For whatever reason, Kenjaku had dropped Mahito into the "modern world" without ever explaining the details to him.
Maybe time had been too short? Or maybe the phantom Kenjaku kept his guard up even around Mahito.
Either way, all Mahito knew was that a Cursed Spirit named Mahiru existed, and that she was Kenjaku's enemy — he genuinely had no idea what her actual situation was.
…But! Not knowing the details didn't mean anyone got to take him for a fool! Mahito snapped out of his initial shock.
This man in front of him claimed Mahiru "loved humans"?
What a joke! This guy had to be lying!
Other people might not grasp what it meant to be "born from the negative emotions humans hold toward humans," but did he not know what he himself was?
He was the concentrated filth of all humanity's emotions. From the moment of his birth he had known every base and ugly thing about human beings. He had opened his eyes already loathing them by nature, and stealing a life away brought him enormous joy.
Even if that other Mahito called Mahiru differed from him in temperament and taste for whatever reasons — there was no way she'd turn into some champion of justice. She'd simply be a different flavor of vicious murderer.
"Hahaha." Mahito jabbed a finger at the Commander. "You're absolutely lying to me!"
Your face was so sincere it nearly had me!
Lucky I gave it a second thought!
Hahaha, credit where it's due, that lie is genuinely outrageous. You're telling me the Idle Transfiguration Cursed Spirit from another timeline turned out to be a good person? Give me a break!
I have to hand it to you for coming up with that one. Tell me Jogo and Hanami are off somewhere running a hot spring inn, farming the fields and living the quiet life, and I'd believe half of it!
But you say that Idle Transfiguration Cursed Spirit named Mahiru protects humans?
Absolutely impossible! He's lying!
As for why the man would lie… that was easy enough to guess.
"Hahaha… not bad, you. You look like a man who's never cracked a smile, and yet you tell such good jokes." Mahito laughed until his shoulders shook. "If you're testing where I stand, there's no need for any of this. And if you're trying to steer me into hating that other me called Mahiru — hahaha, then there's even less need, because from the very start I've been her enemy, never her…"
Uh.
The Commander, for his part, wasn't sure how to put it.
The creature in front of him clearly didn't believe a word.
"If you don't believe me, you're welcome to look at the news in Japan, or stop any passerby on the street and ask. Though I've no idea whether you use the internet." The Commander shook his head.
Then something seemed to occur to him, and he glanced at a soldier beside him whose gear differed slightly from the ordinary guards'. "Or — one of our people has a Shared Memory Cursed Technique. Feel free to share memories with him and see for yourself whether what we say is true."
"Hm?" Confusion crept over Mahito's face.
This was sounding less and less like a lie.
These people… they couldn't actually believe Mahiru was a good person, could they?
…What was going on here? Why? Did that Mahiru have some power to rewrite human memory?
No. It really did look like Mahiru was doing good.
And thinking it through, the whole thing was strange.
In this timeline, Jujutsu High hadn't suffered a single proper casualty. He had assumed Mahiru was simply too useless to kill anyone and had gotten her head kicked in by Jujutsu High besides — but no matter how weak Mahiru was, there was no way she couldn't even manage to kill an Assistant Supervisor with no Cursed Energy at all.
So the fact that nobody at Jujutsu High had died could only mean Mahiru had chosen it.
Hsss… "So she's playing the good guy?"
Mahito's reaction now was identical to Kenjaku's back then.
The instant either of them learned Mahiru was truly doing good, their reflex was to assume she was deliberately deceiving the people of Jujutsu High. Neither could believe her kindness toward humans came from the heart.
And the more they turned it over, the more sense it made.
"So there's a route like that?" Mahito mused.
Play the good guy, burrow into Jujutsu High from the inside, and finally pull off some grand, magnificent conspiracy.
As the saying went: the better the good deeds you do while wearing the mask, the worse the evil you're saving for the end.
Every one of these people believed in Mahiru's goodness without a trace of doubt — which meant the girl really was brewing an earth-shattering plot.
"What?" The Commander frowned.
Mahito was delighted. "Never mind, never mind. If you're all so certain she's a good person, then go on believing it. I've no objection."
The Commander rubbed his chin. "You mean… she's only pretending to be good?"
"Humans are such short-sighted creatures, after all." Mahito spread his hands, shrugged, rolled his head from side to side. "Toss them a few crumbs of kindness and they lose all sense of which way is north… that's the rotten root of emotional creatures…"
A few crumbs of kindness…
The Commander ran back through Mahiru's record — sacrificing herself to save Tokyo once, sacrificing herself to save Tokyo twice, sacrificing herself to save Tokyo three times…
Granted, she'd come through safely every time… but did any of that count as "crumbs"? At this point, if Mahiru walked into a temple, shoved the stone statue off its pedestal and sat there herself, the citizens of Japan probably wouldn't see anything wrong with it.
"Anyway, let's talk about our cooperation." Mahito's head kept swaying. "We share the same enemy in Jujutsu High, don't we?"
"Oh? We would certainly be willing to work with you." The Commander perked up the moment the conversation turned to business. "But cooperation has to profit both sides. Might we hear what it is you want?"
"Want? What is there to want?" Mahito's smile turned wicked. "As long as I get to play until I'm satisfied… that's my one final demand."
"Whoa, that's impressive." Nobara Kugisaki scrolled through the system panel in front of her, faintly startled. "This community is… seriously professional."
"Hmph, hmph, of course it is. I asked Yaga and the officials to bring in a whole team of professional online community managers to run it, you know?" Mahiru sat on the sofa swinging her legs, and at the praise her nose tilted nearly to the ceiling. "Now we've got a public-opinion and intelligence network nobody can interfere with. Pretty impressive, right? You really can't get by without me, can you?"
"You're right, we really can't. The sky would fall without you." Nobara answered while she kept scrolling.
What she had open was the Culling Game's system panel, but the page inside it looked like an online forum.
This was the other new feature Mahiru had rolled out together with Kaori Suo after the Little Blue Shop, named the "Little Blue Forum." Every Player in the Culling Game could log in, post threads and comments, and talk to other people, exactly like being online.
Someone might reasonably ask: the internet in Japan hadn't been destroyed when the Culling Game began, had it? So what was the point of this?
The truth was that Japan's networks and infrastructure failed constantly because of the Cursed Spirit problems the Culling Game created. Some regions had lost connectivity entirely from the damage. Plenty of ill-intentioned organizations had the means to tamper with information online, and some Cursed Spirits even had Cursed Techniques that ran on the network itself.
So if Jujutsu High wanted sovereignty over its own information, it had to build an information network of its own — one nothing could touch.
And the Culling Game's community served that purpose perfectly.
"Speaking of which…" Nobara's finger paused. "In theory, our enemies can log into this forum too, can't they?"
"Yep. They can log in, and they can post and comment too." Mahiru swung her legs like it was the most obvious thing in the world. "For instance, take a look at the number four trending thread right now."
"Number four?" Prompted, Nobara switched over to the rankings.
And there she found a thread from a poster named "Admin No. 1." The title read: "Ever Since I Learned Aggression, My Life Has Been Nothing but Bright."
"Uh? What is this garbage?" Nobara's mouth twisted, her face a mess of reactions. "What's 'Aggression' supposed to mean?"
"Aggression? Roughly, the thrill of combat, I guess. In the Culling Game, fighting just means taking down other Jujutsu Sorcerers to earn points, doesn't it?" Mahiru spread her hands. "That thread is nothing but bait-and-switch logic. Read it and you'll see."
Nobara tapped in and skimmed the contents.
This "Admin No. 1" had posted dozens of floors of different case studies — at the start they were all wish-fulfillment fluff like "After I worked hard for points and got stronger, the girl of my dreams fell in love with me," or "After I learned Aggression, I cured my own inferiority complex."
Further down came sales-pitch aphorisms: "The greater your responsibility, the greater the combat power you need," and "Better to trust the blade in your own hand than to trust Jujutsu High's protection."
Nobara finished reading, her mouth working, her feelings in a tangle.
"This Admin No. 1 is one of our enemies, right? What is he even doing…" She pushed the panel a little farther away. "This feels so abstract and so cringe."
"He's just fanning the flames, hoping to breed a bigger war." Mahiru spread her hands and shrugged.
Nobara was speechless. "And you're not banning him? You've got the authority to ban him, don't you?"
"No, no, no. Oh, I have the authority." Mahiru lifted her chin and wagged a finger. "But banning people is so low-class."
"Then what did you do?"
Mahiru smiled serenely. "I hired a thousand paid posters to roast him. They're more than ten thousand replies deep by now."
Uh.
For a moment Nobara had no idea what to say.
So that was how the number four trending thread had gotten there.
Though — ten thousand replies of roasting and it was still only number four? Then what were the top three?
Curiosity got the better of her, and Nobara looked.
Number three: "The Culling Game's Ultimate Show-Off Skill Build Guide, Recommended with Love by a Ten-Year Veteran of the Jujutsu World."
Number two: "Biography of the Blue-Haired Angel — It All Starts with a Gender-Swapped Ten Shadows Technique User."
Number one: "Official Debate Thread: Mahiru vs Yuta, Gojo vs Sukuna…"
Nobara's mouth dropped wide open at the sight of them.
Then she leaned in close to Mahiru. "Honestly, I'm a little curious myself. Between you and Senior Yuta, who's stronger?"
Mahiru rolled her eyes. "Get lost."
"How could you…" Rejected, Nobara shuffled back with her lip stuck out, thoroughly wronged. "I was only asking…"
While she was at it, she opened the number one thread and left a comment: "Gojo swatted Sukuna aside without breaking a sweat. Sukuna's the challenger here."
There. Consider that her show of support for her own teacher.
"So everything people talk about in this community of yours is pretty unserious, huh." Nobara swiped as she griped.
"That's only because those rankings go by click count." Mahiru waved a hand. "Besides the clickbait, there are solid, practical featured posts — those are the reason I built this community in the first place."
Experience threads, for example, where people shared how different Cursed Techniques worked and how to use them, so everyone could learn from one another.
Or the real-time intelligence network formed by countless ordinary citizens and official personnel.
Where Cursed Spirits had appeared, where a Cursed Spirit Tide had surged, where enemies had been sighted — all of it was compiled on the forum as it happened and broadcast live to everyone in Japan.
A forum wasn't really the right format for intelligence work, but something beat nothing.
This forum had genuinely become a nationwide intelligence-gathering system.
And it was exactly because of it that Mahiru got hold of one critical clue before anyone else.
"Heh…" The girl narrowed her eyes and let out a soft laugh. "Not bad at all… what an insidious little move…"
She had seen it: a photograph of the remains of an ordinary person murdered by Mahito.
There was no mistaking it.
That was the corpse of someone killed by "Idle Transfiguration."
In an instant the girl understood the whole picture, understood what Kenjaku had done.
"So he actually revived Mahito and threw him over here…"
In fact Mahito hadn't been found out because his killings were too brazen. Quite the opposite — this time he had been fairly discreet about them.
Since arriving he had killed a great many people. But he almost never left traces, and even when he did, the citizens couldn't tell that the ragged scraps of flesh on the ground had once been a human body.
Only Mahiru could.
Ha…
If Mahiru hadn't built this Little Blue community intelligence network inside the Culling Game, she would have had a hard time noticing this early.
"So that step of the plan really was the right call."
Information was the foundation of every decision.
Get the information one step sooner, and you seize the winning chance one step sooner.
The value of an intelligence network could hardly be clearer.
Mahito might not even know his cover was blown yet. At first Mahito had been in the shadows and Mahiru out in the open; now the positions seemed reversed — the prey being kept in the dark was no longer Mahiru, but Mahito.
Still, Mahiru knew she couldn't let herself relax for a second… this was the most repulsive and troublesome enemy of them all.
She had to be on full alert. Had to. Had to.
____
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🔥 New history: DanMachi: Collecting Goddesses Right from the Start! — posted on The_Mikudayo