They had to find Mahito.
On one front, Mahiru used the intel circulating in the Little Blue Community to pinpoint where the remains of the corpse Mahito had killed were lying, and began tracking him from there.
On the other front, after turning it over and over, Mahiru decided to expose the fact that she already knew Mahito had crossed into the modern world. She sent warnings about him out in every direction and wove her surveillance net the most old-fashioned way there was.
Having Mechamaru plant surveillance puppets everywhere. Stationing her own clones. Asking Assistant Supervisors to lay down surveillance Barriers.
By rights, that net covered an enormous amount of ground. Unfortunately, Jujutsu High had no idea that Mahito had already thrown in with the military of the United States. Tucked away under their protection, he was nearly impossible to find.
And it was right then — the day after Mahito and that commander finalized their deal — that the Culling Game rolled out another update.
With this update, Suo added a feature to the Culling Game's system that nobody had seen coming.
"'Us in the Original Timeline'?" In one of the camps, Yuji Itadori was resting when he spotted the new module the patch had added, and the boy blinked in surprise. "What's the 'Original Timeline' supposed to mean?"
"Isn't our world the original one?" Nobara Kugisaki asked, baffled.
"What are they up to now?" Fushiguro frowned.
"Looks like it lets you receive the memories of yourself in the 'Original Timeline,'" Yuji Itadori said. "And it's free, on top of that… want to give it a shot?"
"Uh. Maybe ask Mahiru first?"
What they didn't know was that the so-called "Original" timeline was, in truth, the timeline of the original work.
They called Mahiru.
They were confused. Mahiru was no less confused.
She was still following Mahito's trail when the update appeared, and the sight of it left her staring blankly at nothing.
"Mahiru, what's that Culling Game update supposed to mean?"
What did it mean? How was she supposed to know what it meant.
You're asking me? I'm just as lost as you are.
Mahiru's own system panel didn't have the feature — obviously, since she wasn't a character in the "original work." She was a thing that didn't exist there at all. But she could still see the patch notes, and she could read the feature description.
True to its name, the new addition was a simple memory-sharing function.
The mechanism was to transmit the memories of the future world into their counterparts on this timeline. All it achieved was letting the people of this world know one thing: what would have happened to them if Mahiru had never been born.
Mahiru read it over carefully. The memories cut off at the original work's Shibuya Incident — right around the point where the Culling Game began there.
"So what on earth is he playing at?"
She couldn't make sense of it. What was the phantom Kenjaku doing? What good did this feature do him?
Mahiru's eyes flickered, her face gone faintly slack.
No answer came.
The girl had no idea what he stood to gain from a move like this.
What was the upside of making everyone in this world sit through seasons one and two of the Jujutsu Kaisen anime? It didn't touch Mahiru at all. What, was he hoping to watch Jujutsu High spiral into depression?
"This so-called 'Original World,'" Mahiru said, half her attention on the marks in the dirt, "probably means that future world."
"The future world?" Itadori's voice moved closer to the phone. "You mean the one out of those three parallel worlds?"
"Right. The feature is probably just letting you look at the memories of your counterparts in the future world."
"Whoa," Itadori said, blinking. "That sounds pretty interesting."
That sort of thing did have a real pull on young people — horoscope quizzes, tarot readings, same appeal. Not that Mahiru was claiming she wasn't young herself.
"Careful, it could be a trap," Nobara warned.
"A trap isn't very likely." On the other end of the line, Mahiru shook her head. "The system administrator is one of the parties to a Binding Vow, so he can't lie to us about the rules. This feature really does look like it's being handed to us for free."
Itadori was curious and itching to try. "So can I?"
He was asking for Mahiru's permission.
She thought it through from every angle, brainstormed, and in the end still couldn't work out what Kenjaku wanted out of this stunt.
"If you want to look, look." She agreed with a nod. "I've got things to handle over here, so I'm hanging up."
And with that, Mahiru ended the call.
On the other end, the three of them traded a glance.
"I'll try it first, then." Itadori reached out and tapped the confirmation button on the system interface.
The next second, a strange ripple of Cursed Energy rose around him.
Itadori's lips parted. For reasons he couldn't name, he felt his nerves tighten. "Is it starting?"
The him in that other world had lived a different life.
What kind of life would it be?
A good one, surely.
At least, that was Itadori's guess.
Mahiru had mentioned before that the gap between how events unfolded in the future world and in their own reality traced back to a single tiny difference — that one small change had set off a butterfly effect, and the two timelines had branched apart.
So the other him and his experiences should be mostly similar.
Even so, he still figured the other him had it better than he did now.
After all, he'd always felt he ought to be doing better.
There'd be a Mahiru in that other world too, right?
He really hadn't been much help to his teacher or to Mahiru in this one, so he honestly hoped the other version of himself had done a better job of it. And if that version had done better, surely things wouldn't have deteriorated to where they stood today.
The boy carried that hope with him as he watched.
As the Culling Game's system function engaged, a virtual three-dimensional space unfolded in front of him, rebuilding a scene out of the other world's memories.
The blur sharpened into focus.
It looked like the underground level of a subway station.
Huh? A subway station, of all places?
By rights, the memory being replayed had to be one seared deep into the other him — otherwise it wouldn't have surfaced first.
So where am I? What am I doing?
Oh! Itadori's eyes lit up, because he had spotted himself.
He seemed to be inside the station. He could make out his own figure standing far off across the platform.
A subway station meant he was heading out somewhere, didn't it?
So what was he up to? Out having fun with friends, or on a mission with his teacher?
See, the other him really did have a wonderful life.
Where was he going, though?
A curious grin spread over Itadori's face as he moved closer to his other self.
"Let me see, who are you here with…?"
Itadori's grin froze.
He saw himself, blood covering his face, despair carved into it.
He saw, lying in a spreading pool of blood with half her skull pulped to ruin… Nobara Kugisaki.
A wet burst of sound.
Flesh rupturing, behind him. The boy whipped around.
Nanami — the man he respected, half teacher and half friend — stood not far off, drenched in gore, half his body twisted into something no longer human.
A slap.
"Hahahaha…"
A pale arm, crawling with stitches, came down against Nanami's body.
Along with that vile, grating peal of manic laughter, Nanami's figure burst into a spray of red across Itadori's vision.
The boy's pupils shook violently under the sound of that shrill, mocking laugh.
"Wha—"
How could this happen?
Nobara Kugisaki was dead? Nanami was dead too?
He couldn't believe it.
Another sound reached him. He turned his head.
The station ceiling had split open, and civilians were tumbling out of it by the dozens, slamming into the floor — and then, one after another, being twisted into grotesque, malformed monsters.
"How could—"
All of them dead.
Every one of these people, dead in front of Itadori.
Why did they die?
Why hadn't the future him protected his friends and his teacher?
What had actually happened here? And what about everyone else?
His heart hammered against his ribs, and a dread with no source, deep as a chasm, swept over him.
Something struck him, and his head snapped around toward the blue-haired man who had cut down every last one of them.
That figure, stitched all over, wrapped in a wrongness he could taste, was laughing at the other him now — laughing, jeering, wringing every drop of scorn out of it.
["Do you understand now?…"]
Faint and half-heard, someone seemed to be murmuring in his ear in that same mocking tone.
["The original you, the original timeline… Mahiru never appeared, you never got her help…"]
["And this is how it ends for you."]
The voice at his ear broke into open, howling mockery. It was loud enough that Itadori caught its timbre clearly — and he realized, with a chill crawling up his spine, that the voice laughing at him was his own.
"Yes! That's right! In that world! You got your friends killed, you got your teacher killed, you got thousands upon thousands of people in Shibuya killed!"
"Haven't you figured it out yet? In your world, without Mahiru's help, the people around you would still have died one after another!"
Itadori turned his head, dazed.
And he saw the one calling his name — soul twisted, body warped into a monster… Junpei.
"!!!"
In the real world, the boy doubled over and started retching.
"Urgh!"
"Hey — hey! What's wrong with you?" Nobara Kugisaki jumped, then hurried over to pound his back.
Fushiguro came over frowning. "What did you see? So it was a trap after all?"
Itadori dry-heaved for a long while before he steadied, his heartbeat slowly settling.
"…It wasn't a trap." His voice still came out with effort.
"Not a trap? Then what's the matter with you?" the black-haired girl asked. "Don't tell me you saw some kind of bad memory."
"'Bad' doesn't begin to cover it…"
Memories from another world had just been poured into his skull, and the helplessness, the despair, the fury had come with them, infecting him wholesale. For that moment he'd been the boy who had just learned Mahiru sacrificed herself.
Coming back to himself now — finding that Nanami and Nobara Kugisaki were alive, that Junpei's family was still under Jujutsu High's protection, tucked away in some safe house somewhere and treated like ordinary people — Yuji Itadori slowly steadied.
He reached back and touched his spine. His shirt was soaked with cold sweat.
What rose in the boy now was the sick, delayed terror of a disaster narrowly avoided.
So that was it… the one turning point separating the future world from this one was Mahiru's existence.
If Mahiru had never appeared, he would be exactly like the him in that future — having lost friend after friend after friend, having gotten countless people killed.
Yes. Without Mahiru…
The boy clenched his teeth, unsure what expression his face was even making.
He knew Mahiru had helped them enormously, saved a great many people, reversed one crisis after another. But people rarely grasp the weight of something they haven't lived through.
Only now, with those memories in his head, did Itadori see clearly just how much Mahiru had changed this world — and realize how staggeringly lucky they were to have met her at all.
"Hey." Nobara Kugisaki hesitated, then said it anyway. "Can you tell us what you saw?"
Itadori told them, all of it.
Both girls fell silent.
"That blue man in the memory has to be the enemy that broke into our world recently, doesn't he?" The black-haired girl's face was hard to read. "That thing called Mahito is the Idle Transfiguration Cursed Spirit of another world… so in that other world, we and the Idle Transfiguration Cursed Spirit were sworn enemies."
And if, in this world, they and Mahiru were sworn enemies — what would that look like?
Mahito was no match for Mahiru, and he had still authored a horror on that scale.
And if they had not only lost Mahiru's help, but had her turned against them…
A chill ran up every spine in the camp. All three of them shivered.
Nobara Kugisaki tapped the system interface too and watched her memories from the original work, and she came away shaken as well — though a little less than Itadori had been.
Her memories ended at the Shibuya Incident, at the moment Mahito's attack left her dying. So Nobara Kugisaki had no idea whether she'd been saved in the end.
Better to assume she'd died.
"So Mahiru pulled me out of a bad ending too?" Nobara Kugisaki said, staring at her own two hands, half elsewhere.
Nobara and Itadori both turned to look at Fushiguro.
The black-haired girl went still for a beat, understood exactly what they meant, and reached out to activate her own memory-sharing function.
In theory, the three of them had operated together in that other world, so her memories shouldn't differ much from his — synced or not, it hardly mattered.
But then, as Cursed Energy surged and the memories flooded her mind, the black-haired girl froze where she stood.
"Did you… see something?" Nobara caught the stunned look on her face and asked carefully.
Fushiguro's lips parted, but no words came. Her eyes trembled with disbelief… and at last she let out a soft laugh and closed them.
"I saw further than he did," she said.
She had seen how the sister she treasured most had her body hijacked and died a wretched death, and seen how her own body was taken from her by Sukuna… the memories she'd received reached all the way to the eve of the Shinjuku showdown.
"Further? Further how? What memories?" Nobara Kugisaki demanded, dissatisfied. "Could you be a little clearer?"
"Mm. If I'm being clearer, then… " The black-haired girl opened her eyes. "I saw exactly what kind of horrifying tragedy Mahiru shattered for me."
Something like that.
____
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