[A/N: I had wanted to skip the whole transmigration part, but I changed my mind.]
'My head hurts.' The young man thought, wincing as a sharp, throbbing ache pulsed through his skull. He slowly cracked open his eyes, only to be greeted by a clear blue sky stretching endlessly above him, framed on either side by the looming walls of narrow buildings. He blinked, disoriented, and looked around to find himself lying in a cramped alleyway, the ground beneath him slick and stained with blood.
Panic surged through him instantly. He scrambled upright, hands flying over his body in a frantic search for wounds, patting down his arms, his torso, his legs — and then exhaled a long, shaky breath of relief when he found nothing.
But his relief quickly gave way to confusion as his hands pressed against his own midsection. Even through the fabric of his clothing, he could feel the hard, defined ridges of muscle beneath. A six-pack — no, he realized as he pulled the blood-soaked shirt over his head and tossed it aside — an eight-pack, each abdominal carved with a precision that bordered on sculpted.
He stared down at himself, bewildered, turning his hands over as though they belonged to someone else. None of this was familiar. This wasn't his body…
He stood there in confused silence for several long seconds before the memories came rushing back: the void, the old man in golden-blue armor, the mission, the pain.
Understanding settled over him like cold water, and he sighed as the pieces clicked into place. He had taken over the body of someone who had already died, and whatever power the old man had given him must have healed it. But something nagged at him — his body was supposed to have reshaped itself to match his soul, and yet nothing about this form felt like his own.
He didn't recall ever having a six-pack in his previous life, let alone an eight-pack, but he shrugged the thought away for now. There were more pressing matters at hand. He needed the Six Eyes and Mahoraga. He wasn't sure if there was anything else in this world worth — wait. There was Tengen.
"Those are the three main targets. The main targets." He muttered softly to himself, stepping out of the shadow of the alleyway and into the open street. The moment he emerged, eyes began gravitating toward him as though he were some kind of magnet — an inexorable pull that turned heads and stopped conversations mid-sentence. And how could they resist?
He stood there bathed in daylight, shirtless, with beautiful blonde hair that shimmered almost like spun gold under the sun's gaze. His eyes were a striking, luminous golden — warm and cold all at once, like molten amber frozen in time. His features were nothing short of divine, a level of handsomeness that defied mortal description, as though the very concept of beauty had been distilled and carved into a single face.
Several passersby simply fainted dead away when his gaze swept over them, their minds unable to reconcile the sight before their eyes, while others felt heat rush to their faces and through their bodies from nothing more than a single, idle glance in their direction.
The best way to put his looks into words was to picture Michael Jackson — a man who merely flinched a finger, and people fainted. A man who possessed such an overwhelming aura that he could stand on stage doing absolutely nothing, not moving, not speaking, not even breathing in any particular way, and the crowd would still erupt into cheers.
Now, take all of that — that raw, magnetic presence — and convert it entirely into physical appearance. That was the young man's new look. An appearance so divine, so impossibly perfect, that gazing upon it was practically a form of mind control.
'Why are they looking at me?' He thought, his brow creasing into a deep frown as he noticed the sheer volume of stares being directed his way. Some of the onlookers had already fainted, crumpled where they stood, while others had gone bright red in the face, their expressions caught somewhere between awe and something far more primal.
The entire street had come to a standstill — every single person, male and female alike, frozen in place and staring directly at him — and the scene was beginning to feel less like flattery and more like something out of a horror movie.
Unease crept through him like ice water, and he instinctively stepped backward into the mouth of the alleyway. But the moment the crowd saw him retreating — saw that their collective attention had frightened him — they surged forward as one, hands reaching out, voices overlapping, desperate to stop him from disappearing. The young man didn't wait to hear what they had to say. He turned on his heel and ran for his life.
'What the hell is this?!' He thought, heart hammering against his ribs — and then his eyes went wide. He was fast. Absurdly, impossibly fast. He didn't recall ever being anywhere close to being this fast.
His legs carried him forward with an ease that felt almost weightless, every muscle in this new body coiled tight with power he hadn't yet begun to understand. Without thinking, he leaped, kicked off the side of a brick wall at an angle, used the momentum to launch himself toward the opposite wall, and from there vaulted upward in a single fluid motion until his feet touched down on the rooftop above.
'No way… that was pretty cool.' He thought, a grin slowly spreading across his face. He didn't even know how he did that, it was all on instinct.
He glanced back over the edge and saw the crowd that had chased him pouring into the alleyway below, only to freeze collectively as they craned their necks upward, staring at the rooftop in stunned disbelief at what they had just witnessed.
His grin widened, and he turned away, breaking into a sprint across the rooftops — leaping from one building to the next with growing confidence, each jump carrying him further and faster than the last.
'That's right, I got all of Iishiko's abilities. I'm unstoppable.' He thought, the grin never leaving his face as his mind began cycling through everything he knew about the man whose power now coursed through his veins.
Iishiko had possessed Omni-Weapon Proficiency — and not the watered-down, vaguely impressive kind. He had taken a rubber band, a simple rubber band, and bisected Ajimu with a single shot. In Iishiko's hands, everything was a deadly weapon. A pebble, a twig, a sheet of paper — even the wind itself could be turned lethal with nothing more than intent and skill.
Then there was Subjective Immunity, and this one was where things truly became terrifying. Anything Iishiko didn't recognize simply could not affect him. The ability was so absolute that he could stand perfectly still and allow a sword to be driven clean through his heart, and he would take no real damage from it — because in his perception, it was nothing more than acupuncture. And so, the damage his body actually registered would be equivalent to exactly that: a needle prick. Nothing more.
The only known way around this was word-based power, because a person will always recognize words spoken in a language they understand — the mind processes them automatically. This same ability also worked in reverse, allowing him to bypass the defenses of others just as effortlessly.
But Iishiko's most dangerous ability, the one that truly set him apart, was Irreversible Destruction. Any damage Iishiko inflicted upon the world would never heal. The scars he left were permanent — carved into reality itself. But that was merely the surface of what this power could do. If someone forced Iishiko to recognize an attack — truly forced him to acknowledge it as a threat, compelling him to block — then the attack itself would break. Permanently.
A fist used to strike him would shatter and never function again. An ability used against him would crack apart at its foundation and become forever unusable. The only way to undo the destruction was to defeat him outright.
And to make matters worse, once an ability or technique had been used against him, he would no longer recognize it at all — meaning that even if the power somehow remained functional after being broken against him, it simply wouldn't affect him anymore. Curses, debuffs, status effects — all of them would find their influence dissolving the instant their effects attempted to take hold.
Next was Supernatural Luck. Iishiko had been the luckiest person in his entire verse — at least until he committed certain acts that stripped that fortune away. Before that fall, his luck should have been greater than Medaka's, who had been capable of casually manifesting one-in-a-million chances. She had guessed the correct combination of a locked door — a sequence with a one-in-a-trillion probability — and could have pulled it off a million times in a row without breaking a sweat.
Lastly, there was Iishiko's ability to transfer his consciousness and abilities into the body of a fully prepared or in-training Shiranui Village backup. However, this was more of a function of the village's desire to preserve unusual existences like Iishiko rather than an innate power, so for the young man's purposes, it was essentially useless.
'My goal right now should be to… what? Master curse energy? I wonder what my innate ability would be.' He thought, slowing to a halt atop a rooftop and closing his eyes. The city hummed distantly below him, but he shut it all out, turning his focus entirely inward.
Curse energy was, at its core, born from negative emotions — the pain, the grief, the rage, the bitterness that every living being carried within them whether they acknowledged it or not. If he focused deeply enough, he should be able to draw it out.
So he did exactly that. He reached into himself, past the surface, past the noise, diving into the emotions buried deep within. He tried to relive the times he had been angry — truly, violently angry. The times when uncontrollable hatred had consumed him so completely that rational thought had ceased to exist. And, naturally, the times he had watched a One Piece flashback.
It took a moment. The silence within him stretched, stubborn and unyielding. But then, faintly, he felt something stir to life deep inside — a spark, fragile and weak at first, flickering uncertainly like a candle flame in a storm.
He latched onto it, refusing to let it fade, and as he poured his focus into that tiny ember, the power grew. And grew. And grew — until it was no longer a flicker but a roaring inferno, and he reached out on pure instinct and seized hold of it with everything he had.
***
As the young man tapped into his curse power, the rooftop beneath his feet trembled — and then his body erupted.
A massive column of curse energy detonated outward from him, raw and violent, shaking the entire building down to its foundation. What he had perceived as a small, manageable amount of energy tore through the air with enough force to send shockwaves rippling across the surrounding blocks.
A beam of pure curse energy lanced upward from his body and pierced straight into the heavens, splitting the clouds above like a blade through silk.
Not too far away, a man appeared standing in the sky as though the air itself were solid ground beneath his feet. He reached up, slowly removing his blindfold, and turned his gaze toward the source of the overwhelming energy he had just sensed.
"This curse energy… its output is almost as massive as mine." Satoru Gojo said softly, a look of genuine confusion crossing his usually unshakable features. His brow furrowed as he studied the distant pillar of light.
"Why is it golden?" He murmured to himself, and in the span of a single heartbeat, he teleported — reappearing not far from the source, hovering above and looking down at the shirtless young man standing at the center of it all.
The man stood perfectly still, seemingly unbothered, while a dark golden curse energy poured off of him in wild, uncontrollable waves, radiating outward like heat from a furnace. And to Satoru's mounting shock, the output wasn't stabilizing — it was climbing. Rapidly. The energy pouring from this stranger had already surpassed his own reserves and showed no signs of slowing down.
'This is at least twice as much as Yuta…' Satoru thought, his eyes narrowing with an intensity that rarely surfaced.
Yuta Okkotsu was the person with the highest curse energy output Satoru had ever encountered. Satoru himself was the strongest sorcerer alive, yes, but that title rested on the foundation of his genius — his unparalleled technique, his mastery over the application of cursed energy, not raw volume alone.
And that distinction mattered, because applying cursed energy to physical attacks could be just as devastating as any cursed technique in the hands of a gifted combatant who specialized in close-quarters combat.
The amount of cursed energy an individual could release was referred to as their potential Cursed Energy Output — a measure of both offensive and defensive capability. While it wasn't the most common method of combat, individuals with sufficient output could channel directed blasts of raw cursed energy as a form of attack in and of itself.
"Nice." The young man opened his eyes, a satisfied grin stretching across his face as he felt the overwhelming power coursing through every fiber of his being, thrumming in his veins like a second heartbeat.
But the grin faltered almost immediately as he sensed something — a presence, sharp and impossibly vast, hovering directly above him. He looked up, and there, floating effortlessly in the air, was Satoru Gojo, staring down at him with deadly seriousness.