions.
If this were allowed to continue, this family of three would eventually commit suicide. The villa would be abandoned, rumors of hauntings would spread, drawing in locals and students from other districts. One person after another would go missing, fear would compound again and again, feeding the birth of a near–Grade One cursed spirit—until, in the end, the entire villa would be overturned by a single blast of Gojo Satoru's Blue.
At this moment, there was no need to hire Grade One or Grade Two sorcerers to investigate, no need to dispatch two future "strongest" youths and a bearer of Reversed Cursed Technique for rescue, no need for a powerful Blue to scour the land.
Asou Akiya stood at a crossroads of fate.
He chose to tear away the first page of next year's Hidden Inventory arc and form a bond with the family of three before him.
Even though he did not have that much money on hand, even though he smiled gently as he petted the puppy while coldly calculating gains and losses in his heart, he remained composed and unflustered, like a kind-hearted benefactor delivering salvation to the unfortunate. For the opening of September 2006's storyline was clenched tightly in his grasp, pressed into flesh and blood, constantly reminding him—
He was a challenger of fate.
"Two hundred million yen."
"I'll buy you a chance at happiness. Is that acceptable?"
The price is this… when I need you in the future, you will work for me."
One fifth of Fushiguro Megumi's price. Asou Akiya was remarkably calm, not acting on impulse, using reason to govern the execution of an act that was, at its core, one hundred percent emotional. Within three years, he would have to turn fifty million yen into two hundred million yen.
[I can do it.]
[In the next three years, endure more hardship, plan more carefully, and make myself stronger.]
How could someone who pursued happiness bear to witness the shattering of another's happiness?
He was not a saint, nor a savior—at most, he was an ordinary transmigrator who helped when he could.