Chapter 22

  Whenever Gojo Satoru didn’t train, he would play.

  To anyone that asked him why he would ‘waste his talent’ on frivolous pursuits like watching cartoons, playing video games, or doing sports, he would give them the same answer: he was waiting for inspiration.

  That was the thing that weak people didn’t understand about him. Gojo Satoru didn’t train to be strong. He trained to reach a new milestone, to attain a new height in a skill, whenever his imagination allowed him. He never reached for it. He just… stretched his hands, slightly, for the next level. And that was always enough.

  It hadn’t been until Satoru, at the tender age of seven, had challenged every ‘sorcerer’ in his clan worth a damn, that they had stopped hassling him about it. The current generation, with a glaring exception of him and him alone, were utterly bereft of innate techniques, and even a modicum of talent. The few that possessed enough cursed energy to exorcise a curse and perform martial arts…

  …they had still not been able to hold a candle to Satoru’s skill in hand-to-hand combat.

  They had stopped questioning him after that, letting him go at his own pace. Letting him wait patiently for inspiration to strike. When it did, he would weave his cursed energy and practice a new skill with his innate technique. He would push his Six Eyes and his concentration to his limits, making up for his downtime with a feverish energy, sprinting towards the next milestone of skill.

  Satoru didn’t really try to be strong.

  All the grown-ups kept reiterating to him why it was important that he grow strong. All they did was fill his ears about his responsibility 24/7. In an abstract sense, he understood what was at stake. Weak people were dying, and they needed strong people like him to save them, and protect them.

  At the same time, they wouldn’t actually let him do those things. According to the geezers, he was still in danger of being assassinated by curse users, because they, too, understood the meaning of Satoru’s power.

  Or at least that’s what they all thought. All they did was assign the meaning, like he was beholden to their definitions and perceptions of what the role of the strong was.

  Logically, only he could decide that. As he was the only one that was really ‘strong’.

  The last time he thought that was when he looked up at the skies on a clear day, in his clan compound in the outskirts of Tokyo, forest and greenery surrounding him on all sides.

  Hundreds of millions of razor-thin threads of cursed energy stretched across the sky, like some celestial fishers had cast their lines at the same direction.

  He had seen a—far weaker—semblance of this long before, while he was training to understand his own cursed technique.

  Right now, his Six Eyes could easily tell the connection between a shikigami and its master. The shape and property of these lines indicated that these shikigami were the type that could be directly controlled by its master.

  And the make-up of every single line’s cursed energy signature?

  Identical. All of them came from one, singular sorcerer.

  Ever since that day, Satoru had never lacked in inspiration.

  000

  Old men yapping about nonsense: Gojo Satoru’s greatest weakness.

  In being told all of his life that he was strong, Satoru made it a game to figure out where he was ‘weak’, just for fun. He considered himself like a Pokemon without a type disadvantage, and a type advantage to every other ‘mon. Therefore, finding weaknesses was necessary in order to balance the game!

  He didn’t like spicy food, but he could just choose not to eat that. Yellow tea was kind of icky, but again, it was a matter of choice. Now boredom. That was his greatest weakness. And he had no choice over whether or not to be bored. Usually, he only ever got bored if old men were involved. Old women, too. Anyone old, really. Museums and lectures about ancient family artifacts, too. So anyone and anything old. And he never had a say in things when it came to old stuff.

  Like this dumb meeting with the old men, for example. Clan head said he had to show up.

  Old things were so damn boring. They should all just die or turn to dust!

  A world with only kids sounded like the coolest thing in the world.

  Hmmm, then again, Tajiri Satoshi-sensei invented Pokemon. He gets a pass.

  Hongo Akiyoshi-sensei, too! Digimon is also great. I don’t care what anyone says, it’s just as good as Pokemon!

  All the other mangaka and video game developers, those can live.

  Anyone that didn’t know the name of Dragon Ball’s main character, however? Death sentence. All of them!

  “Pay attention, Satoru-kun.”

  Satoru sat next to his clan head, in seiza, a long table before him where many other old men also sat, most of them either drinking their green tea or yucky sake. The one that had whispered to him was his clan head. Gojo Manjiro. Like the other clan heads, he had a cup of sake to go with his tea.

  Satoru remembered a time when he had thought that Manjiro was his father. It had been weird to learn that he wasn’t, and that his real mother and father had given him away to the clan to be raised communally, as was tradition. The elders told him to consider the clan as his mother and father. Satoru still hadn’t decided on exactly how to feel about that.

  The rest of the elders were from other clans. Satoru recognized Naobito from the Zen'in clan—he had a funny mustache. Made him look like a funny guy.

  One of the other old men were probably from the Kamo clan, but Satoru didn’t recognize them at a glance. When you got super old, all faces started to blend together a little. Case in point Gakuganji from Kyoto, the principal of the Kyoto school for Jujutsu. Satoru bet that he was born old. He’d been the Kyoto principal for a hundred years, no doubt. Geezer. Just wither up already!

  …That wasn’t really fair to Gakuganji. He was weird, like all oldies were, but he actually seemed a little nice. He didn’t talk to Satoru like he was a sorcerer. The one time they’d spoken, he had asked him who his favorite singer was, and if he liked rock.

  The principal for the Tokyo school, Hatori, was a fat old man. From what his Six Eyes were telling him about the man’s energy, he… didn’t seem to have much time left in his career. He looked unhealthy.

  Unlike the other old men, he might actually die soon.

  When confronted with that fact, Satoru suddenly lost all desire to even joke about wanting people dead.

  “—still, this talk of ‘reintegration’ reeks of a quiet arrogance. How dare they presume so much of themselves?” One old man asked. “Not in recorded history have our clans ever been in leagues together. The Hibana strayed from the light well before the formation of the Jujutsu Society as we know it. They’ve been criminal scum and tsuchigumo for over a thousand years!”

  If they wanted to turn their act around, then what was wrong with that? Did they think that the bug people were trying to trick everyone?

  …Why?

  Tricking people was for the weak. Whoever controlled those shikigami was not weak at all.

  “Regardless,” Naobito said. “We can’t dismiss their utility out of hand. The Hibana clan have been the ace in the hole for these scumbag curse user clans for centuries. Since the Heian era when they banded together, even. Now, they’re claiming that they want to join us, and are being frontal about what they can do to benefit us.”

  “Don’t be fooled by shiny gifts,” Gojo Manjiro rebutted. “The sweetest drink often hides bitter poison.”

  “Twenty-seven potential sorcerers is a sweet tea, indeed,” Naobito agreed. “Even if they are of non-sorcerer backgrounds, the fact yet remains that no player worth their chips would ever go all in on the first round.” Huh? Old people talked weird. Naobito noticed Satoru’s look and explained himself. “My point is: they are hiding more potential sorcerers, no doubt. And they have demonstrated a hitherto unseen knack for locating potential sorcerers. If we act hastily without good information, we might find that we have bitten off more than we can chew.”

  “Indeed!” One elder said. “Whatever ritual that has empowered the Hibana clan to collectively be able to control that mindboggling swarm of Juchū must be understood. Then, we must deal with it!”

  A ritual?

  Like a barrier technique?

  Could barrier techniques really be that strong?

  Even if they were, whoever cast it was still really, very strong. Too strong for these old men, definitely.

  Hmm, maybe not Naobito. He was strong, too.

  “This is a serious matter,” one elder said. “No less than tens of thousands of sorcerers must be working around the clock while being enhanced by this ritual. The level of planning alone boggles the imagination.”

  “Thankfully, that scale of operation results in numerous different shatterpoints that we can take advantage of. Tilt only a few pillars and this monumental show of force may never be replicated again.”

  “It’s only one person,” Satoru yawned.

  Satoru couldn’t help but pipe up. Manjiro told him never to speak in these meetings, but what was he supposed to do? They were wrong! And stupid! And old!

  They all looked at him. He didn’t wait to be asked to clarify. He just did. “All those shikigami are only being controlled by one person.”

  “Impossible!” One man shouted. “Even if it was possible for a person to have such an enormous output with their technique, control is a different issue entirely! No human being can split their focus so many ways!”

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  “Independent shikigami, then?” One random geezer shouted. “Such a thing is possible.”

  “Perhaps each shikigami are imprinted with a copy of their master’s ego?” One other rotten asshole suggested. “Still, the scale of cursed energy…”

  Satoru had seen that scale with his own eyes, actually. Whoever controlled the Juchū was clearly using cursed spirits as batteries. And each Juchū carried its own temporary stores of cursed energy. To enable the existence of that many Juchū required that the master suck out the cursed energy of spirits across entire cities.

  Satoru explained those points patiently.

  “That… is potentially good news,” some rotten pig-bowel bastard said. “That means that only a single curse user enables this operation. That, and the ritual empowering him.”

  They kept discussing the situation.

  Sharpening their knives for a fight against someone whose abilities they had no clue about. All the while, Satoru felt a silent pressure to… grow older from these men. They wanted him old. And ready. Just so that he could be their answer to the Hibana clan’s attempts at…

  Whatever they were attempting. That wasn’t clear, but everyone was convinced that it was bad.

  The meeting finally broke up, and all the geezers finally scattered.

  While Satoru walked besides Manjiro, on his way down Mount Ushiro’s mountain staircase, he asked the old man the question. “What did they do? Why are we talking about attacking them when they want to be friends with us?”

  Manjiro scoffed. “There are no friends in this world. Only clan and rivals.”

  Satoru raised an eyebrow. “What about Naobito-ojisan?”

  “He’s not your ojisan,” Manjiro hissed, no doubt trying to look scary. Satoru didn’t find even an inch of him scary, really. “And no. None of them are our friends. There is clan, there are rivals, and then there are enemies. The Hibana clan have been nothing but enemies for a long time. Now, they claim that they want to be our friends.”

  “What if they mean it?”

  Manjiro groaned quietly, as if to say ‘why can’t you just listen when I say something’? I don’t know, old man! Maybe it’s because you’re crap at explaining yourself?!

  What was Satoru supposed to do, pretend like he understood? That was idiotic.

  “Fine. Even if they ‘mean it’, that still doesn’t matter. Jujutsu Society’s many factions share a precarious balance. Inviting a former enemy in will mean disturbing this balance. They are already disturbing this balance by empowering Jujutsu HQ—and they stand to empower it even further in time, with their gift of potential sorcerers. Do you understand this, Satoru?”

  “I understand.”

  There were the Big Three clans: the Zen'in, Gojo, and Kamo clans. Then there was Jujutsu HQ. The Big Three could decide who were in charge of HQ, along with the Prime Minister. They could also decide who became principal of each school.

  In exchange, Jujutsu HQ had a certain amount of leeway to act in interests that didn’t align strictly with any one clan. They were unofficially seen as the face of all the teeny tiny sorcerer clans out there, and the sorcerers that randomly spawned from non-sorcerer families.

  So even if the Big Three didn’t like the Hibana clan, if the Hibana clan could make HQ like them, then they could sidestep the Big Three clans entirely!

  And…

  Satoru’s eyes widened. “Ohhhh, it’s bad because when they get stronger, we get weaker, right?”

  “Right,” he said as he took a swig of his gourd of sake.

  Pathetic. Satoru laughed. Manjiro grinned at him, nodding in approval of his comprehension. Still, he couldn’t understand what Satoru was laughing at.

  But seriously. If your strength is decided based on a comparison of how well-off your rivals are, then could you ever really have called yourself strong in the first place?

  Just one more bit of evidence to add to a mounting pile, all of it suggesting how dang stupid old people were.

  In his opinion, this approach was wrong. If he were the leader, he would just invite the Hibana clan straight in, and then rough up their leader a little, just to show that they’re not all that. And if they were all that, then what could anyone do to resist them? They were strong.

  All these little tricks and strategies were just delaying the inevitable. At some point, a clash of powers would decide everything.

  Satoru’s mind was bursting with inspiration.

  000

  The seasons changed. The snow had come and gone, and the cherry blossoms had shed their petals in spring. Before I knew it, a year had passed since my ascent to the clan head.

  And eight months spent marinating in a never-ending Bath of evil.

  I had grown two inches. Two inches of growth fueled purely by positive energy. I had yet to discover an upside to this.

  The clan’s finances had stabilized. The money we were raking in from or trade of cursed silk and our investments were enough for us to break even on all our fixed costs as jujutsu sorcerers in training. Providing for the remnants of the Association clans was a hassle, but it couldn’t be avoided. We weren’t ready yet to make contact with the Society.

  We needed more power.

  And power was money.

  By now, I had a Daughter Bug in every major city of Japan. It had taken trials and tribulations aplenty to get to this point, and I wasn’t convinced that the Society wouldn’t tear my network down at a moment’s notice should they discover it. Keeping my signal extenders hidden—buried underground, hidden inside abandoned apartments, veiled by barrier techniques—had been half the work.

  Using the Juchū in my range, I used what little our clan saved up in money to invest in good stocks. My ability to eavesdrop on all movements of industry had netted us a roughly forty-percent yearly growth rate—a projected rate, since a year hadn’t passed just yet. It wasn’t enough, of course. It would compound over time, but we still needed more money.

  The sharks of the Jujutsu Society, the Big Three, were circling. Jujutsu HQ was content to stand back and watch as their patron/partner clans came to a decision surrounding us. And I knew what that decision be, should we show even an ounce of weakness.

  We needed money.

  The Yakuza had money.

  Not just their own money. They were also in the business of providing hiding places for the riches of overseas billionaires. Chinese billionaires persecuted by their government.

  The set-up was stupidly simple. The billionaire got into contact with one singular fixer of organized crime—a yakuza consigliere, and an old business partner that they had collaborated with in the past, and trusted with their life. Together, they would decide on a property to buy secretly. They would develop this property, building an apartment block or a mall on top of it. Before then, they would build an underground bunker for which the billionaire’s physical stock, mostly gold, could be moved in secret. Covered up and concealed even from the laborers doing the work.

  Then, this room would be sealed by concrete. The billionaire would go home, and the fixer would never speak a word of this treasure trove’s location to anyone, ever.

  Unfortunately for Mr. Li Yuan and Takenaka—I had witnessed the entire process go down with one Juchū. The apartment building being built atop this treasure trove was in Kobe. Li planned on keeping the location hidden even from his family members, and would only recover it should the CCP freeze his assets domestically on account of whatever corruption he traded in.

  How in the hell was I meant to resist the temptation?

  I had my shikigami dig a tunnel underneath the bunker. They moved the gold away through the tunnel, filling it behind them, before carting it back to a secure location in the Hibana clan compound, covered up so no one would see.

  By the time anyone found out, the residuals of cursed energy—scarce as they already were—would disappear entirely. The Yakuza would take the brunt of the fault, a gang war between two countries’ criminal underworlds might occur, and Jujutsu Society would be none the wiser. Why would they ever involve themselves with the goings-on of lowlives in the first place?

  I had been steadfast in my resistance of the temptation of robbing criminals. I still didn’t regret that steadfastness. Most of the opportunities afforded to me had been to hit stash houses filled with scant few millions of yen, and these robberies would be too traceable by sheer virtue of their magnitude—I would have to hit dozens of stash houses a year just to break even.

  This had truly been my best opportunity.

  Now I was a hundred and fifty million dollars up, in gold bullions.

  Twenty billion yen.

  That was power. That was potential.

  Potential similar to the goings-on of my all-too peculiar soul.

  000

  Michiko.

  I bet you’re enjoying this.

  If you can hear my thoughts, then I want you to know this.

  That makes me very happy.

  I wish I had gotten to know you better. I wish I had dared to step over the line separating us. I wish I had the guts to shoulder the burden of your story and past when you still lived.

  I wish I had been able to trust you not to reject me, back then.

  You deserved more than minding a precocious brat whose mere presence put you in constant mortal danger.

  I’m sorry.

  I hugged Michiko as tightly as I could, but I could feel my grip slacken. She had regrown her body, and the cloak covering it, but she was the size of a somewhat large teddy bear, half my height. And she hugged me back and stroked my hairless head tenderly, transmitting through our contact a nigh-endless patience for my pain and suffering.

  I felt even more sorry for keeping her alive in this state. Forcing her to endure as a cursed spirit whose barest nature was destructive and negative.

  After the events of Toji, I had made sure to request an additional binding vow out of Michiko: should I die, she too would have to die.

  And it was the truest testament to her love and devotion of me that she instantly agreed, swearing the vow. I suspected that it was the reason why she was able to recover to this point at all. In a few more years, provided I survived this Bath, she would be whole again.

  In case I died, she had to disappear with me. It was the only way to save the Hibana clan from what would follow in the wake of my demise.

  And for this leg of my spiritual journey, I sensed that death was… the next step.

  I carefully lowered the output of positive energy, gradually lowering the oxygen in my brain. Then, I lowered the output in the rest of my body. My heart instantly stopped beating. Organs started decaying in the wake of all the poison.

  I was dying.

  I had come close to death twice, before entering the Bath. Once against Sosuke. Once again after fighting Toji.

  Both times hadn’t taken me nearly to the point of true death as the few close brushes I had had in the Bath. Exploring my soul had netted me little in terms of usable knowledge. I had five layers to my soul. In learning to sense my own soul, I learned to sense the souls of others. Using my clan as a control group, I had found roughly none of the idiosyncrasies of my own soul—like how it seemed to have five souls superimposed atop one another. From my ease of being able to Reproduce inside of living hosts, I had known for a while now that my soul was sturdier than most. And the only connection I could make to this phenomenon was the fact that I had been originally born in a set of quintuplets—all of whom had been sacrificed, except for myself.

  Presumably because they were a bad omen.

  I… didn’t know where souls went after the body died. I had always assumed that the soul was just energy, and that once released, it would disperse into the air in a useless state.

  Then I had seen the gate.

  An airport gate.

  And a waiting area. It was blurry, like I was once again using my real eyes to see.

  And I saw four small figures seated in the waiting area.

  Michiko had woken me up by biting me, dragging me away from what I had assumed were the gates of the afterlife.

  I had to go back.

  I had to speak to them.

  I had to apologize.

  And before I knew it, I was back.

  This time, with more intention. I could sense my body holding on by a scant few millimeters to life. My Reverse Cursed Technique was a candle in the wind. One false move and that hair-thin connection to life that I maintained would be severed.

  They were there, once again. All four of my nameless sisters.

  “Aw,” one of them said. “You’re not supposed to be here so early!”

  Another said, “She’s not here forever, can’t you see? She’s just visiting!”

  000

  We sat on the cold tiled ground in a circle. They all looked identical to me, sans eyes and antennae. None of them should have names, or anything resembling personalities. They had died in their infancy, after all.

  “You’ve watched me,” I said.

  They nodded sequentially.

  “She’s One,” the girl to my right pointed to the one on my left.

  “She’s Two,” One pointed to the girl to her left.

  “She’s Three,” Two pointed at the one on her left.

  I looked to the girl to my right. “And you’re…”

  “Million.”

  I blinked. She grinned.

  “That’s not fair,” One said. “You’re Four!”

  “Four Thousand!”

  “How can you speak?” I asked. “Did you learn from watching me?”

  “We can hear you all the time,” One said. “Because you’re carrying us.”

  “What is this place?” I asked them.

  “It’s where you go after you die, and then you wait for a plane to come and take you somewhere good or bad!” Four, Four Thousand, or Million said. Four. She’s Four. “And we’re going to the good place because we did nothing wrong! And they’re going to take you too even though you did a bunch of wrong! Isn’t that cool? All of us are going together!”

  I… didn’t know where to even begin to process all of that.

  No. Nevermind. I set it all aside. Whatever they thought this was, or what our final destination would be, I had to put all of that aside.

  “What does it mean for our souls to be intertwined?” I asked them.

  They sequentially tilted their heads in confusion. “We don’t know,” One said. “It probably means your soul is stronger. Because we’re making it stronger.”

  “Can… can you incarnate through me?”

  One shook her head. “We tried a buncha times because it got boring here, but we weren’t allowed. We think it’s because our bodies are gone somewhere.”

  My eyes widened at that. It was a leap in logic that hadn’t occurred to me, which made it an incredibly valuable tidbit of information. “What do you mean by—“

  “Go back!” One screamed at me as she lunged for me with both hands, pushing me away.

  At that exact moment, I felt a bite in my real body. Michiko.

  I revved up my Reverse Cursed Technique, discovering that I had been skating far, far too close to death. My Reverse Cursed Technique was burning out as well. Too much decay had almost tilted me into a positive feedback loop of death.

  I’d have to spend hours, or even days, repairing the damage before trying again.

  But at least now, I had some headway.

  Great news.

  And… thank you, Michiko. For saving me.

  ‘I will never let you down again, Teira-chan,’ I heard her speak, inside my head.

  What the fuck?!