Chaos and Harmony.
That was the name of an utterly monstrous Cursed Technique.
The ability people had nicknamed the "MC Command Block" — this was it.
"Chaos" meant shattering the existing order of laws.
"Harmony" meant rebuilding the order of laws you wanted in its place.
Add the two together and you could destroy, create, rebuild — basically the power of "because I say so." As long as there was Cursed Energy to spare, you made whatever you felt like making, and whatever you wanted to happen, happened.
The most brainless, most obscene, most powerful Cursed Technique in existence.
And it belonged to the Rumelian twins — Maru and Cross.
Its only limit was that neither boy had much Cursed Energy.
The two of them were also the protagonists of the Future Arc.
In the original story, they were supposed to travel to Earth in that world sixty-eight years from now, meet the descendants of Yuta Okkotsu and Maki Zenin — Yuka Okkotsu and Tsurugi Okkotsu — and, through no end of setbacks and growth, finally broker peace between humanity and the Simurians.
This time, the two boys would never get their chance.
Because Sukuna had crossed over into the future.
A variable from another world had rewritten the fate of their planet and their species from the ground up.
Sukuna ruled their planet. He ruled the Deskunte, the strongest people on it, and he had brought the Rumelians — Maru and Cross's own people — almost entirely under his control. That strongest of alien warriors, the one called Dabura, had his sister held hostage and no choice but to work for Sukuna.
And these two boys, holders of Chaos and Harmony, were of course found out. And of course put to use.
"So what do you need from me next…" In a sealed chamber, the Rumelian boy lay half-sprawled on the floor, drained hollow.
This was Cross, the younger of the twins.
He looked wrung out, as though his Cursed Technique had been squeezed dry.
Disgust filled his eyes as he lifted his head toward the figure standing over him — or rather, toward a phantom.
"You can rest a while now," the phantom said, smiling. "Don't look at me like you want to kill me… I died a long time ago. Someone finished me off in an extremely violent fashion — didn't even leave bones behind, you know?"
The phantom was Kenjaku.
The Kenjaku of the modern era. The dead one.
Mahiru really had killed Kenjaku. Body destroyed, soul scattered with it. But before she set out to attack Satoru Gojo, she had planted a fragment of her own soul inside the Culling Game.
Just as Kenjaku had been able to split Sukuna's soul into twenty pieces, she had split off a small piece of her own and lodged it in the Culling Game's system. Once her main body died, her consciousness could still move within that system — memories unchanged, knowledge unchanged — she simply couldn't fight anymore.
The phantom Kenjaku was less a person now than the Culling Game's resident AI.
Every plan Sukuna had run since arriving in the future, every step of the power grab on Simuria, had the phantom Kenjaku sitting at his elbow as advisor.
The wringing-out of Cross was the phantom Kenjaku's work too.
Why could the Culling Game reach across timelines, across worlds?
The Culling Game of the original story couldn't. Kenjaku certainly couldn't.
What let it do all of that now was precisely this Cursed Technique — Chaos and Harmony.
The phantom Kenjaku had seized the twin brothers and wired their Cursed Technique straight into the Culling Game's system, giving the whole thing one enormous upgrade.
It could cross time. It could erode worlds. It could swallow uncountable numbers of people. The Culling Game had never wanted for Cursed Energy, and now it could pour out Chaos and Harmony at will.
The only limit was how much the twins' bodies could endure.
If Chaos and Harmony hadn't instinctively shielded the brothers, the phantom Kenjaku would long since have had Sukuna kill them both and used Spirit Descent to strip the Cursed Technique off their corpses.
"Remember our deal." Cross glared at the phantom Kenjaku through clenched teeth. "You don't touch Maru."
"Of course," the phantom said, smiling. "Provided you stay obedient."
The phantom Kenjaku crossed to the side of the chamber and slid a stone panel aside.
Behind it was a window, made of clear crystal.
Outside it lay the vast emptiness of space.
So they were aboard a spaceship.
"A little longer and we'll reach Earth," the phantom Kenjaku said, still smiling. "You'll be cooperating with me again then. We're taking Earth as well."
Cross ground his teeth and said nothing.
Then, in the next breath, the smile dropped off the phantom Kenjaku's face.
Beep. Beep.
Almost the same instant Sukuna received the alarm, he received it too.
Shock spread across the phantom Kenjaku's features.
Some power — sly, insidious, troublesome — was worming its way into the Culling Game's system.
Like a virus, it had forced a brand-new account into being inside the system's administrator layer.
"Tengen? But… ah." The phantom Kenjaku worked it out in a heartbeat.
Someone had gotten there first and taken control of the Tengen of that past timeline.
The phantom Kenjaku knew exactly how much the past world's Tengen mattered. That was the very reason he had pushed so hard to erode the past while he still hadn't finished securing the future — to stop precisely this from happening.
And for all his frantic racing against the clock, in the end he hadn't outrun that blue-haired Cursed Spirit.
"Honestly… you've already killed me, and you're still going to be my natural enemy?"
The phantom Kenjaku's mouth split into a grin.
He wasn't Sukuna. He couldn't feel the Cursed Energy signature attached to that new account. And so, naturally, it never once occurred to him that his own past self might be wrapped around Mahiru's finger — might be running errands for her.
Which left the phantom Kenjaku genuinely at a loss.
How had Mahiru uncovered the secret of parallel worlds this quickly? How had she reached Tengen in the past world this quickly, and taken control of Tengen on top of that?
The blue-haired Cursed Spirit was strong, yes. Not that strong.
With no eyes on the past world, the phantom Kenjaku found the whole thing beyond belief — that blue-haired Cursed Spirit had outstripped his imagination all over again.
And above everything else, what staggered him most was that she could truly breach the Culling Game's system to this degree.
No, hold on. How was she this fluent with it?
How did her grasp of the Culling Game run so deep?
Nobody was going to tell him Mahiru had glanced at the Culling Game a couple of times and seen through the architecture of the entire system. No genius alive was capable of that.
No. Impossible. It had to be luck! Or brute force battering out a miracle! Mahiru's Idle Transfiguration was tied to the Culling Game to begin with — maybe she'd tripped some flaw in the system.
Whatever the case, Mahiru had absolutely only managed all this by accident!
All he needed to do was patch the hole again and delete that new administrator account!
And so, right in front of Cross, the phantom Kenjaku vanished. He stilled his mind, sank down into the system, and threw the full weight of his own account against the intrusion coming from Mahiru's side.
Meanwhile, in the past world, the female Kenjaku who had just acquired this new "privilege" named Tengen felt the resistance pushing back from the phantom Kenjaku's end.
Her eyebrow rose.
"Oh?"
She'd had her suspicions already… but it really did seem the one who built this system knew what they were doing.
Interest kindled in her at once. She was practically cracking her knuckles.
"Then let's find out who's better," she said, smiling.
Kenjaku was confident of victory.
Well. On both sides.
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