The world felt heavy. Not the crushing, artificial gravity of the Architect's towers or the suffocating pressure of a digital cage, but the thick, humid weight of a genuine Tokyo summer morning. We sat on the mossy stone steps of a small, forgotten shrine in Minato, watching the first commuter trains of the day rattle across the elevated tracks in the distance. To any normal person walking by, it looked like the city had simply woken up from a particularly bad dream. The sky was blue, the birds were chirping, and the smell of breakfast was beginning to waft from the nearby apartments.
But we knew the truth. We could see the "ghosts" in the machine.
"I can still feel it," Nobara said, her voice a low murmur as she kicked a loose stone down the stairs. She watched it tumble into the weeds. "The HUD is gone. The levels are gone. The quest markers don't show up in the corner of my eye anymore. But when I close my eyes... I can still hear the 'resonance' of the city. It's like a ringing in my ears that won't go away. A frequency that wasn't there before."
"That's the residual energy," Megumi explained. He was leaning against a weathered stone pillar, his arms crossed over his chest. He looked physically better—the pale, sickly look from the Puppet Master's control was gone—but his shadows were different. They didn't just sit on the ground anymore; they seemed to writhe and boil, more restless and aggressive than they had ever been. "The Architect spent weeks gathering the cursed energy of millions into a single point. When Ren shattered the Core, that energy didn't just vanish into the void. It flooded back into the atmosphere like a dam breaking. The veil between our world and the cursed realm... it's thinner than a sheet of paper now."
The Ghost in the Soul
I looked down at my palms. They were clean. The violet marks that had glowed during our final battle were physically gone, but my soul felt... different. I wasn't just Ren anymore. I felt like a container that had been stretched to hold something immense, and even though the energy was gone, the shape of the container had changed forever.
I focused my mind, trying to reach for that familiar spark of gravity. It didn't respond with a "Ping!" or a System message. Instead, it was a slow, deep hum in the pit of my stomach.
[SOUL ARCHIVE: REN]
* Current State: System-Disconnected (Organic)
* Residual Power: Void Essence (Passive)
* Status: Unbound
The "System" was no longer an active force telling me what to do or rewarding me with "OP" for killing monsters. It had left its fingerprints on us, though. We were the only ones who remembered the "Leveling" and the "Quests," the only ones who had seen the world in bits and bytes. But the power we had gained through blood and sweat stayed behind, baked into our very spirits like a scar that never quite fades.
"We aren't just students anymore," Maki said, her voice sharp as she ran a whetstone along the edge of her blade. Shhhkt. Shhhkt. The sound was rhythmic and deadly. "The Higher-Ups at Jujutsu High are in a total panic. I've already heard the rumors through the Zenin channels. They don't know how to handle what happened. Half the city saw the sky turn red and the buildings turn into light. You can't just 'memory-wipe' a population that saw the end of the world."
"And they're terrified of you, Ren," Toge added. His voice was raspier than usual, his throat still healing from the strain of the climb, but the words were clear enough to send a chill down my spine.
They were right to be afraid. In their eyes, I wasn't the hero who had deleted a digital tyrant. I was a dangerous anomaly—a "glitch" that had survived the deletion of its home program. To the old men who ran the sorcery world, I was a variable they couldn't control.
The First Error
The peace of the morning was shattered not by a scream, but by a sound I had hoped never to hear again: the sound of a computer crashing. A loud, digital screech tore through the air, vibrating the very stones of the shrine.
A few hundred yards away, in a crowded plaza where people were beginning to gather for their morning coffee, a "Glitch" appeared. It looked like a jagged tear in a photograph, a line of black static and flickering white light hanging five feet above the pavement.
Out of the tear crawled something that defied every law of biology and sorcery. It wasn't a standard Cursed Spirit born of human fear, and it wasn't one of the Architect's programmed monsters. It was a Vestige—a creature born from the marriage of corrupted data and raw, ancient negative emotion.
"It's starting," Yuta said, appearing silently behind us. He had been quiet since the tower fell, his presence heavy with the loss of Rika's physical form, though she still lingered in his shadow. "The leftovers of the Architect's code are merging with the natural curses of the city. They're called Errors now. They don't follow the rules of Jujutsu, and they don't follow the rules of the System."
The creature in the plaza was shaped vaguely like a man, but its body was made of flickering television static. Its limbs stretched and snapped with a jerky, broken animation, moving at fifteen frames per second while the rest of the world moved in real-time. As its "hand" brushed against a nearby lamppost, the metal didn't bend—it turned into blue pixels and dissolved into nothingness.
The Sword of the Void
I stood up, feeling the familiar, heavy pull of gravity in my gut. I didn't have a HUD telling me the enemy's level. I didn't have a quest log promising me 5,000 OP for its head. I just had the sight of people screaming as they ran from a monster they couldn't understand.
"We don't need a System to tell us what to do anymore," I said, my voice sounding deeper, more resonant. I looked at my friends—Maki, Nobara, Megumi, Toge, and Yuta. We were a team forged in a fire that didn't exist in any history book. "We were sorcerers before the game, and we're the protectors of what's left after. If the Architect left a mess, we're the ones who clean it up. No rewards. No points. Just us."
I stepped off the top of the shrine stairs, but I didn't fall. I caught myself on the air, my boots hovering an inch above the stone as I manipulated the gravity around my own body. The violet light didn't flare out in a blinding explosion; it simmered beneath my skin, deep, controlled, and infinitely more dangerous.
"Maki, take the flank and guide the civilians. Nobara, setup a perimeter with your nails—if that static touches them, it might spread. Megumi, use your shadows to trap its feet," I commanded, the authority coming naturally now. "Yuta... I want to see what a Special Grade can really do when he's not being held back by a Mandatory Quest."
Yuta smiled, a dangerous, sharp expression that reminded me why he was feared across the world. "With pleasure, Ren."
As we charged toward the first Error of the new age, the wind whipping through our hair, I realized that Volume 3 wasn't the end of our journey. It was just the tutorial. The real fight for the soul of our world—a world that was now half-broken and half-reborn—was only just beginning.
[NEW ERA: THE AGE OF THE VOID]