It wasn't that Mahiru felt relaxed, or that nothing worried her.
Mainly, panicking about the current situation wouldn't accomplish anything.
After the Culling Game's version update, chaos was inevitable. No matter what attitude people went in with, ninety percent of them would end up buying something from the Culling Game's System Shop and becoming Jujutsu Sorcerers.
So aside from steeling themselves and preparing for disaster, they had no real way to reverse this "version update."
But who could have guessed... the future is always a murky thing.
Kenjaku had expected that the moment the version update dropped, people would start cutting each other down, a death game in full swing, and Japan would fall in an instant. After all, only killing earned points, and points were how they'd pay off their loans. Their enthusiasm for mutual slaughter would be limitless.
Jujutsu High had assumed exactly the same thing.
So the Jujutsu Sorcerers were on a hair trigger, braced as though for war. They worked with the government, contacted the Beautiful Country's military, and threw together suppression units across the country that could hold order for a little while, along with a great many rescue teams, assembled at speed.
There'd be a free-for-all, right?
Countless people tearing into each other, all of them in desperate need of treatment, right?
This was going to be a brutal assignment. That was what the rescue teams told themselves, nerves drawn tight.
Until the first wave of wounded arrived.
"Uh... this one's a burn. He set his own hair on fire while test-driving his flame Cursed Technique." Maki Fushiguro stood in front of an enormous pile of casualties, walking the rescue crew through each injury in turn. "Huh? You're asking about this one? Blunt force trauma to the head. That's right, he was experimenting with his Object Flight Cursed Technique and got clobbered by the stick he was controlling."
The head of the rescue team, Miss Shoko Ieiri, listened to Fushiguro's briefing with a twitching eyebrow, so far past speechless that she had no idea what expression to land on.
Yes. Within one hour of Season Two of the Culling Game version update, the Tokyo rescue teams had taken in 1,402 patients.
And 1,386 of them had injured themselves by accident while using their own Cursed Techniques.
Nobody out there was using a Cursed Technique to hurt anyone else.
People were busy beating the daylights out of themselves.
Getting a handle on your own Cursed Technique already took everything you had. Who had time left over to pick fights with strangers?
Never mind the phantom Kenjaku failing to foresee this. Even Mahiru couldn't have predicted it. So it turned out that for ordinary people, simply operating a Cursed Technique was that hard to get started with.
More than a thousand people across Tokyo had been carried to the rescue teams with serious wounds, and those were only the extreme cases.
If the outliers were the ones critically hurt, what about everyone else?
Minor injuries, naturally.
Or a flat inability to use their Cursed Technique at all.
Powerful or feeble, a Cursed Technique in the hands of an ordinary person with no experience and no practice produced no real strength whatsoever. If anything it "degraded" to match how garbage its user was.
For instance. For instance, uh...
Maki Fushiguro's mouth stretched wide and she bent her head.
The black-haired girl was scrolling through her phone.
Specifically, through the flood of warning threads about "Culling Game skills and items" that had come surging onto the Culling Game's built-in Player Community.
[Warning! Steer clear! Do NOT buy the "Ishiryuu-Brand Cursed Energy Cannon"!]
Plenty of people asked why in the replies. The original poster answered:
"Because with the Cursed Energy output cannon, right now most of us can only output out of our asses!"
Set aside the difference in sheer volume of Cursed Energy. Wasn't Ishiryuu's Cursed Energy output technique powerful? Wasn't it cool as hell?
But a lot of buyers learned it and discovered they had no feel at all for what Cursed Energy output was supposed to be like.
What is Cursed Energy? What is output?
How do you release something you can't even sense from inside your own body?
With all those factors piling up, the good folks who'd bought the Ishiryuu package could currently only fire Cursed Energy out of their backsides. But whoever went into a fight aiming their rear at the enemy first?
Were you supposed to stick your butt out at your opponent and greet all comers with a thunderous posture? And to aim, were you supposed to brace both hands on your knees and squint backward at them from between your legs?
Absolute insanity!
[Steer clear, steer clear! Do NOT buy the "Mechamaru-Brand Puppet Manipulation"!]
This Cursed Technique had been one of the hottest sellers back when the shop first opened. In the Culling Game System Shop, every product logged its view count and its purchase count.
Sorted by likes and anticipation, Mechamaru's technique was the most breathlessly awaited item of all. After all, this was the technique that drove a mech into battle!
Who wouldn't want to fight in a mech?
And fighting in a mech meant that even when the mech broke, you didn't get hurt. What a life!
On top of all that, when you purchased this Cursed Technique, the System Shop threw in a starter puppet for free.
There was also a note attached that read: "Because this Cursed Technique is a Heavenly Restriction, it produces a slight side effect of restricted mobility. However, the starter puppet included with your purchase will compensate for this side effect."
People read that and were thrilled. Not only did this thing come with a free gift, the free gift even "compensated" for the drawback.
My god. The whole crowd cheered. This was daylight robbery in their favor!
So an awful lot of people bought this one.
Then they brought the technique home and found that not only was it fiendishly complicated, the side effect was hardly "slight." Learn this Cursed Technique and your entire body was paralyzed on the spot.
Couldn't move an inch.
Apart from the neck, the eyes and the mouth, nothing else would budge.
Heard the puppet compensates for the technique's side effect?
Well, Kenjaku hadn't lied.
The puppet was an automated mechanical wheelchair!
And so every single person who bought this technique instantly turned into Hawking, slumped in a wheelchair, using Puppet Manipulation to steer the chair around. They had lost everything and gained the most "wheelchair" Cursed Technique in existence.
Tragic.
Maki Fushiguro's eyes narrowed, her face arranged into an expression of profound sympathy as she read the sobbing accusations of the poster and the other users in the thread.
"Hahaha, this is too funny!" Mahiru, by contrast, was laughing herself sick, looking thoroughly amoral and entirely devoid of empathy.
The girl was having the time of her life with these threads.
Taking joy in other people's misfortune really wasn't a good habit, but anyone who could read these posts with a straight face ought to go get screened for depression.
There were so many of them, and every one was funnier than the last.
Scroll down far enough and you'd find people warning about Mei Mei's Black Bird Manipulation.
Black Bird Manipulation had been a hot seller too, since it rolled reconnaissance and offense into one package. And when you opened its product page in the shop, the buyer photos were pictures of Mei Mei, that stunning beauty herself, which pulled in fans by the thousands.
But plenty of people only realized after buying that the technique was perfect in every respect except one: there weren't enough crows.
Tokyo was one of the most modernized megacities on the planet. Where were you supposed to get that many crows?
And since Mei Mei was a Grade 1 Sorcerer, once she summoned crows nobody else could compete for them. Everyone else had to scavenge whatever birds Mei Mei had passed over, and the leftovers were pitiful.
One city block, several hundred people all sending out signals, and a single crow on the roof.
Take in a hundred-odd summons at once and even a human being would burst. In just that brief stretch of time, Tokyo's crows had been dropping dead one after another as though they'd all been hit with Unlimited Void. It was ghastly to watch.
So across the whole of Tokyo, the people who'd bought Black Bird Manipulation had no crows to work with.
And in the few remote spots where wild crows survived, spared the torment of "Unlimited Void," the Jujutsu Sorcerers had to line up and take a number.
One crow serving dozens of masters.
Back and forth, back and forth, like a delivery driver on a shift that never ended.
But how was that supposed to work? In a future fight you couldn't exactly run into an enemy and then go find a crow to queue up with, could you? By the time your number came up, the whole thing would be over.
The girl scrolled further and found people warning about Nanami's Cursed Technique and Naoya Zenin's Projection Sorcery.
Those two, at least, made sense.
Nanami's was a critical strike at the seven-three point, but where would an ordinary person get Nanami's talent and practice? Even holding up a ruler to measure for that seven-three point, they'd struggle to find it.
And Naoya Zenin's Projection Sorcery required moving at twenty-four frames per second, which was flatly impossible. Factor in their limited talent and, once they'd learned Projection Sorcery, the technique shriveled down to moving at one frame per second.
Hilarious. How was that Projection Sorcery?
That was Red Light, Green Light. Whoever moves is a dog.
Scrolling back and forth, back and forth, one niche hidden gem finally began drawing a crowd of interest.
The Heavenly Tyrant's Heavenly Restriction.
At first people had assumed this thing meant sacrificing your Cursed Energy in exchange for physical strength. Come on. What's the use of raw muscle? Without Cursed Energy, wasn't that just crippling yourself on purpose?
So the overwhelming majority had ignored it, and only once every other option had blown up in their faces did they settle for second best and go for a boost to plain physical ability.
So this one had to work, right?
This time they weren't asking for anything except physical ability. No Cursed Energy, no extras, nothing.
Nothing could possibly go wrong this time, right?
And so, in a spirit of grudging compromise, people chose the Heavenly Tyrant's Heavenly Restriction.
Whereupon the Cursed Energy in their bodies vanished, the Culling Game's Barrier could no longer sense them, and they could never open the system page again. Their systems froze solid.
Everyone was left staring.
Game designer!! Are you messing with us?!
"Incredible, truly. Never expected the Heavenly Tyrant package to turn out to be a left-brain-versus-right-brain masterpiece running on pure spaghetti code."
"This game designer's possessed. The man's a demon."
"Who was hyping up the Heavenly Tyrant? My system's frozen and my physical stats barely went up. The ability blurb said..."
"Relax, upstairs, I've already found the fix: get someone at home to open the system for you."
"? My whole family bought it."
Mahiru laughed until her ribs ached.
By the end, the warning threads had started rhyming their titles.
[Beware! Bewail! I paid good cash to buy myself hell!]
[Turn back! What I bought wasn't a Cursed Technique, it was a disability certificate!]
[Newbies, don't rush to buy. Go find someone to flag down an ambulance for you first...]
Well, this was something.
The great Season Two brawl Kenjaku had been anticipating hadn't even had time to begin before every Player, each showing off their own unique talents, dropped dead where they stood.
Looking at it that way, at least for a day or two, with Jujutsu High's people managing and guiding the situation, Japan wouldn't collapse into total anarchy.
The posters online would say the Heavenly Tyrant's ability was useless, but not because Heavenly Restriction was weak.
It was because no matter what Cursed Technique an ordinary person got their hands on, growing into the level of a true Jujutsu Sorcerer was beyond them.
The essence of a Heavenly Restriction was trading Cursed Energy for physical ability. Maki's and Toji's Heavenly Restrictions were strong because even without them, even with the Binding Vow undone, their capability as sorcerers would still have sat at the level of Three Great Families bloodlines.
Among ordinary people, having one in a thousand climb to Grade 2 or even Grade 1 Sorcerer level through the Culling Game system would already be a rare thing.
Let alone this early on.
That said, there was no room for optimism either. Even if every last person only reached Grade 3 Sorcerer level, tens of millions of Grade 3 Sorcerers going at each other would be a catastrophe of absolute devastation.
So a solution had to be found, fast.
But she couldn't devote herself entirely to that. She still had to track down Satoru Gojo.
"I'm heading up, then." Mahiru said it to Maki Fushiguro and Itadori in the camp, then spread her wings and flew into the sky.
The weather was beautiful, not a cloud for miles.
The girl pressed her palms together. A halo appeared above her head, and white mannequin angels surfaced around her one by one.
Domain Expansion. Golden holy light gathered and spread out high in the air, a sheet of white-gold auspicious cloud.
Searching for the traces of a distortion in space and time, then tracing them back to their source, was genuinely difficult work.
Even having pulled off time travel herself, Mahiru frowned.
It sounded a little like notching the boat to find a sunken sword, but in this stretch of ground where Satoru Gojo had been teleported away, traces really did remain.
The traces were faint and well hidden. Mahiru had to strain every fiber of herself to dig the information out. Which made it exhausting.
After holding the Domain for half an hour, her energy finally ran dry and she dropped out of the sky.
"How'd it go?" the black-haired girl asked.
"...It's going to take more time."
That said, the girl fell into thought again.
"My approach might be wrong," she said. "There ought to be a more efficient way..."
She was still turning it over when she noticed the look on Maki Fushiguro's face.
"Did something happen?" Mahiru asked.
"The situation's changed," the black-haired girl said with a nod. "There's a Cursed Technique in the System Shop that works extremely well for ordinary people once they buy it. Everyone's snapping it up now. An arms race has started, and things have gotten seriously chaotic."
Mahiru went still for a moment.
"Which Cursed Technique?" she asked. "How chaotic are we talking?"
"The technique is [Cursed Speech]," Itadori said from beside them.
Ah...
Surprise crossed Mahiru's face first, then understanding.
"Cursed Speech, huh..." The girl's mouth twisted, a headache blooming behind her eyes. "Then yes, things really are going to get chaotic."
A technique with no floor to it, Limitless in the most literal sense. Of course everything was going to hell.
[Author's Note: New month, and I'm begging everyone for monthly ticket support! (rolling around on the floor, rolling around, rolling around...) Also, plugging a friend's book!]
____
⚡ BONUS CHAPTER GOALS
✍️ 5 REVIEWS = +1 Bonus Chapter
💎 100 POWER STONES = +1 Bonus Chapter
🔥 P@TREON (Walnut-chan): Read +40 chapters ahead and get access to over 60 exclusive stories!
🔥 New history: Mushoku tensei: Speed Run to kill Hitogami — posted on The_Mikudayo