"…Maybe I'm not completely screwed after all."
Then I heard it—voices. Footsteps.
Crap.
The noise from that little "blue fire incident" must've echoed through the whole hallway. I could already hear the teacher shouting something about smoke, and some students peeking out their doors.
"Yeah, nope. Not dealing with that," I muttered, and bolted.
I slipped down the back stairs and out through a side exit, cutting across the schoolyard before anyone could ask questions. My head was still buzzing from whatever just happened, and I wasn't about to explain why I was setting the hallway on fire with glowing flames.
By the time I hit the street, my breathing had evened out.
The afternoon sun was warm, the city noise familiar, and for a second… it felt almost normal.
Almost.
"Alright, Arata," I whispered to myself, "new world, new body, same hustle."
Fifteen again. No ID. No money. Not even a phone.
And judging by the cheap fabric of this uniform, this version of me was broke as hell.
So, naturally, I fixed that.
On my way downtown, I "accidentally" bumped into a few people. A businessman here, a couple of students there. Nothing major—just a wallet or two lightening my pockets' burden of emptiness.
Old habits die hard.
By the time I reached the shopping district, I had enough yen to pass as a spoiled brat. I slipped into a small family restaurant, the kind with a warm smell and bored waitresses, and dropped into a booth by the window.
The moment I sat down, everything hit me at once.
The plane crash. The school. The curse. The flames.
My hands started trembling again as I flipped open the menu.
"…What the hell is my life?" I muttered, forcing a grin at the waitress when she came by. "Uh, ramen. Extra meat. And tea."
She nodded politely and left.
As soon as she was gone, I slumped forward, pressing a hand to my chest. That faint, pulsing heat was still there—like an ember that refused to go out.
I dragged a hand through my hair and groaned. "I'm in Jujutsu Kaisen, I can see curses, and I've got some freaky phoenix knockoff technique. Great. Just great."
I leaned back, staring out the window as people passed by. The normal world kept moving, blissfully unaware of the monsters crawling in the shadows.
"Guess I better figure out how to survive before one of those things decides I look like a snack," I muttered.
The waitress set down my bowl. I gave her a tired grin.
"Thanks. You have no idea how much I needed this."
I picked up the chopsticks, hands still shaking slightly, and whispered to myself—
"…Welcome to your jujutsu kaisen, Arata. Try not to die too fast."
…
A week passed. Way too fast for my liking.
In that week, I did my best to blend in—or at least pretend I was supposed to be here. I kept going to school, mostly because I knew the story hadn't started yet. Yuji was still just a normal kid, and the cursed finger—the thing that would set everything in motion—was still sealed inside that old Stevenson screen out back.
I checked on it every day.
Every. Single. Day.
Because the moment Itadori Yuji found that finger, my quiet little grace period would end, and hell would officially begin.
Until then, I had to act natural. Or, well… my version of natural.
I didn't bother trying to make friends. I picked fights, slept in class, mouthed off to teachers, and skipped whenever I felt like it. A week was all it took for me to become "that delinquent bastard" everyone avoided.
Still, it was exhausting.
I might've looked fifteen, but mentally? I was twenty-three, stuck reliving the worst years of my life surrounded by hormonal kids who thought detention was the end of the world.
During that week, I started experimenting with cursed energy. I remembered how Yuji watched movies to train his emotions, so I copied him. Horror, romance, action—didn't matter. I sat through all of it, trying to make my cursed energy flicker, change, do something.
No luck yet.