"Honestly, this has happened plenty of times by now… so do you actually have that kind of Cursed Technique?"
"What?"
"You know, the kind where all you have to do is make the situation absurd enough and the problem solves itself." Jogo said it to Mahiru with her mouth twisted into something she couldn't quite settle. "Or is dragging every scene down to this just a hobby of yours?"
Uh.
I don't have that kind of hobby.
Mahiru bared her teeth in a grin.
"Besides, that technique you're describing does exist. It just isn't mine."
That technique belonged to Takaba.
Except Takaba and Higuruma were still missing.
And honestly, the length of time Higuruma and Takaba had been gone had crossed into abnormal territory — far enough that Mahiru had started to wonder whether the two of them were still in this world at all.
They couldn't have been quietly picked off somewhere, could they?
That would be awful.
And a huge loss.
In any case, Mahiru distributed two pieces of Cursed Speech to the citizens — "Don't Say That" and "Rebound" — and the situation came back under control.
The Assistant Supervisors and the Jujutsu Sorcerers were nudging the chaos toward stability inch by inch, which meant Mahiru could finally turn her attention to the actual business that kept getting interrupted, the one that had been crawling along at a snail's pace.
Namely, finding Satoru Gojo.
"So, can you find the guy or not?" Jogo yawned, sitting down beside her.
The sorcerers who had been assigned as Mahiru's bodyguards were all off handling their own crises, so Jogo had been drafted on short notice to come protect her.
"Might be a little difficult." Mahiru shrugged, smiling.
Jogo went still for a second.
"Huh? A little difficult? Then what do we do?" She smacked her lips. "Look, I can't stand that blue-eyed bastard, but isn't it kind of bad if nobody can find him?"
"What I mean is that I can't find him right now." Mahiru rolled her eyes. "That doesn't mean I'm out of options."
She had already changed her approach, and she had a plan. Tracking down where Gojo had gone using only the clues at this site was simply too much to ask.
What remained here was the trace of a space-time Passage from a month ago. That much time had passed, so naturally the trace had faded to almost nothing.
Put it this way. Back when Gojo was sent through, the disturbance that space-time turbulence carved open had been roughly big enough for a compact car to drive through. And now? Now it was about the width of a pinhole.
There was barely any trace of the Passage left at all.
So how was she supposed to search?
Mahiru had wanted to follow the Passage through and see where it led, and that was off the table too.
The pinhole was far too small.
Only a god could have squeezed through it.
"Relax." Mahiru thumped her own chest. "I'm the queen of bright ideas, and I've got another one."
"…It's not going to be another one of your absurd ideas, is it?" Jogo gave her a deeply suspicious look. "Frankly, you really ought to sit down and think about why literally everyone, sorcerers included, gets along badly with that Six Eyes freak — and you're the only person alive who can stand him."
Meaning I'm as much of a freak as Satoru Gojo?
Did you have to insult me that hard?
"Buzz off, don't bother me. I'm starting the ritual."
Mahiru grumbled it out, closed her eyes, and stretched out both hands.
Blue Cursed Energy gathered in her palms, then slowly took shape in the space between them.
First came a small white sphere, like an insect's cocoon. Then the cocoon split open and a pair of wings, thin as cicada membrane, unfurled.
"Oh?" Jogo leaned in to watch.
Cupped between the girl's palms was a very pretty little insect. Pure white from end to end, its wings shot through with a faint gold where the light caught them, it rested there without moving, quiet and strangely holy.
"Ta-daa. All done." Mahiru raised an eyebrow and held it out for Jogo to see. "This is a tracker I built."
"A tracker?"
The trace of the Passage was only pinhole-sized and Mahiru couldn't fit through it herself. So send something small enough through instead. Problem solved.
"Yep, yep. The principle's dead simple," Mahiru explained. "Gojo got sent somewhere through the Passage, right? So I send this tracker through the same Passage, and then I just track the tracker."
Mahiru unfolded her Domain once more.
Golden light tore a tiny hole open in the air, and the girl slipped the little insect inside.
Then a second insect appeared in her other hand, similar in shape but carrying a different aura.
The one she had just thrown in was the transmitter. This one was the receiver.
Receivers could be mass-produced.
And the transmitter's signal range was enormous.
There were only three separate space-time worlds anyway. Wander through those three, pick up the signal, and finding the signal was as good as finding Satoru Gojo.
"This one's yours." Mahiru smiled sweetly and tossed one of the little white insects to Jogo.
Jogo caught it and stared at it blankly. "What am I supposed to do with this?"
"In this modern world, the job of hunting down Gojo's trail belongs to you." Mahiru clapped Jogo on the shoulder, wearing the face of someone entrusting a sacred duty. "Just carry the little white bug around and drift back and forth across Japan, as long as you keep yourself safe while you do it. My guess is the odds of Gojo being in another country aren't high."
Then Mahiru sank back into thought.
In the present world, finding someone to send after Gojo was easy enough. Everyone under this sky was on Mahiru's side.
But the past world?
Who could she hand it to there?
Kenjaku, obviously.
So a few hours later, once night had fallen and Mahiru was back at the hot spring inn, she made contact with the past world again.
When she reached the "modern world" from the "past world," she had to attach herself to little Kaori. Reaching the "past world" from the "modern world" required attaching herself to someone as well.
She attached herself to Tengen.
"White hair, huh?" Mahiru studied herself in the mirror. "White hair really is gorgeous."
"If you love white hair that much, why not just turn your own hair white?" said the woman with the short black hair beside her, laughing. "You can adjust your body however you please."
Mahiru tilted her chin up and wagged a finger.
"No, no, no, you don't get it," she said. "Beauty on somebody else and beauty on yourself are two completely different things. Same as how liking cake and turning into a cake are different things."
For her own body, blue was still the perfect fit.
Oh, right. She'd almost talked herself off topic.
Mahiru swept a hand through the air.
Space and time rippled faintly, and a little white insect appeared at her fingertip — the signal receiver for finding Satoru Gojo. As it appeared, Kenjaku leaned in, curious.
Mahiru held it out to her. "Here. You hold on to this."
Kenjaku took it, mildly puzzled. "What is this? It feels… like an ordinary Shikigami?"
Mahiru laid out the whole situation and the job she was assigning to Kenjaku.
Kenjaku listened, blinked, and agreed on the spot.
"Of course. Leave it to me," Kenjaku said, smiling.
She tucked the little white insect away. Once it was stowed, though, she spoke again. "By the way. I have some rather unpleasant news for you."
Mahiru paused. "What unpleasant news?"
"Do you remember the task you gave me a while back?"
The task from a while back? I've given you plenty of tasks… and if this counts as "unpleasant news"…
Mahiru rubbed her chin, and then something clicked and her expression soured. "Don't tell me you mean… the one about recovering all the Cursed Objects that got scattered."
"That's the one." Kenjaku smiled her confirmation.
At that, Mahiru's face went genuinely dark.
Because she could already guess what Kenjaku was about to say.
"You still didn't find them?"
"That's right. No matter what I tried, they were nowhere to be found."
Kenjaku's fingers, the Cursed Objects belonging to Urogi Kyoko and Ishiryuu — none of them turned up. Not one.
"That's bad news…" The girl's face was grim.
The modern world had Sukuna's fingers in it, so naturally this past world did too.
Which was why, after arriving in this world and settling on a rough plan, Mahiru had been intending all along to collect Sukuna's fingers and lock them away somewhere safe. Except when she went searching based on her memory of the original story, she hadn't turned up a single finger.
Back then she had assumed Kenjaku shifted the fingers around during the ten years between the Hidden Inventory / Premature Death Arc and the main story, and that was why she kept coming up empty.
Later, once she and Kenjaku established their partnership, she simply asked Kenjaku for the fingers directly.
Kenjaku went and looked. And when she came back, she told Mahiru with a baffled look on her face that she couldn't find those Cursed Objects either. Every last one of them was gone from where it should have been.
Understand, Kenjaku had no way of lying to Mahiru anymore. She couldn't manage so much as half a lie in her presence.
So "can't find them" was the truth.
And what that implied was terrifying.
"The fingers were recovered ahead of schedule…?" The girl's teeth clenched.
"There's no other possibility left, is there?" said the woman beside her.
If neither of them could find them, then Sukuna's fingers could only have been recovered already — by the Sukuna of the future world and by the phantom Kenjaku.
The Culling Game had begun eating into this world far earlier than she'd imagined. Which meant Sukuna may well have started collecting the fingers before she ever woke up in the "past world."
"Haha…" Mahiru let out two dry laughs. "When it rains, it pours…"
Wonderful.
Every time the girl pictured herself someday facing a Sukuna with eight arms and four mouths, she wanted to laugh.
The twenty-finger Sukuna was already that hard to beat. What exactly was she supposed to fight a forty-finger Sukuna with, her skull?
Was anybody allowed to enjoy this game anymore?
Could somebody please force-ripen this world's Satoru Gojo? Get him up to Sukuna's level in a hurry so Mahiru's side could put together a twelve-eye bond of its own?
Infuriating, truly—
To the world of the future arc, sixty-eight years on, just how distant had the events of sixty-eight years ago become?
Yuta Okkotsu's granddaughter, Yuka Okkotsu, found herself circling that question every time she thought about her grandfather.
Her grandfather's era really did feel far away. Far enough away to be a legend.
The sorcerers who fought Sukuna back then were now referred to as "the great heroes of that age."
The catastrophe that had turned Tokyo into a demon's realm had likewise become a legend that drifted a little further off with every passing year.
How much was still remembered?
How much did people still remember of what happened back then?
The story of those few months that decided the fate of the world, handed down mouth to mouth, grew richer in legend as the river of time washed over it — and at the same time, people's memories of it grew blurrier and blurrier.
Sixty-eight years is not a short span.
People began to miscount by a name or two when listing who had taken part in that final battle, and began to forget which villains of that Culling Game had butchered ordinary people and which good souls had saved them.
Yuka Okkotsu had grown up hearing her family tell the stories, so she knew and understood more than most. Even so, the names she could still recall kept dwindling. Twenty of them, then ten, then five… until in the end only a handful remained — the ones she knew intimately, and the ones that had left the deepest mark.
And of those, only three villains' names were truly carved into her memory.
One was Sukuna.
One was Kenjaku.
And the last, the one that left the deepest impression of all, was Mahito.
Mahito was terrifying.
More terrifying than any of the rest.
Not because he was stronger than the rest, but because he was more evil than the rest — more sickening, more deranged, more nauseating.
Because he was the most vile.
He killed a great many people. In front of who knew how many onlookers he slaughtered their friends, and in front of who knew how many Jujutsu Sorcerers he played with ordinary lives however he pleased.
He was the Cursed Spirit that everyone hated.
Sixty-eight years later, he was still the "historical figure" people loathed most, despised most, recoiled from most, with no one else even close. Parents scaring their children would say things like, "Behave, or Mahito will come and eat you."
And funnily enough, Yuka Okkotsu had been frightened that way as a child too. Back then she really did have nightmares about Mahito at night — even though the girl had never once seen what he actually looked like.
"Haah…"
The black-haired girl stretched in her chair.
She looked up at the sky. Not a cloud in it, blue and rinsed clean from end to end.
Why did that of all things come to mind?
It struck her as a little ridiculous.
"Something that vile is never going to appear again."
Because Grandfather and the others tore every seed of evil out by the roots…
We… really do live in a fortunate age…
And then, one hour later, Yuka Okkotsu learned she was wrong.
"You… what did you just say?" The girl's mouth fell open, shock written all over her. "You're really not… joking?"
"Miss Okkotsu, this is confirmed information from Mr. Usami." The Jujutsu High staffer standing in front of her had gone pale and stiff. "This morning, every prophet in the jujutsu world who possesses a Prophecy Cursed Technique delivered the same prophecy, all of them at once…"
"You're telling me…"
"The second [Cursed Spirit born from humanity's negative emotions toward humanity] is about to appear…" The Jujutsu High staffer forced the words out through his teeth, dread and gravity impossible to hide in the depths of his eyes. "That most vile, most venomous, most skilled deceiver of human hearts — the Calamity Cursed Spirit… is coming back."
____
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