Jujutsu Kaisen: If One Thing Was Different - GlitterFix

Chapter 1: A Desperate Request

Chapter Text

Satoru Gojo recognizes their cursed energy, little dots of light out in the dark on a very cold January night. It’s two in the morning; he wonders why they’ve come and isn’t going to leave them in the cold. There’s probably going to be a snowstorm anyway, and he doesn’t know how they’re doing or if they’re okay.

Satoru is already in bed, but he dresses quickly and speeds to the bus stop outside the campus where Mimiko and Nanako were sitting, crying and cold.

They’re startled when he appears in front of them.

“Hey there, ladies. It’s too cold and wet for you to be out and about. Is there anything that I can do for the friends of my friend?”

Geto’s death is still fresh, and Mimiko wants to scream about how much she hates him, and Nanako wants to attack him out of blind rage and grief.

He knows this. He also knows they would not have shown up there if they weren’t in desperate need of help, or if they had anyone else that they could turn to.

Nanako is shaking because they’ve been sitting there for a while. “We have a question we need to ask you.”

“Okay.”

“Are you sure that you killed Master Geto?”

Satoru is startled and dismayed by this question and believes initially that they’re having difficulty grieving because they didn’t see the body. Since Suguru raised these girls for ten years and they just lost their adoptive father one month ago, he wants to be as gentle as possible, because he is the one who brought this pain to them.

Satoru nods. “Yes, I’m sure.”

“Do your people have his body?”

“It should have been cremated and delivered to the Geto family. If you want to visit his grave, I can talk to his family. His grandfather will understand.”

Nanako says, “He came home.”

Satoru’s blood runs cold.

Tears start to spill as she cries, “But it’s not him. The face is the same. The voice is the same. But it’s not Master Geto. We just know it’s not him! Master Geto was kind and warm and he always looked after us.”

They sob, and Satoru stands stunned, his eyes wide with horror. He knows he killed Suguru Geto, has no doubt. There’s not even a one-in-a-trillion percent chance he didn’t die right there in the alley.

Satoru realizes the position these girls are in; there’s some sort of monster in their lives, masquerading as their loving adoptive father. As powerful as Geto was, it wasn’t like they could just tell anyone. They had to come to his killer, a decision that probably hurt like all hell, and on top of that, they probably didn’t have anywhere to go if they were running away from fake-Geto.

“You two, please come with me. I know that you both probably hate me, and that’s okay. But my apartment is warm and safe, and you two need to be warm and safe right now.”

Satoru brings them to his apartment, starts up the fireplace, and lets them warm up while he makes them hot cocoa and tries to bend his mind around the pure, incomprehensible horror that there is something in the world pretending to be Suguru Geto.

Mimiko’s stomach growls, and he goes back to the kitchen and prepares a simple meal for them.

They consume the fried rice like they haven’t eaten all day, and once they’ve recovered from the cold, he learns they have run away from their lives with nothing but a couple of changes of clothes in their backpacks, and enough cash to eat for only a few days, having decided to bet everything on the chance that the person Geto called a friend might help them.

Satoru sits with them in front of the fire and says, “I know this is an incredibly painful subject for you both, but that you understand why things went the way they did in the end. So we don’t have to talk about that. What I will say is that I can absolutely confirm with no room for doubt that Suguru passed away when he was with me. Whoever this person is, it’s not Suguru Geto.”

This brings tears, and he says, “Can I ask you some questions?”

They nod.

“Does this person have the ability to use Suguru’s technique?”

They nod.

“Oh hell, that’s a pain in the ass.”

Nanako answers, “If he couldn’t, we’d kill him ourselves. There’s a scar. Suguru burned himself once, when he was making breakfast. This person has it too.”

Satoru asks, “Have you observed this person sleeping as Suguru Geto?”

“Yes.”

The answers to their questions are disturbing. To them, people who have known him for ten years, his body is completely indistinguishable. They fervently believe that something is living inside of Suguru’s corpse, and they’re terrified and distraught. The fact that the person is able to use Suguru’s technique is almost indisputable proof that they’re right.

This person walks with the weird little limp Suguru had from tearing his ACL in junior high, possesses little marks and scars, even has the same chipped tooth.

A shapeshifting technique would cause the user to switch back while sleeping.

A copy technique might allow the use of some techniques, but not persistently.

Satoru is disgusted and upset, so he can’t imagine how they feel, being young people who looked at him as their father. In some ways, he had been mourning the loss of Suguru Geto for many years, but for them, he had just been taken away.

He makes up two futons in his guest room and runs the bath for them.

Nanako gets a phone call, and they call him in.

She answers on speaker phone.

“Master Geto?!”

“Yes, Nanako. I just noticed that you and your sister haven’t made it back yet. Is everything all right?”

Nanako said, “It got really cold, and so we sat down at a café until things warmed up. But they didn’t. We found a place around here to crash. We’ll come home in the morning.”

“Come home now. I want to share my bed with you tonight.”

Satoru’s stomach turns as he realizes what this imposter has been doing to Geto’s precious girls. He almost picks up the phone and identifies himself; he’s almost certain that someone inhabiting the body of Geto will know his name.

But he doesn’t.

He also knows that he has limited time to act because whoever it is, they’re going to realize the girls ran away if they don’t come home immediately, so ‘immediately’ is his timetable too.

As soon as they hang up, they seem to be contemplating going back; they’re scared of his wrath.

“You’re safe with me. I promise. Tell me where he’s expecting you to show up and any information you have about the location.”

Information pours out of them, and all of it is incredibly disturbing.

They’ve been paying close attention, spying, even, trying to figure out whether the person could possibly really be Geto.

There are other players:

A person who might be a woman or a man, with short white hair that has red blotches. They don’t know her name, but she spends a lot of time speaking with fake-Geto in private.

There are four cursed spirits that spend time in the hideout:

First, a silent crustacean-like curse named Dagon. According to them, it sits around a lot and doesn’t do much.

Second, a giant white monster with antler-like eyes named Hanami. This one speaks, but her words are unintelligible, powers unknown.

Third, a pale humanoid-like curse with one central eye and a volcano head named Jogo. They’ve observed fire coming out of his head when he gets minimally annoyed. This one is capable of intelligent human speech and has long conversations with fake-Geto.

Fourth, a very human curse named Mahito. They don’t know his powers, but he has stitches all over his face, he seems intelligent, and there’s something about him that seems explicitly evil.

These girls were raised by Geto and had cursed techniques, so he didn’t think it was possible that they were confusing the cursed spirits for curse users; after all they knew the red-blotched person was a sorcerer. It wasn’t completely unheard of for certain special grades to possess intelligence and communication abilities, but multiple special grades working together with curse users was bizarre at best.

They have something; a cursed object: a cube covered in eyes. He thinks he knows what it is, but it’s almost incomprehensible that they would have it. Whatever it is, ‘it is for Satoru Gojo.’

Satoru travels to the warehouse that is serving as the hideout and enters through a side door using Nanako’s key.

When he walks in, he finds a surreal scene:

Fake-Geto, sitting around a table with a Monopoly game set up. Around it, the cursed spirits described by the girls as Mahito, Jogo, and Hanami. There was a curse user—a powerful one—in a back room that he could sense, and the crab-like curse Dagon was sitting against the wall.

Satoru pulls his blindfold off and glares, and even to his Six Eyes, the man seems like Suguru Geto. He imagines that if this was sprung on him at the wrong time, he might lose his sh*t, but he already knew there was some sort of imposter situation, and if the words of the girls weren’t enough, hearing this creature order them into his bed and sit around with a bunch of special grade curses was.

As he stands there, he is sure that this person is not Suguru Geto, but all his senses are fooled mostly, but his soul tells him something isn’t right about the picture beyond his knowledge.

And he remembers:

Several of his predecessors have had run-ins with a mysterious curse user, believed to be immortal, who can steal the bodies of dead sorcerers and live in them. The only indicator they felt was a strange slight unsettling feeling, like they were looking at an illusion or something that’s not real.

Kenjaku recognizes Satoru Gojo as he appears in their hideout for no apparently reason, and he stares in shock, in disdain, in disgust. They have not interacted with him; there’s no reason he should be there.

Their situation couldn’t be worse; they’re in a warehouse that’s part of a massive factory complex that went out of business years ago, which is sandwiched between a watershed and lake used for cooling when it was open. They’re on the outskirts, barely tucked into the Tokyo metro. There are probably less than ten humans in a four hundred meter radius, that’s why they chose this location.

It is the worst most f*cking horrible place to get caught by an enraged god who could unmake the world if he wanted to. There aren’t any sorcerers around; he doesn’t need to hold back.

Still, he says, “Yo, Satoru. It’s been a long time.”

“You have me mistaken for someone that you know, because I am certain that we have never met. Pretty sure you might be a dipsh*t named Kenjaku that my ancestors wrote about in their journals.”

Kenjaku flinched at the mention of his name, and said, “Every damn time…every goddamned time…Every time, Six Eyes appears.”

“Don’t worry, I’m about to release you from the cycle.”

Mahito is the first to move and ran for Satoru. “One touch, one touch!”

His hand touches nothing, and Satoru said, “Talk about stranger danger! We haven’t even been properly introduced. I can see your technique is abhorrent and truly disgusting, but if you need to touch me to use it, you’re out of luck, buddy.”

The hideout was littered with stuff and Gojo could sense what he assumed was a treasure trove of cursed objects. There were papers all over a desk as well, and this odd assortment of villains was clearly trying to do something.

Satoru decides to do his best not to trash the place.

He knew this was a worst case scenario for them; whatever they were doing, Kenjaku knew who he was and knew they were f*cked.

The scene explodes into violence, and Kenjaku tries to use the cursed spirits to escape.

There’s some ice too—the curse user springs into action as Kenjaku attempts a vertical escape using a flying cursed spirit that looks like a huge worm with wings.

Satoru knows it’ll be easier to find the cursed spirits than a body surfer; surely, if he escapes, he’ll find a new body right away and then Satoru won’t know where he is.

The ice curse user is unusual as well, and he thinks they might be the result of a cursed object incarnation. Whatever the situation, neither Kenjaku nor the ice user were in the body they were born in.

Satoru realizes Kenjaku isn’t trying to escape the area, but travel to a different part of the factory complex, probably to go find the Prison Realm, as the girls said he stored it in a vault in a different place. This was fine, because first of all, Satoru had the Prison Realm, and secondly, if Kenjaku got far away from the main hideout, Satoru wouldn’t have to destroy it to kill him.

The cursed spirits were a terrible pain in the ass; the one with the fire technique had abilities that would be considered apocalyptic if there were civilians or literally any other sorcerers nearby.

But there aren’t!

This location is perfect for what is going to happen here: he doesn’t have to worry about civilians or property damage. The owners of this closed factory will probably be giddy with delight when they find out they can cash their insurance check because obviously no one wants to buy the place.

Kenjaku knows they’re f*cked, and Satoru knows he knows they’re f*cked because the Prison Realm is a priceless, rare object of incalculable value. It is the second unspeakably powerful cursed object that has been carried to Japanese soil with the intent of ending him. If they had any hope of defeating him by any other means, they would not have gone to the effort of finding it. The mere fact it is an object in play was an acknowledgement that they understand he is too much for them.

He gets annoyed and summons a Blue attack, and it tears through the cursed spirit Hanami as she sends branches ahead of him that temporarily obstruct him. The ball of Blue hits Hanami like a bomb and it—or she, as the girls called her—explodes into ash and purple fire before turning in the air and hitting the curse user.

The ice curse user defends themselves with domain amplification, which he takes as a sign their mastery level is quite advanced.

A massive wall of ice hit by a ball of fire slows him down and them obstructs his highest level vision for a moment, and he responds by warping behind the curse user and punching them so hard in the back of the head with a punch charged with blue that they simply crumple to the ground.

Mahito tries touching him at the exact moment he punches the curse user out but finds that his Infinity is selective, and he can make precise rules about what gets through.

Satoru wants to chase Kenjaku, but he realizes this curse who can kill simply by touching any human being no matter how powerful they are can’t be permitted to escape. He looks into his eyes and simply knows that he’s going to kill sorcerers before he is stopped, and that killing him is going to be difficult task for anyone else due to his strange body.

He doesn’t know that Kenjaku is betting everything on Mahito’s technique; Mahito can’t die, and so he turns and opens a domain expansion.

“Domain Expansion: Womb Profusion.”

Satoru crosses his fingers. “Domain Expansion: Unlimited Void.”

Kenjaku knows it’s a longshot but he’s stunned when his domain shatters in an instant and he finds himself standing in Satoru Gojo’s domain, where Gojo is holding some random entrails and organs he has ripped out of Mahito, including the part of him holding his soul in the split second before the domain opened.

His hand glows with Red as the organs were torn apart by the repelling, churning force Limitless’s reverse curse skill.

Mahito perishes.

Kenjaku is using Falling Petals to protect himself from the brain-destroying effects of merely standing in Unlimited Void.

Everything has gone to hell.

All of it.

The fact Mahito would be almost impossible for sorcerers to kill was one of the reasons that he didn’t really have a contingency for what he would even do if he died. In theory, Satoru Gojo might be the only Jujutsu Society sorcerer who might be able to do the deed.

If he thought there was a serious risk of that happening, he would have consumed him already. Kenjaku had made a gamble that he could use Mahito’s malicious, murderous nature to advance the narrative and cause mayhem among sorcerers to the point of probably killing some of them, and now he’d lost because Satoru Gojo killed Mahito before he killed even one sorcerer.

Kenjaku says, “This really is the most bullsh*t thing that has ever happened in the history of everything.”

“Did you risk your life to save that monster?”

“Risk my life? Surely you jest. I have thousands of cursed spirits stored in this body right now, and millions hidden in the earth, and I will unleash them.”

“…the ones that are in your body will die instantly if you let them out in my domain, and you can’t interact with the outside world while you are in here. But thanks for the tip. Now I know I have to get rid of you before you get out of here even if it messes up that body.”

Satoru has his theory, since Kenjaku is using the cursed technique of the body, and while Kenjaku does loose all of the cursed spirits in the body’s inventory, Satoru simply makes his domain several times larger to accommodate them and sends balls of Red bouncing around at lightning speed, shredding them all as soon as they emerge.

In the middle of this maelstrom, he appears behind Kenjaku, grabs him by the hair, and pulls so hard he expects Geto’s entire head to come off, but instead only the top does and he sees what Kenjaku actually is: a brain in an empty skull.

Satoru rips the brain out and as his domain is assaulted from the outside and starts to crack, a strange chill filling the air. He believes the ice user has awoken and is trying to break Unlimited Void from the outside. They’re surprisingly adept, he notes, as he crushes Kenjaku’s brain-body in his hands and then rips it apart with cursed energy until it’s just a little ball of pink mist.

He knocks the ice user out again once he releases his domain and then hunts the other two curses, Jogo and Dagon. Dagon has not moved from his spot in the main building and dies without incident; he’s clearly very powerful but doesn’t use that power for whatever reason.

Jogo goes down after a fiery melee where he thinks that Satoru will be unable to use his technique so soon after a domain expansion and dies in a bloody, lopsided, one-way domain expansion, leaving only the curse user.

It is twelve minutes and thirteen seconds from when he arrives to when the last cursed spirit falls.

When he finishes, he notes the curse user has gotten up again, and he pursues them to small vault lined in seal papers. It’s open, and they are simply standing there, staring.

“Looking for this?” he asks holding the Prison Realm, “Your name is Uraume, right? I heard someone yell it during the fight.”

They nod. “It was the girls, wasn’t it? I told Kenjaku to leave those girls behind. When he refused, I told him not to harass them at night. He thought I was saying that for their sake.”

“Everybody’s dead, Ice Princess. All four curses and the Brain. Obviously, you’re going to be taken into custody. I have so many questions to ask you. The first one is…what the hell are you? Are you incarnated successfully in the body of a person? What I’m thinking is that you’re basically what would happen if someone ate cursed remains and their power took over the body instead of destroying it. Which is fascinating.”

Uraume knows they can’t defeat Satoru in battle or successfully escape from him. If they were going to escape, they would have needed to flee right away when the attack started. Now, there’s no one left to distract him.

Kenjaku is dead, the sorcerers are going to recover the cursed objects, including the fingers, along with plans, schematics, journals…they will learn about a thousand years of lies, corruption, and conniving, all for something that will never take place now.

Uraume hopes against hope that Kenjaku hasn’t written down the rune technique used to create cursed body parts that hold human souls. If he wrote it down, it was probably only mere days until the Jujutsu Society figured out how to reverse the spell and permanently destroy both the cache of cursed body parts he planned to use to reincarnate past sorcerers and the fingers of Sukuna.

The Jujutsu Society has a number of these fingers, and they are going to find eight in the factory complex, including four collected by Kenjaku, three collected by Uraume themself, and one collected by the girls. It is possible the Jujutsu Society might know the locations of eight to ten fingers, including fingers that might be kept by the clans, and if they destroy eighteen of twenty fingers…well, Sukuna’s revival becomes less viable even if one finger is destroyed.

Gojo looks around and says, “No f*cking clue what any of this is, but game over, am I right?”

Chapter 2: An Investigation

Chapter Text

Satoru doesn’t leave the site until Atsuya Kusakabe arrives to safeguard it because the area is absolutely filled with cursed objects. He takes Uraume back to the campus and seals them in a pit-like holding cell with chains that leech cursed energy from their body continually.

When he returns, he and Kusakabe are flummoxed at the wonderland of horrors left behind.

Kusakabe says, “Do you sense that foul aura?”

“Mhmm. This place has so much weird mixed residue from cursed objects it’s a bit much for my eyes, but there’s definitely something here that stands out.”

He opens a safe once he feels like he’s determined the direction of the malevolent aura, and once he does, immediately orders everyone who is not a Grade 1 sorcerer or above off the property and requests that highest-grade prepared sealing papers be brought—as much as is available.

Kusakabe peeks over his shoulder. “Tell me those aren’t what I think they are?”

“Ryomen Sukuna’s fingers, in three different little boxes. Eight in total. Weaker sorcerers can become cursed just by being around them when they’re unsealed like this. Although I wonder if this has something to do with the fact the fingers have been giving us trouble lately, like they’re becoming more powerful.”

“What were these people going to do with his fingers?”

Gojo shrugs. “Your guess is as good as mine. I’m almost scared to ask. It’s not just Sukuna’s fingers that are here. There are a bunch of mummified, cursed body parts.”

Kusakabe said, “And the ringleader was someone who…stole Geto’s body?”

“I’m going to tear someone ten new assholes when I find out where chain of custody when wrong, but yeah. Some former Six Eyes users have run into the guy before.”

“How’d we find out?”

Gojo answered, “Those girls that Suguru was raising were freaked out and scared, so they came to me. They’re pretty shaken up. You can imagine how desperate they had to be to ask their adoptive father’s executioner for help. But who even knows what they’ve done for us; whatever these people were planning on doing, it was dark as hell."

“No kidding. I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s going to take forever to temporarily seal and suppress the objects just so we can move them. And probably, we need to be careful about who sees the technique runes. I’d bet anything there’s some taboo sh*t here.”

While they’re working, he gets a call from Megumi at 4:30 am.

“Yo, Megumi, is something wrong? It’s so late.”

“Tsumiki…she’s awake. I’m on my way to her right now.”

“She just woke up?”

“Yes.”

Gojo knows there’s almost no possibility that the killing of the curse user and Tsumiki’s recovery aren’t linked. The possibility that sweet girl had been cursed by Kenjaku is both infuriating and frightening.

“The situation with me is kind of critical, so I can’t come with you and it’s late. We killed a very major curse user tonight. Her curse may be related to him. I’m going to send someone to drive you. Please keep me updated on how she is doing.”

“Okay. I talked to her on the phone. She sounds okay. I think...I think she's fine.”

“And Megumi? I’m glad. You must feel so relieved.”

Megumi is a young man of few words, but that basically just means the words he speaks are incredibly meaningful, so when he said his sister was fine, Gojo knew he was probably very happy.

Satoru personally escorts the fingers to the Tokyo campus, and then returns to continue sealing the other objects. Nearly all of the objects have strings wrapped around them with two different names.

One is a mummified ear that says, “Yorozu – Tsumiki Fushiguro.”

He wraps the ear and continues working until later that morning when Ijichi delivers a report that everyone with the Sleeping Curse had awoken. The Sleeping Curse had affected a few dozen people, all being monitored in hospitals across Japan like Tsumiki.

According to Ijichi, all of them woke up at the exact same instant.

There’s a rustle of paper, and Kento Nanami who has recently joined the investigation team unrolls two huge sheets of paper that had been rolled like a scroll.

Kusakabe asks, “What is that?”

“…A map of Shibuya? And a schematic of Shibuya Station? Tons of notes written all over them,” Nanami explains.

He listens to a recap of the disaster curses, a fire curse that left the ground outside melted, a peculiar crab, a monster with twigs for eyes, and one that could even kill by touching any person even once.

Kento says, “A special grade who can kill by touch? Intelligent and deliberate as well? How disturbing. It’s fortunate that he met you first. It's also a miracle you did as little damage as you did, if you killed a curse user and four special grades.”

“I’m awesome, right? Who knows? Maybe I saved your life last night.”

“I doubt it. Anyway, what is the deal here?”

Satoru says, “We don't know. I’m struggling to bend my mind around what this curse user was actually doing. I have no idea what we’re going to find once we put all this together. I believe that some component of this was some sort of plot to possess civilians using cursed objects.”

“That would just kill the victim, right?” Kusakabe asks.

“The ice technique curse user we apprehended is made up of a powerful sorcerer’s soul in a body that probably didn't have cursed energy aptitude before. They also seem to have the technique and name of a traitor from my clan named Uraume. Uraume left Fujishiro and ran around with Sukuna back in his day, famous for being his ‘people chef,’ if you know what I mean. We did find a number of Sukuna’s fingers here as well.”

Atsuya asks, “Yuck. You think they were trying to reincarnate the King of Curses? sh*t. What would we even do if Ryomen Sukuna came back?”

Satoru pouts. “What do you mean? I’d kick his ass obviously.”

The other man lights a cigarette. “You’d lose.”

Satoru grabs doughnut an assistant is offering without washing his hands even though he’s been touching mummified cursed body parts. With a mouth full, he says, “Nah, I’d win.”

Nanami says, “We’d need a shovel to collect your corpse from the battlefield.”

“Into the shovel and straight into a garbage dumpster,” Atsuya answers.

Still talking with his mouth full, Satoru whines, “You guys are dicks.”

Once the cursed objects are secured and moved, and all the runes detailing techniques are packed, Ijichi’s team comes in to begin their investigation.

Satoru returns to his apartment with takeout breakfast for Mimiko and Nanako.

He tells them he’s taken care of the situation, and they are confused.

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve recovered Suguru’s body. I haven’t pieced together how any of this happened, but someone I trust has been guarding the body without taking her eyes off it. Once you finish, we can go see him.”

Mimiko asks, “What was inside of him?”

Satoru answers, “A disgusting monster named Kenjaku who has a technique that could essentially jump from one body to another. We haven’t really put anything together, but he was going to do some seriously messed up stuff. You two probably saved a lot of lives.”

“What about everyone else?”

“Uraume, the curse user, has been brought in for questioning. Everyone else got smoked, Kenjaku and the cursed spirits. Gone.”

Nanako crinkles her nose. “But we saved people? We weren’t really trying to do any favors for the monkeys.”

“If you start back with that nonsense, someday the Jujutsu Society will send me to find you, and that would make me very sad. I was able to convince the Jujutsu Society after what happened last month not to pursue you two as criminals because you are kids, but they won’t give you that grace a second time. If you murder again, you'll probably be executed by sorcerers,” he gently answers.

“You’ll kill us?” Mimiko asks.

“If you make me. Please don’t.”

Satoru says, “I do understand. I know you think no one does, but the world is a horrible place. Society is this supposed contract where if you follow the rules, the benefits of humanity are supposed to be available to you. In your case, the idea of society and humanity both failed you, so you have no need to be loyal to it. You view it as what it is, because your eyes were forcibly opened to how sh*tty living on earth really is for some people.

“Suguru and I did not part ways because we disagreed that the world was broken. We disagreed because of what we believed we could do to fix it. Suguru’s path leads to darkness, and I don’t believe he would want you to follow his footsteps right into your graves.”

This is such a touchy and raw subject, and they can barely stomach his words.

Yet, it’s the middle of winter and they don’t have anywhere to go, and this apartment is the first time they’d felt okay since the man they now know as Kenjaku came into their lives.

After they finish eating, he takes them to the crematorium, where Shoko is guarding Suguru, having not taken her eyes off Suguru even one time.

She’s usually not affected much by her work, but this morning, her eyes are puffy over the hell that her old friend came to in the end, and for the pain that this causes both Satoru and the girls. Suguru raised them from such a young age that they probably don’t remember a world without him particularly well, and having to come to his executioner for help is…dark.

Satoru has done surprisingly minimal damage to the body, mostly to the top of the skull, so it hadn’t been difficult for her to prepare him so the girls can see him one last time.

They squeeze Geto’s lifeless hands and cry. They thank him for caring for them and teaching them and raising them all those years.

As they all stand there, knowing that this is the last time that they will ever see Suguru Geto ever again, the wound is fresh, bleeding, stinging.

Satoru’s voice is so gentle as he says, “What would make Suguru happiest is for you to promise that you’ll live the best lives you can.”

They make this promise to Suguru, and tell him their goodbyes.

Once they're ready, Suguru Geto goes into the cremation chamber, along with his ideals and the future he tried to create.

While his body is being cremated, Satoru takes the girls back to his apartment and shows them pictures of his high school days with Suguru and tells them funny stories. There's a Suguru they didn't get to know, and they just don't talk about the rest. They look at the pictures, and appreciate that they all cared for him.

Shoko texts him as she finds out how the Jujutsu Society lost his body; there was another doctor working there briefly during fall and up to a couple of weeks ago. Since she had personal connections to Suguru, one of the Elders pulled her away from the case and assigned custody of Suguru’s body to the other doctor.

The Geto family was given ashes, but not Suguru’s, and his family rejected them while the Jujutsu Society notated that his body was handed over intact to them. In the end, his corpse was stolen using incorrectly filled-out paperwork, an oversight that no one saw because no one was looking.

His family has rejected his body again and want nothing to do with the process.

Gojo decides that Suguru can rest in the Fujishiro cemetery on the Gojo clan’s estate, a place where Satoru himself will someday be buried.

They have bone picking, he and the girls.

He uses a warp seal to take them to the Gojo clan estate, where he has rooms already ready for them where they can just peacefully exist near Geto’s grave, mourn, recover from everything they’ve been through, and figure out what their lives should be like in the future.

Truthfully, he’s not sure what will happen to them, but he's sure they're at least going to be safe.

Gojo believes they will do better if they don’t have to face him every day, so he leaves them in the hands of his clan to care for them for the time being. He asks his mother to keep a close eye on them and help them if she can.

Meanwhile, the Jujutsu Society is left with the enormity of Kenjaku’s life, his work, his plans. Kenjaku was a meticulous note-taker and kept journals of important information, noted his techniques neatly on scrolls, and kept documentation of everything.

It becomes clear that Uraume is indeed an incarnated sorcerer from the Heian Era, and not a stranger; he knows her name. When Michizane Sugawara died, the thirty children he had with concubines were almost entirely killed by his second son. Among the survivors was the youngest and smallest, a girl named Uraume who fled from Fujishiro, the clan’s estate, at age twelve and was very soon after known to be Sukuna’s traveling partner.

She went on to have a relatively long run as the only person Sukuna ever allied with and was known even in the Heian Era for the fact that she was a scholar and Sukuna’s personal chef, who cooked and ate humans with him.

Uraume as a prisoner is useless, and provides no useful information. It becomes unclear if her cooperation is needed, with how meticulous Kenjaku kept everything organized and documented.

An entire week of round-the-clock work happens with many people brought in who normally didn’t take part in everyday affairs.

His grandmother, one of the foremost sorcery scholars, makes a visit to look at the raw technique information, sketches, and runes. At Satoru’s insistence, the Kamo clan isn’t allowed to look at anything, due to mounting evidence that Kenjaku has had some sort of persistent relationship or presence within the family.

No one in the Zenin clan is academically gifted enough to be useful except Naoya Zenin, but he’s halfway excommunicated from the sorcery community and there is absolutely no one who wants him to see potentially taboo sorcery notes.

It is nine days from the impromptu raid that Satoru walks into the Chamber of Elders with neatly wire-bound reports that Ijichi helped him make.

He floats the books over the rice paper ‘shields’ they use to protect their identities like he can’t see their souls, and says, “Sorry, this is going to be a long meeting.

“First and foremost, Kenjaku was a contemporary of Tengen and Sukuna from the Heian Era. His technique allowed him to switch bodies, stealing the bodies of other sorcerers, even if they are dead. Historically, he has repeatedly taken vessels in the Kamo Clan. Whether this was done with willful cooperation from the Kamo Clan is yet to be determined. I don’t personally believe at this time that we will find evidence to support that conclusion, but I recommend continuing to exercise caution, considering the magnitude of these matters.”

There’s no objection to this argument, even from the representative from the Kamo clan that sits among the elders, because he has learned his own brother was Kenjaku’s last host before Suguru Geto and the family is internally up in arms about the evidence that this monster has definitely been with them multiple times.

There’s some resentment among the elders because Satoru is the one making this presentation; they are relieved that whatever was going to happen has been stopped, but he is a nuisance and he accomplished this legendary accomplishment on his own, without even telling anyone about it until the fighting was over.

Satoru says, “If you can please turn to Page Four, the Proposed Timeline of Events:

“Starting in November, forty-six people were afflicted with the Mysterious Sleeping Curse. We now know that each of these people fell under their curse after an interaction with Kenjaku in his prior host before Suguru Geto, Souta Kamo. The purpose of the Mysterious Sleeping Curse was to immobilize the users and prepare their bodies as vessels.

“Kenjaku made binding vows with a number of extraordinarily powerful sorcerers across centuries, offering them immortality and the ability to reincarnate in the future. They bound their souls to a part of their body: mainly fingers and ears. Kenjaku’s talent for making things that are horrifying seems boundless; at least sixty percent of all cursed objects we would like to destroy but can’t, including the Cursed Womb Death Paintings, may be his work.

“Between February 1^st and 14^th, Kenjaku planned to visit each of the people suffering from the Mysterious Sleeping Curse and implant a sealed cursed artifact carrying the soul of one of these sorcerers in their bodies. Since these objects would be sealed until his command, this would likely have gone unnoticed and would not have affected the victims. To us, they simply would have remained asleep.

“The next component of Kenjaku’s plan involved a boy named Yuji Itadori, who was, to put it simply, made by Kenjaku. This leg of the investigation is still pending, but Kenjaku was somehow involved in his birth, and he has some blood relation to Sukuna. The purpose of Yuji Itadori is to be a vessel for Sukuna to reincarnate, but with the stipulation that he won’t actually be able to run around free because the vessel will be able to control him until Kenjaku is ready to unleash him on the world.

“One of the fingers guarded by the Kamo clan was hidden as a ward at the school where Itadori would be attending in the spring. As Kenjaku unleashes more and more of the power of the fingers because he controls the binding vow used to make them, eventually this young man would come into contact with a finger. If he ate it on his own or was eaten by a cursed spirit who also ate a finger, Kenjaku was reasonably certain that just putting the object near the vessel intended to contain it would result in an incarnation. As a last resort, he planned on employing a curse user to force-feed him the first finger.

“Of course, we in the Jujutsu Society would jump at the chance to have a vessel we could use to dump those damn fingers. So Yuji Itadori would enter our world with the purpose of eating all the fingers.

“This would cause the fingers still in play to awaken, and while Kenjaku did not know where all of them were, he was certain they’d be able to find them thought this process given a few months.

"Kenjaku had superior command over barriers and veils, and instituting rules in declared spaces. We will see that with every major step of his plan from here on.

“Knowing that we’ll be conservative about how many fingers we throw into that kid over time, Kenjaku planned on stealing all the Jujutsu Society fingers during the Goodwill Event during September, using a combined force of curse users and the special grade curses, which he referred to as the ‘Disaster Curses.’ They had plans and reasonable means to do this, including secret maps and schematics of this campus. This raid would likely have resulted in the deaths of both students and staff. One of the components of this raid is a barrier that would specifically prevent me from entering the area where the students would be fighting four special grade curses.

“The next major item on the timeline is October 31, at Shibuya. Kenjaku designed a system of complex barriers to cause a mass-casualty event in Shibuya with three key purposes:

“First, the primary goal of the event was to trap me inside of the cursed artifact, Prison Realm, in order to prevent me from taking any action on future steps of the plan.

“Second, Kenjaku intended to feed a large number of fingers to Yuji at the same time to destabilize him and unleash Sukuna on Shibuya, which will be filled with thousands of civilians due to the Shibuya Halloween Street Bash, civilians who will be unable to escape. The grim circ*mstances will in Kenjaku’s estimation, create a situation where Yuji Itadori will be forced to forge a binding vow to give his body to Sukuna to save his allies.

“The end result is that a full-power or nearly-full-power Sukuna would be loosed on the world at Shibuya.

“If that’s not enough, the so-called Disaster Curses and an army of curse users would be on the ground to kill weaker sorcerers, and other Jujutsu Society staff like managers, in addition to creating chaos.”

He pauses and crosses his arms. “Make no mistake, Shibuya would have been a pivotal event, and possibly a mortal injury to the Jujutsu Society. Sukuna rampaging and murdering thousands of people out in the open, cursed spirits chasing frightened civilians, the Disaster Curses free to rage—this would be the end of sorcery as we know it. There would be no way to keep our world a secret anymore.”

He pauses for questions, and they ask if they might have prevented Shibuya if the girls hadn’t tattled on Kenjaku.

Satoru says, “I’ve been thinking about all of this, and to be honest, no. I am optimistic, arrogant, and sometimes I over-estimate what we are capable of as Japan’s defense against cursed spirits and cursed users. But when I look at everything, I believe that we would not have realized there was an overarching scheme until Shibuya, and that would have been too late. This is one thousand years in the making and we’re only mortals, after all.”

Then, he continues, “At the conclusion of the events at Shibuya, Kenjaku would devour the curse Mahito and use his ability to alter human bodies in order to awaken potential sorcerers: people who didn’t have a brain that allowed them to use cursed energy, but a cursed technique. He would also use it to reinforce the bodies of the Sleeping Curse victims as he unsealed the sorcerers and curse users whose artifacts he placed in their bodies.

“Those with Sleeping Curse would awaken as powerful sorcerers from ages past, and many new sorcerers would be created.

“At the same time, he would unleash ‘curse traps’ he has placed all over Tokyo; they are similar to inventory curses in that they are pocket domains but filled with cursed spirits. According to Kenjaku’s estimates, there are over eight million curses in the traps.

“Kenjaku was going to ‘harvest’ Tengen at some point soon after, and force most sorcerers to participate in the Culling Game, a battle royale where curse users and sorcerers would all fight and kill each other until none were left and Japan was essentially a pressure cooker of cursed energy. At that point, he would attempt to merge humans with Tengen’s cursed body within that pressure cooker in hopes of ‘evolving’ humanity.

“Even according to Kenjaku’s estimations, there was an eighty percent chance this would result in a hybrid being capable of things sorcerers are not, a fifteen percent chance nothing would happen, and a five percent chance that cursed spirits would evolve and become wholly intelligent beings.”

Reading about an averted apocalypse in a booklet Kiyotaka Ijichi made in Microsoft Word is a surreal experience for everyone, and Satoru is like the elders, who keep looking at the pages for a hint that they would have found out about everything. The evidence that they wouldn’t have figured out anything important until it was too late is staggering.

Kenjaku was both a phantom and both an omnipresent menace for the past eleven centuries, depending on whether you know he exists or not.

The most important actions to prevent this grim future have already taken place.

Elder Tanashiro says, “Eliminating Sukuna’s vessel seems a prudent act.”

Satoru answers, “Kind of disappointing that’s immediately where your mind goes, but it’s unnecessary. My dear grandmother, Lady Midori Gojo, and Tengen have basically figured out how Kenjaku’s artifacts were made. Kenjaku created a framework of sorts, essentially a system where an object or person could enter into a binding vow with him.

“The reason these objects are not destroyable by any means is because we didn’t know how they were made, and even if we did, there are two failsafe measures that protect and empower the objects in order to prevent them from decay. The first was Kenjaku’s life. The second is the curse traps. They’re essentially a massive power source that’s used to empower the objects and prevent them from losing power over time.

“Eliminating the traps is something we need to do right away. If someone broke one or one malfunctioned and set a hundred thousand cursed spirits out into a busy Tokyo ward, that would be a disaster. If we evacuate and use catastrophic force against them, we should be able to neutralize them. This may be a task that I will have to complete personally.

“Once we eliminate all the traps, we should be able to destroy all the cursed objects concentrated bursts of reverse curse energy using a special curse-breaking technique we are able to develop because Kenjaku documented how the items were made. We have seventeen of Sukuna’s fingers, and the Gojo clan has one, so if we destroy eighteen fingers, there’s no reason to eliminate the vessel.”

The Elders are quick to agree that millions of curse spirits hidden all over Tokyo is a situation that needs to be remedied immediately, but they are quietly annoyed that Gojo is the only answer to the problem.

Satoru usually does his best not to ‘only me’ tasks when he can, but the curse traps are densely packed miniature domains filled with tens of thousands of curses. It is easy to kill them at the point of exit, but he thought maybe only Yuta could produce that kind of force, and he is currently overseas.

For any curses to escape would be a problem, so one-by-one, he deals with them by firing orbs of Red inside and letting them bounce around until nothing is left. It actually takes a massive amount of effort because of the sheer number of curses, and eliminating all of them ultimately takes almost two weeks.

It scares him to think that Kenjaku could have opened the traps during their brief battle and was only prevented from doing so because he was inside of Unlimited Void and his cursed energy couldn’t escape from the barrier.

Everything about the situation scares him.

The Elders are frightened by it too, because by anyone’s estimation, they were about to sink into hell and had no idea.

He texts home often to check on Mimiko and Nanako, and hears they decided on their own to start going to classes, and they’re learning how to snowboard.

His mom is also teaching them how to paint, which they evidently like.

The Gojo clan estate is nestled in central Hokkaido, and everyone who goes to live there from some other place experiences one of two things their first winter: they either find they’re super into it and love playing in the snow, or they decide they absolutely hate it and decide they’ll spend several months inside reading. They both seem to be embracing the spirit of the winter, ice skating, playing in snow forts, drinking hot tea around a fire with other kids.

He sends word to Suguru’s old crew through Miguel that if any of them tries to pull Mimiko and Nanako back into the genocide cult, he will delete them from existence.

And on the night that he finishes with the curse traps, he grabs pizza and drops in on the Fushiguro house, where they eat and play Mario Kart with the demon dogs laying across their laps until two in the morning since it is a Friday night.

Tsumiki has no memories outside of encountering a strange man and then waking up later, but because cursed energy has been used to manipulate her body, she has gained the ability to see cursed spirits and her brother’s shikigami, something she has always desired.

Her unrivaled glee at being able to snuggle the demon dogs is adorable and she’s just more delighted when he fills the living room with bunnies.

Satoru is glad they have this time together, because their paths will soon part; Megumi will go to Tokyo Jujutsu High, and Tsumiki is likely destined for Kikuchi Girl’s Academy, a top-notch high school for girls with a dormitory.

So, for high school, they’ll be living at different boarding schools. There’s acceptance in this fact as Megumi would never even want to pull her into the world of sorcery and Tsumiki is rightfully afraid of it. Megumi’s fate has always been in the shadows, and Tsumiki’s has always been in the light.

When Satoru returns to his apartment, he thinks about everything and feels an overwhelming sense of relief. Every time he thinks of how bad things might have become, his mind clouds with darkness.

The investigation remains ongoing as he heads back to work, but within a week, Gakuganji successfully destroys an artifact in Kyoto using a technique reversal technique blueprint made by his grandmother and Tengen.

It is an academically complicated technique, and Satoru doesn’t really get it. He considers himself prodigious, but not everyone else feels that way.

Utahime shows up a few days later, having fully grasped the technique, and even when she shows him so he can watch with his Six Eyes, he still can’t replicate it.

While they sit at a table in the secure reliquary with several of the mummified parts from the factory complex, he leans forward and rests his head on his hands as he stares across the table at her. “Admit it, you learned so you could come hang out with me.”

Utahime rolls her eyes. “Yeah? And what did I do to make sure you didn’t learn?”

“Oh, c’mon, I can’t be perfect at everything, despite what people say.”

“Nobody says that,” she answers, feigning irritation.

Satoru pulls his blindfold down and bats his eyelashes at her.

Iori rolls her eyes. “That doesn’t work on me.”

“Why not though? I’m handsome and I saved the world. What else do I have to do to get you to go out with me?”

“You’re so annoying, Satoru,” she says, although he can see she’s biting the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling at him.

“I know you like me. It’s just a matter of time.”

“It’s been ten years.”

“Okay, a matter of a lot of time.”

She shows him the technique, and Yorozu’s mummified ear disintegrates into ash.

He watches her three times, and on the fourth, he puts his hands over hers. “I’m ready now. Let me try.”

Satoru unseals a finger with a tag that says, ‘Hajime Kashimo,’ and says, “Apparently this guy was the biggest talent of the Edo Era. People called him the ‘God of Lightning.’ It’s strange to me that all these sorcerers we would think of as respectable entered into these pacts. Every one of these sorcerers could have fought, and they didn’t. Even worse, they knew the only way for them to be reincarnated would be to take the body of an innocent person.”

“Most sorcerers are really despicable though, aren’t they?” she asks.

“Yeah. So according to Kenjaku’s notes, Kashimo wanted to fight Sukuna, but what he wrote after that was basically the Edo version of ‘lol.’ Some sixteen-year-old boy in Yokohama was really going suffer the fate of having his body stolen by someone else and then driven straight to a terrible death. Like, what’s the point?”

Utahime is always struck by how protective and kind Satoru has become as an adult, and how he feels about protecting kids. As young sorcerers, they all had to give up on their childhoods early on for some reason or another, and part of how he copes with the loss of his youth is by fiercely protecting the youth of others.

She gives him a little smile, and knows she’s made a mistake, because this just makes him flirt with her again. Now comprehending the unbinding technique, he doesn’t even look down at Hajime Kashimo’s finger as it glows red and turns to dust.

“Every time you flirt with me, I remember how you used to do it when you were already in a relationship and it would piss your boyfriend off,” she says, trying to deflate his momentum.

Then she remembers that wound is still fresh.

“Sorry.”

Satoru looks down and says, “It’s fine. The good times were a long time ago. It really sounds like you want to know the answer to the question everyone has been asking all these years.”

“What question is that?” she asks.

He sweeps his hand like letters flowing across a marquis. “IS SATORU GOJO A fa*gGOT OR NAH?”

Almost falling out of her chair, she exclaims, “We are at work, Satoru! And that is not appropriate language! You are a teacher! What is wrong with you? Are you brain damaged?”

“The answer: only emotionally, actually. If we were older when it happened, maybe something would have come of it. It’s just that we were all so young back then, and we weren’t ready to be like that. If we were older, we probably would have become a thing. As fully-grown man, I’ve just kind of been dead set on you, but you keep slapping my hand away. I like who I like. It's not complicated for me."

Utahime, who has been subjected to a lifetime of this, feels like there’s something different about this time. He put the Suguru Geto card on the table and turned it over so she could see it for herself, and to her knowledge, he has never done this for anyone. Rumors about his relationship with Suguru have always been everywhere, and Satoru never acknowledges them.

It hadn’t been her intention to cause him to do that; truthfully, it doesn’t matter to her what he did or didn’t do with Suguru Geto. Anyone who knew Satoru knew that was a unique relationship and a unique situation. The truth that mattered about Suguru and Satoru was that it caused Satoru an incredible amount of agony in his life. If anyone knew how big the hole in his heart was, they would know that Satoru loved Suguru, in whatever the biggest way he was capable at that time was.

They go back to work, but the atmosphere is uncomfortable.

Utahime says, “For what it’s worth, I’m really glad that Geto’s adopted daughters were able to come to you for help, and that you’re looking after them. By some miracle, you’ve turned out to be a mostly all right guy. It’s hard, being young in the sorcery world. I know you’re trying to change that, and I hope you’re successful. Maybe the next generation will have it better.”

Satoru destroys another priceless, irreplaceable mummified body fragment, effectively killing a past sorcerer who had ambitions of being reborn.

Then he says, “Speaking of the next generation, you want to help make it with me?”

“Are you asking for help with the students?”

“I am not.”

She looks up, and he gives her a suggestive eyebrow waggle.

Utahime blushes and says, “This is harassment, and I am going to HR.”

He softens his voice and almost whispers in wonder, “I bet you’d be a really good little mom.” And then he grins and adds, “And I’d be delirious with joy to the point of being braindead goofy if I had a kid.”

She sighs. “I think about stuff like that. Becoming a parent. Having someone to go home to. It might just be because I'm getting older. I guess we're not kids anymore, are we?”

“I’d take such good care of you, you know. There’s probably some universe where both of us don’t survive until the end of the year. But we get to live. So why can’t we really live?”

They work together, all day, but when the day is over, he asks her if she wants to get some dinner, and she says yes.

Chapter 3: Politics of Power

Chapter Text

When they were all in high school, and Naoya Zenin hadn’t fully manifested as someone who needed to be removed from polite society, Utahime dated him. As a clan girl, her father ‘suggested’ it, and they were going to the same school.

Her first time was with him, and it was horrible. In sorcery society, women were second-class citizens at best; third-class if the men were allowed to count cursed weapons. It wasn’t until her first time that she found out male sorcerers were often so rough with female partners that they left them bruised on the inside and bleeding.

She decided she’d never be with another sorcerer again and tried breaking things off with Naoya. He flew into a rage and ripped her face open, telling her no man would ever want her with a mutilated face.

The next time she saw the Tokyo boys, Satoru complimented her on ‘getting a kickass scar’ because at that time, he had negative emotional intelligence and a terrible personality. People who admired Satoru as he was now really had no idea how unpleasant his presence was when he was younger.

Suguru Geto was mature and deeply empathetic and kind, and he was so attentive to everyone around him. Anyone who really knew them knew that Satoru learned how to love other human beings from Suguru. All of his kindness was carefully cultivated by Suguru Geto, who planted and watered and nurtured it.

Geto understood from the hurt in her eyes that she had been hurt by Naoya, and even though Satoru was still emotionally underdeveloped then, he had Geto to tell him things he needed to know.

Satoru and Suguru beat the absolute sh*t out of Naoya Zenin that afternoon, just absolutely wrecked him until the only thing that could save him was Gakuganji’s RCT. And after Gakuganji healed him, they dragged him off and did it again.

Gojo started flirting with her after she got the scar on her face; she always felt like maybe it was a game that he and Geto had already agreed to, where Satoru would flirt and Suguru would feign offense. Even though she always pretended it was irritating, having a handsome guy that every woman wanted call her ‘Pretty Girl’ and ‘Warrior Princess’ helped her get through the difficult period where her facial mutilation caused her sense of self-worth to evaporate.

Under all the rumors about what Satoru Gojo and Suguru Geto were, people tended to miss the most important fact of all: Suguru was a part of Satoru, and when they parted ways, Satoru was left with a garden of kindness and empathy that had been carefully tended to by Suguru, while Suguru’s own garden, deprived of sunlight, was left sparse and filled with thorns and poison.

One kept growing; one decayed.

But all that was then.

She puts the past out of her mind as she puts on a silk chemise and fixes her hair; this is their second weekend together, and he is waiting for her in his bedroom.

Satoru is meticulous in preparations for sex; he takes an extra sheet and folds it, placing it over the middle of the bed before they lay down to catch the mess. He has a little metal tray, which he prepares with soft, wet and dry washcloths, and places cold sports drink, and some snacks out on the nightstands.

Affection that he offers is pure puppy love; he’s playful, he’s silly, he showers her with a thousand tiny little butterfly kisses. Sometimes their kisses don’t align well because he can’t stop smiling. Sometimes it makes her smile too, and their teeth clink together, causing them to laugh.

Once they finish, he takes a wet washcloth and gently cleans her: her face, her hands, between her legs, showering her chaste little kisses, before sliding the messy extra sheet out from under her.

Utahime wonders if Satoru really falls in love and experiences the kind of attraction that other people do, or if he just loses his mind and becomes delirious with joy whenever someone understands his heart and treats him like a human being instead of a weapon of mass destruction.

Satoru tucks her in and kisses her forehead when it's time for them to sleep; he is surprised by this development in their lives, as he’d been annoying the hell out of Utahime for years. He thinks at first that he’s finally worn her down, but there’s more to it than that. They’re not kids anymore, and they have been reminded by recent events that life is fragile.

Learning Utahime secretly wants to become a mother is one of the cutest things that has ever entered his brain, and he thinks becoming a dad would be awesome. The idea they could just have a baby with each other and settle down seems like the solution to a puzzle he has lacked the ability to even approach in a meaningful way before this happened.

Somehow thinking that the universe would just give him a baby is strange to him, like how irresponsible would it be to trust Satoru Gojo with an infant? If he appeared with one, his coworkers would probably immediately take it away out of concern, and probably ask where he got it, maybe yell at him to stop taking other people’s children.

But the point was, there wasn’t anything stopping him from living that life. There is someone in his life that he deeply cares for and they have the same heart about things that matter. Utahime understands all his little inner workings and shares his dreams of raising a generation of sorcerers that is filled with hope and a vision for a better future.

They aren’t entirely emotionally open about what it is that they're really trying to do outside of little jokes and some teasing; instead, they are just two adults and certified sexual education instructors who know better having completely unprotected sex, like they are daring the powers that be.

There are so many things going on beyond his bedroom, but he’s unexpectedly found joy amidst the chaos. It’s a reminder that not every surprise in life has to be bad.

Sorcerers spend weeks destroying cursed objects and juggling their other tasks, with Sukuna’s fingers posing the biggest problem. Even with the reverse enchantment technique, the only person with the sheer, unimaginable power necessary to destroy one single finger is Satoru.

He can only do two in one day, and that nearly blows his brain out, and this gives him the first and only indicators for exactly how powerful Sukuna was. It’s a little scary; knowing Sukuna was armed with decades of experience and all this power left him secretly wondering how things would really have gone if they met in battle.

In Kenjaku’s timeline he wonders if his only possible paths are being trapped in the Prison Realm or meeting Sukuna.

He crosses paths with Kusakabe and Nanami often during this task as they’re stuck doing this tedious work right along with him.

One afternoon, after he destroys a finger, Nanami says, “Maybe a shovel wouldn’t be sufficient?”

Kusakabe answered, “You know how sometimes the body bag is just filled with tons of little plastic zipper bags?”

“I’d win, using my wits,” he insists.

They laugh.

Satoru says, “Anyway, Nanamin would go hard with Sukuna, give him critical hit zones and look all cool. And you know where you would be, Atsuya? Hiding under a rock.”

“Damn right I’d be hiding under a rock. Because I’m not a gangly albino with a god complex.”

Nanami asks, “Sukuna is not going to be there for us to fight, so it’s pointless to speculate. Besides, we already know Gojo would lose. Anyway, how are those girls doing? The ones who had been staying with Geto? They’re with your clan now, right?”

“They’re actually doing really well. They live in the castle, and my mom looks out for them. Both of them are actually crazy, crazy smart. Mimiko especially, when it comes to sorcery. My grandmother is so impressed that she’s considering taking her on as a student. She must be very talented because I have never done anything to impress her.”

Kusakabe’s brow rose. “She’s not proud of her precious grandson?”

Satoru explains, “Grandmother once told me that my chief accomplishment in life was coming out of my mother with Six Eyes and that I had done nothing noteworthy since then. I think I was seven at the time, and started crying, and she told me that’s exactly what I did on the day I was born too.

“She’s a lot nicer now that she’s super old and she likes girls, so she takes them out shopping and tells them how brave they are instead of inflicting emotional trauma on them.

“Nanako is a little tougher because she holds on to Geto’s beliefs a lot harder, but she probably just needs time. They’re going to classes, doing hobbies, making new friends, so if we just leave them be, they’ll be okay. I try not to bother them as much as possible. My mom keeps a close eye out for them and is helping them along.”

Chapter 4: Enter Nobara

Chapter Text

Satoru is spending some face time with the clan; it’s been one week since his meeting with the emperor, which was surprisingly scary.

The emperor was surprisingly well informed about the sorcery world as a whole; but his knowledge was missing glaring pieces of information, a sign of incomplete information. While he had been told that there had almost been a serious incident, the version of the story he was told was that the Council of Elders discovered and solved the problem without incident.

Nothing more, nothing less.

He listened, asked questions. In total, their one-hour meeting ended up going on for almost six hours.

The emperor was somewhat antagonistic toward him because his family harbored deep resentment because it seemed his family hadn’t stopped blaming the Gojo clan for losing the war. It was just an incredibly silly thing to still be mad about in 2018 to Satoru, but then again, the Gojo clan had their old grudges too.

Satoru has no idea what the outcome of the meeting will be and waiting made him a little anxious.

The twins approach him and ask if they can leave to attend a concert in a few weeks, and he informs them that they’re not prisoners and should feel like they have the same freedom as any other kid that’s around. He encourages them to do things that make them happy, unaware that this event will be formative in their lives.

He has a big lunch with everyone, tea with his grandmother, who grills him about his relationship with Utahime.

The next morning, he receives a text from Atsuya Kusakabe, informing him that he was injured during a mission the night before, asking Satoru if he can go meet a potential student who has applied to attend Tokyo.

Teachers usually split these meetings up since not all applicants are accepted, and Kusakabe wanted to know if Satoru could take his meeting since he needs to rest his leg.

Since Satoru is the first year instructor, he agrees and travels to a quiet country town to meet a girl named Nobara Kugisaki.

According to the file Kusakabe sends, Kugisaki was identified as a potential sorcerer at age five when she started talking about seeing things that didn’t exist.

In Japan, a child suspected of having sensory disorders, i.e. ‘seeing or hearing things that don’t exist’ are referred by default to a very small number of specialists to determine the diagnosis. Those specialists present the kid in question with a small cursed spirit in a cage, and they are asked to describe it.

If they accurately describe the spirit, the Jujutsu Society opens a file on them.

In most families, the child sorcerer is not the first person in the family that has had some kind of sight, but there is always a first.

Kugisaki is the first in her family.

In these cases, Windows—the people who have sight but no cursed technique—usually keep a close eye on them, and a low-grade sorcerer will visit occasionally to help them learn the basics.

It’s a system that’s incredibly faulty, with the biggest fault being that mental health is such a taboo subject and parents are reluctant to see help when their kids start seeing monsters.

But the system caught Kugisaki Nobara.

Not every sorcerer gets to come to Tokyo or Kyoto and train; that’s an elite option reserved for sorcerers that are believed to have first grade potential only. Sorcerers that have less capability are usually trained through mentorship and apprenticeship through whichever of the Big Three controls the place where they live.

Nobara is in the Central Territory, so Kamo clan territory. The Kamo clan doesn’t train women, but one of the subordinate clans that works under them in the Central Territory took on the task of teaching Kugisaki the basics as she grew. It’s Yasu Higurashi, the head of the Higurashi clan, who wrote to Masamichi Yaga recommending that Nobara be trained as an elite.

Yasu seems surprised that it is Satoru Gojo who comes to visit.

“I’m still just a teacher. I’m in charge of the first years again this year, so I’m super interested in seeing what Miss Kugisaki can do. Underestimating someone’s power and leaving them without training befitting their potential is always bad, but overestimation can be deadly,” he answers.

With an understanding nod, Yasu turns and gestures for Satoru to follow him. Tea is offered, but Satoru doesn’t really want to linger too much since he has another task he wants to tend to before the day is over.

The Higurashi clan’s estate is humble compared to most, a big house with a few smaller houses and some areas used for training. It’s beautiful country all around though, quite peaceful, surrounded by farmland.

This clan doesn’t have particularly powerful techniques; they’ve never produced a Grade 1 sorcerer. Yet, their modest abilities are just fine for the day-to-day issues that pop up in rural areas like this one. This clan is knowledgeable and diligent, and they maintain their area well. Despite not commanding much power, they’re well-respected in the community for being willing to help other fledgling sorcerers.

The first time he sees Nobara, she’s standing in fresh spring grass at the Higurashi clan’s estate, holding a hammer in one hand and nails between her fingers on the other. With the wind blowing her hair, she meets his gaze without any hint of intimidation, looking him dead in the eyes like she was ready to fight him.

His first impression is of that fearless look of determination in her eyes, and he smirks as he pulls his blindfold down to read her technique with one of his eyes.

While he learned about her technique in a report from Yasu Higurashi, the old man understated it, probably accidentally. Even without needing to see her use it, he can tell it’s quite powerful and she has incredible cursed energy reserves to use it.

After Higurashi introduces them, he smirks. “I like you already. You’ve got a fierce look about you. Let’s see what you can do, Kugisaki. Come at me.”

One of the funniest things about this exchange is that he doesn’t have time to explain to her that she can go all-out because she won’t be able to hurt him. Her attacks are fast, and ranged attacks that pack a decent punch are actually fairly rare in sorcery.

Her attacks do more than just physical damage; he can tell that because her soul is bound to the nails while they are in play, they have potential to do damage beyond the tearing of flesh. It’s clear that there’s enormous room for development and improvement of this technique even on the basic level, indicating her potential can still significantly expand.

Nobara moves well, quite confidently, and she’s reasonably agile. She has a great technique, good movement, and her head game seems excellent. There’s nothing more he could ask for in a potential student. There is definitely room for improvement, but that’s what the purpose of school is in the first place.

He’s incredibly impressed and pleased with her performance, but she says, “There’s one skill I can’t show you.”

“It’s fine. I won’t be hurt.”

“This would hurt you. Trust me. A lot.”

Satoru is curious now because she’s used her nails against his Infinity and seems very convinced that this other skill will cause him physical damage. Now, he’s sure he needs to see it, so he fully pulls his blindfold down and scans the area, looking for a cursed spirit.

He detects a presence underground that would be unnoticeable to his senses in a bigger city.

In an instant, he is standing with her at the end of a canal, where the entrance to an underground drainage tunnel is ahead of them.

“There’s a cursed spirit down here. A little guy, but it’ll do.”

“Yuck. Couldn’t you find one in a more pleasant location? Like near the shopping center I coincidentally need to visit?” she asks.

He laughs. “Sorry, this area is well-kept by the Higurashi clan. You can tell how diligent they are even though they’re all the way out here in the middle of nowhere, with as little power as they have.”

“Master Yasu is pretty great, right? I mean, I know he’s not strong like the big sorcerers from the city. I heard his boss clan didn’t want them to train me, and he did it anyway.”

Satoru says, “The Kamo clan? They’re a pain in the ass, but they’re in huge trouble right now about this thing that happened.”

“Are you talking about the brain guy? We get the news even out in the country, you know. Master Yasu told me about it. You’re the guy that killed all those freaks, right?”

“I am.”

Nobara asks, “I have a really serious question.”

“What?”

“What did it feel like?”

“Kenjaku? It was soft, and incredibly slimy. Like really firm bread dough covered in snot, and warm—warm and slimy is always just the grossest thing. There was a smell too, kind of like corn chips. It was all very gross.”

Kugisaki nearly squeals. “Ewwww! Disgusting!”

Satoru pulls the grate open. “I know, I know. Speaking of gross, in you go, in your nice sneakers, too.”

“If they get ruined, you have to buy me new ones.”

“Fair enough.”

Kugisaki crinkles her nose as she uses her cell phone as a flashlight. “It smells like rotten eggs down here.”

“This is information they’ll teach you early in your training since it’s common to patrol underground in larger cities, but if you smell rotten eggs in a sewer, it typically means there’s a buildup of methane gas. The air here is probably mildly flammable. If it was more severe, we’d have to do something about it before entering.”

“Gross. It’s dark, wet, and now there are flaming egg farts?”

“Sorcery isn’t exactly a glamorous profession, you know. We go gross places and see gross things,” he explains.

Nobara throws her nose up in the air. “Did you know a place becomes significantly less gross if I am there? I smell good, so if there was more of me, this place wouldn’t stink.”

Satoru replies, “If I came down here and found a bunch of copies of you living in the sewers, I’d actually kind of be freaked out and I’d have a lot of questions about what the people in this town are doing and why they are doing it.”

“Ha! You could only be so lucky!”

Nobara is naturally very funny, and he really just likes her as a person and can tell that she’s going to really add some color to whatever environment she’s added to.

They walk for a while, and she says, “You seem cool, but before I form an opinion about you as a person, I need to ask a question.”

“Sure.”

“Are you against women becoming sorcerers?”

“No. I think it’s good for us to use all our strength, but you’re going to run into a lot of people who don’t feel the same way. The Jujutsu Society is backwards as hell. Women weren’t even allowed to train at Kyoto or Tokyo until about twenty years ago.”

“Men suck.”

“Girl, tell me about it,” he answers.

Kugisaki laughs but becomes more serious as she hears a noise up ahead.

When they reach the cursed spirit, he shines the light from his phone for her and watches as she approaches the pathetic blob-like body, flanked by a few tentacles. It looks like it’s never moved from the spot it was born, and that it could not do so except if moved by some other force.

Kugisaki hammers a nail, amputating a tentacle, and then a few more into the body. Then, as he watches, impales the tentacle on her straw doll.

A couple of seconds later, massive metal spikes resembling enormous nails burst out of the cursed spirit, instantly exorcising it.

He’s quite surprised as he realized this technique would indeed have acted on him even from within infinity because her cursed energy more or less teleported to its endpoint instead of traveling across the distance between her and the cursed spirit.

“That was really cool, and I’m glad we didn’t do that on me.”

“So, am I in or what?”

“You’re in. We’ll see how you do in Tokyo though. It’s a different ballgame, but I think you’re going to do great.”

He takes her out to buy her new shoes because her sneakers are soaked in sewage and cursed spirit blood, and then out to lunch at the nicest place in that little town. Before he leaves her, he makes a conditioning regiment for her to follow until classes start.

Satoru still doesn’t know how many students he’s going to have as other potential students are having meetings like this over the coming week.

Nobara is ambitious and aggressive by nature, and he knows she’ll probably compliment Megumi’s personality well; he doesn’t know if that means they’ll get along, but she’ll give him an earful about being too gloomy, that’s for sure.

While he is on his way home, he gets a text from an unknown number.

‘Please come visit me when you return to campus.’

‘Who is this’

‘Tengen’

For some reason, the idea of Tengen possessing a cell phone and using it to send texts is so weird even though he knows that she has one and very rarely communicates. In ages past, there was an attendant on staff at all times just in case she wanted something, which might happen one time in an entire year.

He hasn’t seen or spoken to Tengen since that incident and can’t imagine why she wants to speak to him now.

It’s a hassle, and he planned on dropping in on Yuji Itadori that afternoon to see what was up with his situation, but instead, he returns to Tokyo and makes his way to the Tombs of the Star Corridor.

She is waiting for him, under the strange, tree-like column at the center of her odd little world.

“Long time, no see. It’s been a while. You’re looking…okayish? I mean, holy sh*t, you turned into a monster, Lady.”

Tengen seems unamused by this greeting, and says, “It has been some time, Satoru Gojo.”

To Six Eyes, Tengen had an unsettling appearance even before, like swarming mass of several souls smashed together inside one larger soul. As an adult, Satoru viewed what she did with the Star Plasma Vessels less as ‘merging’ and more as ‘eating,’ a belief that had caused him to develop a lot of misgivings toward Tengen, her work, and her place in Jujutsu Society.

They stand in silence for a while, and he asks, “You asked to see me, didn’t you?”

“You are hostile toward me?”

“I didn’t come down here to fight. You summoned me.”

Tengen is clearly irritated by his attitude; he believes she’s probably used to people feeling honored to have her attention.

Satoru is sure that Tengen and Kenjaku both knew one another and had some sort of relationship as there is simply absolutely no possibility that they both existed in the same space doing a lot of the same weird stuff with barriers and they never crossed paths. If he asks, he wonders if she’ll discuss this, but assumes she’ll defend herself by saying she doesn’t interfere with the world despite the fact that her ‘mergers’ are some of the most disruptive events that happen in the world of sorcery.

Tengen says, “I remember the last time that we met. I knew even then that you were quite different than your predecessors. I knew right away that you had rejected the fate of the Star Plasma Vessel.”

“Riko Amanai. Her name was Riko Amanai.”

At age twenty-seven, he tends to think of Tengen as a secret monster that the Jujutsu Society keeps underground that must periodically be fed a young virgin girl in order to prevent her from mutating into an apocalyptic monster and killing everyone.

“Of course. I wasn’t attempting to insult her name. My reason for asking you to come here is something quite…abstract, I suppose. Let me preface this by saying that this particular sensory ability of mine is extremely vague and not particularly useful in almost all cases. It’s not something I have ever been able to use to any advantage and I do not imagine that will change.”

“What are you talking about?”

She says, “In a very unclear sense, I can see threads of fate. Not where they lead or how they relate to anything, only that they exist.”

Tengen asks him to imagine there’s an eight-year-old boy named Hiro, whose fate is to die at 10:33 am the following day by being struck by a car after carelessly stepping into the street while out shopping with his mother. This is his fate, and it is deeply entangled with the fates of others.

His parents will split due to the grief, not have other children, and his father, Kenichi, will become an alcoholic and will someday drive a car while intoxicated and paralyze an unrelated person, named Nobu.

Nobu is a serial murderer and paralyzing him will prevent him from killing yet another party, a woman named Kagura, who will discover the cure for a disease and save millions of lives forever into the future.

So there are four important players in the story:

Hiro, who is fated to be struck by a car at 10:33 am;

Kenichi, his father, who will become an alcoholic as a result of his grief;

Nobu, a serial killer, who will become paralyzed by Kenichi;

Kagura, a researcher will cure a disease and save countless lives

Hiro’s death is deeply woven into a tapestry of fates; there are literally millions of other fates tied to his. Each thread strengthens this fate, and the stronger a fate is, the more difficult it is to break it.

It might also be Hiro’s fate to have a meat bun that morning, but if he wills to eat a sweet pastry instead, it means nothing for that thread to be snapped and so he may do so by simply making a different choice.

If Hiro’s mother decides not to go shopping, he might get a call from a friend and go outside to play. If he doesn’t step carelessly into the street, perhaps he’ll trip and fall, or crash his bike into a traffic lane. A car might experience a mechanical failure or have a distracted driver and jump the curb. Perhaps two cars will crash together so hard a piece of one car goes flying and hits him in the head. Even if he doesn’t go outside, perhaps a car will crash into the front of the family home while he’s playing near a window.

The point is that the owner of the fate, Hiro, the instrument of fate, the car, and the time of that fate become more and more inevitable based on how interconnected that event is with the fates of other people. Regardless of the wills of the parties involved, the universe will try to make that happen.

An ordinary person lacks the ability to escape from these situations.

If Satoru Gojo is near Hiro at 10:33 am, things are different.

If Hiro begins to step into the street in front of a car, Satoru will simply grab him using superhuman speed. If he’s about to crash his bike into a traffic lane, or trip and fall, or even if someone is going to push him, all of these situations are stoppable by Satoru. If a car jumps the curb, or two cars crash and a piece of debris flies at Hiro’s head, or a car is about to crash into the house…there are not reasonable means involving Hiro and the car that Satoru is unable to stop.

Therefore, Satoru Gojo can break Hiro’s fate, and all the fates connected to his all at once, forcing the tapestry of fates to be repaired, those threads stitched some other way.

Even though Hiro’s fate to die by car has been averted, the most efficient way to knit the torn tapestry back together is still for Hiro to die. If he falls down the stairs later that day and dies from a broken neck, his father can still become an alcoholic, and the rest can happen as fated.

Gojo listens and says, “Do you know what Final Destination is, Tengen?”

“I do not.”

“It’s a series of films about people who escape their fate to die and death actively pursues them, trying to cause them to die in all kinds of crazy, f*cked up ways. I’m a huge fan, so basically, you’re saying even though we got rid of the killers, people who were going to die are probably going to die anyway, just by different means?”

Tengen answers, “I do not believe it is as simple as that. Eliminating Kenjaku’s faction so abruptly didn’t create a small snag in this tapestry…it ripped it to shreds. Almost everyone who lives inside of my barrier has a broken fate. It really speaks to how impactful and terrifying Kenjaku’s scheme would have been, even for ordinary people. Everyone was going to be affected, and living in the modern connected age that we do, a stone thrown in Japan ripples across every nation.

“Neither am I saying that your decision was wrong, or that we should not have taken drastic action. I am only saying that something deeply meaningful that probably affects everyone has happened. We will likely not live in a world that is simply without the outcome of Kenjaku’s schemes, but something else entirely.

“Whether our future is good or bad seems to rely on one question. In the situation between Hiro, Kenichi, Nobu, and Kagura, where you stop the car, would Fate resolve the conflict by killing Hiro, finding another way for Kenichi to hurt Nobu, disabling or removing Nobu by some other means, or allowing Kagura to simply never meet him? We don’t know if Fate is benevolent or malevolent or neutral or some random force, if it favors survival or simply tries to emulate the original plan.”

Satoru says, “So if a meteor falls on Shibuya on October 31^st?”

“That would be something. I think the more consequential a person is, the more likely it is that they will find a similar fate.”

He understands that Tengen is telling him that she has no idea what’s going to happen in the common months, but she’s sure that things are going to happen. They could be great, they might be awful, and there was some chance that everyone who was going to die is still going to die and catching Kenjaku didn’t mean anything at all in the first place.

Tengen says, “I think we should be most concerned about the people who can still fit into their original fates. Sukuna’s intended vessel is likely the most imperiled. I have been searching for the other fingers but have been unable to locate them.”

Satoru nods. “I’ve been thinking a lot about that kid. I was going to go to him today. His whole family situation is strange. His grandfather appeared out of thin air with his son awhile back. There’s no paper trail, no genealogy. Yuji’s parents died under odd circ*mstances as well.”

He checks in on his students after he leaves Tengen; they’ve been in Ijichi’s care for almost forty-eight hours while he took care of business. It seems like they’ve been having a good time, although Ijichi looks like he wants to jump off a bridge.

They’re sitting around on the steps in front of the cafeteria, having just finished dinner.

“Kelp!” Toge Inumaki says, waving.

“Did you forget you have students?” Maki Zenin asks.

Satoru answers, “You all are about to be second years, so just getting ready to wash my hands of you. Just kidding. But no really, I went to go see one of the incoming first years.”

Panda says, “Have you heard the news?”

“What news?”

“One of the second years got into a fight with Elder Tanashiro. He got suspended.”

The teacher sighs. “Well, Hakari is the only one who would do that. Did Kirara split too?”

Panda gasped, “How did you know? I was so surprised to hear that she decided to leave with him.”

“If you were a human teenager, it would make sense to you.”

“Salmon Roe…”

Maki asks, “When is Yuta coming home anyway?”

Satoru leaned down as she sat on the steps and teased, “You miss your boyfriend?”

“He’s not my boyfriend!”

Gojo says, “A lady already liked him and put a ring on it.”

“Good. I don’t care, because I don’t like him like that.”

“And I’m just saying, if he beat up Elder Tanashiro and got in trouble, you’d sit in his bike basket as he rides away, suspended for his sins.”

Maki glares at him briefly. “Why are you like this? Sometimes I wonder if having an extraordinarily dumb teacher can actually make me stupid too.”

Satoru says, “I saw the final academic rankings for this year and yeah, that’s probably possible. You guys did not impress anyone but me. I think you’re great. Maybe study a little more next year, and spend a little less time thinking about how handsome Yuta is.”

“I hate you,” the teenager answers, “and I have better things to do than sit around and listen to this.”

As she is walking away, he pulls out his phone, makes a Facetime call, and holds out his phone.

Yuta answers the call without realizing its Facetime, and yawns, his hair a mess, shirtless as he sits up in bed. “Gojo?”

Satoru says, “Maki really misses you, Yuta.”

“She does?”

“Yes, she said she can’t wait to see your handsome face again.”

“I don’t think she said that.”

Maki snatches the phone. “I did not say that. Stay in Morocco until you die for all I care!”

Yuta gives her an uneasy laugh. “I actually miss you too, Maki.”

In an instant, she is paralyzed, and he awkwardly adds, “…and Panda and Toge, and even Gojo. Sometimes.”

Maki says, “We’re going to throw him in a volcano.”

“Would that do anything?” Yuta asks.

“It would make me feel better. Probably nothing else. He’d just come out of it and go right to being a gigantic idiot.”

Toga nods. “Salmon.”

There’s a noise on his end, and Yuta says, “Oh, there it is. I have to go.”

When he hangs up, the girl throws the phone at his head and he catches it.

As she stomps off, he turns back to Panda and Toge. “Young love, am I right?”

Chapter 5: The Vessel

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

In theory, if any person on earth ate one of Sukuna’s fingers—and there are two still missing in the world—one in a million would maybe have the ability to incarnate Sukuna. The rest of them would be ripped apart by his cursed energy. This is the reason that it has never happened before, despite the fact that it has been attempted.

One of the fingers that the Jujutsu Society had was collected when Gojo was a student, at the scene of a cult who chose a vessel they thought would work. Sukuna’s cursed energy caused the attempted vessel to explode like a water balloon.

It was a gory scene, and Gojo’s second least favorite cult story.

A really powerful sorcerer’s body might work, or one with special properties. Yet all past attempts ended in disaster, maybe because the fingers had some sort of element that Kenjaku added to prevent Sukuna from just manifesting at some unplanned time.

‘Unplanned Sukuna’ would probably present wild complications to anyone having any kind of organized day.

While walking toward the Itadori residence, he stops to send Utahime a steamy selfie he took earlier and send her some dirty texts. It was time for her staff meeting, and he had waited all morning for this opportunity.

She started it the night before by sending him a text asking if he wanted to see her puss*, and when he excitedly answered that he did indeed, she sent him 254 pictures of her cat, Kumo, who is very jealous of anyone getting close to her. When he sleeps over with her, if he wakes up in the middle of the night, Kumo is always just staring at him like he’s waiting patiently for Satoru to die, but he might take matters into his own hands if he must.

To Satoru, Kumo is an abominable mountain of white fluff who is fifteen years old, missing half his teeth, and has to take a lot of pills in order to continue living. Because of this, he is confident that it’s not necessary for him to complain about Kumo since he’ll dig him a grave soon, and once Utahime has finished mourning that rotten creature, he’ll get her a new cat that doesn’t suck.

He has told Kumo this and believes that Kumo understands completely. Although they cannot speak, the enmity between them is understood.

Utahime seems to be aware Kumo is not a great cat because she told him she’s a sucker for a white-haired boy with a horrible personality.

Anyway, the point is that Satoru didn’t want 254 pictures of Kumo, he wanted to see Utahime, and she trolled him.

When she gets out of her meeting, she sends him angry texts, and he asks if he can sleepover.

Utahime tells him she’s started her period, and he feels a little bit disappointed because he knows that means no baby so far.

He tells her it would be silly for someone like him to be squeamish about a little blood and she curses at him and blocks him for an hour and then unblocks him and tells him to bring takeout and wine.

When he looks up from his phone, he goes back to looking around for Yuji Itadori. It’s after school, but he didn’t go home. There’s a big park across the street from the apartment where he lives with his grandfather, so Satoru crosses the street and starts looking around. Looking for someone with cursed energy, there are no sources anywhere in the park.

Yuji has pink hair, and Satoru manages to spot him.

To say his body was strange would be an understatement.

In all likelihood, they would not have met until Sukuna was inside of him, because if they met before, that wouldn’t happen. So in Bizarro Land, the other version of himself maybe didn’t get to glimpse what this boy’s body was like before it was corrupted.

Yuji Itadori has a strange vessel.

If cursed energy is like electricity and techniques are like appliances, the bodies of sorcerers are like houses that have wiring throughout their bodies and a master electrical box in their brain.

Yuji’s body was like a house that had an extreme amount of wiring, and places in his body where his appliance was definitely supposed to plugin, but the electrical box is missing and so is the appliance.

There was a technique in this body at some point, because the body was knit together with some physical adaptations, with some of that abandoned ‘wiring’ in his muscle tissues.

But there’s no technique in the body now, and he is disconnected from the grid.

So, in practice, he’s probably living like any ordinary person, even though he’s not one at all.

Satoru has never seen anyone like him, and he spends a few minutes just staring at him with his blindfold off, trying to piece together what might have happened. His first theory is that clearing the innate technique out of the body was necessary to make him a suitable vessel for Sukuna.

Or maybe the forced disconnection of his native cursed energy from his mind is the failsafe that would allow him to control Sukuna?

According to ancient accounts, Sukuna had rosy-pink hair like many members of Kitagawa clan, and Yuji had that hair color as well. There were some notes in Kenjaku’s base that suggested there was some blood relation between Sukuna and Yuji, but across a thousand years and no clear answer, it was unclear what that connection was.

He had asked Uraume, but she was worthless as a prisoner. He’d already been given the order to get rid of her, but he hadn’t gotten one damn thing out of her, and he was unwilling to let her go that easily. He went to the trouble of bringing her in instead of killing her that night; one way or another, she was going to be useful to him.

His phone rings.

“Yo.”

Naoya Zenin’s voice comes over the line. “We need to talk. Can we meet?”

“I’m not interested in seeing your face unless it involves me getting to feed it into a wood chipper.”

“There’s an investigation going on, being run by the Imperial House. The investigators are asking a lot of questions about the clans. How many hours a week we work, some notable incidents, what leadership roles we perform…have you talked to anyone?”

“No. I’m not worried. Gojo clan and the Northern Territory are more than pulling their weight. We keep our own territory, and have several sorcerers working for the Jujutsu Society. We can open our books to the emperor at any time, and he’s not going to find we’ve devolved into the sh*t circus.”

Naoya hisses, “Was this your doing, Satoru?”

“What if it was?”

“Surely the emperor will remember who remained loyal to the Imperial House during the war.”

Satoru answers, “They had the Zenins, and that means they won, right? I forget how the war ended sometimes.”

“You’re honestly a horrible person.”

“I’m a guy who laughed at your ancestral home getting nuked by the Americans, and you raped and choked a woman to death last year. We’re the same, you know?”

Naoya is annoyed, and asks, “You want me to come show you the strength of the Zenin clan?”

“Please do. Everyone will yell at me if I just go to your house and kill you, but if you come to me and start a fight, I can claim self-defense. I’ll throw a little party to honor the heir to the Zenin clan. The theme is purple.”

Naoya hangs up, and Satoru places his phone back in his pocket.

Ruining Naoya Zenin’s life is one of Satoru’s chief accomplishments; they came up in school together, with Naoya the top dog at Kyoto while Satoru was at Tokyo. After graduating, Satoru constantly used the respect and trust others placed in him to damage Naoya, reminding others constantly about what a terrible creature he was.

People started slamming doors in Naoya’s face, excluding him from raids and special missions, and he’d become a pariah even though in prior generations, a man having such foul behavior toward women would be ignored if he was a good sorcerer.

Naoya was confident in his status as the clan’s heir, but Satoru wasn’t so sure, as his reputation was irreparable and there was one charming, well-mannered, good boy with Ten Shadows slowly growing up outside the Zenin clan.

Satoru turns his attention back to Yuji, who was playing basketball before, but is now sitting on a bench next to a girl.

Yuji is a good looking kid; tall, athletic, handsome face.

The girl sitting next to him on the bench is not conventionally attractive; she’s a little overweight and short, and probably ranked low in the cruel social caste of teenagers while Yuji probably sits near the top.

Yuji had gone over to her, not the other way around, and just based on his facial expression and his hands, he regards her like she’s a very valuable friend. In his eyes, she’s one of the cool kids.

Some girls wearing the same uniform pass by Satoru, complaining as they do about how Yuji is always talking to ‘that fat pig.’ The other girl says her friend needs to be careful because if he hears them talking about the pig he’ll get pissed off.

Satoru is reminded kids are brutal.

But Yuji seems like he’s probably a loyal friend and a good kid.

“Jujutsu Sorcerer.”

He turns, and finds a very short old man, holding a bag with the logo from the store on the corner. The bag is small, probably medicine.

“Wasuke Itadori, I presume. My name is Satoru Gojo. As you said, I’m a sorcerer. Your grandson’s name came up in an investigation. Since you recognize me as a sorcerer from my clothes, I’m guessing talking to you will get me some of the answers I’m looking for,” he says.

Wasuke scowls. “One of those Gojos?”

“Indeed I am.”

There is a technique in this body…fire, and it’s potent. In his youth, this man might have been as strong as a Grade 1. Fire elementalists were always a pain, because there were so many ways to amplify their abilities. They could ruin someone’s life with a can of hairspray even if their powers were minimal. His body is weak from age, and according to the investigation, riddled with cancer that has metastasized so extensively that it no longer matters where it started.

It’s clear he hasn’t used cursed energy in some time, and after standing there briefly, Wasuke said, “We’ll talk alone. I don’t want my grandson to know. About anything. This way.”

They head up the stairs, and even getting to the second floor is difficult for the old man. He is thin, gaunt, and has begun to take on that appearance people get from wasting diseases where they look a little dead even before it actually happens.

There is no doubt whatsoever that he is about to find out Wasuke was a curse user when he was young and that he probably did some really messed up stuff. But he is old and dying, and there was no reason for him to hide any of it; the harshest consequence he could face is an express ticket to a destination he is very slowly making his way to already.

Wasuke offers him tea, but Satoru ends up being the one who makes it while the old man recovers from going up the stairs. He says he wants to cook his grandson dinner, but it looks to Satoru like he probably needs to take it easy for the rest of the day.

Satoru sits with him and asks, “How long?”

“Two, three months maybe. What’s left isn’t going to be good. My doctor tells me it’s time for hospice. How did Yuji’s name come up?”

Satoru said, “A curse user had extensive plans to use Yuji’s unusual body in order to incarnate Sukuna, the King of Curses.”

“Kenjaku! That—That fiend! I’ll find him…”

“Relax. Kenjaku is dead.”

“You don’t understand. He’ll just find a new body.”

“I took him out of his last host and atomized his little weird body. But it’s interesting that you know both his name and what his true nature was. You were either a close ally or a serious enemy.”

Wasuke pressed his lips together, and Satoru said, “You’re dead anyway. There’s no reason for us to try and seek justice for any deeds you may have done forty years ago. That’s the deal, right? You left the sorcery world, changed your name, settled down with your son and never looked back. I don’t care about any of that. I’m here about Yuji.”

Wasuke Itadori admits he was an accomplice when he was young. His technique was good for killing people, and he’d even collected some of the fingers that were found in Kenjaku’s possession, so he was well versed on them.

Forty-one years ago, Kenjaku found a very young woman with a strange property called ‘Star Plasma Vessel,’ and used her in some sort of bizarre and insane ritual that Wasuke did not understand. He said it involved part of what appeared to be a mummified baby, and once it was over, the girl was kept locked up in a cell.

Wasuke’s duties included taking care of this prisoner, who was, according to Wasuke, maybe fifteen or sixteen. Over time, her belly started to swell, and she had no idea what was happening to her until her baby started moving.

He claimed to have fallen in love with her, but Satoru could do basic math and a forty-something-year-old man ‘falling in love’ with a teenage female prisoner who had been forcibly impregnated in some sort of evil ritual had such intense ick factor that Satoru felt sick to his stomach.

She died from some unknown complication while giving birth, and Kenjaku cut the baby out of her and then had an enraged fit, something Wasuke had never seen before.

The baby was born with a Heavenly Restriction and could not contain, use, or store cursed energy, something Kenjaku was able to determine right away.

Satoru is really kind of astounded at how everything he learned about Kenjaku was somehow more disgusting then the most disgusting thing he’d heard before.

“I’m scared to ask, but what do you mean ‘part of a mummified baby?’”

Wasuke swallows nervously. “…the bottom half?”

“I don’t know what answer I was expecting, but wow.”

The pink-haired baby was worthless to Kenjaku, who said if he did the experiment again, the result would be the same. In every life, he would come with that Heavenly Restriction. Wasuke remembered this well, although he didn’t understand at any point what that really meant.

Wasuke, out of his misguided and very gross affection for the now-dead Star Plasma Vessel, took the baby in. He named the baby Jin, and decided he wanted to be a good father to him.

He changed his name, moved to Sendai, and got a job at a telephone company, disturbed and dismayed by his boss’s work and looking for a new start with the baby.

Jin Itadori grew up well, with no contact with the sorcery world. He was physically overbearing like the members of the Zenin clan who were cursed, but his life was mostly normal. After high school, he went to college, and fell in love with a girl named Kaori who had cursed energy, although according to Wasuke, she didn’t ever tell Jin about sorcery.

They married, and soon after, Wasuke got word they were expecting. There was a miscarriage, and another pregnancy just a couple of months later. Wasuke said he felt like they were really jumping the gun since they’d both had to drop out of university, but they really seemed to want a baby.

Jin confided in him one night that his wife’s behavior had recently changed, and he found it upsetting, but she’d become pregnant again. He resolved he’d leave her if the pregnancy ended in miscarriage since she seemed to no longer love him, but it continued.

When Kaori went into labor, Wasuke went to the hospital to see them.

She was hot, and pushed her bangs back while Jin fanned her.

Wasuke he saw the stitch line on her forehead, and was filled with immeasurable shock, horror, and disgust, because he knew it meant that Kenjaku was inside of that body—that at some point he had killed Kaori and entered her body. Just based on the timeline of when Jin said his wife started acting funny, it was before she became pregnant.

Wasuke was unable to tell Jin everything, and despite his vague warnings that staying with ‘Kaori’ was dangerous and terrible choice, Jin stayed.

The lifeless bodies of Kaori and Jin were found when Yuji was a baby.

Satoru is certain that no matter how long he lives or what he sees for the rest of his life, he will never hear a more f*cked up story than this one. Ever. No matter what.

Wasuke says, “Since Jin was born without the ability to use cursed energy, I thought he wanted Yuji’s technique. So I sealed it away.”

This inevitably played into Kenjaku’s hands, since it essentially turned Yuji into a consummate empty vessel, perfect for Sukuna to move in. One thing that all the ‘vessels’ that had the Sleeping Curse had in common was that none of them had techniques. The presence of an innate technique probably meant there would be two innate domains and a powerful host might be able to kill or overwhelm an intruder.

Satoru had to pack away the enormity of the ‘wtf’ factor of this whole situation. The fact that Wasuke had completely lifted Yuji’s entire cursed energy aptitude out of his body without leaving him braindead was an incredible mystery. If the Jujutsu Society knew how to do that, it would make dealing with curse users a breeze.

But Wasuke said he did it using a binding vow that left Yuji’s cursed abilities are sealed inside of Wasuke’s body, which wasted his body away and is the reason that he is mostly just cancer on the inside. It also only worked because Wasuke did it while Yuji was a baby and his power levels were extremely low.

When Wasuke dies, he will take Yuji’s technique with him and leave Yuji without the ability to see cursed spirits, any knowledge about the world of sorcery, no cursed energy, and no cursed technique.

Yuji’s name has been outed and is known in the Jujutsu Society, and there’s almost no possibility his identity and potential as a vessel for Sukuna isn’t known. His unusual body would make him an excellent container for just about anything; he probably could have incarnated the Death Paintings, any of the cursed body parts collected for the Culling Game, and, of course, Sukuna.

There were issues in other nations, cults, separatists…a perfect vessel was a victim waiting to happen and Wasuke was about to leave him with no tools to defend himself.

At some point, the world of sorcery was going to come for him.

And maybe that’s why Kenjaku was so sure that merely putting the finger at Yuji’s school would lead to him merging with it. When that moment came, the only way for him to gain the cursed energy to fight for himself would be to eat the damn finger.

“If you die and destroy Yuji’s innate technique, he’s either going to die, have his body taken over by Sukuna, or become a vessel for some other being. You need to unseal it while you can.”

Wasuke says, “I refuse. He doesn’t belong to this world. He’s a good boy. He could live some other life.”

“We know about him, so the curse users and the black market information brokers do. A normal life is already out of the question for Yuji.”

The old man says, “Unsealing his technique would likely be more than my body can handle. I wouldn’t be able to train him.”

“You can leave him to the Jujutsu Society. We’ve decided to look after him.”

Wasuke puts his nose in the air. “And have him become a sorcerer? How disgusting.”

Gojo stares at him, blinking slowly behind his blindfold, and then says, “Kenjaku f*cked your son and had his baby, but the thing that would be disgusting is if the baby becomes a sorcerer?”

The old man presses his lips together.

Satoru says, “It’s not your place to take his technique anyway. What you’ve done is like cutting off his legs because you’re afraid he might use them to travel to a place that’s bad because that’s what you did with your legs. You aren’t considering that legs are kind of important for survival and thriving and while a person can live without them, they are more vulnerable and face significant struggles.”

It ultimately isn’t hard to convince Wasuke not to take Yuji’s innate technique to the grave. Since he used to be one of those ‘bad guys,’ he knows exactly how much danger his grandson is in.

“Do I have to tell him everything?”

“God no. We can tell Yuji that he was born with a special ability to become a vessel without explaining any of the details. I always think transparency is best, but those were my thoughts that I had with my brain before all of this information entered it. If he needs some detail later on, I will tell him.”

Wasuke says he doesn’t want to destroy Yuji’s world until after his junior high graduation.

There is a steep hurdle ahead, where his grandfather will have to tell Yuji about sorcery and unseal his technique, an act that will likely kill him. Yuji will be given instructions to call Gojo when the time comes, and Satoru has promised the old man to look after Yuji as he embarks on a strange new journey.

This is probably going to be brutal for Yuji and cause him a great deal of suffering. Even though Satoru didn’t meet him yet, just from watching him, he’s sure Yuji probably loves this worthless old man even though he doesn’t deserve it.

And Satoru wonders if, in every version of the universe, Yuji comes to him with a broken heart and for some reason, he thinks he probably does.

After he leaves, he heads to Kyoto for his sleepover with Utahime, but he drops by Gakuganji’s office, enters without an invitation, and greets him.

“Gojo? This is a surprise. And by surprise, I mean, I didn’t invite you—why are you here?”

“Hey Gramps, what’s up?”

Gakuganji asks, “Since when do you call me Gramps?”

“You can call me grandson. I mean, what else are you going to call the man who loves your granddaughter so much?”

The old man looks up from his book and says, “You don’t want me to answer that, Satoru Gojo.”

Satoru laughs as he sits.

There’s a seating area in Gakuganji’s office, two sofas arranged around a table. The men are sitting opposite each other on different sofas.

“Tea? It’s chamomile. I chose it to give me a sense of calm, but now you’re here.”

“No thanks.”

Gakuganji asks, “I’ve been meaning to ask…Are you planning on marrying Utahime, or just subjecting her to more humiliation?”

“Utahime is my queen. We’ll get around to the paperwork soon.”

“We did things different in my day. I thought I would be angrier, because of the premarital sex and the fact you didn’t ask for permission, but I’m just glad Utahime is happy. She went through her own hell after what that Zenin boy did. I wasn’t sure she was going to ever see anyone seriously again.”

Gojo says, “My grandmother told me not to ask men for permission when it comes to women because that implies that they are owned. You’ve known her longer than me, so you know how it is with her. Sometimes I think some of our differences are just from being in different generations. You’re really not as bad as the old men in the room, and I think you know that I’ll take good care of Utahime. I love everything about her except her cat.”

“Kumo? What an insufferable little beast. I enjoy the company of a cat now and then, but not that one.”

“I hate that piece of sh*t.”

These two men, powerful sorcerers and leaders, spend five minutes of their lives complaining about an elderly cat they don’t like.

Then Satoru says, “But anyway, I came here to tell you the most f*cked up story you’re ever going to hear in your life.”

Thirty minutes later, the chamomile tea is gone, and Yoshinobu Gakuganji is staring, mouth hanging open. Satoru has laid down on the sofa, like he is speaking to his therapist.

Gakuganji is visibly disturbed.

Satoru folds his hands over his abdomen and says, “A part of me wants to better understand and all the other parts of me wish to cast this knowledge into an abyss and never think of it again.

“There is a very weird and unsettling riddle right at the surface of this. We know what Sukuna looked like: two sets of eyes, two mouths, two sets of arms, a horrible enormous freaky body. We can’t know about what his organs were like, but externally, he’s sort of double everything on top and normal on bottom. And then we also have half a baby, but only the bottom half, the part of Sukuna that wasn’t doubles. We have 1.5 and .5. Those facts kind of seem like they’re related.”

Gakuganji answered, “And now that idea is in my head also.”

“The more you think about it, the weirder it gets. And the thing is that I watched this kid and he seems like a sweet kid who is made from sunshine.”

The old man actually can make a little sense of it after he thinks for a while, and says, “Since we have Mai Zenin, I have been reading up on the rare phenomenon of twins. Identical twins are essentially the same person split across two bodies. Perhaps Sukuna was born a conjoined twin. So a woman carried twins who shared the same soul and perhaps even parts of their body, but when it is time to give birth, instead of one and one, she gives birth to one-and-a-half and a half.

“We don’t have access to this information, but Kenjaku was alive during that time, so he could have travelled to wherever Sukuna was born and found out. That’s something people would talk about for generations. It’s also possible that Kenjaku heard about Sukuna’s birth right away when it happened. Since newborn infants don’t really have bones and their bodies are very fragile, the fact the remains were mummified suggests someone went to some effort to preserve them.”

Satoru raises his hand. “What do you mean, ‘babies don’t have bones?’ How do they not have bones? Is this information I should know?”

Gakuganji thinks about explaining that what he meant is that their bones haven’t hardened yet which makes them more durable to decay, but he decides to just leave this young man with a little bad information. At some point, he’ll tell someone else.

Instead Gakuganji lays out a plausible theory, that Kenjaku had the remains but they are only remains. It probably wasn’t a cursed object or anything, and if one looked at the experiments Kenjaku did in ‘people science,’ especially the Death Paintings, it seems that he was doing experiments over a long period of time to discover how he might be able to turn the remains into something useful.

Star Plasma Vessels are extremely rare, but the men share a belief that Tengen essentially uses them to ‘refresh’ her body and transfer her soul, a form of forced reincarnation. Kenjaku may have used this ability to forcibly and fully reincarnate the remains into heir next life, essentially creating a living copy of Sukuna’s dead twin.

Jin Itadori would in theory, be the absolute perfect vessel for Sukuna because they were already basically the same thing. There was perhaps also a chance that joining the two parts of Sukuna’s soul might actually power him up in some sort of way, but Kenjaku found out that part of the soul was subject to a Heavenly Restriction.

If a finger went into Jin Itadori’s body, it would be like if an ordinary person ate a rock; nothing would happen. Nothing would ever happen. If Kenjaku truly discarded Jin and didn’t care if Wasuke raised him, or he just didn’t want to be bothered with the menial task of getting Jin to adulthood was anyone’s guess.

Gakuganji said, “Identical twins are the same in every way that matters. The children of an identical twin are the same as the children of the other. So if this theory is correct, Yuji might be Sukuna’s nephew, but because the brothers are identical, he would be the exact same person if he was conceived by Sukuna himself. A nephew in the technical sense, but genetically, the same as a son.”

Satoru decides this theory probably makes more sense than other explanations they might find and it explains a lot of the outstanding questions, which is why Satoru dropped in on Yoshinobu in the first place. Gakuganji was his favorite frenemy, someone who was seventy percent in with the conservatives but also incredibly bright and not a complete waste of space.

Sometimes he wonders if Gakuganji might eventually break away from the conservatives, but he’s not politically as resilient as Yaga or someone from a powerful clan, so if he acted up too much, they’d just replace him.

After they finish talking, he goes to get takeout, wine, bubble bath, chocolate cake, and flowers for Utahime, although he is displeased that he committed himself to sex early in the morning before his mind became filled with foul ideas.

He has negative libido, seriously doubts that he will be able to clear his head, and if she realizes he’s so disgusted he’s bad in bed, she’ll probably assume it’s because she’s bleeding.

When he gets to her apartment, she’s sitting under a big blanket in front of the television in the living room with Kumo.

Notes:

oh my goodness
Thank you everyone who has followed and given kudos. Someone even commented and I'm so pumped. I'm glad people are enjoying, I've been writing this for a while trying to figure out if I should post it.

Chapter 6: Someone Satoru Never Met

Notes:

ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
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wejwiejfowiejfowiejfowiejfwoei
I'm so glad so many of you are reading and enjoying, this is so crazy to me!
I'm super grateful for the kudos and comments. It's like 'i have a worm in my brain and other people want to talk to me about it.'

Chapter Text

Uraume.

She’s an incredibly violent prisoner, and even chained up, only certain people can safely open the door to the pit-like prison cell to throw her food or clean clothes.

Uraume is the youngest child of Michizane Sugawara, a legendary figure whose name nearly every sorcerer knows. There are many historical records in their clan from his time, and one thing that is clear is that by the time his youngest child was born, he was out-of-his-mind batsh*t crazy.

Sugawara had an entire wing of the castle that served as his harem, and fathered at least thirty children with a number of different women. Many were born very powerful, and when he died, his instructions were basically for them to fight for the throne.

And so Satoru’s ancestor, the second son, killed almost every single one of his siblings, hunting them down in a long and brutal game that spanned across several islands and lasted over ten years.

The sole survivor of this death game was the youngest of them all, a girl who was twelve at the time of Sugawara’s death during a battle with Sukuna. Uraume, born a clan princess and known to have been spoiled by her insane father, was granted no protection in his death and she was forced to fight to survive like her siblings.

She survived by aligning herself with Sukuna.

Records about Uraume with his clan transition from ‘cute girl who likes to play shakuhachi and is beloved by her father’ to ‘disgraceful, vile murderous whor* who serves the man who brutally killed her father.’

Going from being a clan princess raised in the gardens of Fujishiro to Ryomen Sukuna’s ride-or-die was quite the character development arc, because she wasn’t just someone with took refuge with him. She was his biggest supporter, his accomplice, someone who chose the fate of becoming a cursed object just so she could follow Sukuna into another lifetime.

One of the interesting things about Uraume is that even though she was living in a different body, her presence in her new vessel had caused it to emulate her old one. She has somewhat opalescent white hair, something only his relatives possessed, and amethyst eyes, another trait that was common in his family. She also possesses Hellfrost, one of their clan’s more powerful hereditary techniques.

It was interesting how much she physically looks like a modern Gojo even though they are separated by one thousand years. He mentally notes this probably means their freak genes are very dominant.

Satoru believes she might be like Suguru Geto, someone who broke away from her life out of desperation, and then learned to revel in the destructive world she found after that.

Then again, it seems like everyone he meets is Suguru Geto in some way or another, as his brain continually struggles to understand how his best friend ever devolved from a deeply caring individual to an arrogant cult leader that assembled a small army with the purpose of mass murder.

This woman practically died and came back to life to be with Sukuna again.

Uraume is tight-lipped and difficult. She’s aggressive and evil all by herself; only certain people can feed her because she almost removed an assistant’s head when they tried to share some sweets with her in hopes of having a more successful interrogation.

There is no possibility that Uraume can survive, as she’s an incredibly high-risk prisoner. As the person most likely to know where one or both of the missing Sukuna fingers are, if she gets loose, she might ruin Yuji’s life or cause some other form of mayhem.

The Elders wanted Uraume to be executed right away when it became clear that she wasn’t actually going to tell them anything, but Satoru was the one who was given that assignment and he’d simply refused to do it because there was one fact he couldn’t stomach.

Uraume didn’t exist by herself; she was living inside of the body of a fifteen-year-old girl named Rei Sato. They did a DNA test, so they knew who she was, what she looked like, what her life was like before she met Kenjaku on some random afternoon and vanished into thin air.

Satoru asked Uraume in his first interrogation if it was possible for her to leave the body she was in, and Uraume laughed in his face and told him she could do it at any time and the host would probably be fine, but she wasn’t going to do that.

Yuji Itadori, and Tsumiki Fushiguro, and the others with the Sleeping Curse had probably escaped their fates as vessels, but Rei Sato had not. Uraume is occupying a body with another soul in it, one that was probably conscious and aware of everything that was going on.

Satoru wants to save Rei Sato, and over time, he has discovered there were very small ways to appeal to Uraume’s mostly discarded humanity.

The elders continually pressure him to execute Uraume due to the incredible risk that keeping her alive poses, but he is trying to save someone, so he simply doesn’t do it. Satoru knows they have asked others, but none of his students are going to kill another kid, and most of the pros won’t do it because they either respect what he is trying to do or they don’t want to piss him off.

Uraume’s host is actually a pretty famous kid, who received her horrible fate because she did something impressive and meaningful. According to Uraume, Kenjaku told her he was up one night drinking and saw a gymnastics event on television where the Japanese competitor dominated. Kenjaku realized gymnasts are consummate athletes and she’d make a good vessel, so one day he just went to where she was and took her.

If Uraume left the body, her technique would probably stay, and it wasn’t hard for someone like Satoru with a sense of vision to figure out giving a powerful cursed technique to a physically and mentally superior person would probably be pretty f*cking great, so in his head, he could see this kid as one of his students.

The Elders don’t respect what he is trying to do, they don’t seem to care if he’s successful, and they’re continually pushing back on anything he tries to do because he is the one who is trying to do it.

On the day after his first years moved up to second years and started their break week, Satoru goes to speak to Uraume, but when he goes down to her cell, she’s not there.

The talisman and sealing papers all over the walls, ceiling, and floor are drenched in blood like someone exploded in that tiny room, and Masamichi Yaga is wrapping a shriveled finger in sealing cloth. Two assistants are peeling bloody paper off the walls, and there is a heavy, heavy atmosphere.

Naoya Zenin’s residue is all over the place, because who else would execute an innocent girl?

The cursed finger is a little puzzling to Satoru, and he thinks at first that Uraume must have turned herself back into an object after her host body had been mortally wounded.

He looks up at the security camera in the corner, and Yaga says, “I’m not sure what happened, but they erased the footage already.”

Satoru looks around and can see exactly where the finger fell on the floor after being detached was because the blood spray outlined it neatly. “We don’t need the footage. The finger left a clean spot in the blood spatter, therefore the floor wasn’t bloody when it fell. Uraume left the body before any of the bleeding injuries took place. In other words, Uraume was not in the body when it was destroyed.

“We are talking about a fifteen-year-old girl who obviously didn’t know how to fight. Look at this mess…do you think a powerful sorcerer needs to do this to a kid’s body in order to kill them?”

Yaga knew a very big misstep has been made.

Yaga suffers from the same curse that his former student does; he sees facets of Suguru Geto in any situation. As Suguru’s teacher, he feels responsible for what happened, like he more than anyone should have been able to help his students.

Satoru Gojo and Suguru Geto were anomalies in the sorcery world, both in terms of their power and the fact that young men from the sorcery world usually got into all kinds of foolish rivalries. They don’t fall in love and pine for each other.

When they were young, he thought of them as being like two stars in a binary solar system, bound together by the force of gravity, their movements dictated by how powerful the other was, and how powerful they were together. Everything would get caught in their gravity, and yet they were not all-powerful as long as the other star was there.

Their power kept all the things in their world in order, but Suguru realized one day that the force of his gravity wasn’t enough; he could also just use his power to obliterate the objects in their shared universe that he didn’t like.

Suguru no longer exists in this solar system, and all objects are now orbiting solely around Satoru. He is mostly a nurturing source of warmth and energy for others, but at the moment, he is clearly questioning why he the goddamned sun, takes sh*t from people he could turn to ash at any time.

Yaga watches Satoru as he simply stands there with an incredibly dark look on his face.

The egregious behavior of the Elders is stupid, and it is dangerous. The fact Naoya murdered the girl even after she was no longer possessed is probably a very unwanted outcome for them, but they are the ones who called him there. Satoru pushed him out of everything that matters for a reason and now the Council of Elders is left holding the bag and the only thing in it is the corpse of a girl that Satoru Gojo wanted to save.

Satoru is quiet for a long time, because things are happening inside of him, and they are unpleasant.

Gojo says, “I think about killing the old men in the room a lot.”

“I know. If you do that, there will just be a new room with more old men. Nothing will change.”

Satoru answers, “I’ve always believed you when you said that, but you know what I just realized? The new ones will know what happened to the old ones.”

“Don’t you want to set a better example for your students?”

“The best thing I can do for them is ensure that they don’t die because six old men decided they should die.”

Satoru leaves and heads to the Council of Elders, where the six elders are having some sort of panicked conversation with Naoya about what he has done.

He listens for a moment.

They’ve obviously seen the security video, so they know the disgraceful monster they summoned killed the girl even after she wasn’t possessed anymore. If he’d just killed them as a combined being, they could say ‘it had to be done,’ but since Uraume separated herself, there was no reason to kill Rei Sato.

Naoya is a viper and claims he didn’t know, and they didn’t give any instructions other than the kill the prisoner. A claim of malicious compliance isn’t acceptable, but he offers it anyway, because he doesn’t care whether they believe him. Ultimately, he came there because they asked him to.

They’re pleading with him to make sure Satoru doesn’t find out, and he laughs at them for being afraid of someone under their command.

Satoru opens the doors. “Looks like today is the today!”

He is, of course, referring to the day he will enter this room and kill everyone inside, and he believes that everyone else also knows what he means by that or else they wouldn’t be trying their hardest to keep Satoru from finding out Naoya murdered the kid.

Yet as he stands there, he thinks about his students. About his friends. About Utahime. About how he wants to become a better person and someday a husband and a father, and show his students that they can find warmth and happiness in their lives even though they are sorcerers.

And most of all, he thinks about how once Geto stepped into the darkness, there was maybe nothing that could save him, and he cursed everyone who loved him to a lifetime of wondering what they could have done to save him. Maybe standing there on the precipice of ‘why don’t I use my power to kill until the change I want takes place’ he better understands that maybe no one could have stopped Geto from jumping.

So he stops himself from killing the Elders.

Naoya is different. He says nothing and attacks him, and Naoya seems surprised, like he never thought Satoru would come after someone who had acted as an agent of the Eders.

There is a brief scrap that wrecks most of the building, sending the Elders scrambling.

Naoya wants to sh*t talk Gojo like they’re having a row about some trifling male rivalry nonsense, and maybe that’s what it is to him. Because he does not believe that he has removed something of value from the world. The fact that he probably enjoyed what he did makes Satoru want to atomize him—to turn him into a thin mist and let the wind blow him away.

“You want to fight the strongest prince of the Zenin clan?’

Satoru looks up, and something about this comment makes him stop as he pulls down his blindfold. He laughs at Naoya, and answers, “How many so-called princes of the Zenin clan have hung from the Great Tree?”

The Great Tree was an enormous two thousand year old tree growing on the Gojo clan’s estate. In one of the most violent exchanges between their clans, his ancestors massacred an attacking party from the Zenin clan and hung their corpses the Great Tree and let crows eat them.

Someone ‘hanging from the Great Tree’ is a well-known saying in the Japanese sorcery community that means they were slain by the Gojo clan even though they only actually did the hanging one time.

He takes a step forward, “If I murdered you here right here, right now, you wouldn’t even be the strongest prince of the Zenin clan to die by my hand. But I’m not going to do that. Do you want to know why?”

They scrap for another minute, and Naoya does his best, but it becomes clear to him that Satoru doesn’t even need to try to keep up with him. There haven’t been any flashy balls of colorful light despite the fact that Naoya has done what he can do.

It’s clear that Satoru is purposefully embarrassing him, because in his periphery, he can see a growing crowd is watching Satoru manage him. While Satoru’s attacks are not serious, his countenance and mood are oppressive to the point of being quite scary.

He is angry and the teachers and students and staff who are watching can practically feel the air shaking because of it.

Satoru manages to slam him very hard, face-first into the ground, and then sits on his back and grabs his hands, pulling his arms backward behind him until they dislocate, causing incredible pain.

Satoru whispers very quietly, “Sometimes when a lioness is teaching her cubs to hunt, she’ll maim an animal so her cubs can ‘hunt’ it and finish it off. It’s how they learn and become confident.”

And then, he rips Naoya’s arms off, without using cursed energy, just with pure brute strength, rage, and adrenaline.

Blood sprays from the open sockets at the and of Naoya’s shoulders, and the other man leans down as Naoya gasps and adds in a barely audible whisper, “But let me leave you with this curse: I hope you die twice at the hands of a woman.”

A sorcerer saying, ‘I hope you die twice’ is the cruelest curse, because what it really means is ‘I hope when you die you turn into a monster and die again.’ It’s a rare occurrence, but one that sends bone-chilling fear and dread through the sorcery community when it does.

Satoru blasts the arms into pieces so they can’t be reattached, and leaves Naoya gasping for air and bleeding all over the place.

And then, he leaves.

He doesn’t want to talk to anyone about his feelings or about anything at all, so he warps to a random rocky spot on the coast where he sometimes goes. If he goes home to his clan, he’ll have people there wanting to talk to him, and if he goes back to the Tokyo campus, he’ll have things to do there, and people will ask him if he’s okay. Even if he goes to Utahime, she’ll want to talk to him because he got mad and ripped a man’s arms off.

Sitting down on a big rock, he takes his shoes and socks off and rolls up his pants, and then dips his feet in into the water.

He never met Rei Sato, so it wasn’t really that someone he cared about personally had died.

The elders call, one by one, to apologize. Something so serious should usually be done in person, but they don’t to see him when he’s in a ‘Biblical wrath’ sort of mood and he doesn’t want to see them either. He knows they’re not sorry that the girl died; they never cared one bit about her in the first place. They’re sorry that he might rip their arms off or liquefy their brains inside of his domain.

Satoru casually kicks at the water with his feet, and works on calming himself down, reorganizing his thoughts.

He thinks again about whether he should kill the Elders. The whole reason that he sent Yuta to train on a different continent was because the Elders were pissy first that Satoru refused to let them kill him, and then secondly because Yuta was such a major player with unshakeable loyalty.

Letting him train in Africa gave Yuta an opportunity to explore his potential without facing all the bullsh*t political stuff that he would face as Satoru’s most powerful ally.

In early afternoon, he gets a call from an unknown number, and someone asks when he can meet with the emperor. Satoru says he can clear his schedule, and that anytime is fine, and they ask for dinner that night.

He’s surprised the meeting is that soon, but agrees.

Satoru heads home and showers, changes into formal traditional wear, and tries to fix his attitude as much as possible.

They eat dinner alone in a quiet dining room; as expected, the food is good.

What Satoru notices right away is that the emperor seems a bit depressed, and after they finish eating, he explains why, and Satoru realizes that his interests and the emperors had a shared interest.

An orphan who wins international gold medals as a young teenager is sometimes granted the honor of meeting the emperor. While Satoru never met Rei Sato, the emperor did, and he remembered her.

He said she was funny, told rude jokes at the table, broke protocol by throwing up a peace sign when they took a photo together, and that she made him laugh until his belly hurt. When she vanished into thin air, he followed news stories closely and even asked for an update from investigators.

The emperor’s investigators had bugged the Jujutsu Society, including the room with the old men, and that’s how he found out that Sato had been found but was in a really bad situation.

He’d been incredibly interested in the outcome of the situation, and knew Satoru was arguing for her life daily, both before the Elders and Uraume.

Because they had bugged the Council Room, the emperor’s investigators heard the elders discussing the fact that while the girl’s life could probably be saved, they didn’t want it to be. If Satoru successfully separated Uraume and Rei Sato, it would likely result in the creation of another very powerful and determined sorcerer that was loyal to Gojo, and they very explicitly said it would be better for her to die than for Satoru to get another monster like Yuta.

The emperor followed the situation, day by day, as it unfolded, thinking the outcome would be that Satoru would save the girl and the Elders would be disappointed. He had no idea that they’d just murder the girl.

Satoru had not seen the video of Naoya Zenin murdering that girl, but the emperor had. He wasn’t someone who just knew people who had been murdered. He wasn’t conditioned to seeing sights like that, and considering there was blood on the ceiling, it was an ugly sight. Whatever Naoya did to her, it was harsh.

He said she curled up like a baby, and that he can’t stop seeing the images in his mind.

Satoru wonders why a civilian would watch something like that.

The emperor has learned since their last conversation that there are no new fourth year students transitioning to full professional roles because they were all killed before reaching their third year; that the two should-be third years were driven right out the door, one for being biracial and having a modern technique, and his girlfriend who was born male, since that sort of thing was just unheard of and forbidden in their community; then there’s the now second-years, one of which lives in Africa so the Elders don’t mess with him, and one is being bullied by her own family…

There are currently only two incoming first-year students, Nobara Kugisaki and Megumi Fushiguro, and Nobara’s application has been wrapped up in miles of red tape by the Kamo clan because she’s a girl. Satoru tells him that is normal when a girl wants to study and that she might not be fully approved until June or July.

The emperor says he admits he doesn’t really understand their world and that it’s frightening to even think about at times. But, his investigators found many problems, from licensed sorcerers in clans not working because clans are paid essentially for existing, to people who are literally children being forced to do unbearable amounts of emotionally devastating work, to dysfunction caused by deep faction politics and fragmentation, to lack of moral accountability for people who desperately need it, and so forth.

He acknowledges that he has no idea how to fix any of it, although he can see that the machine is evil and broken.

He proposes a solution that seems a little unreal:

For one whole year, he will give Satoru control of the Jujutsu Society. Within the first few weeks, he’ll be expected to set up a board to help make decisions, and they’ll be required to come up with new plans and rules to address a number of concerns. The emperor says he’ll basically let Gojo rebuild the Jujutsu Society in any way he seems fit as long as it’s fair and it works equally well for everyone.

He has requirements from the Gojo clan too; they’ll give up their operational independence and merge the Ainu Jujutsu Society into the Jujutsu Society.

Satoru has had dreams where he gets to make certain reforms, but he’s never been so bold as to think he would be given the power to just knock everything down and rebuild it in a way that he sees fit.

It was an absolutely wild turn of events.

He was kind of beside himself.

The power to do anything? Like change which clans made up the Big Three? Or not having a Big Three at all? Or changing it to a Big Seven? Or requiring the clan sorcerers to work if they want to get paid, therefore making it so his students didn’t have to do all the damn work?

Could he bring Yuta home if there were no grouchy old men to bother him?

He thought back to what Tengen said about how everyone’s fate had been broken, and that the future might be something completely different than just a world without Kenjaku.

The marching orders from the emperor have not changed since the war ended, and even then, it was only to give power to the prime minister to choose the jujutsu commander, which was now being revoked. The Jujutsu Society hasn’t been meaningfully changed in almost four hundred years.

When sorcerers awaken the next morning, notices are being posted all over Jujutsu Headquarters and Tokyo and Kyoto campuses, as well as being hand delivered to registered sorcerers and clan estates.

There is broad confusion about whether this is a practical joke as word spreads like wildfire, but everyone knew the emperor was poking around in everyone’s business and there was a general belief some change might be on the way, but it was surreal to everyone to find out that Satoru had basically been made the dictator for a year after his years-long political war.

At only age twenty-seven, Satoru has acquired a staggering amount of political power, simultaneously holding the title of the head of the strongest sorcery clan in the world, which leads an entire territory, being the most powerful sorcerer in the world, and being the jujutsu commander in a role with limitless power.

The victory feels hollow as he awakens in Utahime’s bed, laying with his head on her chest.

Even though he might have made some dramatic scene under any other circ*mstances, he’s kind of down, so he sent an email to everyone in the Jujutsu Society’s master distribution list firing the old men in the room and making the room itself irrelevant.

In his decade-long war against the conservatives, he emerges the final victor, but it feels like nothing, because he feels like that victory came at much too high of a price. He wonders if it’s silly; he never met her, was probably never fated to meet her in any universe, and everything that happened was only in his imagination.

All he actually knows about Rei Sato for sure is that she was extraordinary and she curled up like a baby when she died, something that children do when they die.

He wonders if they’ve finished washing her blood off the ceiling.

Utahime scratches his scalp with her fingernails, and he looks up at her.

Sorcery is an incredibly bleak world sometimes, and even people like Satoru who learn how to cope with the emotional weight and the constant wear-and-tear can’t escape from these sudden deep valleys. The fact he handles himself so well most of the time, so he is his happy, silly self, and then on hard days, this sweet blue boy comes out.

Shoko told her once that Suguru and Satoru both suffered from some weird variant of a god complex where instead of feeling great because they had power over everything, they just blamed themselves for everything that happened around them.

Ordinary people and ordinary sorcerers just lived with the understanding that they could do their best, but they couldn’t always have everything go their way and they couldn’t be perfect. Satoru and Suguru were not ordinary people and could never accept this for themselves, because they were the ones who had been given all the power.

Satoru will teach his students that it is human to make mistakes and then never give himself that much grace, like he does not recognize himself as human.

It’s break week and they have new students coming in the following week, so it’s not to terrible that he’s rotting in the bed at eleven in the morning if one doesn’t consider he is the newly appointed ruler of the Japanese sorcery world.

Utahime climbs on top of him, and he gives her a rather boyish smile. “You’re okay. You want me to go with you to work today? My kids are off unless they have to go on a job since it’s break week so I can help you today.”

He asks, “You would do that for me? You’re on break too.”

“I’ll help you with anything you need. You have so much on your shoulders. I wonder how you’ll be able to handle it all.”

He reaches out for her hands and says, “I’m an excellent delegator. Delegation is when you find a nerd who knows how to do the work you’re supposed to be doing, and you pay or peer pressure or bully them into doing it for you.”

“That is not what delegation is, Satoru.”

“You say that, but would you rather me manage budgeting or Kiyotaka Ijichi.”

“Ijichi. I’m not even sure if you can count.”

Satoru flashes her a little grin. “Count? Of course I can count,” he answers, in a silly accent mimicking the Count on Sesame Street, popular in Japan in households where kids learn English from a young age.

He puts a hand on one of her breasts, and then the other. “One booby. Two boobies. Ah, ah, ah!”

“Why are you like this?” she says, sighing, although she’s actually very happy he is being ridiculous because it’s a sign he’s shifting gears mentally. It’s what he needs most.

Flipping her over onto her back, “The word of the day is ‘cunniling*s,’” he says, still using the accent.

“First of all, NO, and second of all, NO. The Count counts, numbers are his thing. He doesn’t do word of the day. And if he did, it would not be that word. No accent. Please.”

He parts her knees and flicks the inside of her left knee, tracing numbers with his tongue. “One, two, three, ah, ah, ah!”

She exclaims, “Stop with that accent, Satoru! We are not having sex while you do that.”

But despite her protestations they do it anyway, and he continues his impression until they finish, at which point he rolls over onto his back and just bursts out laughing.

“You’re perfect,” he says as he stretches.

“You’re gross. Get out of my bed and go to work.”

While they’re showering together a few minutes later, he says, “We could do Oscar the Grouch next. I need to work on my impression. You wanna f*ck in a trashcan, Utahime?”

“Is there something wrong with you? Sometimes I really worry about how much power you have when I understand how your brain works. I mean, you just found out babies don’t have bones a couple of weeks ago.”

He rolls his eyes. “Well, I’m sorry I don’t know everything.”

She adds, “Besides, normal people roleplay things like nurses, firemen, maids, you know, professions that are kind of attractive. You’re over here…f*cking my brains out while you pretend that you’re a Muppet?”

“I could totally dress up as a fireman for you. We can dress Kumo up like a little flame and I can chase him around outside and spray him with the water hose.”

She continues, “No, Satoru. And, if you’re going to be a vampire, that one? Basically, all vampire men are sexy. Except that one. You had so many other choices.”

Sarcastically rolling his eyes, he answers, “Well, excuse me for supporting education. I guess I could be like that guy from Twilight and cover myself with glitter. The part of me that is a teensy bit fruity and the part of me that likes looking in the mirror a lot would probably both like that.”

Utahime twists her body so she’s facing him as he’s soaping up and sprays him in the face with the showerhead.

“Now you’re waterboarding me? Kinky.”

She sprays him again, but he uses his technique to twist the water into a heart and then splashes it right onto her face.

In the past day and a half, this man has sustained a serious disappointment, went into an apocalyptic rage that almost caused him to kill the government, ripped a man’s arms off because he was mad and so his students can kill him easier later, moped, hung out with the emperor, was made king of the jujutsu world, ate eleven cupcakes, slept, moped more, fired the government guys he was going to kill the day before, and had sex while doing an impression of a Muppet.

Utahime wonders if Unlimited Void is just a glimpse into the boundless chaos in this man’s head, but what really matters is that he has refocused his emotions and adjusted his mood and he is out of bed. If she had to f*ck the Count to make that happen, it was worth it, but she hoped it wasn’t something he tried to make a habit of.

Chapter 7: Meeting Yuji

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

A wave, a smile.

Yuji looks really tired when Satoru finally gets to introduce himself. He didn’t call until his grandfather had already been buried, and even then, only when he was already getting on the train to Tokyo.

Using all of his newfound power, Satoru has cut the red tape around Nobara, and she came in late the night before.

The first thing Satoru decided to do with his powers was consolidate the two schools into one. There were multiple reasons for this, but the main one is that he planned on reducing the sprawl of the Jujutsu Society significantly. Currently, Jujutsu Headquarters, Tokyo, and Kyoto were all separate and were very much at odds with each other in different ways at different times.

He was also bringing Kirara Hoshi and Kinji Hakari back, and he felt like dumping the third years into the same fishbowl was going to be really useful. He already knew Todo and Hakari weren’t going to get along, but they’d be able to push each other to the next level.

Kinji could be a bit of an instigator, and at the core of the conflict was when they met and he ran his mouth in a rather insulting way. Todo asked him what kind of women he liked and Kinji answered with these words:

‘I like girls with big dicks like Takada-chan.’

Todo damn near slapped Kinji’s brain out of his skull and into orbit.

Satoru was deeply confused when Utahime tried to explain that Takada-chan was a celebrity and that she had a special place in Todo’s ‘rich thought life.’ Understanding that Toko almost brain damaged Kinji because Kinji said his imaginary girlfriend had a penis was the kind of knowledge that makes even Gojo wonder if the future is really going to be okay.

Putting them in the same class was going to be wild. None of their last meetings have gone well, and Gojo had to break them up once because nobody else could.

But the first years? He thought they were going to be fine.

As Yuji steps off the train platform, he is greeted by his teacher and classmates, Megumi Fushiguro, Nobara Kugisaki, and Arata Nitta.

He’s pleased he’s actually got all his kids primed to go before the first day of school. Under normal circ*mstances, it almost never happens.

Yuji’s innate technique seems to be gravity related according to his Six Eyes, and Wasuke said his mother had a technique like that. There is something funny to Satoru that Kenjaku was cooking with pretty premium ingredients, but the genetic lottery gave him a technique like his mother instead of Kenjaku’s or the Kamo clan’s or Sukuna’s.

His cursed energy seems to settle in his hands and feet, a sign his technique is probably predisposed to be discharged that way; he’s a brawler. Considering Yuji’s physical prowess, that seems to be a good match, and skills of this variety are easier to use out of the box than ones with more abstract properties, so the fact he hasn’t been training all his life might not be a significant handicap.

Megumi’s innate technique was so conceptually difficult that he had to start training very hard when he was very young, and he still had so far to go.

The same thing could be said for Kugisaki; her skill was complex and very nuanced.

Arata’s technique is of moderate use now, lower-grade than most, but people with some sort of healing ability were always exceptions. Abilities that could mitigate bodily destruction without requiring RCT were extremely rare. Reverse Curse Technique was very hard to use, and most sorcerers never figured it out. Even among the ones that did, healing a body that is not one’s own is perilously difficult.

Arata’s technique allows him to treat an injury so it won’t get worse or hurt, and that’s his starting point. No one is at their maximum potential on the first day, and all of them are going to find new ways to use their abilities. Since his innate technique involves interacting with the bodies of others without hurting them, if he does somehow obtain RCT, he’ll probably be a perfect healer. It’s also possible that maybe he’ll find ways to do the opposite of his current power and worsen the injuries of enemies.

However it goes, it goes.

At Kyoto, there were no other first years, and that was probably going to be crippling, so putting him with the others meant he’d have lots of work.

While Satoru is worried about Yuji, who is grieving the loss of his grandfather and dealing with the knowledge that the sorcery world is real and that he is a part of it. Even though he wants to comfort Yuji, Satoru doesn’t want to poke at Yuji’s wounds. Ultimately, Satoru is a stranger to Yuji, and one of the most important things a person can ever learn is ‘never be emotionally vulnerable with a person you don’t trust.’

For now, what he can do for Yuji is introduce him to his new allies and friends and give him a world of new things to think about and do.

He introduces his students to each other, and they follow him through the train station like little ducklings, which makes his heart actually very happy.

Satoru knows Megumi well for obvious reasons, but he’s only met Nobara once and the other two he’s just meeting on this day, but he feels really good about this group right away.

Megumi is quiet, Nobara is loud, Yuji is all over the place, and Arata is kind of shy.

Reaching out to pat Arata on the head, he says, “I can tell you’re going to get lots of practice with your technique with this group.”

Nobara asks, “Are you saying we’re going to get hurt a lot?”

“I’m not going to name any names,” he pretends to cough, “Megumi!” and coughs again, “But at least one of your teammates is very reckless. If he gets into it bad enough, he is prone to thinking a lot about murder-suicide.”

The young woman looks over at Megumi, who clearly didn’t enjoy being referred to this way, and says, “That seems kind of intense.”

Gojo nods, “He’s kind of an intense guy. One of the skills of his technique is actually so powerful that if he used it right now, everyone here would die including him. The most important thing you need to know is that if he does this stance,” Gojo poses, “and starts talking about a treasure, punch him as hard as you can in the stomach. If he can’t breathe, he can’t summon.”

It’s something Gojo jokes about to drill into Megumi how foolish it would be to ever do it. Some techniques have psychological pitfalls associated with them, and Ten Shadows is one of the most famous.

Almost every person who has ever been born with Ten Shadows has been slain by Mahoraga. They live knowing they’re holding the mother of all trump cards, and that on the day that they get cornered and have no way forward, they will throw their ace down and be slain by the true king of the shadows.

But if a Ten Shadows user ever did tame him, they’d be so incredibly powerful.

Satoru feels like there’s room on the summit for Megumi, and he really wants to help him reach that goal.

Yuji seems a little weirded out; kids raised in sorcery and thinking about sorcery tended to be a little dark compared to the general population and were quick to make jokes about violence and death because they were destined to have close relationships with these things.

He has enough students they have to use an SUV to drive them around, and with Yuji’s bags loaded up, Akari Nitta, Arata’s older sister, drives them around.

Nobara wants to see Shibuya Sky at night, and Yuji seems interested, that’s where they go.

Satoru, Akari, Arata, and Megumi are used to the city, so they’re not necessarily as elated by the views as Nobara and Yuji, but Satoru is glad the little bumpkins are happy.

He also feels like bringing Yuji to Shibuya to make happy memories is a good way to laugh at the gods.

They were all so different, but they had a good vibe together. Nobara and Yuji had good social chemistry, and Yuji naturally wanted to include everyone else, so it seemed like he was always bringing Megumi and Akari into the conversation.

Satoru can tell that Yuji is one of those extroverts that just adopts introverts, and then forces them to have fun whether they like it or not. This is exactly the type of friend Megumi needs because he’s not afraid of coming out of his shell like Arata is; he genuinely likes being inside of it and has no desire to come out. Arata needs to feel safe to come out, but Megumi has to be offered some sort of incentive for doing so.

Someone as naturally introverted as Megumi would probably do fine in the civilian world, but sorcerers need functioning emotional support systems to make it.

After they eat, walk around, snap some pictures, and have ice cream, they get back in the car and go for a long drive. It’s dark and quiet, and the teenagers are full and in reasonably good spirits.

Megumi falls asleep in the car, his head resting against the window and letting out a light thumping sound every time the vehicle hits even a slight bump.

Satoru hears a noise from the backseat and looks over his shoulder to see Arata going ass first from the middle row of seats to the back where Yuji and Nobara are. He gracelessly flops over, the soles of his shoes touching the roof of the SUV as he is pulled over, and then whispered laughs, and ‘shh, shh, shh.’

He has no idea what they’re going to do, and wonders if Megumi knows that falling asleep early within a group of teenagers is just asking for it?

If he doesn’t, he’s going to learn tonight.

They have found a marker on the floor.

He looks back again when they see they’ve begun drawing on Megumi’s face, and they try to hide the marker.

Satoru takes off his seatbelt and climbs through the narrow space between the driver and passenger seats, forcing Akari, their driver, to squirm in her seat in order to avoid being hit in the head with Gojo’s butt as he wiggles through that little space.

When he makes it back to the middle seat, he sits back on his heels, propping himself up with one hand as he leans forward and takes the marker from Yuji. Then he does what any responsible teacher trying to teach the next generation good morals would do:

He inks a Hitler-esque mustache on Megumi’s upper lip while he sleeps peacefully, a little drool dripping out the corner of his mouth.

Nobara draws little eyes on his eyelids, and they quietly giggle and whisper.

Akari looks in the rearview mirror occasionally, and sighs.

One of the first things Satoru Gojo did when he became king of their world was delegate an enormous amount of administrative oversight to Kiyotaka Ijichi, which was fine, and it made sense to her. He knew how to do everything, he was very knowledgeable, he had excellent judgement, and in a lot of ways, being berated by the former management had limited his confidence.

Akari is really happy that Satoru has given Ijichi an opportunity to shine, but that was kind of his thing. He joked about being a good delegator, but it had been three days and he’d already picked his advisory board and rearranged everyone into roles he thought suited them better and everything was weirdly mostly okay.

This meant Ijichi isn’t available to be just at his side all the time, and Satoru had chosen Akari as his next victim. It has been only a couple of days, but being his assistant on call was a surreal experience.

The first time she drove him anywhere, he was half-asleep during most of the ride, and then abruptly shouted for her to stop. She thought there was an emergency, so she slammed on the brakes. He pointed out the window and said there was a new cupcake café and that they should stop.

He was already thirty minutes late for a meeting that he scheduled, and when they arrived, he told them he was late due to an emergency, but his tongue was purple from cupcake icing and there were a few stray sprinkles caught in the folds of his collar.

The next time he asked her to stop, he got out of the car and went into an abandoned building and killed several cursed spirits, leaving her to scramble and put up a veil while running after him.

Satoru is very high-maintenance, and she has no idea how Utahime manages, but Akari is incredibly glad that her little brother Arata is now under Gojo’s tutelage because in three years, none of his students have been killed or forced to retire due to injury. He takes care of them in ways people don’t realize as well, helping them learn how to navigate their lives and not just their battlefields.

When they arrive at their destination, no one tells Megumi that he looks ridiculous.

“Where are we?” he asks, drowsy.

“On our first class mission. Yay!” Satoru answers.

Satoru breaks the chain on a lock on a big metal gate and pushes it open with a thunderous creek.

Yuji asks, “We’re going to kill a monster?”

“We are! A few monsters, actually. This place is the Catholic Mental Health Center. It was a hospital for mentally ill people from around 1920 to 1980. At least publicly. The Catholic Church is weirdly the biggest player in the sorcery world outside Japan, and on a few occasions, they’ve been caught in Japan because there’s more cursed energy here. They basically filled this place up with people who could see cursed spirits and did experiments on them.”

“…seriously?” Nobara asks.

He nods. “There’s basically the church, which is okay, I guess? I don’t get it, but whatever. They’re all right and mostly charitable and people are participating in earnest. Then there’s a secret shadow organization that kind of exists at its core that none of the normal clergy or members will ever know about, but they control the whole sorcery world outside Japan.

“Japan has more cursed energy, sorcery, and objects than any other place on earth by a lot, so they actually sent ‘missionaries’ here a long ass time ago to cause trouble, way before Japan had real contact with the west. A very powerful curse user ate them, and honestly, good for him and good for Japan.

“Ryomen Sukuna becoming the first Japanese person to hear about Jesus Christ and dealing with it by eating the people who told him is funniest thing that has ever happened or will ever happen in the history of earth. They reported that Japan was a nation of barbaric monster cannibals and didn’t come back for a long time, but there was really just one guy that was eating people.

“Anyway, this place is cursed because they tormented sorcerers here. Cursed spirits are born here often, so it’s a place you’ll drop in on occasionally. Sprits that spawn here are likely to exhibit social behaviors since sorcerers have more coherent cursed energy.”

As they hand out flashlights, and little bags of gear that are ready as this had always been their destination, he teaches them about cursed spirits that exhibit ‘social behaviors:’

There are swarms, which are similar to swarms of insects or schools of fish, where they’re moving together, but there’s not anything particularly intelligent behind that. They’re usually not difficult outside of just being many in number. A swarm may or may not attack and are often just incredibly weak with very limited drive.

If minimally intelligent curses are cooperating for some sort of basic purpose, they call it a hive, like insects that are working. The purpose itself doesn’t have to be intelligent, only their organization. Cursed spirits are ultimately almost always conglomerated nonsense, so it’s not unusual to find a hive doing something stupid like arranging garbage into a pile. A hive will usually ignore humans as long as the activity is not interrupted.

Swarms and hives are usually very low grade curses with minimal destructive drive toward humans.

There is a vast gap between hives and the next step up, which is pack behavior. A pack is a group of curses that makes organized efforts to hurt or kill humans. The risk of curses is determined both by their abilities and what they are driven to do with their abilities.

More evolved pack behavior might involve curses assuming specific roles, like one who lures a human and one who attacks.

Satoru knows the cursed spirits inside were exhibiting pack behavior, and he thought this would be a good chance to see them work together.

Yuji probably has little to no use of his technique or cursed energy, and Arata wasn’t a fighter, so this battle was probably going to rely on Megumi and Nobara, who are primed and ready to go.

Coming to a certifiably haunted, dilapidated former mental asylum where people were secretly tormented to death in cruel experiments was creepy as hell, and they all had a different attitude about it:

Megumi doesn’t care and stands with his hands in his pockets as their manager for the mission, Akari, gives them a briefing about environmental hazards, like falling through the floor and broken glass.

Arata seems quite nervous and appears to be chewing on his bottom lip as he grips his flashlight.

Nobara does not perceive the location as scary or creepy as much as unsanitary and unattractive.

Yuji is pumped.

“This is like a haunted house, but real. I’ve watched so many scary movies in my life to prepare me for this!”

He leans over Arata’s shoulder. “Boo!”

Arata jumps, and Yuji laughs.

Megumi summons his demon dogs as they prepare to go inside, and the other students suffer from a moment of ‘must pet dogs.’ Even though their master pretends they’re wasting time, Gojo knows it makes him happy when people show love to his shikigami.

Under the cover of a veil, they head inside, and Satoru leans against the car with his arms crossed.

He’s not worried; Megumi could do this mission on his own, probably Nobara too.

Sometimes, Satoru considers the morality of kids this age going on missions at all. On an individual level, being born a sorcerer or into a sorcery family is unimaginably cruel. Receiving a fate where fighting is inevitable and many die before they even reach adulthood is harsh.

Yet, this is when it has to happen. The growth that they have at this specific period of their lives will determine their future potential. They have to do as much as they can during this last period of growth because once they reach their early twenties, the acceleration rate of their power and mastery will slow significantly.

Most sorcerers who will ever have a domain expansion or use reverse curse technique will be able to do so by age twenty-one. It’s rare for those abilities to manifest later on. What happens in adulthood is more of a maturation process, where techniques become more polished.

Since he hopes to have a kid of his own soon, they’ll walk this path too. See terrible things, do terrible things probably too.

It’s not something that makes sense to an outsider. Yet if he could snap his fingers and be on the other side of the mirror, he wouldn’t.

After a few minutes, he decides to go inside and is displeased to find that the groups have split, and split in the worst possible way, with Megumi and Nobara in one group and Yuji and Arata in the other group. It’s a foolish choice, but this is what training is for.

It’s incredibly dark inside, and he has to use infinity to keep the sounds of his footsteps from making noise on the creaking floorboards.

Yuji stops walking and says, “Do you feel that?”

“Feel what?” Arata asks.

“Just this feeling, like we’re going watched,” he says, putting a hand on his chest, “my heart is racing. I think whatever is watching us is scary. I’ve never felt this way before. Let’s go regroup with the others.”

Gojo is surprised that Yuji’s instincts are this sharp right out of the box; he has perceived that he is being watched, and that his watcher is dangerous.

Yuji positions himself between Gojo and Arata, walking backward, his gaze fixed on the darkness ahead of him, an abysmally dark atrium where something is watching him.

Gojo stays far back as they maneuver quietly back to where Megumi and Nobara are.

When Yuji tells them that he felt like something scary was watching him, Megumi says, “Relax. That feeling can come when a powerful being looks at you, but the only thing here powerful enough that might make you feel that way is Gojo. The curses here are actually small fries. It’s surprising that they’re organized.”

“This is probably a dumb question, but is our teacher a curse?”

Megumi answers, “Not in the literal sense, but yes.”

“I don’t think I understand what a curse is…”

Nobara says, “Yuji, do you know about wieners?”

“I’m a guy? So I guess?”

“Not that kind of wiener. A hot dog. Cursed spirits are like hot dogs.”

Even Gojo, who is watching them from the shadows, has no idea what the actual hell this girl is talking about, but he’s sure that he’s about to hear something interesting.

Nobara holds the nails in her hands, and they glow. “Human will is powerful, right? Your brain is constantly harnessing the ultimate power of your being. There’s a lot of stuff you discard along the way, sadness, fear, anger, distress…

“When animals are butchered, all the leftover bits and pieces from multiple animals become hot dogs. Hot dogs are leftover meat garbage parts, and they get mixed together and grinded up and stuffed into a skin. That’s basically what a cursed spirit is. All the leftover garbage created by our souls, grinded up and mixed together, wearing a skin.

“A hot dog is not a cow or a chicken or pig, it’s a completely different thing, something unspeakably disgusting that should not exist. A cursed spirit is basically the same thing. Just a skin full of leftover garbage created by human souls. In the same way you kind of know a hot dog is made from meat, you can tell curses are sort of made from humans.”

It’s the weirdest, strangest, funniest way that Gojo has ever heard anyone explain what a curse is, but she’s not wrong and she’s explained it in a way that kind of meets Yuji where he is.

Yuji listens and appears to have gained some understanding, but then throws it all away. “Hot dogs are pretty great.”

Megumi says, “We’re supposed to be hunting not talking about wieners.”

Nobara answers, “He said ‘wiener.’”

She and Yuji laugh, and Megumi turns, glaring at them. His expression is serious, but he has a Hitler mustache, eyeballs drawn on his eyelids, and various other inky embellishments. “Could you all stop talking about wieners and focus on what our mission?”

Even Arata laughs. “Wieners!”

They are, after all, teenagers.

A cursed spirit leaps from the shadows and never makes it to him because Nobara nails it to the ceiling.

When the pack of small curses attacks, the response is clumsy; Nobara almost hammers Megumi’s hand to the wall because it’s moving and in the dark, it’s her instinct to attack whatever is moving that’s not her. But she trips backward over Megumi’s frog spirit and is about to land on the back of her head when Yuji grabs her by the wrists and lifts her onto her feet.

Satoru is puzzled but somewhat amazed by Yuji’s natural instincts. He sensed when he was being watched and kept himself between Arata and whatever was watching him, and he understood to rejoin the rest of the group instead of trying to be brave even though he wasn’t individually scared.

With Nobara tumbling back, he kept her from landing on her head, but instead of catching her, he nearly threw her back onto her feet.

Nobara had been in a chain of actions that started with being spooked by Megumi’s hand and thinking it was a curse that got too close, followed by stumbling blindly backward, and then falling. What most people did not understand about situations like these is that everything happened very fast, and when a person made even a slight mistake, it could cause them to mentally slip and keep making increasingly serious mistakes.

If Yuji hadn’t stopped her, she would have had to let go of her hammer and nails to try and mitigate her fall, and dropping weapons in battle was a more serious mistake.

Throwing her back onto her feet right away stopped the chain of mistakes and set her right on her feet.

Satoru doesn’t think this is deliberate or that he’s giving any of it serious though. But that’s what instinct is, the ability to know what to do without being taught or needing to consciously consider it.

Megumi and Nobara are like two kids with recorders who are trying to play different songs. They’re loud, they’re off key, and they’re trying to be louder than the other. It is Yuji’s first day in the band, and he doesn’t even know how to use his recorder yet. Arata is just there to repair the recorders if they get played so hard they break.

A pack leader attacks, and he’s bigger and significantly stronger, but he comes at them from an angle and targets Arata, the member of the group clearly least capable physically.

Yuji exclaims, “Look out!”

And it just happens.

Yuji crashes through the window, shoving it away, and then uses his technique, in the most rudimentary way, releasing a burst of gravitational force.

The spirit flies through the air with a hole through its middle and disappears before it hits the ground.

Yuji, however, hits the ground, having jumped from a third-floor window, and has miraculously not broken any bones despite the fact he doesn’t know how to use cursed energy to reinforce his body. The glass did cut him up quite a bit, however.

Yuji stands there, flexing and unflexing his fist as he stares at it and blood oozes out of several deep gashes on his body.

The fact he was able to shove a cursed spirit that big out a window is freaky because most cursed spirits are unnaturally heavy for their size. It would be like throwing a small car out the window, and then punching a hole in it before hitting the ground and not necessarily being bothered by the impact.

Even more interesting, the force from Yuji’s punch went straight through the cursed spirit and made a little crater in the ground.

Satoru appears in front of him and says, “Well, well, well. How was that, Saitama?”

“…kind of awesome?”

“Right?”

Yuji notices his arm is bleeding, and that he’s never been injured like this before, and somehow he doesn’t care.

And Satoru goes back to thinking about how much young sorcerers suffer, but they also live drunk on their own power and capable of accomplishing things an ordinary person could never do. They’re the last true adventurers of the modern age; maybe going on an adventure is dangerous, but if it’s in a person’s heart, living any other kind of life would never be enough.

That was the reason that Kento Nanami came back. Maybe sitting at a desk was safer, but it’s just not what he was born to do, so he returned to the life where he could get eaten on any random Tuesday instead.

Yuji doesn’t care about the pain because he has taken the first step into his destiny and was feeling all the power and excitement of tapping into his true power.

Outsiders would never understand, but it was fine. They didn’t need to.

Arata dashes out of the building, and immediately uses his technique on Yuji’s injuries. Since he can’t outright heal, stopping his injuries from becoming worse is fine. He’ll have to visit Shoko, but it’s not a serious situation.

Satoru says, “Good work everyone. A little disjointed, but this is a school, and you all just met each other. We can talk more about it tomorrow.”

The phone in his pocket starts vibrating, and it’s Mimiko Hasaba, so he answers.

It’s very late, so he’s not sure why they were calling.

Her words are unintelligible, but she sends him a location pin and he definitely heard the word ‘doctor.’

He’s confused that they are in Tokyo, but remembers they were supposed to come down for some concert at some point this week.

“Arata, we’re going on a special mission. Nitta, take the others back,” he says, instructing the assistant manager to take the rest of the kids to the campus.

How the twins managed to get into some kind of trouble was anyone’s guess, but they did have contacts in Tokyo that Satoru preferred they never connect with. They know about some forbidden places where forbidden people go, but they’d been doing so well that he earnestly believed that they wouldn’t get into trouble.

When he gets to the location, there is a very powerful cursed spirit nearby.

Upper first grade.

No, it’s not nearby—it’s been exorcised.

Hanako and Mimiko are inside a shop that they crashed into during the fight, on two sides of a very small child who is alive but grievously injured.

They’re smart girls, and they’re putting pressure on injuries that would immediately cause exsanguination. The position of the head is…concerning.

Arata tries to use his technique, but he seems to swallow his own vomit as he does. It’s likely his first time to see gore, and the circ*mstances are grim.

Satoru lifts the kid’s head gently by placing his hands on each side of his head and finds the whole back of the skull is crushed into the brain, and there’s no tension at all, a sign he’s likely been internally decapitated.

If he warped him to Shoko, it wouldn’t make a difference.

Arata puts his hands out to try again, and Satoru shakes his head.

“There isn’t anything we can do here,” he gently says, “so the merciful thing to do is to not make it last longer.”

Nanako exclaims, “That’s not good enough! Can’t you do it?”

He’s sure they don’t know this child, and they’re not idiots; they knew he was basically dead when they called him. Basically anytime the brain is visible, it’s game over.

Satoru is deeply confused about what is going on, but Nanako is definitely asking him to use RCT on this boy, who is in the lifestage of toddler, or ‘extra large baby.’ He’s a muggle on top of that, so his body doesn’t know what to do with cursed energy in the first place, and even if none of that were true, the reason Satoru can’t really heal other people is because he is very bad at moderating reverse curse energy because it’s twice as potent as standard.

Being able to heal this kid would require Satoru being able to not just see pathways of energy in his body, but be able to read and tap into them, in addition to conditioning his reverse cursed energy to know what to do once it arrived inside of his body, and he had to precisely apply very minute amounts to not overwhelm these pathways.

There’s not a polite way for him to explain that him being able to help this child would be like using some sort of enormous earthmoving or excavating machine to thread a needle, except that when he does it wrong, the needle will burst and cover everyone with the blood and guts of a little person.

“I actually can’t. It’s too difficult for me to control my cursed energy. If I tried, he’d die.”

Nanako says, “What is the point of being the strongest if you can’t save anyone?”

These words seem like an indictment, and he answers, “Being the strongest doesn’t mean I can do whatever I want. The person I wanted to save more than anyone else wasn’t saved.”

“Won’t you try?”

“It would make things worse.”

“He’s going to die anyway.”

If he doesn’t try, they’re going to be mad at him, and he doesn’t understand anything that is going on. This kid is what they would call a monkey, so he’s sure they don’t know who he is, and Satoru doesn’t understand how they ended up in this situation in the first place.

Satoru says, “Nitta, use your technique.”

Arata Nitta knows exactly why they shouldn’t be asking Gojo to do this; it is common knowledge that while he’s unspeakably powerful, he’s not particularly good at precisely controlling it and therefore works better when he’s alone.

The fact this baby’s body is still working despite how catastrophically damaged it is shows there is a will to live despite the fact he is not conscious and will probably never gain consciousness again.

Satoru turns to his student. “Keep using your technique as much as you can.”

While Satoru doesn’t think there is any way that he will be successful, he also doesn’t believe that a person should ever try to do anything with that attitude, so he imagines himself, threading the needle. Successfully.

If he doesn’t put this effort in, he feels like he might lose the girls, and he promised Suguru at his grave he would do whatever he could to keep them safe. He believes they will forgive him if he fails more easily than if he doesn’t try.

The number of catastrophic injuries this little body has that would be fatal by themselves is staggering: the head, neck, spine, and abdomen are all in extremely poor condition and he remains a little confused about how the body is still functioning at all.

He takes off his blindfold and visualizes his task.

Nanako’s words still cut, but she has a sharp tongue and more than her sister, at times becomes the specter of Suguru Geto. This time she is questioning the nature of his power, and its purpose. What is the point of being the most powerful person if he can’t help others?

Maybe the true ultimate power isn’t destructive at all, but no battle was ever won just through healing. Violence and destruction are the tools that shape the world and those are the ones he commands peerlessly.

Satoru tries he best, but he doesn’t really believe any of the living sorcerers with RCT would be able to make this work.

Still, he tries to thread the needle.

There is something odd about this body, and he can’t quite describe it, but he’s sure it isn’t normal even though everything about it seems normal to his senses.

Satoru wonders if this kid has some sort of Heavenly Restriction that makes him extremely durable. He can’t see that with his Six Eyes; Toji Fushiguro with his Heavenly Restriction was like a phantom beyond physical sight any normal person would have.

Mimiko explains that they’d actually come with a group. Two boys had come as well, and somewhere in the back of his mind, Satoru wondered how a group of two teenage girls and boys they weren’t related to managed to slide an overnight trip past his grandmother.

They wanted to go to bed after the concert, and the boys wanted to go to an arcade, so the group split.

Mimiko and Nanako were walking over toward their hotel when they spotted a mom with her son coming out of a store. They noticed it because it was very late, and it was odd to see someone out that late with a toddler.

They saw a cursed spirit attack them, and it killed the mother in an instant and then snatched the boy and ran off. The girls decided to try and help him, so they chased it and managed to exorcise it here in this random shop they’d eventually crashed into.

The chances of a sorcerer randomly encountering a cursed spirit strong enough to carry someone off was actually fairly slim unless they were the one the cursed spirit planned to target.

These girls, who believed only a few months ago that all the monkeys needed to die, had decided in a split second to fight to save one. It was such an indicator that they were evolving as human beings.

He doesn’t want their act of bravery and kindness to end with them facing the fragile nature of humanity or how the best-intentioned acts often prove futile. If they fight to save someone one time and gain a bad emotional scar from it, they might not ever do it again.

So he tries his hardest to thread the needle.

He summons Shoko to their location and works slowly; the body continues to refuse to die and does not exhibit signs of being poisoned by cursed energy.

Satoru wonders why the cursed spirit carried this specific kid off, and not an adult. Cursed spirits eat humans because they are often born with hunger; they don’t experience satiety or anything like that and they don’t need energy. It’s still unusual behavior that the smaller meal was selected.

If he can get him to ‘not imminently going to die’ and fix his brain and spine, Shoko might be able to get him the rest of the way. Her RCT is very gentle, and she better understands how to tune into a person’s energy.

Satoru is not sure if this is ultimately going to be successful at all, because even if he does get there, pumping a ton of cursed energy into a body that doesn’t know what to do with it is also actually really dangerous and will likely result in secondary illness or injury.

He’s very nervous; his hands are shaking, covered in blood, because if he makes even the tiniest mistake this kid is going to pop like an egg in the microwave. He also worries that if he manages to fix the brain and spine, the kid will wake up and start screaming and thrashing, but Shoko is on the way and she’ll bring drugs with her.

In the back of his mind, he thinks a lot about the nature of his power, and how absurd it is that he’s too strong to help someone, and too strong to share a battlefield with his allies, and yet too weak to save many of the people he tries to save.

When Shoko arrives, she finds Satoru and the girls gathered around a mangled person. This was how they were the last time they she saw them, except this time, instead of the body being the dead Suguru Geto, an attempted mass murderer, they’re gathered around a very small child who in no way could have asked for whatever had happened to him.

She’s surprised that Gojo is trying to use RCT because it should be impossible. He can’t even use it on grown sorcerers without hurting them.

Shoko’s RCT is somewhat soft in nature; she can accelerate healing, but she can’t do anything drastic. She practices hybrid application of RCT to bridge her amplify her abilities, which means she’ll stitch a wound before healing it so that she doesn’t waste her power bringing the flesh back together.

She lacks the incredible amount of power needed to reverse critical injuries, but Satoru has that power without the ability to modulate it properly. Or so she thought—he seems to be proving maybe he is capable or wants to be capable.

In this case, there are no more active bleeds, and she sets up a field transfusion with a bag of blood she brought.

This wouldn’t be a useful skill in a battle; Satoru has clearly been working for a while when she arrives.

Part of his success is Arata.

Arata’s abilities seem meager on paper, but he is proving very useful in this endeavor. Human bodies want to spiral when they are injured badly enough, and he stops that. And she notes too that there may be something about this specific child that’s important.

Green eyes blink open suddenly, and Shoko immediately sedates the boy since he has open abdominal wounds and broken bones. She checks his neck, and the movement seems normal.

They have crossed a threshold, and Shoko says, “I can take it from here. It might be best for you to let up. We should go slow from here on. He’s going to need to heal from your RCT on top of his injuries.”

The girls, who have been silent during this process that lasted more than ninety minutes, audibly exhale as Satoru lifts his bloody hands.

The boy gets taken back to the infirmary by Shoko and Arata and two assistants.

This leaves Gojo with Mimiko and Nanako, who seem oddly quiet.

He washes his hands in the backroom of the shop, and he asks, “You two okay?”

Mimiko is uncomfortable; her face is tense, and her brow seems heavy. Nanako seems to be lost in thought.

He says, “For what it’s worth, I think it’s really brave that you decided to try to save someone who needed your help. Risking your life to help someone else is a really difficult thing to do; you should be proud of yourselves.”

Nanako looks down as she speaks, “Master Geto was going to use his cursed spirits to get rid of the monkeys. It’s just…when he said it like that, it didn’t seem wrong. But seeing what it’s like when a cursed spirit kills someone is…it’s different. It’s not like they were just going to disappear.”

The knowledge has entered their minds that the act of killing someone isn’t equal to them simply vanishing from the earth. Geto taught them to believe in a world without monkeys, and probably hadn’t allowed them to really comprehend what it would entail to feed all the monkeys to cursed spirits.

Actually seeing the pain, violence, terror, and gore that this kind of death involved left them visibly shaken—like they had just realized what they believed in all those years was inherently and inescapably evil and they had only been blind to that fact because they let their minds play tricks on them.

Satoru doesn’t know what to say, or if he should say anything.

These girls just chased a cursed spirit, exorcised it, and demanded he level up as a whole person and save a kid.

“Can we visit him? In the hospital?” Mimiko is eager, because they genuinely care.

“He’ll be hospitalized at the infirmary for the Jujutsu Society. Shoko will probably keep him comatose for a few days or a week while she works on his other injuries. You can come visit him once he’s awake, and then he’ll be off to his family. They’ll be very happy that he’s been saved.”

Nanako asks, “Do you think…do you think if Master Geto was here, that if he could, he would have saved him?”

The answer is an emphatic no, but he’s not going to say it.

Satoru answered, “We don’t have to put Suguru Geto on trial and figure out what he was or wasn’t guilty of. Suguru has moved on, and so should we. It’s okay to care for and be cared for by an imperfect person. You own your own mind, and if you decide that you’ll enjoy all the good memories and forget the bad ones, that’s your own business.”

The girls return to the hotel they were staying at, and Gojo returns to the campus, where he finds his students are doing different things.

Arata is in the infirmary, helping and learning from Shoko.

Megumi went to bed after yelling at everyone from drawing on him.

Yuji and Nobara are up exploring the grounds late at night.

Utahime is halfway moved into his apartment, having been instructed to move to Tokyo because the new Jujutsu Commander ordered the schools to consolidate. She felt like he was partly motivated by his desire to have her close all the time, but there was no point in fussing about it because she agreed that it was the right decision.

Besides, she liked hanging around with him. He offered her an apartment of her own, and she was honestly a little insulted, but he seemed really happy when she chose to stay with him instead.

When Satoru wakes up before her in the morning, he realizes he left his laptop…somewhere. He actually has no idea where it is, and he has an email with a big spreadsheet of tasks he needs to look at.

One of his first priorities is digitizing the Jujutsu Society and creating connectivity, because it entered the digital age while being run by very old men who had to find out they were fired from others because he fired them by email, and they didn’t know how to use it.

Utahime is still asleep, but he’s borrowed her work laptop before, so he logs in to open the spreadsheet and finds a tab open in her browser.

Despite the fact that Utahime has told him many times she doesn’t want to make a big fuss about anything, and they can just go down and get the certificate when they marry, he finds a Pinterest board that says otherwise.

She’s not the kind of person who would ever make anything about herself, so asking to have a big wedding was contrary to her personality. She’s pinned forty pictures of the same dress, a ring, flowers, decorations…these pins go back years as he scrolls through them and he realizes she wants to have a pretty Western princess wedding.

He saves the pictures to his email one by one, forgetting his work.

When his distraction with Utahime matters causes questions to remain unanswered, his phone rings, and he answers, distracted.

“It’s Yaga. Is scheduling on-call sorcerers my duty to Ijichi’s?”

Satoru says, “Everything is going into two management chains, administrative and enforcer branches. You have enforcer branch.”

“That doesn’t answer the question.”

“Okay, here’s the criteria for all tasks. As yourself, ‘should a person who regularly gets concussions be managing this activity,’ and if the answer is no, then it’s Ijichi. If it’s about fighting and you can do it with a brick for a brain, it’s yours.”

Yaga says, “Julius Caesar was stabbed to death by his friends.”

“Julius Caesar didn’t have Infinity, so he shouldn’t have run his mouth or whatever he did. You know if all his friends got together and stabbed him at the same time he was annoying as f*ck.”

“Of course I know, I have to deal with you,” the other man answers.

Gojo playfully answers, “Good luck trying to stab me. Besides, I know you’d never resort to that. I’m your favorite former pupil. Besides, scheduling is Kusakabe’s responsibility. I’m sure he’ll send out the new schedule once he figures out how to attach it to an email.”

Yaga hangs up because Satoru knew all along who was scheduling, and Satoru’s phone rings again. It is Kento Nanami.

“Am I on call tonight or not? No one knows who is scheduling and the old schedule expired last night.”

Satoru asks, “Why, you got a hot date or something?”

He hears a long sigh. “It would help you to take your responsibilities a little more seriously.”

“Let me have a little fun. Although, I am kind of getting tied up with all this extra stuff. Could you take my first years on Friday? Utahime has a dental appointment,” he answers.

“I’m not a teacher.”

“But you could be. Anyone can become a teacher.”

“Clearly.”

Satoru adds, “We’re making the clan sorcerers pull their weight so you won’t be on patrol call as much. Taking the first years for now and then will unlock the part-time teacher benefits.”

“What’s the benefit?”

“Personal enrichment? And more money. Utahime might be stepping away from teaching for a bit at some point.”

Nanami doesn’t ask; their relationship is known, and everyone seems to think Utahime has locked down the person Gakuganji calls ‘his future grandson-in-law, the omnipotent imbecile.’

“Let me think about it.”

When Satoru hangs up, he calls Kusakabe, who was responsible for making a schedule and emailing it to everyone.

“My man, people are in an uproar, where is the schedule?”

Kusakabe is in such a bad mood as he answers, “Do you have any idea how long it takes to email a hundred people? That’s a hundred emails!”

He answers, “That is one email, my friend. Go on the line where you put the person you’re emailing it too and type in ‘Working Sorcerers and Associates Distribution List.’ Then attach the schedule.”

It’s quiet for a minute, and Satoru gets the new email alert on his phone, leading Kusakabe to sigh deeply. “I hate this.”

“I don’t know why you’re this bad off, you’re only like fifty?”

“I am thirty-five, you babyfaced sh*t.”

Satoru answers, “I’m sorry to hear that. It might be time for you to stop smoking? But it’s even worse that you don’t know how to send a group email?”

Kusakabe says, “Have we decided to organize and kill you yet?”

“Yaga is working on something. I think it involves knives.”

Kusakabe hangs up, three angry hangups in just a few minutes, and for some reason, Satoru is in incredibly good spirits.

What he actually received from Kusakabe was not actually an email with the spreadsheet with the schedule, but a series of photographs that Kusakabe took of his computer screen with the spreadsheet open. None of them are rotated correctly, and within seconds, someone has replied all with the words ‘upside down’ and nothing else.

Someone else responds and says it’s upside down for them too, and if that means they have a computer virus, and another person responds with ‘take me off this spam email.’

Naobito Zenin does not understand he is on a group email and replies to the last person, a woman from the Inumaki clan, to ask if she’ll send him some more naughty pics.

And then people respond and tell him it’s a group email, and he asks how he can delete his message, which he can’t because everyone has seen it.

Kagura Inumaki then informs the group that she would never send anyone naughty pictures even though she is well known for being a prolific adulteress among the clans.

People are still commenting ‘upside down.’

The lady of the Kamo clan, who definitely knows how to use email, quotes the Inumaki woman and then puts enormous eye-rolling emoji underneath.

Then more ‘upside down.’

Someone else wants to know why they’re using email instead of delivering schedules by courier once a week, like it’s normal in the year 2018 to share work tasks this way.

It’s such a sh*tshow. It’s stunning to consider that this specific collection of people is the only thing standing between Japan and complete destruction.

Satoru sends a calendar invite for mandatory communication training but realizes that the people who need it most won’t understand what to do with a calendar invite, will not accept, and won’t look at their calendar anyway.

He sends Maki a text asking her to get her teacher’s laptop and show him how to send the spreadsheet as an attachment and BCC the distribution list so they can’t talk to each other.

Despite knowing she’ll handle it, he has minimal hope that a majority of the recipients will know how to open or read a spreadsheet.

Will they click it? Assume it’s a virus? Put it in the spam folder?

Maki sends the new email from Kusakabe’s account a few minutes later with the spreadsheet, and numbered instructions telling them how to open the file and check to see when they are scheduled.

Never once has Maki failed to impress.

He finishes copying Utahime’s Pinterest wedding board and makes breakfast.

Utahime comes out scrolling through her phone. “Goodness, Lady Kagura and Master Naobito in my inbox, what has gone wrong in the world? And Kamo just being messy for no reason.”

He answers, “Bringing the sorcery world into this century seems like a good idea, but at the same time, I don’t really know if it’s a good idea to make it easy for these people to talk to each other. They’re all sort of horrible, you know?”

“How’s the kid from last night?”

“He’s good. We know his name now. Kyo Takahashi. He might have some minor issues, but he should mostly be okay. He’s going with his grandparents when he’s ready to be released. It seems like he was targeted, but we can’t find any evidence about why—it might have just been cursed spirit nonsense.”

“And the girls?”

Satoru answers, “They’re all right. They just always had a long journey, you know? Experience is a hard teacher. They saved someone’s life, and that’s pretty neat, but on the other side of that is the fact that they were all in favor of people losing their lives not that long ago. Their lives are bittersweet in many ways. Every step forward will reveal one thing about the future and something about the past. But they’re still walking, so it’s fine.”

He notices her finger has a bandage. “What’s this?”

“Just a hangnail. Kind of lame.”

“I can heal it now!”

He kisses her finger, and a tiny little stream of cursed energy comes from his lips, healing her fingertip.

Pleased with himself, he says, “I’m so useful now!”

She kisses him and picks Kumo up off the floor. “I have the first years today. Is there anything I can help you with after hours?”

“I feel like you’ve been putting in too much work the past couple of days, so probably, just rest. Do you want to go to the spa on your day off?”

“Will you go with me?”

He pouts. “I dicked around and ended up with too many responsibilities. Once I have everything figured out, I’ll have more time.”

Utahime holds her cat like he is a baby most of the time, and Kumo seems to enjoy it.

Satoru said, “I’ll give you a real baby and then you can stop pretending with that nasty old thing.”

“We’re a blended family. I expect you to start calling him ‘son.’ He is my first baby. I can feel you rolling your eyes under that blindfold.”

“Good. That thing is no son of mine.”

His girlfriend pouts. “This move is very hard on him. He just needs his father’s love.”

“If I was his father, I would control him through the power of shame and disapproval like a proper Japanese father. He would do anything to make me happy, and I’d still choose to be unhappy. Just glare at him disapprovingly while he tells me he’s the top student cat in Japan.”

“You wouldn’t.”

“You’re right. I wouldn’t. Because this idiot could never be the top student cat in Japan.”

Utahime sighs. “There’s no such thing as the top student cat in Japan.”

“But if there was, it wouldn’t be this little idiot.”

Laying a gentle kiss on his cheek, he served them breakfast and prepares for a very busy day of teaching old people how to do basic tasks in the modern era.

Notes:

I decided to give Yuji a technique of his own because it makes me sad in JJK that everything he can do came from him eating someone else's body. I love that sweet baby and I want him to have something that's just his.
Thank you all again so much for kudos and comments and feedback. Like, this is such an experience!

Chapter 8: Sea Urchin's Heart

Notes:

ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
another chapter, thanks again for comments/reviews and kudos
I'm glad we're still together. This chapter doesn't move the plot along very much, but it's important.

Chapter Text

A month passes, and things are so busy. Then another.

Satoru is busy on all fronts; he has less time to spend with the first years, but he finds he can still have a rich relationship with them as their advisor if he makes sure the time he has with them counts, so instead of being in the classroom with them all the time, sometimes they have a meal together or he takes them out on their training missions.

Some of the students are struggling to get along, mainly Mai and Maki for obvious reasons, and Aoi Todo and Kinji Hakari, because Kinji knows how to provoke Todo and Todo will punch him out if he does it.

The first years are marvelous, and a really special class because none of them suffer from any sort of malignant insecurity or egotism that causes them to fight. Satoru believes that if Nobara was male, she’d probably fight everyone, but women were just far less likely to get into petty scraps than men were. Megumi and Yuji were forming a really close friendship, and that made Satoru happy because he knew they both needed it.

They were accidentally a nearly mechanically perfect team. Yuji was their brawler and tank, Megumi had nearly infinite utility with his curses, Nobara had range, and Arata could help them if they got hurt.

Yuji had a lot of extra training he had to do because he hilariously could use no cursed energy or an amount that could knock down a building and nothing in between. Satoru doesn’t think that’s his maximum output, it’s just like he can be at zero or five, never one or ten.

Everything in the world seems to be going the way he wants it to go; all the students are flourishing outside of their little scraps here and there. The sorcery world is somewhat quiet, and the structure of the Jujutsu Society is taking on a new form.

Some of it is trial and error, even with good perception and faith in others, helping everyone into a meaningful niche is quite a task. Satoru believes he is helped by the fact that he doesn’t want to be in charge of everything; he just wants it to work right.

Setting up a system that works and can’t fall into the same cyclic corruption as the old one seems difficult. How can one safeguard against a future where people think and feel differently? Giving independent sorcerers enough power to stop the clans from grabbing all the power again seemed important, as well as limiting how far they could reach in the first place.

He doesn’t really like being the guy, and had no intention of trying to retain power once his year was over. He liked going on missions, fighting, training, his family, and his students. He figures that in the same way that it doesn’t suit him, it probably suits someone else.

Satoru is secretly planning a surprise wedding for Utahime in June, according to her Pinterest. He has her dress, he has the most romantic part of his clan’s gardens being polished and prepared, he has the menu. A string quartet is reserved. The champagne has been delivered, flowers are ordered, her hair and makeup people are scheduled.

He's sure there’s a lot more to it than that, but he hired a wedding planner and emailed her the pictures he ripped off Utahime’s Pinterest and turned her loose.

Utahime has no idea.

None.

He had invitations hand delivered with a note that it’s a secret from Utahime, and everyone who knows her knows exactly why. She’s just not the kind of person that likes to ask for things or to have any drama about herself.

Her grandfather, Yoshinobu Gakuganji, is so excited about the surprise wedding because he knows she’d be uncomfortable thinking about having a wedding like that, but if it just happens, she’ll just be able to enjoy it and not think about whether everyone is too busy to fuss over her for a whole day.

“You’re sure her dress will fit?” he asks one afternoon over tea.

“My Six Eyes constantly measure everything that is within my field of vision with extreme accuracy.”

“That sounds annoying.”

“That is why I cover them up.”

Gakuganji asked, “Will there be pitter patter of little feet?”

“Are you talking about the cat?”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

He frowns. “It’s been four months, and it hasn’t happened yet. I’m annoyed. I just thought it would happen right away.”

“You’re not even married yet.”

“I’m sorry, I thought we were adults.”

Gakuganji said, “I didn’t touch my wife until our wedding night.”

“That’s just how they did things eight hundred years ago, but that’s very sad for you.”

The old man sips his tea. “I had a baby ten months after that.”

This feels like a little bit of an insult. “It’s not a competition.”

“If it was, you’ve already lost, no? But my granddaughter will be such a good mother.”

“Right?”

They’ve had a rocky relationship, but Gakuganji loves his granddaughter more than anything else in the world. Their family was broken, irreparably, because her father, his son-in-law, did not love her the way that she deserved. She is the youngest of three, with an older brother who is his father’s clone and an older sister who was always seen as being incredibly beautiful.

Her mother, Gakuganji’s daughter, died from a short illness when she was only a baby, leaving her with only her father and older siblings.

Utahime wasn’t perceived as being as attractive as her sister, and in most sorcery, arranged marriage is still the fate of most of the women born into the clan. Being attractive and likeable by men is all that matter even when they are only girls.

Her lack of self-confidence and tendency to fade into the background were baked into her at a young age by a father who did not find her valuable.

Gakuganji doted on her and found her quite precious, sweet, smart, and kind.

When she got older, she asked to go to Kyoto to train, but she mostly just wanted to be with her grandfather.

Utahime did well and started building confidence in herself once she left home.

Maybe it was just due to proximity, but Naoya was one of her classmates, and she caught his eye.

In retrospect, it seems obvious to Gakuganji that he was drawn to the fact that she had self-esteem issues and thought as little of herself as he felt about her.

Suddenly, her father, who had not spoken to her in over one year, invited her home, treated her like she was a princess, and took an earnest interest in her. He encouraged her to accept Naoya’s advances, which he’d heard about because when she told him she wasn’t interested, Naoya reached out to him, because he knew a traditional father would jump through hoops to marry his daughter to the heir of the Zenin clan.

So Utahime, desperate for the approval of her father, walked that path, ignoring warning signs that there was a monster up ahead. Gakuganji tried to intervene, but Utahime was very young and thought tolerating a little disrespect to mend her broken relationship with her father and gain the approval she had desperately sought all her life.

He pressured her into sex, subjected her to intimate violence, and when she finally realized she couldn’t stay in the relationship, Naoya split her face open and told everyone he’d f*cked her, a big no-no in a world that valued marrying off virgins.

Her father called her a disappointment because in his words, she must have “done something to make him angry,” and faulted her for the failure of the relationship.

Gakuganji was left without recourse; Naobito Zenin considered it a quarrel between teenage lovers. Despite being reasonably powerful, he wasn’t powerful enough to hold the Zenin clan heir accountable.

But there were people who could.

Suguru Geto and Satoru beat him so badly he choked on his own bloody vomit, and when Gakuganji was forced to heal him to prevent death, the Tokyo boys came back later and dragged him off again. They were like angry big brothers, and even though Utahime would never thank someone openly for having such a nasty fight over her, Gakuganji knew that it meant something to know her pain mattered to her friends. Vengeance was a peculiar love language, but Utahime heard and understood the message loud and clear: she had two friends that had her back no matter what.

Utahime’s relationship with her father was wrecked, because the Zenin clan felt like his daughter had caused violence from the Gojo clan, like no one was ever going to find out how her face ended up like that. Her sister was engaged to someone in the Zenin clan’s territory, and they used their power to break it off and spread rumors about the family.

She was meanwhile left hurt and humiliated, and despite having suffered all this for her father, he had downgraded their relationship from apathy to antipathy. Utahime was functionally excommunicated from the Iori clan over these events.

At some point Satoru started flirting with her, and Satoru wasn’t just a random guy. As far as the arranged marriage world was concerned, Satoru was the hottest commodity there was. He was handsome, rich, the most powerful sorcerer from the most powerful clan, and on the cusp of ascending as its leader. Every girl wanted to be chosen by Satoru.

Utahime’s father exacerbated already deep wounds by offering him the ‘pretty’ sister, and Satoru very impolitely declined.

Gakuganji found Satoru annoying on a good day, but he was Prince Charming who had cared for his granddaughter since they were young. He wants to whisk her away to his castle where she can live happily ever after.

He never questions if he will treat her well.

He feels like a hypocrite sometimes, having sided with the conservatives against his future grandson-in-law dozens of times, because someone following the ‘old ways’ would not be marrying a twenty-seven-year old woman with facial mutilation who was known to have been used and humiliated by another man.

Gakuganji is sure someone has told Gojo not to do that, and to pick some nineteen-year-old virgin, and reminded him he could have anyone he wants.

Gakuganji reaches for a cookie, because if one is having a meeting with Satoru, there are always sweets. “Maybe you’re impotent.”

“That’s rude.”

“The omnipotent impotent?”

“Even ruder.”

“Maybe you’re doing it wrong.”

“Doing what wrong, exactly? You put the coin in the machine, and you get a gumball. I have inserted a lot of coins, and no gumball.”

Satoru finds family subjects quite awkward. When he was still in high school and his older cousin told him she and her husband were trying for a baby, he felt a little horrified that she was basically announcing she was letting her husband bareback her while sitting at a table with their grandmother. The only thing that made it more gross is the fact that his grandmother was pleased by this information.

Gakuganji is excited about adding a baby to the family but finds it similarly awkward to acknowledge what that involves. He wants to meet a little gumball without acknowledging this irritating boy and his coins.

“The Northern Territory is still notably absent from work.”

“I have them doing something special. They’ll come around when it’s done.”

Satoru is not in the mood to explain to this man that he sold the entire Tokyo campus to commercial real estate developers so they can build an amusem*nt park called Hello Kitty World and that he’s using the money for his big project. It’s just not something anyone would find okay, since he already basically closed down headquarters and Kyoto. He is trying to do something and doesn’t want a bunch of interim drama before people can appreciate it.

Most of Satoru’s changes are actually going really well.

Assistants have logged a hundred years’ worth of handwritten records, so he can sign onto a new app and analyze data about all the cursed spirits logged by the Jujutsu Society. The locations, dates, qualities, strength rating, going all the way back to around 1904—there are older records they haven’t gotten to yet.

There is a database with curse users with pictures that sorcerers can review to become familiar with their faces and what they can do.

There is a portal with the schedule, and their scheduled events are sent automatically to their work calendars, which everyone now knows how to use.

There’s a user forum that all the active trainees have access to, even the younger ones. There was a rather heartwarming post from one kid who was trying to learn swordsmanship, but no one in his clan used a blade, and another kid said he was going through the same thing, so they decided to meet.

And then promptly stabbed each other.

They are now good friends who might occasionally stab each other, in their own words.

Utahime told him that only boys would do that and that women don’t even have thoughts like that ever in their lives.

Since Gojo has a new policy that sorcerers only get paid if they work, the clan sorcerers are doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Combined with the fact that the sorcery world is uncharacteristically quiet at the moment, he’s able to only send the students on jobs to enrich them and not just because there’s work to be done and too few hands to help.

He thinks often about Tengen’s concern that things might get weird or difficult. Assuming that Kenjaku’s timeline worked the way he thought it would, the biggest events that wreck the most lives don’t start happening until September, so Satoru feels like he probably needs to make most of his moves and have everything functioning well by then.

The only real major task that was completed before September in Kenjaku’s plan was awakening Sukuna.

Since they have Yuji, most of the fingers are destroyed, and Yuji knows not to touch or eat any fingers, that seems incredibly unlikely.

In September, the lives of the students are supposed to diverge significantly because the campus is attacked by special grades. It is not unreasonable to predict a number of them probably would have perished. It’s the day many of their fates were probably scheduled to end or at least be altered.

Then, October 31 is really the day when things would get really weird.

Tengen believed something bad was probably going to happen, and he takes her warning serious because Tengen bothered to say something while she normally wouldn’t tell them she saw smoke if half Japan was actively burning.

He gets a reminder on his phone and says, “Sorry, have to cut this short. I have a meeting with Ogi Zenin.”

“What does that old bastard want?”

“Probably to bitch about the fact I want to promote his children. Maki, Mai, and Yuta have been doing a lot of practice together since Yuta got back. He provides good target practice for Mai, and she’s improving his reflexes. Hilarious to take him to the infirmary so Shoko can pull a bullet out of his butt.”

Gakuganji leaves because he doesn’t want to deal with the plume of unpleasantry that is Ogi Zenin, Naobito Zenin’s brother.

According to basically everyone, the only reason Naobito became head of the Zenin clan despite being a lazy drunk with a bad personality is because his two brothers produced children affected by the clan’s curse. It is generally assumed that Ogi probably would be head of the clan if Mai and Maki weren’t born with poor and nonexistent cursed energy aptitude.

Ogi is bitter, and rages against his daughters—another father who can look at a precious daughter and see something worthless. He does everything he can to keep the twins down, especially Maki. Mai is more limited, but Maki is incredibly successful and talented.

He wants to promote Maki to a Grade 2, and feels that in terms of pure skill, she wouldn’t bet against Maki against any of the Semi-Grade 1s. He both wants her to get experience and also spend more time working with others before he moved her on to the next level. Mental state and maturity and emotional health were things that needed to be considered, something he was acutely aware of as someone who became Special Grade at age seventeen and was immediately expected to be able to deal with everything.

It's pointless to appeal to him as a father; Satoru wonders what on earth is so wrong with this family. Every branch of the family tree is diseased, and the only ones who don’t have incredible character flaws are the ones who don’t have active connections to the clan.

Ogi Zenin is appalled by the idea that Maki might someday become the same rank as him, as if she is equal to him, and Satoru confirms that Maki won’t be his equal but rather surpass him and leave him behind.

Satoru feels this was a meeting that could have been an email, or angry ramblings scribbled on a napkin at a McDonalds somewhere.

He makes a bit of a mistake and when he gets a text from Megumi asking to train, he agrees to meet him. So when the meeting is over the two men walk out together, Megumi is waiting outside in the courtyard.

And in an instant, Ogi walking up on Megumi causes Mai and Maki to appear like they materialized out of thin air. They were clearly somewhere nearby and did not like one bit the way their father seemed to take an immediate interest in Megumi.

“What do you want?” Maki sharply asks.

Ogi answers, “Not the two of you, clearly.”

He pushes Mai out of the way, and Satoru realizes he’s going to do what he’s going to do. Short of beating his ass in front of the students, there’s no stopping him.

So he steps up. “Megumi, this is your great uncle, Ogi Zenin. He’s Mai and Maki’s father. Zenin, this is Megumi Fushiguro. I know you know all about him.”

Ogi spits. “I curse you for siding with the man who murdered your father, a Gojo. Don’t insult the blood running through your veins. We might spill it someday.”

Megumi is not a particularly expressive young man, so he just sort of stares as he wipes his cheek. “Gojo killed my dad?”

“These treacherous girls know. Ripped him apart. It was gruesome, entrails everywhere, parts of him missing. His death was painful. Humiliating. And then he had the nerve to take a son of the Zenin house once he’d done that.”

They’re all standing around, this information just hanging in the air, waiting to see how Megumi reacts.

It’s so awkward, because it’s a good day. There are some birds singing, the sun is warm, and there’s a nice breeze. It seems like out of nowhere, this old man has come, spitting and saying intense things to Megumi, who is a bit bewildered at first.

Megumi looks up at Satoru, trying to read his expression, something that is impossible because much of his face is covered by the blindfold. “Is it true?”

“It’s true,” Satoru answers.

Megumi turns back to Ogi and asks, “You called it a murder. Was he innocent? I don’t remember anything about my dad, but I know a lot about Gojo. I know if he kills someone, it’s because they’re asking for it. So tell me the circ*mstances, and if you can convince me Gojo was wrong, I’ll go with you people and do whatever you want.”

Satoru is honestly a bit shocked both at how Megumi received the news and in his unwavering faith in him, a force so strong that even when told about his father’s death, Megumi does not doubt him even for one minute.

Ogi says, “The circ*mstances don’t matter.”

“Maybe they don’t to you, but you’re trying to convince me. So, convince me,” Megumi presses, a bit more aggressively, “Well? I’m listening.”

Invited to make a moral case for why it was wrong for Gojo to kill Toji Fushiguro, Ogi Zenin simply feels insulted.

He recognizes this block of power as a cohesive unit for the first time: Mai, Maki, and Megumi. They are outside the influence of the clan and tucked neatly under Satoru Gojo’s wings.

Megumi simply walks away from the interaction, and heads to the practice field, since that’s where he and Gojo had been going.

Gojo is very proud of Megumi for not falling for Ogi’s trifling bullsh*t.

Following his student along the path, he sees Megumi is a bit tense.

“Do you want to know the whole story?”

Megumi sighs. “It probably doesn’t matter, but if I don’t find out, I’m just going to wonder.”

“It’s a very long and bad story. But I guess we’ll talk about it today.”

They sit together on the steps by the practice field, and he removes his blindfold as this is a conversation deserving of eye contact. Megumi had known Satoru long enough that he really didn’t mind, but he wasn’t going to say anything either.

The story starts with him and Geto meeting Master Tengen and being given a very special mission, one that immediately makes them uncomfortable, but they were kids at the time. It’s hard for him to imagine Satoru as a student, and he’s never really heard him talk about Geto before either.

Megumi’s knowledge of Geto was that he was a genocidal monster who used to be a close associate of his guardian, but despite everything that has happened, Gojo still talks about Geto in a rather soft tone, like he was someone very important to him.

Even Megumi knows the rumors about them, something he’s been thinking about a lot lately for other reasons.

It is a long story, a crazy adventure with assassins and beach trips and Gojo and Geto questioning themselves and their mission. There’s no mention of his father throughout any of it, even when they get to the point where they get Riko back to the campus.

And then he tells Megumi about when Toji Fushiguro finally stepped onto the stage.

Megumi is horrified to hear his father abandoned him in order to kill teenagers that were roughly the same age he is. The idea that he murdered a girl who was only in junior high is sickening and stressful.

Now and then over the years, he’s seen Gojo’s body. Most recently, at a ryokan during a school break the year before.

He asks, “Those horrible scars you have…”

“They came from Toji.”

“And the girl he shot…”

“Dead before she hit the floor.”

It’s upsetting to Megumi, knowing his father left him to live this life.

Gojo says, “I had my reverse curse technique epiphany, because I frankly didn’t have a choice. I went looking for him. I felt like I was in a daze, or floating, or something. Weirdest mood I’ve ever been in. We had a brief battle, and I mortally wounded him. When I asked him if he had any last words, he said he sold his son. It was his way of asking if I’d save you, or at least that’s how I feel.”

Megumi finds all of this absolutely wild because after his dead ran the gauntlet against a bunch of unknowing teenagers, killing one and maiming two, causing destruction that affected many lives, and setting all kinds of horrible things in motion, he had the nerve to ask the high schooler he cut up for a favor of that magnitude?

And Gojo actually came for him?

It was the first time he’d ever really thought about it, but Gojo was only a year older than him when he became his guardian and benefactor. Megumi couldn’t even imagine taking on the responsibility of looking out for two kids, one of them being the son of his attempted murderer.

Satoru watches his reactions, but finds that Megumi has a kind soul and a powerful sense of righteousness. Maybe it’s because of his relationship with the shadows, but he paints the world black and white and he can see that Megumi is painting over his vague memories of a tall man with black ink, because he murdered a little girl for money.

Megumi remembers something and mentions, “When you told me you took in those two girls that lived with Suguru Geto and I said it was weird that you killed someone and then took their children, and you said it wasn’t your first time, I thought you were joking. One time is weird, but twice, there’s probably something wrong with you.”

Satoru answers, “Anyway, I don’t think you should have an opinion of Toji that’s too harsh. He was raised in the Zenin clan, and they’re a violent group. Killing and dying and violence are their way of life. Since he died worried about your future, I do think he cared about you, but it’s possible he didn’t have the right emotional abilities to care for you properly. Besides, there’s no value in hating someone who is dead.”

“Do you hate him?”

With a shrug, he explains, “When you kill another human being, it’s complicated. It’s sad. You’ll probably kill some curse user someday. It could be five years from now or tomorrow. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and think about how I killed someone who spent his last moments sad and worried about his baby son. Sometimes I hate him, sometimes I hate myself a little, sometimes I hate the fact that the inescapable truth is that while Toji played his role, he wasn’t the director of the play. I don’t know that taking his life served any purpose at all, but through the eyes I had at that time, it seemed like something that had to happen.

“I was very young when it happened and there were so many things I didn’t understand. But after everything, I didn’t feel young anymore.”

Even though this conversation was always going to happen, it’s gone better than Satoru ever thought it would. Part of Megumi’s rather chill personality is that he doesn’t easily lose his composure or think irrationally. Ogi Zenin thought he could light Megumi’s fuse by telling him how his dad died, but Megumi thought about the situation rationally based on the facts that he knew.

He’s grown up enough that Satoru feels like he can be honest about everything that happened and his feelings about it, and Megumi soaks up the information with an open mind.

Megumi leans back on his elbows and said, “If I had to kill someone at this point in my life and they asked me to take care of their kid, you know what I’d do?”

“What?”

“Tell you so you could do it.”

Satoru laughs and reaches out to ruffle his hair. “You know I’d do my best. Whatever that is worth. Anyway, I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this because of who I am and what I did, but I think your dad would be happy to see how well you’ve grown up. For my own reasons, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it would mean to be a parent, and I think it’s a natural feeling for someone to hope their kid becomes a better person than they are.”

It’s awkward for Megumi to try and come up with an answer to this, and he feels like he’s heard what he needs to hear. He stands up and starts stretching, saying, “Enough of this heavy stuff. Yuji just came around and he’s so good at everything. It’s kind of ridiculous and unfair. I can’t let him pass me up.”

They spar for a while, until the sun is going down, and Satoru can tell as they’re winding down that something else is on his mind.

When they finish, he asks, “What is it? I can tell you’re thinking about something. About your dad?”

“No.”

“What then? It’s fine. We can talk about anything.”

Megumi hesitates, and then says, “It’s nothing.”

“Is it your hair? I think your hair is great. You’re like a sea urchin.”

He scowls, and Satoru moves in closer, feeling like he’s losing Megumi. He has indicated there is a matter and he wishes to temporarily exit his shell to discuss it, something that is probably only possible because they’ve already talked about a lot of sensitive subjects.

Satoru says, “I’ll help you if I can.”

Megumi frowns so hard it looks like his mouth might just slide off his face. “So, I don’t know if it’ll make you mad if I ask. About a rumor about you.”

“There’s basically just one rumor about me. It’s honestly kind of amazing that despite everything that has happened in my life, people are still whispering about whether I kissed a boy in high school.”

“Is it okay if I ask if you did?”

“Is there a reason you want to know?”

Megumi says, “I like girls. But sometimes…you know.”

Satoru answers, “This is about Yuji? You two are similar to me and Suguru Geto, two potential special grades coming up and going through the same stuff, on the same path, and yet very different. You two aren’t really that competitive in the sense that you view your success as being stronger than him; you just don’t want him to leave you behind. We were very close.”

“But did that make you kind of gay? Is there like a line, and on one side of the line, you are friends, and on the other side of the line…?”

“There are no lines; everything is blurry and even if you can tell where the line is, you won’t know whether you should cross it. There were times Suguru made me feel like the gayest gay that ever gayed, but then other times we’d look at magazines with naked girls and talk about how hot they were while I sat on his lap. It was such a weird and confusing time in our lives. Nothing like bonding with your boyfriend over how much you like girls.”

The teenager answers, “That makes you sound like a degenerate.”

He laughs and says, “I think it would have been more if we’d been older. Being a teenager is such an odd experience, we weren’t really that mature, and especially, coming from families where that wouldn’t have been welcome, we hesitated. I haven’t felt that way about other men since then.”

Megumi can’t really believe he’s having this conversation with Satoru, but they’d already talked about a lot of really deep stuff, so he felt like it would be okay. Listening to Satoru explain anything about himself was always a reminder that he was somewhat chaotic at his core and the rest of him just sort of went with it.

In no way does Megumi want anyone else to know about these feelings, especially not Yuji. He’s not ready for anything to happen. He doesn’t want anything to happen. He’s just…curious.

Satoru’s advice almost always went along the lines of telling Megumi he should just lean in on whatever he felt like doing and not worrying about anything else, and it seems that’s the message here too.

He always has a way of making Megumi feel like everything was okay, even if it didn’t feel okay. It was something Megumi has always counted on, and the reason he is the only person he could ever talk to about this.

To him, the Zenin clan trying to break the loyalty that existed between them was honestly kind of silly and showed how little they understood how much of himself Gojo continued to invest in him. Even here, he is talking about a subject he protects from basically everyone else.

Megumi sighs. “So let’s say…let’s say in the distant future, maybe something happened. It’s different when two guys are together, right? One of them kind of has to, you know…? How do you know if it’s you?”

Satoru answers, “Yuji is a muscled barbarian with callused hands, and you’re a pretty boy with soft skin and long eyelashes. I thought we were having a serious conversation.”

“I’m done with this conversation.”

“You want to get some dinner?”

“Yeah, okay.”

Satoru takes out his phone and says, “Let’s invite Yuji.”

“On second thought, I’ll just eat at the cafeteria. I think I’ve had enough of you for the day.”

Jujutsu Kaisen: If One Thing Was Different - GlitterFix - 呪術廻戦 (2024)

Chapter 1: A Desperate Request

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Chapter 2: An Investigation

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Chapter 3: Politics of Power

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Chapter 4: Enter Nobara

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Chapter 5: The Vessel

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Chapter 6: Someone Satoru Never Met

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Chapter 7: Meeting Yuji

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Chapter 8: Sea Urchin's Heart

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References