"The King of Curses is Mid and I Can Prove It"

The last thing Kenji Murakami remembered before the infinite, yawning void of absolute nothingness swallowed him whole was the argument.

The stupid, pointless, utterly meaningless argument.

He'd been sitting in his apartment — a modest one-bedroom in Osaka with a leaky faucet that dripped with the metronomic regularity of a torturer's water clock and a refrigerator that hummed a frequency scientifically proven to cause migraines — scrolling through his phone at two-thirteen in the morning. The blue light of the screen painted his face in the pale, sickly glow of a man who had made several consecutive poor life decisions, the most recent of which was opening Twitter. Or X. Or whatever the hell that festering digital landfill was calling itself these days.

He should have known better.

He always should have known better.

But the post had appeared on his timeline like a landmine hidden beneath a field of wildflowers, and Kenji, possessing the self-preservation instincts of a lemming who had read one too many motivational posters about living life on the edge, had stepped directly on it.

@SukunaGOAT_JJK420: "Sukuna is literally the greatest anime villain of all time. No one in fiction compares. He solos every verse. Building level? LOL cope harder, he's EASILY universal. JJK clears your favorite anime and it's not even close. Gege is the GOAT. Yuji is the best protagonist in shonen history. If you disagree you just have bad taste."

It had twelve thousand likes.

Twelve. Thousand. Likes.

Kenji had stared at that number — that preposterous, civilization-questioning, faith-in-humanity-eroding number — for approximately four seconds before his fingers began moving with the furious autonomy of a concert pianist possessed by the vengeful ghost of a music critic.

He had typed. Oh, how he had typed. He had typed with the righteous fury of a man who had been subjected to years — years — of unsolicited JJK takes from coworkers, from classmates, from random strangers on the internet, from the barista at his local coffee shop who had once held his latte hostage until he admitted that Gojo Satoru was "the coolest character in anime history." He had smiled politely and agreed because he wanted his coffee, but the resentment had calcified in his chest like cholesterol in the arteries of a man who ate nothing but gas station hot dogs, and now — NOW — it was time for that resentment to be unleashed upon the world.

His response had been magnificent.

It had been surgical.

It had been a goddamn dissertation.

He had explained, with the patience of a kindergarten teacher and the precision of a forensic accountant, that Sukuna was — and he could not stress this enough — generic. The man was a strong guy who liked fighting and looked down on everyone. That was it. That was the whole character. You could find that exact archetype in approximately sixty-seven percent of all battle shonen ever published, and at least half of those did it better. Frieza had more personality. Cell had more charisma. Madara had more drip. Even goddamn Dio Brando, who was essentially a bisexual British vampire who threw steamrollers at people, had more narrative depth than Ryomen Sukuna, the so-called "King of Curses," whose entire personality could be summarized as "I am strong, therefore I am right, now watch me cut things."

He had explained that Yuji Itadori was "alright." Not bad. Not great. Alright. A perfectly serviceable protagonist who suffered from the same fundamental flaw as Naruto Uzumaki — namely, that he wasn't actually all that impressive without the ancient supernatural entity living inside him doing most of the heavy lifting. Luffy had the creativity. Asta had the determination. Deku had the — okay, bad example, Deku was mid too, but at least Deku had the excuse of being written by a man who clearly lost the plot somewhere around the Overhaul arc. Yuji's big power-up at the end of the manga wasn't earned so much as it was Gege Akutami reaching down from the heavens like the hand of God and slapping a "PROTAGONIST BUFF" sticker on his forehead because the story needed to end and someone had to punch Sukuna really hard.

He had conceded — because Kenji was nothing if not fair — that the ending was genuinely good. Great, even. A billion times better than My Hero Academia's ending, which had the narrative satisfaction of a sneeze that never quite materialized. He had conceded that Gojo was cool, that Yuta Okkotsu was genuinely awesome and should have been the real protagonist since he was infinitely more interesting and had cooler powers than Itadori, and that the manga had its moments of genuine brilliance.

But then he had gotten to the power scaling.

Oh, the power scaling.

He had written seven paragraphs — SEVEN — explaining, with citations and panel references and the barely contained fury of a physics teacher watching someone claim that the Earth was flat, that JJK was building level. BUILDING LEVEL. Large building level on a good day with a tailwind and the power of friendship and maybe if you squinted really hard. Not planetary. Not continental. Not even city level. Building. Level. There were no feats — ZERO FEATS — that supported anything higher. The same way Dragon Ball, despite decades of fans insisting otherwise, had characters who were at best continental because despite all the screaming and all the aura and all the dramatic declarations about destroying universes, the actual on-screen feats amounted to Frieza blowing up Namek, Frieza blowing up Earth in Super, and Beerus doing that one thing that one time and then never again. That was it. Those were the planetary feats. The sum total. The complete collection. When literally no one else in the entire franchise demonstrated anything even approaching that level of destructive output, it brought into question the entire point of power scaling as a discipline, which — Kenji had concluded with the weariness of a man who had gazed too long into the abyss — might have been the point all along.

He had hit send.

He had smiled.

And then he had gotten up to use the bathroom, tripped over the power cord of his laptop, knocked a glass of water onto the bathroom floor, slipped on the puddle, cracked the back of his skull against the edge of the porcelain bathtub with a sound like a coconut being dropped from a third-story window, and died.

Just like that.

No dramatic last words. No profound final thoughts. No montage of cherished memories playing across the theater screen of his fading consciousness. Just a wet slapping sound, a sharp crack, a brief and surprisingly intense flash of pain, and then nothing.

He died on his bathroom floor at two-seventeen in the morning with his pants around his ankles and his last contribution to human discourse being a ten-thousand-character Twitter thread about why JJK fans were delusional about power scaling.

It was, he would later reflect, exactly the death he deserved.

Consciousness returned like a bad hangover — slowly, painfully, and with the dawning realization that something had gone terribly, fundamentally, catastrophically wrong.

The first thing Kenji became aware of was the presence.

It was vast. It was ancient. It was overwhelming in the way that standing at the edge of a cliff was overwhelming, or staring into the open mouth of a volcano, or reading the comments section of a YouTube video about religion. It pressed against the inside of his skull — or what he assumed was his skull — with the casual, suffocating weight of an ocean, a dark and fathomless thing that tasted of blood and ash and the kind of malice that didn't just want to hurt people but found the concept of "people" itself to be fundamentally offensive.

No — not a presence. A residue. Like the heat left behind in a chair after someone stood up, or the smell of smoke in a room where a fire used to be. Whatever had been here — whatever ancient, terrible consciousness had occupied this space before Kenji's awareness flooded in to fill the void — was gone now. Evaporated. Dissolved. Replaced by a twenty-six-year-old Twitter warrior from Osaka who had the cosmic significance of a dust mite and the combat experience of a man whose most violent encounter had been an argument about parking spaces.

Sukuna was gone. Kenji was here. And the power — all of it, every drop of that fathomless, world-ending cursed energy — was his now.

Lucky him.

The second thing he became aware of was the body.

It wasn't his.

The proportions were wrong. The height was wrong. The weight distribution was wrong. The center of gravity was off by approximately three inches, which didn't sound like a lot until you tried to exist in a body that wasn't yours and realized that three inches might as well be three miles. The muscles were different — denser, harder, coiled with a kind of feral, predatory power that his original body, which had possessed all the physical definition of an undercooked noodle, had never come close to achieving. The skin felt different. The bones felt different. Even the teeth felt different — sharper, somehow, and more numerous than he remembered teeth being.

And then there were the markings.

He could feel them on his face — lines etched into his skin like tattoos drawn by a calligrapher with a grudge, curving across his cheeks and forehead and down his neck in patterns that pulsed with a faint, thrumming warmth. They felt alive. They felt like veins carrying something that wasn't quite blood, something older and darker and infinitely more volatile.

The third thing he became aware of was the hand.

He looked down.

His hand — or rather, the hand that was currently attached to the body he was currently inhabiting — was holding something. Something wet. Something red. Something that looked suspiciously like—

"Is that a finger?" he said.

His voice came out wrong. It was deeper, rougher, edged with a resonance that vibrated in his chest like a struck tuning fork. It was the kind of voice that made the air itself flinch, that carried with it the implicit promise of violence the way storm clouds carried the implicit promise of rain. It was, objectively speaking, a very cool voice, and Kenji hated it immediately because he recognized it.

He recognized all of it.

The markings. The residual presence. The body. The voice. The finger.

No.

No, no, no, no, no.

Kenji looked up.

He was standing in what appeared to be the ground floor of a building — a school, maybe, or some kind of institutional structure — and the floor beneath his feet was covered in a thin sheen of something viscous and dark that he chose not to examine too closely. The walls were cracked. The ceiling had a hole in it. And surrounding him, scattered across the floor like discarded toys, were the twisted, dissolving remains of something that definitely wasn't human, leaking a substance that was less "blood" and more "concentrated nightmare fuel."

And standing approximately twenty feet away, watching him with expressions that occupied the narrow spectrum between "horrified" and "fascinated," were two people.

The first was tall. Very tall. Ridiculously tall. The kind of tall that made you wonder if they'd been stretched on a rack as a child or if one of their parents had been a telephone pole. They had white hair — not gray, not silver, white, the pure, shocking, attention-demanding white of fresh snow — that fell across their face in a carefully disheveled style that had probably taken forty-five minutes and half a bottle of product to achieve. They were wearing a blindfold — a strip of dark fabric wrapped across their eyes — and beneath it, their face was...

Actually, wait.

Their face was...

Huh.

Kenji blinked.

He blinked again.

He tilted his head to the side, squinted, and performed the mental equivalent of rebooting a computer by unplugging it and plugging it back in.

The tall person with the white hair and the blindfold was a woman.

Not just a woman, but a woman. The kind of woman who made the word "woman" feel inadequate, who made you want to invent new words just to have something appropriately descriptive to call her. She was wearing what appeared to be a modified version of a Jujutsu High uniform — the dark high-collared top, the loose pants, the whole ensemble — except the uniform was performing the structural engineering equivalent of containing a tsunami in a teacup because the body beneath it was absurd.

She was statuesque in the most literal sense — built like a Renaissance sculptor's fever dream, all impossible curves and dramatic proportions that should have been physically impractical but instead managed to look like they'd been designed by a deity with a very specific aesthetic preference and zero interest in subtlety. Her waist was narrow, her hips were wide, and her chest was — well. Her chest was there. Aggressively, unapologetically, gravitationally improbably there. The fabric of her uniform top was engaged in a heroic, losing battle against a bosom that could only be described as "weaponized," each breath she took causing the material to strain in ways that surely violated several laws of textile physics. Her thighs, visible where the pants hugged them, were thick enough to have their own area code — dense, powerful, sculpted pillars of muscle and softness that spoke of someone who could crush a watermelon between them and look bored while doing it.

She was Gojo Satoru.

Or rather, she was some kind of impossibly, ludicrously, offensively attractive female version of Gojo Satoru, and she was staring at him — or rather, at the body he was inhabiting — with an expression that was equal parts wariness and something else. Something warmer. Something that looked almost like...

Kenji didn't notice.

He was too busy having an existential crisis.

The second person was shorter, younger, with dark hair that fell in messy, unkempt strands around a face that was angular and serious and possessed the kind of quiet intensity that usually belonged to people who had strong opinions about the correct way to organize bookshelves. They were also wearing a Jujutsu High uniform, and they were also—

They were also a girl.

Fushiguro Megumi — because that's who this clearly was, the same dark hair, the same sharp features, the same general aura of "I am tired and would like to be anywhere else" — was a girl. A short, compact, devastatingly curvy girl whose uniform was fighting an even more desperate battle than Gojo's, because while Gojo was tall enough that the proportions at least had some vertical space to distribute themselves across, Megumi was maybe five-foot-four on a generous day, and every single ounce of her impossible measurements was compressed into a frame that had absolutely no business containing that much... that much.

Her hips were wide. Not merely wide in the conventional sense, not the polite, understated wideness of someone who "had hips" the way one might "have a car" or "have a hobby." No. These were hips that demanded attention, that warped the geometry of the space around them, that made the fabric of her pants perform feats of elasticity that would have made a materials scientist weep with confused admiration. Below those hips, her thighs — good god, her thighs — were thick, plush, powerful things that pressed together when she stood, creating a silhouette that was less "human being" and more "the answer to a question that no one had asked but everyone was thinking." Her rear, partially visible from the angle at which she was standing, was a monument to excess — round, full, jutting outward with a defiance that bordered on architectural, a shelf upon which one could comfortably rest a beverage and have it remain stationary through a minor earthquake.

Above the waist, the situation was no less excessive. Her chest, constrained beneath the dark fabric of her uniform, was generous in the way that a firehose was "a little bit of water." Each curve strained against the material with the quiet insistence of something that would not be contained, would not be ignored, would not be politely overlooked. The zipper of her top was pulled up as far as it could physically go, and it still wasn't enough — a valley of pale skin was visible at the collar, the fabric gaping slightly with each breath as though the uniform itself had simply given up.

She was also staring at him with an expression that was part fear, part awe, and part something else entirely. Her cheeks were flushed. Her lips were slightly parted. Her eyes — dark, serious, beautiful — were fixed on him with an intensity that had nothing to do with combat readiness and everything to do with—

Kenji didn't notice this either.

He was, as previously established, in the middle of an existential crisis, and his brain had neither the bandwidth nor the inclination to process the fact that the two people standing in front of him were the most aggressively, almost punitively attractive women he had ever seen in any life, original or otherwise.

No, Kenji's brain was busy processing something else entirely.

You've got to be fucking kidding me, he thought.

Because of all the anime he could have been reincarnated into — ALL of them — whatever cosmic lottery governed the process of transmigration had seen fit to drop him into the ONE series he had spent years being mildly irritated by. Not One Piece, where he could have eaten a cool Devil Fruit and gone on pirate adventures. Not Naruto, where he could have learned some actually interesting jutsu. Not even My Hero Academia, which at least had the decency to be set in a world where superpowers were common enough that he could have gotten something fun.

No.

He got JJK.

He got Sukuna.

The most generic, boring, "I am strong and that is my entire personality" villain in modern shonen, shoved into the body of a well-meaning but ultimately unimpressive teenager, surrounded by characters who existed primarily to die in increasingly dramatic ways so the fans could post "GEGE YOU MONSTER" on social media.

This was his afterlife.

This was his punishment.

He must have done something truly terrible in his previous life. Maybe the Twitter thread had been that bad.

But complaining about it — especially out loud, especially in front of people who were clearly waiting for "Sukuna" to do something terrifying — was a luxury he could not afford. Because Kenji might not have liked JJK, and he might have thought Sukuna was the most mid antagonist in modern anime, but he wasn't stupid.

He was inside Yuji Itadori's body. He had Sukuna's face on, Sukuna's markings on, Sukuna's voice coming out of his mouth. Two jujutsu sorcerers were standing twenty feet away, one of whom was the single most powerful being on the planet, watching him for any sign of what the King of Curses was going to do next.

If he acted wrong — too different, too suspicious, too not-Sukuna — questions would be asked. Questions he couldn't answer without revealing that the real Sukuna had been replaced by a dead Twitter user from Osaka, which would raise approximately ten thousand additional questions, none of which had answers that wouldn't make him sound completely insane.

So Kenji did the only reasonable thing.

He played the part.

Sort of.

"Hmph," he said, because "hmph" was a versatile sound that could mean anything from "I am contemplating the futility of existence" to "this body is mildly inconvenient" and was exactly the kind of noise a generic anime villain would make while surveying a room full of dead things.

He looked down at his hands. Turned them over. Flexed the fingers. Made a show of examining the body he was inhabiting with the detached, clinical interest of a buyer inspecting merchandise — which, as far as anyone watching was concerned, was exactly what Sukuna would be doing after waking up in a new vessel for the first time in a thousand years.

Internally, his thoughts were screaming.

Okay. Okay okay okay. I'm Sukuna. I'm the King of Curses. I'm inside Yuji Itadori. This is the beginning of the story. Episode one. Chapter one. The finger-eating scene. Gojo and Megumi are here. Everything is about to kick off and I need to — what? What do I do? What would Sukuna do?

He knew what Sukuna would do. Sukuna would rampage. Sukuna would kill things. Sukuna would laugh maniacally and monologue about how pathetic humans were and maybe rip someone's arm off just to prove a point, because Sukuna's entire personality was "violence is my hobby and contempt is my vocation."

Kenji had zero interest in doing any of that.

But he couldn't just say that.

"This body," he said, keeping his voice low, measured, dripping with the kind of aristocratic disdain that he imagined a thousand-year-old curse would use when talking about the flesh prison it had been crammed into. He was drawing on every anime villain he'd ever watched, every "dark and brooding antagonist" performance he'd ever rolled his eyes at, channeling them all into a character that was essentially "Sukuna, but make it someone who is deeply tired and would rather be doing literally anything else." "It's... adequate."

That felt right. Vague, dismissive, appropriately villainous. Not a lie, not a revelation, just the kind of throwaway assessment that a being of supreme power might make about its new accommodations.

"Sukuna," Gojo said, and her voice was bright, teasing, dripping with the casual arrogance of someone who knew they were the strongest person in any room they entered and found this fact more amusing than anything else. Except there was something else in it — something beneath the arrogance, a warm and honeyed undertone that softened the edges of the word in a way that was almost... affectionate? "So you finally decided to show up, huh? I was starting to think the kid just had really weird taste in snacks."

She smiled, and the smile was blinding — not metaphorically, but almost literally, a flash of white teeth and curved lips and the kind of raw, concentrated charisma that could probably be weaponized if someone figured out how to bottle it. It was the smile of someone who was used to being the most impressive thing in existence and had long since stopped being modest about it.

It was also the smile of a woman who was looking at him — at Sukuna — the way a cat looked at a particularly interesting toy.

Kenji didn't notice.

He was too busy looking down at his hands.

Four eyes. He had four eyes. He could feel them — the extra pair, sitting just above the normal ones, blinking in alternation like the world's worst optometrist's nightmare. He could also feel the extra mouth, the one on his left cheek, its lips curled into a grin that he hadn't authorized and didn't appreciate. And he could feel the markings, all of them, pulsing with a power that was vast and ancient and—

Boring.

It was boring.

The power of Ryomen Sukuna, the King of Curses, the most powerful jujutsu sorcerer in history, the alleged pinnacle of cursed energy manipulation, flowed through him like a river of liquid potential, and the overwhelming, undeniable, inescapable impression it gave him was that it was incredibly boring.

Because he knew what it did.

He knew all of it.

Cleave. Dismantle. The slashing attacks. The cutting. The chopping. The dicing. The mincing. The julienning. The whole repertoire was just cutting things in various ways. That was it. That was the whole kit. A thousand years of cursed energy evolution and the absolute peak of jujutsu sorcery had produced a man whose entire combat philosophy could be summarized as "what if scissors, but more?"

Even the Domain Expansion — Malevolent Shrine — was just cutting but everywhere. Wow. Revolutionary. Truly the pinnacle of creative combat application. Someone give this man a Michelin star.

I'm in hell, Kenji thought, while his face — Sukuna's face — maintained its expression of regal, contemptuous disinterest.

"Hey," said a voice from the floor.

Kenji looked down.

There was a severed arm on the ground. It wasn't his. Attached to no body that he could see. Just... a severed arm. Lying there. On the floor. Doing nothing.

He looked back up.

Megumi was holding her remaining arm — because she was, apparently, missing the other one — against her side, and there was blood seeping through her fingers, and her face was pale, and her eyes were wide, and she was looking at him with an expression that combined mortal terror with something that might have been — in a different context, in a different universe, in a situation that didn't involve severed limbs and dead monsters — desire.

Her lips trembled. Her chest heaved with rapid, shallow breaths, each inhalation causing the strained fabric of her uniform to stretch in ways that redefined the word "taut." A bead of sweat traced a path down the side of her neck, disappeared into the collar of her top, and embarked on a journey that Kenji absolutely did not track because he was not paying attention.

"S-Sukuna..." she breathed, and her voice was small and shaking and somehow, impossibly, reverential. Her eyes were wide, her pupils dilated, her cheeks flushed with a combination of pain and blood loss and something that was categorically, unmistakably, absolutely not fear. Her lips — full, soft, slightly parted — formed his name — Sukuna's name — with a tenderness that was completely inappropriate for a girl who was actively hemorrhaging.

Kenji didn't notice.

What he did notice was the arm on the floor.

And the stump on her shoulder.

And the blood.

The real Sukuna wouldn't have cared. The real Sukuna would have laughed, or sneered, or made some dismissive comment about the fragility of human bodies. The real Sukuna would have used this moment to establish dominance, to demonstrate his complete disregard for the lives of everyone around him, because that was Sukuna's whole thing — being an asshole to underscore how powerful and above-it-all he was.

Kenji wasn't going to do that.

But he wasn't going to explain why he wasn't going to do that, either.

He just... did something different.

Without any ceremony, without any dramatic declaration, without any of the theatrical grandstanding that the real Sukuna would have engaged in, Kenji reached into the vast reservoir of cursed energy inside him and did something that Ryomen Sukuna had canonically never done in his thousand years of existence.

He used Reversed Cursed Technique on someone else. Willingly. Without being asked. Without any ulterior motive.

He walked over, knelt down, picked up the severed arm, held it against the bloody stump of Megumi's shoulder, and pushed.

The positive energy flowed out of him like sunlight — warm, golden, alive — flooding into the ruined flesh and bone and sinew with a gentleness that was completely at odds with the malevolent markings on his face and the four-eyed visage of the King of Curses. He could feel the tissue reconnecting, the bone fusing, the nerves re-knitting themselves in patterns of impossible biological complexity, and it was fascinating. The energy moved through the injury like water filling cracks in dried earth, finding every broken thing and making it whole, and Kenji felt something that the real Sukuna would have found absolutely repulsive.

He felt satisfaction.

Not the satisfaction of destruction, not the hollow pleasure of watching something break, but the genuine, warm, surprisingly pleasant satisfaction of fixing something that was broken. Of using this absurd, overwhelming, world-ending power for something constructive.

The arm reattached. The wound closed. The blood stopped flowing.

Megumi Fushiguro, short and serious and built like a Renaissance painting of a fertility goddess, stared at him with an expression of such naked, undisguised, burning adoration that it could have set fire to asbestos. Her reattached hand moved — slowly, tentatively — and her fingers brushed the back of his hand where it rested against her newly healed shoulder. The touch was feather-light, reverent, the kind of touch reserved for sacred things and precious things and things that you were afraid would disappear if you held them too tightly.

Kenji didn't notice.

He stood up and brushed off his knees.

Silence.

He looked up.

Gojo was staring at him.

Megumi was staring at him.

They were both staring at him with expressions that occupied a region of the emotional spectrum that Kenji had no map for — somewhere between "complete disbelief" and "something that would get this story flagged for mature content if it were being told in a less restrained medium."

Behind the blindfold, Gojo's expression had shifted. Whatever analytical detachment she'd maintained before was cracking, spiderwebbing like glass under pressure, replaced by something rawer, something more personal. Her lips — full and curved and the kind of pink that cosmetics companies spent millions trying to replicate — were slightly parted. Her breathing had changed, deepened, each inhale lifting that extraordinary chest in a slow, hypnotic rise that made the fabric of her uniform creak audibly. She was leaning forward — just slightly, just enough to shift her center of gravity — and the posture pulled her uniform tight across her torso, the dark material becoming a second skin that left absolutely nothing about the geography beneath it to the imagination.

She pushed her blindfold up.

Just slightly. Just enough.

Two eyes — just two, but what eyes they were — peered at him from behind the curtain of white hair.

They were the most extraordinary eyes Kenji had ever seen in either of his lives. Each iris was a universe unto itself, a swirling maelstrom of blue and silver and something that wasn't quite color at all but rather the visible manifestation of a perceptive ability so profound that it bordered on omniscience. The Six Eyes — not literally six eyes, but the legendary cursed technique that bore the name, concentrated in two impossibly beautiful blue irises that glowed with an inner light like stars trapped behind glass. They were eyes that could see infinity, that could process the entirety of existence in all its complexity, that could perceive the fundamental nature of cursed energy and the fabric of reality itself with a precision that made microscopes look like looking through a foggy window.

They were also looking at him like he was the most interesting thing they had ever seen, and they had seen everything.

Gojo's lips curved into a smile that was simultaneously predatory and gentle, a paradox of an expression that managed to convey "I could destroy you without effort" and "I find you fascinating" in equal measure. She leaned forward — a motion that caused a chain reaction of physics-defying movements in her chest region that would have required a team of structural engineers to properly document — and fixed him with those impossible, iridescent, hungry blue eyes.

"You're different," she said softly. "You're not... what I expected."

The words were careful. Measured. Probing. She was testing him, Kenji realized — poking at the boundary between what Sukuna was supposed to be and what he was actually presenting as, looking for cracks, looking for explanations, looking for something.

Kenji's pulse — Yuji's pulse — Sukuna's pulse — whoever's pulse it was, it spiked for a fraction of a second before he wrestled it under control.

Careful, he told himself. She's fishing. Don't bite.

"A millennium in a box changes one's perspective on certain things," he said, and the words came out smooth, unhurried, dripping with the casual authority of someone who had lived long enough that nothing surprised them anymore. It was a non-answer. A deflection wrapped in the language of vague profundity. The kind of thing a mysterious ancient being would say, without actually committing to any specific claim that could be challenged or disproven.

It was also complete bullshit, but Kenji had a lifetime of experience in the fine art of sounding like he knew what he was talking about when he absolutely did not. Twitter had prepared him for this moment.

Gojo's eyes narrowed. Those two brilliant, impossible, all-seeing blue eyes focused on him with an intensity that felt like standing under a heat lamp — warm, penetrating, impossible to hide from. The Six Eyes saw through illusions, saw through deceptions, saw the true nature of cursed energy and everything connected to it.

But they couldn't read minds.

And they couldn't see into a soul that was fundamentally, structurally different from what they expected to find — a soul that didn't belong to Ryomen Sukuna or Yuji Itadori or anyone else from this world. Kenji's soul was a foreign object, a piece of a different puzzle jammed into the wrong box, and the Six Eyes could see that something was off, but they couldn't tell what.

Gojo stared.

Kenji stared back.

The extra mouths on his face grinned involuntarily, because apparently Sukuna's body had its own ideas about facial expressions and those ideas were uniformly sinister.

The silence stretched.

And then Gojo's smile widened — not into something suspicious, but into something delighted. The smile of a woman who had found a puzzle she couldn't immediately solve, which was apparently so rare and so thrilling for someone with the Six Eyes that it triggered a response that was less "analytical concern" and more "Christmas morning."

"Interesting," she murmured, and the word was warm, and intimate, and aimed at him like a weapon that had been disguised as a compliment.

Kenji didn't notice.

"I'm going to give the brat his body back," he said.

Gojo's eyebrows rose above the line of her blindfold.

Megumi's newly reattached hand flew to her mouth, her dark eyes widening with something that looked almost like disappointment — a flash of it, quick and bright, before she smothered it beneath her usual expression of stoic composure. But her body betrayed her: she leaned forward, just slightly, toward Kenji, toward Sukuna, as though drawn by a gravitational pull she couldn't resist. The motion caused her torn uniform to shift, the damaged fabric parting further over her hip, revealing another inch of smooth, pale skin stretched taut over the dramatic swell of—

Kenji didn't notice.

"Already?" Gojo asked, tilting her head. The motion caused her white hair to shift, revealing the elegant line of her neck and the curve of her jaw. "You just got here. Don't you want to... I don't know... rampage a little? Monologue about the inferiority of modern sorcerers? Threaten to devour someone's soul? It's tradition."

"I'll pass," Kenji said.

"You'll pass."

"I have better things to do than perform for an audience."

And that was true. Deeply, fundamentally true. Not in the way that Sukuna would have meant it — not as a statement of superiority, not as a dismissal of lesser beings unworthy of his attention. But as the genuine sentiment of a man who had just inherited the most powerful cursed energy in the world and could already feel the ideas multiplying in his head like bacteria in a petri dish, each one more creative and more exciting than the last, and none of them — not a single goddamn one — involved cutting things.

He had work to do.

"Until next time," he said, because it felt like the kind of thing an enigmatic ancient entity would say before dramatically withdrawing, and then — before Gojo could ask any more questions, before Megumi could look at him with any more of that terrifying, incomprehensible warmth, before he could accidentally say something that would blow his cover — he relinquished control.

It was surprisingly easy. The body — Yuji's body — had a natural equilibrium, a default state that favored its original owner, and all Kenji had to do was stop trying and let the balance reassert itself. The markings faded. The extra eyes closed. The additional mouth sealed shut with a sensation like a zipper closing. The vast, suffocating presence of Sukuna's power receded, folding back into the depths of Yuji's soul like a wave retreating from the shore, and Kenji went with it.

Down.

Down into the inner world of Yuji Itadori.

Down into the space that was meant to be Sukuna's prison and was now, apparently, his living room.

The inner world of Yuji Itadori was, architecturally speaking, deeply unimpressive.

It looked like a warehouse. A very large, very empty, very depressing warehouse, with concrete floors and exposed support beams and the kind of fluorescent lighting that made everything look slightly sick. There were no windows. There were no decorations. There was no furniture except for a single, lonely folding chair sitting in the exact center of the vast, echoing space, looking about as comfortable as a conversation with a tax auditor.

Kenji stood in the middle of this warehouse — or rather, the metaphysical projection of his consciousness stood in the middle of this warehouse, because his body was currently a spiritual parasite attached to the soul of a teenager — and took it all in with the resigned disappointment of a man who had checked into a hotel that looked nothing like the website photos.

Nice place, he thought. Very minimalist. Very "abandoned Soviet bunker chic." I love what you've done with the nothing.

The warehouse offered no response, because it was a warehouse.

Kenji sat down in the folding chair.

It was exactly as uncomfortable as it looked.

He closed his eyes — his metaphysical eyes, in his metaphysical body, in this metaphysical warehouse; the layers of abstraction were giving him a headache — and began to think.

Okay. So. Situation assessment.

He was dead. His original body was dead, lying on a bathroom floor in Osaka with a cracked skull and, probably, a Twitter thread that would never receive the engagement it deserved. That life was over. Gone. Finished. Closed casket, if anyone cared enough to have a funeral, which, given the state of his social life, was optimistic.

He was now Sukuna. Or rather, he was occupying the metaphysical space that Sukuna was supposed to occupy in Yuji Itadori's body. He had Sukuna's power, Sukuna's cursed energy, Sukuna's technique — and he was going to ignore the last one entirely because it was boring and he refused to spend his second life being a glorified blender.

He was in the world of Jujutsu Kaisen. A world he had never particularly liked. A world he had actively argued against on social media. A world whose power scaling he had spent seven paragraphs debunking at two in the morning on the night he died.

Building level.

He was building level at best.

The thought was somehow both depressing and reassuring.

And, most pressingly, he had to figure out what the hell he was going to do now.

The real Sukuna had plans. Kenji knew those plans — he'd read the manga, after all, even if he hadn't liked it. The finger collection, Megumi's Ten Shadows, the Heian-era contingencies, the whole elaborate chess game that would eventually culminate in a body-snatching scheme that would make the entire fandom lose its collective mind.

He was going to do none of that.

Absolutely none of it.

He wasn't going to collect fingers. He wasn't going to manipulate Megumi. He wasn't going to scheme or plot or machinate or engage in any of the cartoonishly villainous nonsense that the real Sukuna would have done. He was just going to sit here, in this metaphysical warehouse, and figure out how to do cool shit with cursed energy.

Starting with RCT.

He could feel the cursed energy around him — Sukuna's energy, his energy now, a vast and fathomless ocean of negative power that thrummed with the accumulated malice of a thousand years. It was dense. It was potent. It was the kind of energy that would make any jujutsu sorcerer in the world weep with envy, and all the original Sukuna had ever done with it was cut things.

Kenji took a breath that he didn't physically need — because, again, metaphysical body — and reached into that ocean.

The energy responded immediately, eagerly, like a dog that had been waiting for its owner to come home. It surged through his metaphysical form, crackling and alive and hungry for direction, for purpose, for intent. It wanted to destroy. That was its nature — cursed energy was born from negative emotions, from fear and anger and suffering, and its fundamental inclination was toward destruction, toward entropy, toward making things not exist anymore.

Kenji didn't want to destroy.

Kenji wanted to create.

RCT — Reversed Cursed Technique — worked by taking negative cursed energy and multiplying it by itself, two negatives making a positive, transmuting the energy of death and suffering into something that was fundamentally, paradoxically alive. It was the alchemist's dream made real — lead into gold, destruction into creation, poison into medicine. And it was hard. Even among the most talented sorcerers in history, the ability to use RCT was vanishingly rare. The mental gymnastics required — holding two contradictory concepts in your mind simultaneously, forcing destructive energy to become constructive through sheer force of will — was the kind of thing that broke brains and burned out souls.

But Kenji had something that no other practitioner of RCT in history had ever had.

He had apathy.

He didn't care about the destruction. He didn't find it appealing. He didn't revel in the negative energy the way Sukuna had, didn't let it color his thoughts and stain his intentions. The cursed energy was just... energy to him. Fuel. Raw material. He had no emotional attachment to its destructive nature, no philosophical alignment with its entropic purpose. He was, in a very real sense, the worst possible host for cursed energy and simultaneously the best possible candidate for RCT, because the mental barrier that prevented most sorcerers from inverting their energy — the deep, instinctual reluctance to turn their primary weapon inside out — simply didn't exist for him.

He didn't want to cut things.

He wanted to do literally anything other than cut things.

And so, with the casual ease of a man flipping a light switch, Kenji took the vast ocean of negative cursed energy inside him, divided it in half, multiplied it by itself, and produced a stream of positive energy so pure and so potent that it lit up the inner world of Yuji Itadori like a second sun.

It was beautiful.

It was golden and warm and alive in a way that cursed energy never was, pulsing with a vitality that made the air itself feel healthier. It flowed through his metaphysical body like liquid sunlight, filling every corner of his being with a warmth that was the exact opposite of the cold, hungry malice that defined Sukuna's power. It felt good. It felt right. It felt like the universe was finally working the way it was supposed to, like a puzzle piece clicking into place after being jammed into the wrong slot for a thousand years.

And Kenji, sitting in his uncomfortable folding chair in the middle of a metaphysical warehouse, smiled.

Not the cruel, predatory smile of Sukuna.

Not the tight, controlled smile of a man who was plotting something terrible.

Just... a smile.

The smile of a man who had figured out something cool and wanted to see how far he could push it.

He had no intention of using Cleave. Or Dismantle. Or the fire arrow. Or Malevolent Shrine. Or any of Sukuna's canonical abilities. Ever. Not once. He would rather fight with his hands tied behind his back and his eyes closed than resort to the most boring combat technique in the history of supernatural warfare.

Instead, he was going to master RCT at a level that even the original Sukuna — who could use it, because the bastard was annoyingly talented at everything — had never bothered to explore. Offensive RCT, like Yuta had done. Black Flash on command. Cursed energy reinforcement taken to absurd extremes. Barrier techniques that did things no one had ever imagined. He was going to take every creative, interesting, cool technique he'd ever seen in the manga and master all of them, and he was going to ignore the canonical Sukuna moveset entirely because it was the combat equivalent of using a blender for every meal — technically functional, but soullessly, depressingly, aggressively boring.

The real Sukuna was a one-trick pony.

Kenji was going to be a whole circus.

On the surface, Yuji Itadori regained consciousness with a gasp, the markings fading from his face like ink in rain. He blinked, disoriented, and looked around at the ruined building, the dead curses, and the two women staring at him with expressions that he didn't have the emotional maturity to fully interpret.

"Uh," he said, in his normal, non-terrifying, distinctly teenager voice. "What happened?"

"You ate a finger," Megumi said. She was flexing her newly reattached arm experimentally, opening and closing her fist with a look of confused wonder. The moonlight streaming through the hole in the ceiling caught the sheen of sweat on her skin, illuminating the curves of her face, the fullness of her lips, the way her uniform clung to every excessive, gravity-defying contour of her body like shrink wrap on a topographical map of excess.

She looked at Yuji — at the body that contained, somewhere in its depths, the entity that had just healed her — and her expression softened into something private and warm and far too intense for a first meeting.

"Oh," Yuji said, looking at his hands. "Right. The finger. That was... gross."

"You also turned into Sukuna for about three minutes," Gojo added, and she was leaning against a crumbling wall with the carefully constructed casualness of someone who was, in fact, not casual at all. Her arms were crossed beneath her chest, which — given the truly excessive dimensions of that chest — had the effect of pushing everything upward and forward in a display that could generously be described as "physics-defying" and more accurately described as "an act of war against good taste and structural engineering." She was smiling, but her eyes, covered once again by the blindfold, were — Kenji imagined — burning with curiosity behind the dark fabric. "He said some... interesting things."

"Like what?"

"He healed Megumi's arm."

Yuji's mouth fell open. He looked at Megumi. Megumi looked back at him with an expression that was clearly meant for the thing inside him rather than for him specifically — an expression of such concentrated, directed, almost painfully earnest wanting that it would have made a stone blush.

"He... healed...?"

"Yep." Gojo popped the "p" with the casual emphasis of someone who enjoyed dropping conversational grenades and watching them explode. "Just walked right over, picked up her arm, stuck it back on, and healed it with RCT. Voluntarily. Without being asked. Without asking for anything in return. And then he said something about having 'better things to do' and gave you your body back."

She pushed off the wall and walked toward Yuji, each step measured and deliberate and accompanied by a degree of physical motion that would have required a physics engine to properly render. Her hips swayed with each stride, a metronome of movement that drew the eye with gravitational inevitability, and her thighs — thick, powerful, wrapped in dark fabric that might as well have been painted on — moved with the fluid grace of someone who had turned the simple act of walking into something dangerously close to art.

She stopped directly in front of him, close enough that he could smell whatever impossibly expensive product she used in her hair, and looked down at him from her considerable height. Even through the blindfold, the weight of her attention was palpable — a warm, pressing thing that had nothing to do with the Six Eyes and everything to do with the woman who wielded them.

"Your Sukuna," she said softly, "is very, very interesting."

And then she smiled, and the smile was warm, and the smile was genuine, and the smile was directed at something she could sense behind Yuji's eyes — something that shouldn't exist, something that defied expectation, something that was, against all odds and all precedent and all reasonable prediction, different.

Deep inside Yuji's soul, in the metaphysical warehouse that was his new home, Kenji Murakami sat in his folding chair and practiced turning cursed energy into positive energy and back again, over and over, like a musician running scales.

He was going to learn Black Flash.

He was going to master offensive RCT.

He was going to develop techniques so creative, so innovative, so wildly outside the box that the entire jujutsu world would have to collectively sit down and reevaluate everything they thought they knew about cursed energy.

He was going to do everything the real Sukuna never did, because the real Sukuna was boring and generic and Kenji refused — refused — to be a one-note villain in a story he hadn't even liked.

But first, he was going to take a nap.

Because dying, being reincarnated, having an existential crisis, healing a stranger's severed arm, and fundamentally reinventing his approach to supernatural combat had been, all things considered, a pretty exhausting evening.

He woke up — inasmuch as a metaphysical consciousness inhabiting the soul of a teenager could "wake up" — to the sound of fighting.

Not metaphysical fighting. Real fighting. Physical, violent, happening-right-now fighting, transmitted to him through the sensory connection he shared with Yuji's body like a phone call from a very noisy bar.

Kenji opened his eyes.

The warehouse was still a warehouse. Still ugly. Still depressing. Still lit by the kind of fluorescent lighting that made everything look like it was dying. But now there was something else — a window, of sorts, a rectangular portal floating in the air in front of him that showed him what Yuji's body was seeing and hearing and feeling in real-time.

What Yuji's body was seeing and hearing and feeling was: pain.

Lots of pain.

The portal showed a landscape of chaos — a different building this time, larger, darker, filled with the miasmic stench of cursed energy and the wet, organic sounds of something very large moving through a space that was too small for it. Yuji was on his back. There was blood on his face — his blood, Kenji could feel the sting of the cuts, the throb of bruises forming beneath the skin. And looming over him, enormous and grotesque and radiating the kind of malice that made the hair on the back of your neck stand up and file for relocation, was a Curse.

A big one.

A really, really big one.

It was vaguely humanoid in the way that a child's drawing of a person was vaguely humanoid — it had the right number of limbs and a head-shaped protrusion at the top, but the proportions were wrong, the textures were wrong, the everything was wrong. Its skin was the mottled blue-black of a bruise, stretched tight over muscles that bulged and writhed like bags full of snakes. Its mouth — if it could be called a mouth — was a vertical gash that ran from what might have been its chin to what might have been its forehead, lined with teeth that were less "teeth" and more "a collection of broken glass that happened to be arranged in a roughly dental configuration." It had too many eyes, placed with the random carelessness of a child putting stickers on a refrigerator, and every single one of them was looking at Yuji.

Grade One curse. Maybe Special Grade. Hard to tell from inside the soul warehouse, but the cursed energy it was putting out was thick — a visible haze of dark power that clung to everything it touched and made the air taste like copper and despair.

Megumi was there too.

She was fighting — or rather, she had been fighting and was now in the process of not fighting anymore, because the curse had apparently gotten tired of her interference and had swatted her into a wall with enough force to leave a body-shaped impression in the concrete. She was slumped against the wall, conscious but dazed, her uniform torn in several strategic places that revealed expanses of smooth, pale skin stretched taut over curves that had no business being in a combat zone. A rip along her left side exposed the swell of her hip, the curve of her waist, and the beginning of something that—

Kenji didn't notice.

"MEGUMI!" Yuji screamed, and Kenji felt the scream reverberate through their shared body, felt the surge of adrenaline and fear and determination that powered it. Say what you would about Yuji Itadori — and Kenji had said plenty, mostly on Twitter — the kid had heart. Raw, unpolished, bleeding-all-over-the-place heart.

The curse swung.

Its fist — a mass of gnarled muscle and black chitin that was roughly the size of a compact car — descended toward Yuji with the ponderous inevitability of a judge's gavel, and Kenji watched through the portal as Yuji rolled — barely, desperately, his body screaming in protest — and the fist hit the floor where he'd been lying a fraction of a second earlier, shattering the concrete into a spider web of cracks that radiated outward like the world's most violent modern art installation.

Building level, Kenji thought.

The thought was automatic, reflexive, the mental equivalent of a twitch. He couldn't help it. Even in the middle of watching his host body nearly die, the power scaler in him was categorizing. That impact — the fist, the floor, the radius of destruction — was building level. Solid building level. Enough to reduce a small structure to rubble, not enough to threaten a city block. His Twitter thread had been right.

Not that it mattered right now.

What mattered was that Yuji was outmatched. The kid was fast — faster than he should have been, actually, that superhuman physical ability putting in serious work — and he was strong, his punches landing with enough force to make the curse stagger and leak that thick, dark blood-equivalent that curses used instead of the real thing. But it wasn't enough. The curse was bigger, tougher, and its cursed energy was dense enough to absorb Yuji's physical blows like a mattress absorbing tennis balls.

Yuji needed cursed energy.

Yuji, at this point in the story, could not control cursed energy.

But Kenji could.

The realization hit him like a bucket of cold water — not gradually, not with the slow dawning of understanding, but all at once, a flash of clarity so sharp it was almost painful. He could help. He was sitting in this ugly warehouse watching his host body get beaten like a drum when he had access to the largest reservoir of cursed energy in the entire world. He couldn't take over the body — well, he could, but he didn't want to; the whole "Sukuna takes the wheel" thing was exactly the kind of cliché he was trying to avoid — but he could share.

He could push cursed energy outward, from his soul to Yuji's, like priming a pump. He could fill the channels that Yuji didn't know how to fill yet, supplement the kid's physical abilities with the supernatural edge they needed.

And he could do it creatively.

No cutting.

No Cleave. No Dismantle. No opening a goddamn Malevolent Shrine.

Just raw cursed energy, applied with precision and creativity, channeled through Yuji's body in ways that the real Sukuna would have considered beneath him because the real Sukuna had all the creative vision of a lawnmower blade.

Kenji stood up from his folding chair.

"Hey, kid," he said.

In the real world, Yuji flinched. Not from the curse's attack — from the voice in his head. Sukuna's voice. Kenji's voice. The deep, resonant, four-eyed-monster-king voice that was apparently his permanent vocal setting now.

"S-Sukuna?" Yuji stammered, ducking under another swing that would have removed his head from his shoulders. "What do you—"

"Shut up and punch it."

"What?"

"Punch. It. The big ugly thing that's trying to kill you. Hit it."

"I've been hitting it! It's not—"

"You've been hitting it with your fists. Hit it with your fists and cursed energy. I'm going to push some energy into your arms. When you feel it — and you'll feel it, trust me, it's going to feel like your bones are vibrating — you punch. Hard. As hard as you can. And you time it perfectly. The energy and the impact have to land at the same instant. Not a second apart, not a fraction of a second apart — the same instant. Do you understand?"

Yuji, to his credit, did not ask follow-up questions. The curse was swinging again, a wide, sweeping backhand that would have cratered a wall, and Yuji ducked under it with the instinctive grace of someone whose body had been designed for combat even if his brain was still catching up.

"Ready?" Kenji said.

"Ready!"

Kenji reached into the ocean of cursed energy — his cursed energy now, Sukuna's energy repurposed, redirected, reimagined — and pushed.

Not outward. Not in every direction. Not in the wasteful, indiscriminate flood that would have been the default. He pushed it through the connection between his soul and Yuji's, threaded it through the channels of the kid's body like water through pipes, and directed it — precisely, deliberately, creatively — into Yuji's right arm.

The energy flowed. Yuji gasped. His right arm erupted with power — not the dark, malevolent aura of Sukuna's cursed energy, but something different, something that Kenji had modified on its way through the connection. He had taken the energy and shaped it, compressed it, refined it, turned the vast and unfocused ocean into a needle-thin stream of concentrated force that gathered in Yuji's fist like a bullet in a chamber.

But he didn't stop there.

Because Kenji had been thinking. In the warehouse, in the quiet, in the nap that hadn't been restful at all because his mind had been racing the entire time, he had been thinking about Black Flash.

0.000001 seconds.

That was the window. The infinitesimal fraction of time in which cursed energy had to be applied to a physical blow in order to create the spatial distortion known as Black Flash. A window so small that no human brain could deliberately target it, that even the most talented sorcerers in history could only achieve it through instinct and luck and a state of hyper-focused consciousness that bordered on the transcendent.

But Kenji wasn't relying on instinct or luck.

He was relying on math.

Cursed energy traveled at a specific speed through the human body. Physical force traveled at a different speed. The distance from the reservoir to the point of impact was quantifiable. The time differential was calculable. And Kenji, who had been an engineering student before he died and who had spent his entire first life thinking about systems and optimization and the precise calibration of inputs to produce desired outputs, had done the calculations.

In his head.

In the metaphysical warehouse.

While sitting in a folding chair.

He knew exactly when to release the cursed energy relative to the physical impact. Not because he was talented. Not because he was a genius. But because he was an engineer, and engineers solved problems, and this was a problem, and the solution was math.

He released the energy.

Yuji's fist connected with the curse's torso.

And the world went black and red and violent.

BLACK FLASH.

The spatial distortion erupted from the point of impact like a small, localized apocalypse. The air itself cracked — not metaphorically, but literally, the space around Yuji's fist fracturing along invisible fault lines as the physical and supernatural forces compressed together into something that was greater than the sum of its parts. The curse's torso caved — not broke, not dented, caved, the flesh and chitin and muscle collapsing inward like a building imploding, the shockwave of the impact radiating outward in a sphere of devastated air that shattered every window in the building and sent debris flying in every direction.

The sound was indescribable. Not a boom. Not a crack. Not any of the onomatopoeia that human language had developed to describe the sounds of violence. It was something deeper, something more fundamental — the sound of reality being dented, a bass note so low it was felt rather than heard, resonating in the chest and the bones and the teeth like the universe itself was flinching.

The curse flew.

Not "was pushed back." Not "staggered." Flew. It went from standing in front of Yuji to embedded in the far wall of the building in the time it took to blink, traveling the distance with the graceless speed of a cannonball, its body leaving a trail of that dark not-blood in the air behind it like a comet's tail. When it hit the wall, the wall didn't just crack — it ceased to exist in a roughly curse-shaped area, the concrete and rebar and structural supports vaporized by the force of impact.

Building level, Kenji noted with grim satisfaction. Solid building level. Called it.

Yuji stood in the middle of the devastation, his right fist still extended, his body wreathed in the fading afterglow of the Black Flash. His eyes were wide. His mouth was open. His chest was heaving with the labored breathing of someone who had just experienced something that transcended his understanding of how the world worked.

"What," he breathed, "was that?"

"Black Flash," Kenji said from inside the warehouse, and he couldn't keep the satisfaction out of his voice. "You just landed a Black Flash on your first try. Well, I landed it. You just provided the fist. But semantics."

"That was... I... it felt..."

"Like the universe folded in half and you were the crease?"

"YES! That's exactly—"

"Yeah, that's the thing about Black Flash. It's not just a power boost. It's a perception boost. You just experienced pure, undiluted connection to cursed energy. Every sorcerer who lands a Black Flash walks away from it understanding cursed energy on a fundamentally deeper level. You're welcome."

Yuji looked at his fist. Then at the hole in the wall where the curse had been. Then back at his fist.

"You... helped me? Why?"

Kenji considered the question.

He needed a reason. A Sukuna reason. Something that sounded appropriately selfish and self-serving, something that wouldn't raise eyebrows or prompt further investigation, something that fit the character he was supposed to be playing without requiring him to actually be the character he was supposed to be playing.

"If you die, I die," he said flatly. "This body is my vessel. I have no interest in being exorcised because a brat who doesn't know how to throw a proper punch got himself killed by a curse that's barely worth my attention."

It was cold. It was pragmatic. It was exactly the kind of thing Sukuna would say — self-interested to the core, framing any act of assistance as pure strategic calculation rather than anything approaching genuine concern.

It was also a lie.

The truth was simpler and more embarrassing: Kenji had helped because watching Yuji get beaten up made him feel bad. Not in a cosmic sense, not in a narrative sense, not in any sense that he was prepared to examine or articulate. He just... didn't like watching a kid get hurt when he had the power to prevent it. It was a basic, uncomplicated, profoundly human impulse, and it had nothing to do with self-preservation and everything to do with the fact that Kenji, despite his cynicism and his Twitter rants and his general air of detached irritation, was not actually a bad person.

He was just kind of a dick.

There was a difference.

But Yuji didn't need to know that. Nobody needed to know that. As far as anyone was concerned, Sukuna was helping because Sukuna was selfish, and selfishness was a perfectly acceptable motivation for a thousand-year-old curse.

"That... makes sense, I guess," Yuji said, frowning with the earnest confusion of someone who wanted to believe the best in people — even people who were technically parasitic curse entities squatting in his soul. "But you healed Megumi's arm, too. How does that—"

"DUCK."

Yuji ducked.

The curse was moving again.

It peeled itself from the wall like a scab, pieces of concrete and rebar falling from its body in a cascade of rubble. It was damaged — significantly damaged, the front of its torso a ruin of cratered flesh and leaking darkness — but it wasn't dead. Grade One curses were tough. This one was really tough. The kind of tough that made you understand why the jujutsu world had a grading system and why anything above Grade Two was considered a Serious Problem.

It opened its vertical mouth and screamed.

The scream was not a sound that should have been possible in a universe governed by physics. It was multi-tonal, layered, a chorus of agony and rage that resonated on frequencies both above and below the range of human hearing. It shattered what remained of the building's windows. It cracked the floor. It made the air itself ripple, as though reality was a pond and the scream was a stone dropped into its center.

And it was accompanied by a surge of cursed energy so dense that it became visible — a wave of dark, oily power that swept outward from the curse like a shockwave, distorting the air and leaving a taste of copper and bile on Yuji's tongue.

"It's mad," Kenji observed.

"I NOTICED," Yuji said.

"Good. Hit it again."

"With WHAT? My fist is—" Yuji looked at his right hand. The knuckles were raw, the skin split, blood oozing from a dozen small cuts. The Black Flash had done damage to the deliverer as well as the target. "My hand is broken!"

"It's not broken. It's bruised. There's a difference."

"It doesn't FEEL like a difference!"

Kenji sighed. From inside the warehouse, he reached into the cursed energy again, but this time he didn't push it through the connection to Yuji. This time, he inverted it.

Negative to positive.

Cursed energy to reversed cursed energy.

Destruction to creation.

The golden warmth of RCT flowed through the connection like sunlight through a window, pouring into Yuji's body and finding the damage — the broken capillaries, the micro-fractures in the bones of his hand, the torn muscle fibers, the split skin — and fixing it. Not slowly, not gradually, but all at once, the healing energy knitting flesh and bone together with the rapid, almost aggressive efficiency of a body that had decided it was done being injured and was going to do something about it immediately.

Yuji's hand closed into a fist. Unbroken. Unbruised. Stronger than it had been before, because the RCT hadn't just healed the damage — it had reinforced the healed areas, the positive energy leaving behind a lattice of invisible power that made the repaired tissue denser, tougher, more resistant to future injury.

"How did you—" Yuji started.

"Questions later. Survival now. LEFT!"

Yuji threw himself left, avoiding a follow-up kick that cratered the floor in a spray of concrete shrapnel.

Kenji could see the curse's movements. Not through any supernatural ability — not through Sukuna's technique or the Ten Shadows or any other plot-convenient power. He could see them because the curse was telegraphing. Every movement was preceded by a shift in weight, a tensing of muscles, a redirection of cursed energy. It was fighting like a brute — all power, no finesse, relying on its overwhelming physical superiority to compensate for its complete lack of technique.

It was, Kenji reflected, fighting a lot like Sukuna.

Hit hard. Hit first. Hit until the thing you're hitting stops moving.

Boring.

"Listen to me," Kenji said, and his voice was sharp, focused, the voice of someone who had identified a problem and devised a solution and needed the person implementing that solution to pay attention. "This thing is stronger than you. Tougher than you. It has more cursed energy than you. In a straight fight, it wins. Every time. Without question. You cannot out-punch this thing."

"Then what—"

"You out-think it."

The curse swung again. Yuji dodged — barely — and backed up, putting distance between himself and the monster. The curse followed, lumbering, relentless, each step shaking the floor.

"It's a Grade One curse," Kenji continued, talking fast, talking over the sound of concrete breaking and a monster screaming and a teenage boy breathing like he'd just run a marathon. "It's powerful but it's not smart. It attacks in straight lines. It follows momentum. When it commits to a swing, it can't change direction. That's its weakness."

"What do I do?"

"You let it swing. You dodge at the last possible second — and I mean the LAST possible second, not a comfortable margin, not a safe distance, the absolute razor's edge of 'oh god I'm going to die' — and you counter in the gap between its attack and its recovery. And you don't just counter with a punch. You counter with this."

Kenji pushed energy again. But this time, he did something different.

He layered it.

Two types of energy, stacked on top of each other like cards in a deck. The first layer was standard cursed energy — dark, negative, sharp, channeled into Yuji's fists with the focused precision of a laser beam. The second layer was reversed cursed energy — golden, positive, warm, wrapped around the first layer like a glove around a hand.

The result was... unique.

Kenji didn't have a name for it yet. He hadn't planned it. It had come to him in the moment, the way that the best ideas always did — not through deliberation but through instinct, through the creative alchemy of necessity and imagination and the desperate need to do something cool instead of just cutting things.

Positive energy was anathema to cursed spirits. It was anti-curse. The conceptual opposite of everything they were. If cursed energy was the darkness, positive energy was the light. And wrapping a fist's worth of cursed energy in a shell of positive energy meant that when the fist made contact with a curse, the outer layer of positive energy would react with the curse's body first — disrupting its structural integrity, weakening its resistance, essentially dissolving the armor before the attack landed.

And then the inner layer of cursed energy would hit.

Like a bullet piercing weakened armor.

Like a key turning in a lock that had already been picked.

Kenji decided to call it, tentatively, Hollow Strike.

"Your fists are glowing," Yuji said.

"I know."

"Like, really glowing. One color inside and another color outside."

"I KNOW."

"Is that normal?"

"Absolutely not. Hit the thing."

The curse swung.

Yuji didn't dodge.

He stepped in.

It was the bravest and stupidest thing Kenji had ever seen anyone do, and he had once watched a man on YouTube try to fight a kangaroo. Yuji stepped directly into the path of the curse's fist, his body twisting, his hips rotating, his feet planted in a stance that was more instinct than technique, and he punched.

Not at the fist.

At the arm.

Yuji's glowing fist connected with the curse's forearm — midway between the elbow and the wrist, the thickest part, the most heavily armored — and the layered energy did exactly what Kenji had designed it to do.

The outer shell of positive energy detonated on contact.

It was silent — or rather, it operated on a frequency beyond sound, a conceptual disruption rather than a physical one. The curse's flesh recoiled from the positive energy, the cursed matter that comprised its body flinching away from the anti-curse force like flesh from a hot iron. In the span of a nanosecond — less — the area of impact was stripped of its supernatural resistance, the dense cursed energy that armored the curse's body dissolving like frost in sunlight.

And then the inner core of cursed energy — concentrated, refined, compressed to a density that made diamonds look like tissue paper — punched through the weakened area with the irresistible force of a shaped charge detonating inside a bank vault.

The curse's arm broke.

Not cracked. Not fractured. Broke. Snapped clean in half at the point of impact, the upper and lower portions separating with a wet, splintering sound that was equal parts bone and chitin and something else entirely. Dark not-blood sprayed in an arc that painted the ceiling, and the curse screamed — that multi-tonal, reality-warping scream — and staggered backward, its remaining arm coming up to clutch the stump of its broken limb.

"AGAIN!" Kenji shouted, and Yuji didn't hesitate.

He surged forward, closing the distance with a speed that was half superhuman physicality and half the cursed energy that Kenji was pumping into his legs like nitrous into an engine. The curse tried to backpedal, tried to create distance, but Yuji was faster — so much faster with Kenji's energy supplementing his movements — and he was already inside its guard, already winding up, already bringing his fist forward in an arc that traced a path from his hip to the curse's torso with the coiled precision of a piston firing.

Kenji pushed. Layered. Compressed.

Timed it.

0.000001 seconds.

BLACK FLASH.

The second Black Flash of the fight detonated against the curse's torso with a violence that made the first one look like a polite disagreement. The layered energy — positive outer shell, negative inner core — combined with the spatial distortion of the Black Flash to produce an impact that was categorically, qualitatively different from anything that should have been possible at this power level.

It was a Hollow Strike amplified by Black Flash.

Kenji hadn't planned this combination. He hadn't theorized it. He hadn't run calculations or considered the implications or done any of the careful, methodical work that he'd done for the basic Black Flash timing. This was pure improvisation — creative instinct married to mathematical precision married to the sheer, overwhelming volume of cursed energy at his disposal, all of it converging on a single point of impact at a single instant in time.

The curse's torso didn't collapse this time.

It exploded.

The front half of the creature's body simply ceased to exist in a sphere of devastated space, the matter that had comprised it unmade at the fundamental level by the contradictory forces of positive and negative energy colliding within the amplification field of a Black Flash. The positive energy tore the cursed matter apart at the conceptual level — denying its right to exist, negating the negative energy that held it together — while the amplified negative energy shattered what remained, the spatial distortion multiplying the force to the power of 2.5 and turning what should have been a devastating blow into something approaching annihilation.

What remained — the back half, the limbs, the head — hung in the air for a frozen, surreal moment, suspended by the shockwave like a portrait on a wall that didn't exist anymore, and then fell.

Wetly.

In pieces.

The building shook. The floor cracked in concentric rings radiating outward from the point of impact like ripples in a pond made of concrete. Dust rained from the ceiling in curtains of gray, thick enough to taste, thick enough to choke on. The air was filled with the acrid scent of burned cursed energy — a smell like ozone and copper and something older, something primordial, something that existed at the intersection of life and death and couldn't decide which side it belonged to.

And Yuji Itadori stood in the middle of it all, fist extended, body wreathed in the fading light of two types of energy that had never been combined in this way before in the history of jujutsu, and breathed.

He just... breathed.

In. Out. In. Out.

The sound of a teenager who had just killed something that should have been unkillable, and who was only beginning to understand what that meant.

"Holy shit," he whispered.

"Language," Kenji said, and then paused, because he had zero right to correct anyone's language and he wasn't even sure why that had come out of his mouth. "Actually, no, that's appropriate. Holy shit is correct. You just killed a Grade One curse with two punches and a technique I literally invented five seconds ago."

"You... what?"

"Invented it. Just now. On the spot. I call it Hollow Strike. It's a layered energy application — positive energy shell over a negative energy core. The positive energy strips the curse's resistance, and the negative energy does the actual damage. Combined with Black Flash, it's..." Kenji paused, running the numbers in his head. "It's something. I'll need to test it more. But it's something."

"You invented a technique during a fight?"

"I was bored."

"You were BORED? I was DYING!"

"You weren't dying. You were in danger. There's a difference. Dying implies a conclusion. Danger implies ongoing risk. You were at approximately seventy percent danger and maybe twelve percent dying. Comfortable margins."

"COMFORTABLE!?"

"For me. I was sitting in a chair."

Yuji opened his mouth to respond, then closed it, then opened it again, and then seemed to decide that arguing with the ancient curse entity living in his soul was a battle he was not equipped to win. He looked at his hands — his glowing, undamaged, impossibly powerful hands — and shook his head slowly.

"You're weird," he said.

"I've been told."

Megumi was stirring against the wall.

She groaned — a low, soft sound that rose from somewhere deep in her chest and passed through her throat and her lips with a vibration that was approximately eighty percent pain and twenty percent something that Kenji's brain categorically refused to analyze. She pushed herself to a sitting position, blinking through the dust and debris with those dark, serious eyes that seemed to focus and unfocus like a camera lens seeking clarity.

When they found clarity, they found Yuji.

Or rather, they found the fading glow on Yuji's fists, the destroyed curse, the cratered floor, the shattered building — the unmistakable evidence of a power that should not have been possible for a first-year student with no training and no technique.

"Itadori," she said, and her voice was hoarse but steady. She pushed herself to her feet with the careful, practiced movements of someone who had been thrown into enough walls to develop a routine for it. Her uniform was, at this point, more tear than fabric — the left side was almost entirely gone, revealing the sweeping curve of her waist, the dramatic swell of her hip, the beginning of the thick, powerful thigh beneath it, all wrapped in smooth, pale skin that was dusted with concrete powder and decorated with a constellation of small cuts and bruises. Her chest, straining against what remained of her top with the quiet determination of an entity that refused to be contained, heaved with deep, steadying breaths that pulled the torn fabric tight in some places and let it gape in others, creating a patchwork of concealment and revelation that was arguably more devastating than simple nudity would have been.

She looked at the destroyed curse.

She looked at Yuji.

She looked at the fading glow on his fists.

And something in her expression shifted — softened — melted — into an expression of such profound, devastating, overwhelming tenderness that it would have reduced a lesser man to a puddle of confused feelings. Her dark eyes glistened. Her full lips parted. Her body — that impossible, excessive, gravity-defying body — leaned toward him with the unconscious inevitability of a flower turning toward the sun.

"He helped you again," she said. Not a question. A statement. An acknowledgment of the impossible — that the most evil entity in human history was, for reasons that defied all logic and all precedent, helping.

"Yeah," Yuji said, rubbing the back of his neck with the sheepish energy of a teenager who had just been caught doing something cool and didn't know how to handle the attention. "He's... weird. He says it's because if I die, he dies, but..." He trailed off, frowning. "I don't know. It doesn't feel like that. It feels like he actually—"

"Don't project," Kenji interrupted from inside the warehouse, keeping his voice flat and disinterested and thoroughly Sukuna-esque. "I don't care about you. I care about this body. There's a difference."

Yuji shut up.

But Megumi's eyes — fixed on the space behind Yuji's eyes, on the thing that lived in the depths, on the thing that healed and helped and invented techniques in the middle of combat out of something that might have been boredom or might have been something else entirely — did not change. They stayed warm. They stayed soft. They stayed adoring in a way that went beyond gratitude, beyond respect, beyond any reasonable emotional response to the revelation that a parasitic curse entity was being slightly less evil than expected.

They stayed fixed on him — on Kenji — with the quiet, burning intensity of someone who had decided something important and was not going to be dissuaded by logic or reason or the protests of the entity in question.

Kenji didn't notice.

He was already back in his folding chair, eyes closed, replaying the fight in his head. Not the victory. Not the destruction. The technique. The layered energy. The timing of the Black Flash. The way positive and negative energy had interacted when compressed together. The possibilities. The potential.

He had ideas.

So many ideas.

What if he could sustain the RCT offensive shell continuously, not just on impact? What if he could create ranged applications — projectiles of layered energy that could be thrown, launched, directed? What if he could apply Black Flash not just to physical strikes but to energy-based attacks, creating ranged Black Flashes that could devastate targets from a distance?

What if he could develop a Domain Expansion that wasn't just "cutting but everywhere?"

What if he could create a Domain that was the opposite — a space of pure positive energy, a Domain of Creation instead of a Domain of Destruction? A space where cursed spirits were unmade not by violence but by the fundamental incompatibility of their nature with the environment? Where healing was instant and automatic? Where the concept of death itself was denied?

The real Sukuna would have laughed at these ideas.

The real Sukuna would have called them weak, naive, the fantasies of a fool who didn't understand that power was destruction, that strength was the ability to break things, that the measure of a warrior was the pile of corpses they left behind.

But the real Sukuna was generic.

And Kenji refused to be generic.

He opened his eyes.

The warehouse was still ugly. The chair was still uncomfortable. The fluorescent lighting was still making everything look slightly diseased.

But for the first time since he'd woken up in this body — this world, this story, this cosmic joke of a second life — Kenji Murakami felt something that might, if you squinted hard enough and tilted your head at the right angle, be called excitement.

Not because of the power.

Not because of the cursed energy.

Not because he was the King of Curses in a world of sorcerers and spirits and supernatural combat.

But because he had an idea.

And the idea was creative.

And in a world where the most powerful being in history had spent a millennium doing nothing but cutting things, creativity was the most dangerous power of all.

In the real world, Gojo Satoru — all six feet and impossible inches of her, all white hair and ridiculous curves and legs that went on longer than some people's commutes — arrived at the scene of the fight seventeen minutes after it was over.

She surveyed the destruction with the practiced eye of someone who had seen a lot of destroyed buildings and was capable of ranking them on a scale of "minor inconvenience" to "existential crisis." This one fell somewhere in the middle — solidly "major property damage," probably "several strongly worded letters from the municipal government."

She looked at the remains of the curse.

She looked at Yuji, standing in the middle of the rubble, looking dazed and exhausted and somehow triumphant.

She looked at Megumi, who was standing next to Yuji, closer than was strictly necessary, her body angled toward him — toward the thing inside him — in a way that was less "combat partner" and more "planet orbiting a star." Her dark eyes occasionally flickered to something behind Yuji's eyes with an expression that would have required a team of psychologists and a several-page consent form to properly analyze.

Gojo reached up and pushed her blindfold up.

Just an inch. Just enough.

Two eyes — brilliant, impossible, blazing blue — surveyed the scene with the penetrating clarity of the Six Eyes. They read the residual energy signatures in the air, the lingering traces of power that clung to the devastation like fingerprints on a crime scene. They saw the dark smear of standard cursed energy, and they saw the golden residue of positive energy, and they saw the way the two had been woven together — layered, compressed, combined — in a configuration that the Six Eyes had never encountered before.

Not in Gojo's lifetime.

Not in the recorded history of jujutsu.

Not ever.

Her beautiful blue eyes widened.

Then they narrowed.

Then they widened again.

Her lips parted. Her chest — that magnificent, physics-defying, gravitationally improbable chest — heaved with a sharp intake of breath that pulled her uniform tight in ways that defied structural analysis. Her hands, which had been casually tucked in her pockets, came out. Her posture shifted from "casually observing" to "intensely focused" in the space between heartbeats.

She saw the Black Flash signature. Two of them. In the same fight. From a vessel who had been a sorcerer for less than a day.

She saw the Hollow Strike residue — the layered energy application, positive over negative, that no one in history had ever conceptualized, let alone executed.

She saw the absence of Sukuna's canonical techniques — no Cleave, no Dismantle, no trace of the slashing attacks that defined the King of Curses. Just raw energy, creatively applied, in combinations that shouldn't have been possible and definitely shouldn't have been used by a being whose entire canonical repertoire was "cut."

Gojo's mouth opened.

Then closed.

Then opened.

"Oh," she said softly.

Then again, softer: "Oh."

And then she smiled.

Not her usual smile — not the cocky, I-am-the-strongest, aren't-I-amazing smile that she wore like armor. Not the playful, teasing smile she deployed in social situations to keep everyone at arm's length while appearing friendly. This was different. This was private. This was the smile of a woman who had spent her entire life being the most powerful person in the world, who had searched everywhere for something that could make her feel curious again, who had been slowly, quietly dying of boredom behind a blindfold and a smile — and who had, for the first time, for the first time in her life, encountered something that made the boredom retreat.

Her blue eyes — two of them, extraordinary, each one containing the accumulated perceptive power of the most potent visual ability in the history of jujutsu — fixed on Yuji with an intensity that transcended analysis. They weren't studying him anymore. They were looking at him. At the thing inside him. At the impossible, paradoxical, endlessly fascinating entity that had taken the most boring powerset in jujutsu history and turned it into something that made the Six Eyes want to stare.

"You," she said, and the word was aimed past Yuji, through Yuji, into the depths where Kenji sat in his folding chair and thought about energy manipulation and didn't notice anything. "You're going to be fun."

Deep inside Yuji's soul, in the metaphysical warehouse, sitting in the world's most uncomfortable folding chair, Kenji Murakami was not paying attention to any of this.

He was too busy inventing the future.

He was sketching energy configurations in his mind — diagrams of layered cursed energy applications, theoretical frameworks for sustained RCT fields, mathematical models for reliable Black Flash timing. He was thinking about barrier techniques and Domain Expansions and the fundamental nature of positive energy and whether it could be used not just to heal and not just to harm but to create — to generate matter, to reshape reality, to do things that no one in this world had ever imagined because everyone was too busy cutting things.

He was thinking about how to make Black Flash reliable — not a lucky accident, not a moment of transcendent instinct, but a tool. A technique that could be deployed at will, consistently, repeatedly, every single time. He already had the math. He already had the timing. What he needed was practice, repetition, the conversion of conscious calculation into unconscious reflex, the transformation of "I know how this works" into "I can do this without thinking."

He was thinking about what would happen when he combined all of it — the offensive RCT, the layered energy, the consistent Black Flash, whatever other techniques he could develop — into a cohesive fighting style that was entirely his own, that bore no resemblance to Sukuna's canonical abilities, that was creative and unpredictable and interesting in a way that the King of Curses had never been.

He was thinking about all of this, and he was thinking about none of what was happening in the real world, where two of the most attractive women in the history of any fictional medium were looking at the body he inhabited with expressions that ranged from "fascinated" to "smitten" to "something that would require a content rating to describe."

He was also wondering if there was a metaphysical equivalent of a better chair, because his ass was killing him.

And somewhere, in a part of his mind that he wasn't consciously aware of, a very small voice — the voice of the engineer, the pragmatist, the man who couldn't help calculating even when there was nothing to calculate — noted that he was going to have to be more careful.

Not with the techniques. Not with the energy. Not with the fighting.

With the role.

He was Sukuna. He had to be Sukuna. Not the real Sukuna — never the real Sukuna, that one-dimensional, catastrophically boring, cut-everything-and-laugh Sukuna — but a version of Sukuna that was plausible. A Sukuna who was different enough to be interesting but not so different that people started asking questions he couldn't answer. A Sukuna who helped when it suited him and snarked when it didn't and maintained just enough of the original's arrogance and detachment to keep anyone from looking too closely at the soul behind the markings.

He had to be careful with Gojo. Those eyes — those two brilliant, terrible, all-seeing blue eyes — could perceive things that shouldn't be perceivable. They couldn't read his mind, but they could read his energy, his technique, his patterns, and if those patterns diverged too far from what Sukuna should be capable of or interested in doing, she would notice.

She was already noticing.

He had to be careful with Megumi. The girl was looking at him — at Sukuna — with an intensity that went beyond professional curiosity or even personal gratitude. It was the intensity of someone who had seen something impossible and was rearranging their entire worldview to accommodate it. If she started asking questions, if she started expecting things from Sukuna — from Kenji — that didn't align with what the King of Curses was supposed to be...

He had to be careful.

He had to be creative and careful.

Fortunately, Kenji had spent his entire first life being creative and careful. Creative with his arguments. Careful with his timing. Creative with his Twitter threads. Careful with his word choices (except for that last thread, which had been less "careful" and more "unhinged," but in his defense, he'd been provoked by twelve thousand likes on a post that claimed Sukuna was universal-tier).

He could do this.

He could be Sukuna — his version of Sukuna, the interesting version, the creative version, the version that was going to make this world's power scaling community lose their collective minds when a curse that was supposed to cut things started doing literally anything else — while keeping his actual identity locked behind enough layers of misdirection and carefully curated enigmatic statements that no one would ever think to look past the markings and the voice and the cursed energy to the dead Twitter user from Osaka who was really pulling the strings.

Kenji settled deeper into his folding chair.

He cracked his metaphysical knuckles.

And he got to work.

END OF CHAPTER 1