"If they want to cry at your grave, let them cry at your grave. What are you being so loud about?" Jogo clapped both hands over his ears, his face screwed up in distaste. "You died, and now nobody else is allowed to mourn you?"
Fair enough, technically… ugh, but still. Watching an entire plaza packed shoulder to shoulder with people sobbing their hearts out in front of her own gravestone… it was just plain bizarre!
Jogo, you're the administrator of this whole area — couldn't you steer them somewhere a little more constructive?!
Look at that! Just look! On the left there were people burning joss paper for her… and on the right, people waving soul-summoning banners and plucking pipa while they chanted "Return, o soul"!
Was this really okay?!
"Ah!" Someone finally noticed Mahiru off in the distance and let out an enormous shriek, jabbing a finger at the girl. "Wait! Wait — she — she —"
"What are you yelling ab — ah!" A man in the plaza turned with a scowl, ready to curse him out for disrupting the memorial, and then his eyes bulged too. "She! She! She —!"
"She what? … Ah! Good grief!"
"What could possibly shock you that — ah! Impossible!"
"What? Are we under attack — ah! Holy hell! Murayama! Your soul-summoning method actually works!"
"Return, o soul, return, o soul… what are you all going on about? … Ahhh!!"
Like a chain reaction, the whole dense mass of people in the plaza wrenched around to look at Mahiru standing behind them.
They saw the blue-haired girl.
Their shock had no equal.
"Return, o soul!"
"Return, o soul!"
"Return, o soul!!"
"Return, o soul!!"
"Return, o soul —"
"Return, o soul!! —"
"Return, o soul!! —"
Mahiru could only stare.
She watched the countless people in the plaza take up the chant in one unified voice, and no words came. The corners of her eyes twitched.
"Hurry up and tell them you aren't dead," Jogo said, patting her on the shoulder. "Otherwise this is going to get unbearable."
Mahiru's lips parted.
Nothing came out.
She wanted to snark at this — she just had no idea where to start!
News of Mahiru's resurrection swept across all of Japan within days.
Exactly how she had come back was not made public; all anyone was told was that "Return, o soul" had nothing to do with it.
The business of crossing through time was also kept from the public for the moment — and most certainly kept from the United States military.
"That blue-haired Cursed Spirit is back. It's going to do serious damage to our plans." In a small United States forward base, inside an office, an officer was briefing several soldiers. "I need you to investigate her situation for me. Quietly."
He raised a hand, and the system's point-transfer panel bloomed open in front of them.
The sum on it was staggering.
"These points are your operating funds."
The soldiers snapped to attention. "Sir!"
The officer sank back into his chair and lit a cigarette.
"You do this properly, all of you. Every one of our assignments matters." He blew out a stream of smoke. "Once we've taken Jujutsu High's place, your children and your wives will have more money than they can count — and the right to become Jujutsu Sorcerers."
The soldiers' faces brightened a shade. "Sir!!"
Louder, that time.
"All right. Out you go." The officer waved a hand.
The soldiers withdrew and pulled the door shut behind them.
Once they were all gone, he reached out and pinched out a candle at his elbow. It was a cursed tool that soundproofed the room from the outside world, exchanged for through the Culling Game system.
With that, the secret conversation was over.
That was the truth of it.
The Beautiful Country's forces talked a great deal about coming to save lives and relieve the disaster — but they had their own quiet designs.
Jujutsu Sorcerers and jujutsu itself represented power on a scale nobody had ever seen, and a "potential" that defied comprehension. That kind of strength, that kind of capability — it was simply too tempting to leave alone.
After joining the Culling Game and getting a taste of what it offered, the Beautiful Country's people set their minds on one thing: how to seize this entire system of power and make it their own. That was why they had come here, why they had poured in at such scale.
Disaster relief? Saving the people? All of it a lie.
Who would be that generous? They were no bodhisattvas.
They looked like rescuers. In practice, they had been skimming the points that were supposed to be distributed to the residents of every district under their control.
Take those people at the factory Mahiru had just saved. Their factory was working for the military, yet not one worker had points to survive on — because no points had ever been sent.
Did anyone really believe Cursed Spirits laying siege was the reason the points never reached the factory?
Ha. What a joke.
They had never intended to hand those points over, not from the very beginning. Only when the workers were visibly days from death did the 7th Unit invent an excuse to contact Jujutsu High and call them in for a rescue — which, put plainly, meant calling them in to collect the corpses. Those workers were simply lucky. They ran into Mahiru, and she saved them.
Across the territory the Beautiful Country's forces controlled, that story repeated itself over and over.
"Word is that Cursed Spirit brought back close to a hundred million points…"
What a nuisance.
Every extra day or two before Jujutsu High collapsed was another day or two their own plan slipped back.
That blue-haired Cursed Spirit was infuriating.
They had been perfectly content to sit and wait for Jujutsu High to fall apart on its own, then walk in and reap the harvest. Instead, the moment that girl came back, not only were the points replenished, but all those Jujutsu High people who were supposedly demoralized and easy to infiltrate had turned optimistic — brimming with confidence and hope.
And the civilians along with them, as though a sliver of dawn had cut through their despair.
What had those civilians been like before? More than half of them had figured they wouldn't last much longer, had given up on themselves ages ago, and had settled into rotting in place.
Then the news of that girl's return spread — and hell, that same crowd of hopeless wretches suddenly had no aches in their backs, no soreness in their legs, and worked like their lives depended on it, sunnier than a field of sunflowers.
What an almighty nuisance. Wouldn't it have been so much easier if she had just stayed dead? Why did she have to come back?
The upper ranks of the army were grinding their teeth over that blue-haired Cursed Spirit now.
And anyone could see the girl would only bring more positive change in the days ahead.
Jujutsu High and the countless civilians who had been sunk in the mire were going to walk into a bright future — and that was exactly what the Beautiful Country's forces could not allow.
"Is there any way to make that girl die again…?"
The thought surfaced in the officer's mind. His rank wasn't high enough, though; strategic decisions like that were not his to make.
He let out a long sigh.
And it was then that he thought he heard a strange, wet sound.
He frowned.
"Who's out there?"
The silence around him was unnatural, close to the stillness of death. Beyond the window the night held no light at all, like an abyss that swallowed everything.
The officer went rigid with caution, held his breath, drew his sidearm with his right hand and a small cursed-tool knife with his left.
Low-grade Jujutsu Sorcerers were allergic to bullets, and Cursed Spirits were allergic to cursed tools. The little knife had come out of the Culling Game system too.
He rose warily and edged toward the door.
Slowly he pressed the handle down and pushed it open.
The hinges groaned.
The smell of iron hit him full in the face, and something viscous lapped against his boots.
"What the —"
Blood?
And… green blood??
His head snapped up.
There were "monsters" sprawled across the floor.
Bodies wrenched out of shape, bulging with lump after lump, or crushed down into compacted knots — misshapen, impossible things, pinned to the ground by thorns, leaking green and blue and yellow blood.
Where had monsters come from?
Twisted, dying sounds bubbled out of their throats.
And every one of them was wearing his unit's uniform.
These few things, warped into monsters, were unmistakably the soldiers who had just walked out of his office!!
"Who's there?!" The officer's skin crawled, cold racing up his spine.
What was happening?
"Who's there?!!" he shouted, staggering backward.
And in the instant he turned, he froze.
"Yo…"
A gaunt man with long blue hair, disheveled and filthy, stitch lines running all over his body, stood behind him — watching him, staring at him, a warped and wicked amusement in his eyes. "This really takes me back…"
Who the hell are you? — that was the question the officer meant to ask, but the moment his jaw moved he discovered he no longer had a mouth.
In a single heartbeat the blue-haired man was in front of him, hand already resting against his body.
Impossible to resist, impossible to reverse, and utterly hopeless — Idle Transfiguration.
His soul twisted in an instant, and his flesh twisted and caved in along with it, collapsing into a ridiculous rubber ball that bounced a few times across the floor before the blue-haired man stomped it flat.
Pop —
The ball burst.
The blue-haired man — no, perhaps he should be called Mahito — threw back his head and laughed like a creature in ecstasy.
"Hahahaha… hahaha!!" He clutched his head, face tipped to the ceiling, both hands dragging at his own cheeks, his grin manic and horrible. "This feels so good, so good! I'm back! Yuji Itadori, Jujutsu Sorcerers — I'm back!!"
This was the Mahito of the "future world."
"So good! It feels so good!"
He had come back to life. Not resurrection in the conventional sense, but close enough to it.
The world of Jujutsu Kaisen had souls, and it had reincarnation. When people of this world died, their souls travelled through a place called the Passage of Souls, entered the cycle of rebirth, and vanished completely.
In the original story, after Yuji Itadori destroyed him, Mahito's soul should have taken that same Passage of Souls and gone into the cycle.
But whether the Passage simply permitted a soul to linger, or whether it was the particular nature of Mahito's Idle Transfiguration that let him stay, stay he did.
He remained inside the Passage of Souls, all the way through to the future arc sixty-eight years later.
From there he could watch every soul in the world make its walk into rebirth. For decades, he knew exactly who died.
He said he had been waiting for Yuji Itadori all that time, though the original story never spelled out why. Maybe he simply wanted to see Yuji Itadori die. Maybe he had to confirm Yuji Itadori's death before entering the cycle himself, so Yuji Itadori couldn't camp his respawn point…
Whatever the reason, for those sixty-eight years the man lived in the Passage in that state — dead, but not yet reincarnated, a ghost. Until the future arc, when Yuji Itadori arrived with the boy who possessed the Chaos and Harmony Cursed Technique and hauled him out of the Passage of Souls.
And right now, the ones holding the Chaos and Harmony Cursed Technique were Sukuna and the phantom Kenjaku.
Those two had negotiated with him, then dragged him out of the Passage of Souls.
And delivered him here.
"Wonderful! Incredible! I'm so happy!"
He had lost to Yuji Itadori once. Now he had a second chance to do it all over — with help from others, no less, which made him even stronger than before.
"I hear there's another me in this world?" Something occurred to him, and his grin turned nastier still. "How interesting…"
To think he'd even get the chance to come here…
So fate really did favor him after all, didn't it?
Hahahaha…
"Oh! Big Sis Mahiru!" Kin-chan came barreling over and thumped into Mahiru's arms. "It's been so long! I missed you so much!"
"Same here!" Mahiru returned the hug with everything she had. "I missed you too!"
This was lovely. Seeing Kin-chan felt like having her whole spirit patched back together.
Well, what could you do. What she'd witnessed earlier had left her honestly speechless.
For reasons she couldn't identify, done by someone she couldn't name, this original world she'd been born into gave off an absurd air from top to bottom.
Over in the past world, everyone was reasonably serious — they relaxed when it was time to relax and got grave when it was time to be grave. Come back here, though, and everything in sight was liable to make you break character.
Had this place caught something? What exactly was the difference between the two worlds?
And where was Takaba? Why hadn't Takaba turned up yet? She urgently needed him here to offset this world's insanity levels!
Hanami sat off to one side drinking tea, eyes crinkled with a smile. Little Kaori came over to greet Mahiru too, delighted.
Maki and Mai weren't around — apparently they'd gone to meet the Jujutsu High people coming in for the talks.
"You called them over for a meeting?" Jogo asked.
"I did," Mahiru nodded. "There's plenty left to discuss."
Now that she was back, several hard problems were waiting for her head-on.
First: nobody in Japan had enough points.
Even with the roughly one hundred million points she'd brought back this time, Japan held tens of millions of people. It would buy them a few extra days at most. Finding an efficient way to acquire points was a problem that needed solving now.
Second was the matter of Satoru Gojo.
Even now, Mahiru had no idea which time and space Satoru Gojo had been swept into. She'd tried tracking him from the past world and hadn't managed it.
So her return to the real world was partly to search the battlefield where Satoru Gojo had been pulled through, looking for traces — anything that would tell her which direction he and the Prison Realm had been carried.
And there was one more thing. Going to Jujutsu High, breaking open the Tomb of the Star Corridor that held this world's Tengen, and seeing what state this world's Tengen was actually in.
Given the degree of erosion, everything around Tengen had certainly fallen by now.
If they could get Tengen back, their odds of winning would climb through the roof.
____
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