At six o'clock in the morning, the four of them—reeking faintly of alcohol from head to toe—slipped out of the bar through the back door and found their car.
Fortunately, Asou Akiya was still clear-headed enough to remember the route, and he safely delivered everyone to the gates of Tokyo Jujutsu High.
Because outside vehicles were not registered for entry, it was inconvenient to drive onto campus, so the car was parked by the roadside.
The four got out and began walking up the steps. Just before entering the range of the barrier, Asou Akiya lifted his head and looked at the road ahead, shaded by dense greenery. A drunken haze seeped into his gaze as he murmured, "Gojo, Geto—don't you think there are way too many trees here?"
Gojo Satoru's mind felt heavy and sluggish; even the lingering smell of alcohol made his steps unsteady. "Too many?" he muttered. "Aren't the outskirts always like this?"
Geto Suguru asked rationally, "Asou, is there a problem?"
Ieiri Shoko stopped as well and turned to look at Asou Akiya, already knowing full well that he was most likely pretending to be drunk.
Asou Akiya didn't incite the others. Instead, he leaned close to Gojo Satoru's ear and whispered, "Gojo, I'm drunk. I can't stand looking at all these trees. Help me cut down every tree within a twenty-meter radius, and I'll give you a return gift next month."
The warm, damp scent of alcohol brushed against his face. Gojo Satoru's brain turned to mush, and he failed to move for a long moment.
Asou Akiya seemed almost aggrieved. He lowered his voice, then let the final note rise playfully, "Are you helping me or not? If you won't, then I'll go ask Geto."
This was the first time Asou Akiya had ever asked Gojo Satoru for help so directly.
[Akiya… is asking for help?]
Beneath his white hair, Gojo Satoru's ear twitched. As he processed the words, his mind abruptly cleared for a single second.
[Cut down trees?]
[Cut down which trees—the ones all around us?]
Gojo Satoru raised his right hand, and an irregular force of attraction took shape in his palm… a brilliant blue light blossomed.
The "Six Eyes" precisely measured a radius of twenty meters.
Worthy of his reputation as the most exceptional prodigy among jujutsu sorcerers, Gojo Satoru completed the necessary calculations in an instant and executed an intricate sequence of techniques. His arm drew forth the power of the cursed technique Blue, his waist twisting as he released overwhelming tensile force. Every movement spilled a breathtaking, almost brutal aesthetic—directed attraction, pulverization of matter, and a muffled thunderclap rolling through the air!
A humanoid natural disaster—nothing more, nothing less. This was the sheer might that belonged only to one who had gathered such power entirely within himself.
"Rumble—!"
Gojo Satoru annihilated the trees, their roots, and the very ground beneath them in one sweep!
Geto Suguru yanked Ieiri Shoko back, and the two retreated to a safe spot—right beside Gojo Satoru and Asou Akiya.
Asou Akiya stared blankly at the scene of devastation.
Beyond the steps at the school gate, every tree had been erased. No longer shaded by foliage, the sky opened wide as morning light flooded the land. In their place lay a circular crater twenty meters in diameter, with a vertical drop of nearly three meters!
How much energy would that require?
By rough calculation, the energy needed to pulverize that volume of soil was equivalent to roughly half a ton of TNT!
And this was far from Gojo Satoru's limit. He rubbed his sleepy eyes and asked casually, "Want me to fire off another one?"
"Hahaha—amazing, Gojo! I'll go find a construction crew to fill this in!" Asou Akiya suddenly burst into laughter, scooped Gojo Satoru up and spun him around once before setting him down, then dashed straight toward Tokyo Jujutsu High, looking every bit like someone in the middle of a drunken frenzy.
After being spun around, Gojo Satoru stood there in a daze, staggered, and then hurried after him.
Ieiri Shoko was shaken to her core. Facing Gojo Satoru's strength head-on, she murmured, "Power like this… and he's only classified as quasi special-grade?"
Geto Suguru showed no fear at all and replied calmly, "That was just Blue. He hasn't even used the more terrifying Red yet."
Ieiri Shoko's emotions tangled into something complicated.
She turned to look at Geto Suguru, whose strength stood on the same tier, and suddenly understood just how extravagantly favored the two of them were by fate.
This world had no gods—yet the jujutsu world had produced people who might as well rival deities.
"Geto, I'm logistics," Ieiri Shoko said quietly. Being a year older, her understanding of the jujutsu world had deepened by another layer. "You can say things like that to me, but don't say them to Asou… I don't want to see him push himself to death again."
A flash of shock crossed Geto Suguru's face, gone almost instantly as he steadied himself. "Asou won't be jealous of us."
Ieiri Shoko walked on ahead. "Yes… he won't be jealous."
But the human heart could still feel sorrow.
Geto Suguru lingered at the rear, walking thoughtfully as he looked around, only to realize that everything seemed much brighter now. With fewer trees, the view wasn't bad at all.
[Asou… you'll always be the one who clears away the shadows for us, won't you?]
The Gojo family's construction crew was swamped with work.
They had just accomplished the feat of rebuilding a luxury dormitory in seven days and hadn't even had time to catch their breath when a new assignment came in—
—Fill in the ground at the entrance of Tokyo Jujutsu High and plant low shrubs and greenery.
On November 8th, at 9:00 a.m., four alcohol-reeking sinners knelt in seiza on the tatami mats, enduring Yaga Masamichi's merciless interrogation.
The homeroom teacher roared at the four of them, "Who attacked the school gate first thing in the morning?!"
Ieiri Shoko pointed straight at Gojo Satoru. "Him."
Geto Suguru also pointed at Gojo Satoru. "Him."
Asou Akiya lowered his head and spoke up in Gojo Satoru's defense. "I was drunk and instigated it. I'm sorry."
Gojo Satoru raised his hand. "Sensei! Can we just… not pursue this matter?"
Yaga Masamichi's iron fist was about to come down when Asou Akiya hurriedly grabbed his arm, placed that clenched fist on top of his own head, and said without a trace of deceit, "I didn't like the look of those trees and wanted to cut them down myself, but I got lazy for once and borrowed Gojo's hands to clear them out. This way, the safety of students entering the school is improved too!"
Yaga Masamichi couldn't bring himself to punch him after all. Grinding his teeth, he said angrily, "Akiya, next time you report to me beforehand."
Asou Akiya replied pitifully, "I was drunk."
Yaga Masamichi didn't need to inspect them—he could smell the heavy stench of alcohol clinging to all four of them.
"…Honestly, you kids are really good at finding trouble for me."
In the end, the homeroom teacher compromised, cleaning up the mess left behind by students who had drunk through the night and then gone on a drunken rampage upon returning.
After fully accepting the fact that all male students were lunatics, Yaga Masamichi spoke heavily as he pushed the door open to leave, "Shoko, happy birthday yesterday. Next time, don't go crazy together with them. You're my only well-behaved student."
Ieiri Shoko answered obediently, "Yes, please rest assured, Sensei. I'll run away whenever they start going crazy."
Her answer—pure and unstained like a lotus rising from the mud—earned her three speechless stares from her male classmates.
Who was it that smoked and drank yesterday, huh?!
The door closed.
The four of them immediately collapsed, boneless—one pounding his legs, another rubbing his shoulders—not a single one maintaining anything resembling proper posture.
Asou Akiya propped himself up with both arms and said wistfully, "I used to be one of Yaga-sensei's 'good kids' too. I don't even know when I got kicked out of that category."
Geto Suguru shot back without mercy, "Your 'good kid' image was built by stepping on the rest of us."
Gojo Satoru took unmistakable delight in Akiya's misfortune and cut straight to the point. "Akiya is, without exaggeration, a full-blown lunatic."
Asou Akiya made a show of kicking toward Gojo Satoru's knee.
Gojo Satoru caught his ankle.
Reacting on instinct, Asou Akiya reinforced his cursed energy and retreated at once, slipping free before Gojo Satoru could succeed.
Watching the exchange, Geto Suguru frowned, finding it all too familiar. "Don't copy me, Gojo."
Gojo Satoru hadn't even been serious about restraining him, and with a bored shrug, he let Asou Akiya escape his grasp.
"Tch."
Over the next week or so, they were buried in coursework, stripped of the pleasure of going out. Time passed like plain boiled water—bland and unremarkable—until one day Gojo Satoru produced several packets of candy from who-knew-where and handed them out. Only then did everyone realize that the middle of the month had already arrived.
"It's Chitose candy." Seeing Asou Akiya staring blankly, Ieiri Shoko reminded him, "You've never had it?"
"I feel like I've eaten it before…" Asou Akiya brushed it off vaguely.
In the original owner's memories, he seemed to have eaten Chitose candy during early childhood, and astonishingly, a faint trace of happiness still lingered there.
Asou Akiya processed that emotion with the detachment of an observer; it would never shake his sense of self.
He was himself, and the original owner was the original owner.
His parents did not exist in this world. He had no soft underbelly, and he would not allow memories to assimilate him into a stranger.
He wished for his higher-dimensional soul to remain forever clean and lucid, untouched by distortion.
"The candy's sweet. Thanks."
Asou Akiya finished the Chitose candy, a confection imbued with wishes for longevity.
"It doesn't look like something you'd buy casually," Geto Suguru said as he examined the individual wrappers of each stick of Chitose candy. On them were hand-painted cranes, turtles, pine trees, and plum blossoms—meticulously rendered in fine brushwork, unmistakably the craftsmanship of a master.
Geto Suguru laughed at Gojo Satoru. "How old are you, five? Your family still gives you Chitose candy?"
In Geto Suguru's hometown traditions, November 15 marked Shichi-Go-San: boys aged five and girls aged seven would receive Chitose candy, be taken by their parents to a shrine to pray for blessings, or brought to a photography studio to take a formal family portrait.
Chitose candy symbolized prayers for a thousand years of life.
Gojo Satoru gnawed on the stick-shaped Chitose candy, biting it down piece by piece, and with casual ease said something that instantly choked Geto Suguru into silence. "After I turned seven, they've given me this thing every year—kneeling in front of me, dressing me in new clothes, bowing their heads and praying for me."
Geto Suguru: "…I've been wanting to say this for a while now. Your family is seriously feudal."
Gojo Satoru practiced selective deafness.
Lowering his voice, Geto Suguru whispered to Asou Akiya, "Are they raising a kid, or worshipping an ancestor?"
Asou Akiya replied calmly, "Before seven, you're the jewel in their palms. After seven, you're a little ancestral lord."
Asou Akiya searched up the origins of Shichi-Go-San on his phone and held the screen out for Geto Suguru to see.
Geto Suguru read aloud, "'Children under the age of seven belong to the gods and the Buddhas.'"
He had heard of this Edo-period proverb before. In ancient times, from aristocrats down to common folk, bearing and raising children was fraught with hardship, and it was not uncommon for families to end without heirs. From this anxiety was born Shichi-Go-San, a festival meant to bless children and pray that they might grow up safely and smoothly.
The Gojo family's treatment of Gojo Satoru was even more cautious than that of Edo-era nobles.
In ordinary households, once a boy turned five, he could be taken out by his parents to visit relatives, pay respects at shrines, and formally be recognized as a member of the family.
But Gojo Satoru carried a different symbolic weight.
The Gojo family adhered strictly to ancient rites, caring for him with painstaking devotion until the age of seven, venerating him as though he were a god or a Buddha. They knelt in worship, terrified of letting him so much as stumble or scrape himself, lest they disturb the "Six Eyes."
A child treated with such excessive care—held in the mouth for fear he might melt, cradled in the palms for fear he might overheat—was without question the Gojo family's little ancestral lord.
Geto Suguru did not envy this upbringing. He simply felt that Gojo Satoru's childhood was far too exaggerated, unreal in the way television dramas were unreal. The rigid rules and systems of a feudal family exuded an ancient, decayed stench—something no ordinary person could bear for long.
During class, everyone collectively drifted off-task, eating candy and chatting with the assistant supervisor about the ancient customs of Shichi-Go-San.
Just then, a set of ear-cleaning tools that Asou Akiya had ordered arrived. Lacking test subjects, he found himself in urgent need of some "children."
Asou Akiya asked, "Gojo, Geto—do you guys do ear cleaning?"
Gojo Satoru spotted the contents of the box first: feathers, fluffy pom-poms, and tiny instruments that produced sound. His face was filled with resistance. "It's all weird, creepy junk. I'm not doing it."
Geto Suguru found the term ear cleaning intriguing. "You mean… cleaning out earwax?"
Asou Akiya smiled brightly. "Yep. I'm giving you two the chance to be little kids today."
Ieiri Shoko suddenly cut in, "What about me? Am I not included?"
Asou Akiya turned his head. "Not this time, Shoko. Go find your girlfriends—or your future boyfriend—for that."
Ieiri Shoko: "..."
If Asou didn't mind, she really could have treated him as one of her sisters.
Unfortunately, Asou Akiya was far more skilled at maintaining a precise sense of distance. He gave Ieiri Shoko no chance to stir up trouble, smoothly changing the subject and tempting Geto Suguru into becoming the first experimental subject for ear cleaning.
Geto Suguru felt that the classroom wasn't exactly an appropriate place for this. "Let's play around with it after we get back to the dorms."
Gojo Satoru looked openly displeased, yet his ears were clearly tuned in, secretly listening to the conversation as his interest in the ear-cleaning process quietly grew.
After school, three boys gathered in Asou Akiya's dorm room.
Gojo Satoru stubbornly refused to leave, citing the excuse that the Gojo family's construction crew was ventilating his room and wanted it aired out for a few more days.
Geto Suguru lay stretched out on the living room sofa, pushing his hair aside to reveal his ears—full, well-shaped earlobes adorned with black circular studs that gave him a striking individuality. As long as Geto Suguru wasn't forcing a smile and allowed his naturally calm, compassionate temperament to surface, there was nothing delinquent about his presence at all; instead, he resembled a reclining Buddha, gentle and dignified, radiating a quiet grace.
Asou Akiya had long been accustomed to ear cleaning as a way to relax his mind in his previous life, but doing it for someone else was a first in all his years. Squatting beside the sofa, he noticed that Geto Suguru possessed the rare trait of "Buddha ears." He forcibly suppressed the urge to pinch them, his movements growing exceptionally careful, afraid of injuring a classmate even slightly.
When Asou Akiya brushed the outer rim of the ear with a feather, Geto Suguru shuddered.
Gojo Satoru stared.
When Asou Akiya plucked the small instrument, producing a soft, resonant sound, the muscles in Geto Suguru's face gradually relaxed.
Gojo Satoru stared.
When Asou Akiya inserted the ear pick tipped with a fluffy pom-pom into the ear canal, Geto Suguru found it difficult to adjust.
Step by step, the process unfolded. With gentle motions and a harmless, soothing presence, Asou Akiya gradually calmed Geto Suguru. At the moment when Geto Suguru's guard finally fell, the ear pick began to rotate lightly in a clockwise motion, stirring within the ear canal—
In an instant, an electric, tingling numbness surged through the sensitive nerves of the ear!
Geto Suguru instantly bristled.
From his hair to his face and down to his shoulders, cursed energy erupted outward, flaring into a spiky, hedgehog-like explosion!
The topknotted boy sprang off the sofa, bolted out of the dormitory, and shouted at the top of his lungs, "Gojo! I'm leaving this to you!"
Asou Akiya was so startled by the reaction that he froze for half a second, then immediately chased after him, refusing to let Geto Suguru escape so easily. He ran outside, reaching out to grab him as he protested, "Geto, you're going back on your word! Don't waste the disposable ear-cleaning tools I paid for!"
Gojo Satoru: "???"
Geto, Akiya—what on earth are you two doing?
Author's Note:
If everyone is curious about what ear cleaning actually feels like, you can check the comments for this chapter—someone's already explained the reason there.
{Note: Yeah, I am not gonna search and pull that up.}
P.S. Ear cleaning really is incredibly satisfying.