Not far away, the white-haired teacher smiled as he watched his cute students playing around.
Once they finished, he stepped forward, familiarly throwing an arm around Itadori’s shoulder.
“Is the farewell over?” Gojo Satoru asked.
Itadori Yuji felt a weight on his shoulder and turned back to look: “Teacher, you’re here!”
“Principal Yaga told me that you and Kugisaki are heading out with me today for a mission.”
Gojo Satoru nodded. “Lately, you’ve been training with Yuuki and have shown rapid progress; it’s time for actual combat.”
“And Yuuki, don’t feel lonely; Teacher has arranged a very reliable guardian for you.”
Ieiri Yuuki nodded. “Right, Teacher, Tamayo is temporarily staying at the Gojo residence.”
“That’s fine.”
Starting yesterday, Lady Tamayo had borrowed numerous medical books and several Curses from Gojo Satoru.
Then she had locked herself inside a specialized room and hadn’t come out since.
This left Ieiri Yuuki, who had originally wanted to witness a Curse dissection in person, feeling quite regretful…
Ahem.
He wasn’t a freak; he was simply curious.
Seeing their conversation come to a pause, Ijichi Kiyotaka mustered up his courage and stepped forward.
“…Teacher Gojo, Student Ieiri needs to head to the mission site.”
Ijichi had been a corporate drone for many years, but neither his eloquence nor his nerve had improved in the slightest.
Ijichi Kiyotaka wept internally.
[It’s me…]
[Resonating with Ijichi]
[Treating work purely as work, doing neither terribly nor exceptionally well, lacking ambition, punching in and punching out right on the dot every day, wanting to quit at any given second, and only earning that pitiful bit of soul-crushing pay…]
[Enough! I’m here to watch the livestream, not to look in a mirror! Wuwu!]
Amidst the continuously scrolling comments, the youths parted ways.
The camera followed the black car carrying Ieiri Yuuki, gradually moving away from the tranquil ancient estate.
Ijichi glanced at the rearview mirror: “Student Ieiri, this is your first mission. Teacher Gojo has arranged for a second-year student to accompany you.”
“His name is Toge Inumaki, a Cursed Speech user. We’ll go pick him up first.”
“Also, here is the briefing for this mission, Student Ieiri. You can look it over first.”
Ijichi was very responsible, briefly outlining the mission details: “This mission was reported by the police.”
Several murder cases had occurred in an old apartment building, with each person dying by a different method and in exceptionally gruesome conditions.
Five people had already died within a week.
[Five in a week?]
[That’s quite a high number]
[I’m really curious, can Japan’s population actually handle being thinned out like this?]
[Makes me think of the folkloric town of Beika]
[Eastern Gotham City]
Listening while nodding, Ieiri Yuuki unfolded the briefing documents.
The very first page stated that the mission difficulty was Grade 2, requiring the exorcism of a Grade 2 Curse.
Flipping to the next page, he was met with photographs of several victims.
An unemployed youth who, leaning against an old, poorly maintained window, fell to his death while smoking;
An office worker who, upon stepping out, had her throat pierced by the sharp tip of an open umbrella right outside the apartment entrance, dying of suffocation;
A divorced man who was electrocuted while taking a bath;
An elderly person who suffered a heart attack;
And the last victim was an employee at a host club who fainted on his way home from work, struck his head against a stone by the roadside, and died with his temple pierced.
……
The victims were all tenants living in the same apartment building.
Judging from the investigation results, the deaths of all five individuals were non-human, attributed entirely to “accidents.”
Yet within a single week, so many “accidents” could no longer be dismissed as mere coincidences.
With the police finding no leads from their investigation, the case was handed over to the Jujutsu Headquarters.
The latter dispatched personnel to investigate the scene and confirmed that a Curse was indeed wreaking havoc.
There was still one survivor left in the apartment.
However, having been frightened out of his wits, he had hurriedly fled to a nearby shrine, chanting scriptures day and night.
“Preliminary judgment indicates there is a problem with the apartment itself, which is killing the tenants inside.”
Ijichi said, “Therefore, we will head to the apartment to investigate first, and head to the shrine later.”
Not far ahead, a rustling sound suddenly erupted from the green dense forest by the roadside.
Instantly, a figure leaped out!
Ijichi Kiyotaka, who was driving, was startled and nearly slammed his foot down on the accelerator.
Fortunately, at the very last split second, he recognized the figure as the second-year student he had just mentioned
Toge Inumaki.
The white-haired youth had the lower half of his face partially concealed by his upraised collar as he walked over with a brisk step.
Ijichi rolled down the car window, his face washed-out with exhaustion: “Inumaki-kun, it’s you…”
Toge raised a hand and greeted, “Kelp.”
[Inumaki-speak]
[Kelp generally means ‘hello’]
[Such a cute baby!]
“Hello, Inumaki-kun,” the assistant manager said weakly. “I recall your mission was supposed to be in a village several kilometers away…”
Toge: “Cod roe, mustard.”
Ijichi tried to decode these two words, having learned some of Inumaki-speak’s password system from Maki previously: “Dangerous, it’s fine now?”
Meaning the mission was over?
[Cod roe means ‘danger’, mustard means ‘safe’]
Toge nodded to confirm, then opened the car door himself and climbed into the back seat.
There was someone inside, but Toge had long since known his identity as a first-year freshman.
Thus, he greeted his companion with seniorly decorum: “Kelp, kelp.”
[Hello, hello]
[ Melted from cuteness]
Ieiri Yuuki found him adorable as well, and echoed back: “Kelp, kelp.”
“Senior Inumaki, nice to meet you, I’m Ieiri Yuuki.”
“!” Upon hearing the familiar vocabulary, Toge’s eyes lit up.
He’s a very interesting junior!
[Hit it off]
[Eh? I thought he had a cold and aloof persona]
[No, no, because of Cursed Speech, Toge can’t speak casually, but he’s actually very lively]
[Toge basically speaks using rice ball fillings, but he’s super great at creating fun]
The two quickly grew familiar with each other and exchanged contact information.
Ieiri Yuuki discovered
Toge’s typing speed was ridiculously fast!
It was even a bit faster than Ieiri Yuuki’s normal speaking speed.
According to Toge himself, this was the result of over a dozen years of practice, and he could even type blind.
Just like that, one speaking and one typing, they chatted all the way.
On the day Ieiri Yuuki triggered the curse riot, Toge hadn’t been at Jujutsu High.
Or rather, none of the upperclassmen had been at school.
Now at the start of summer, Curses were sprouting out like bamboo shoots after rain, and every student capable of exorcising Curses had been dispatched on business trips.
Working back-to-back shifts without rest.
They were so busy they basically had no time to return to Jujutsu High.
And barring any accidents, this high-intensity workload would persist for another two to three months.
So when he was out on a mission and heard that Jujutsu High had been destroyed, he felt somewhat happy instead.
Toge: [Thanks to you, Jujutsu High got to be rebuilt. I was actually going to propose to the principal that we clear a plot of land behind the mountain to grow vegetables and raise pigs or something]
Ieiri Yuuki: “…Raise pigs?”
Toge: [You probably don’t know yet? The cafeteria at Jujutsu High is super terrible. Back when I ate there for two days straight, I ended up buying a month’s worth of instant cup noodles]
Toge: [Later on, when I got completely sick of those, I went back to eating at the cafeteria]
Ieiri expressed astonishment: “It’s that bad?”
Unexpected.
Toge was quite helpless as well, because there were too few students at Jujutsu High: [From first to fourth year combined, there aren’t even ten people, and most of them are away on business trips, so the cafeteria doesn’t serve much purpose and they won’t remodel it]
Toge: [But for first-year students who mainly hang around Jujutsu High, it’s a form of torture]
Toge: [There are only two reasons to eat at the cafeteria: one to save money, and two to stay alive]
Toge: [So I suggested to the principal that we might as well raise some fresh ingredients so we can harvest them ourselves when we’re hungry no wait, cook ourselves]
As the white-haired youth typed these words, his fingers moved so fast they left afterimages clearly harboring deep-seated grievances, thought Ieiri Yuuki.
[Reminds me of my school…… Tomato scrambled eggs is normal enough, right? Who knew it would turn out to be cherry tomatoes boiled with hard-boiled eggs?!]
[So evil!!]
[I’ve even seen scallions stir-fried with watermelon]
[Now that’s heresy, absolute heresy! Burn it at the stake, ahhh!]
“Buzz—”
Suddenly, with a vibration, the two confirmed it was Ieiri Yuuki’s phone ringing.
Toge immediately paused the conversation, signaling him to check it first.
Ieiri Yuuki took out his phone and saw the sender was Lady Tamayo.
His summoning technique couldn’t achieve a telepathic connection with his shikigami the way Fushiguro could, so he could only communicate like a normal human.
And since the sounds emitted by Curses couldn’t be recorded by electronic devices and phone calls weren’t viable, Ieiri Yuuki had thought of a method
Sending text messages.
He hadn’t expected the text to arrive so soon.
Logically speaking, Lady Tamayo should still be in the dissection room; could something have gone wrong? Or had she made some kind of discovery?
Thinking this, Ieiri Yuuki opened it.
The message from Tamayo wasn’t long, and its content had nothing to do with the dissection: “Lord Yuuki, would you allow me to ‘return’? I’d like to conduct an experiment.”
Returning likely referred to returning to the place where shikigami waited when unsummoned, right?
Ieiri Yuuki: “Alright.”
Tamayo: “I’d like to try whether I can bring things existing in the real world back with me when I return, such as paper, Curses, cursed tools, etc.”
The two texts came one after another, separated by less than half a second.
[Pocket dimension?]
[I remember Megumi’s Divine Dog can do that, biting cursed tools and hiding them in a different space]
[But Megumi can summon his shikigami at any time and shares a psychic link with them; Yuuki is a bit different]
[Though seriously, Lady Tamayo’s proposal is very forward-thinking]
[Yuuki agreed so readily]
He didn’t even make Tamayo wait for three seconds.
Tamayo paused for a fleeting moment before a message came through: “Thank you for your trust.”
Ieiri: “Just a small favor.”
“By the way, Lady Tamayo, might I ask what that space is like?”
Tamayo replied, her phone vibrating slightly: “There is no light, sound, or time. It is a dark, boundless space drifting outside the world.”
[Feels a bit like a sense of deja vu, can’t place it]
[It’s Donald’s dark room experiment, right? Staying in there long enough will definitely drive someone crazy……]
[What is this?]
[Making someone wear an eyepieces, gloves, and plugging their ears equivalent to blocking vision, hearing, and touch, and placing them in an isolation room]
[Sensory deprivation]
[The experiment results say people placed in this kind of environment generally experience brain hyper-excitation and even hallucinations]
[They’ll endlessly imagine imagery, and these hallucinations are out of their control, driven almost entirely by instinct]
[Muzan must be in this exact situation right now……]
[What would he be thinking about?]
Ieiri Yuuki controlled the flow of his cursed energy, and a thread inside his body felt as though it had snapped.
The sensation was roughly similar to when Muzan had vanished.
It should mean… it worked?
In that case, the two-hour cooldown would begin anew.
“Screee—”
The sound of tires frictioning against the pavement.
Unawares, the black car had arrived at its destination: an old apartment building in Kyoto.
Ijichi Kiyotaka killed the engine and said, “Inumaki-kun, Student Ieiri, we’ve arrived. This is the crime scene.”
The surrounding area had already been cordoned off with yellow warning tape.
As soon as they stepped out of the car, plainclothes police officers walked up, immediately recognizing the assistant manager in the black suit: “Mr. Ijichi?”
“Officer Sudo, long time no see.”
It was summer, the high-incidence period for Curses, and Jujutsu High students were basically all out on business trips, making encounters with police officers unavoidable.
Both sides were already familiar with each other.
Sudo Kunihiko stepped forward, his gaze landing on Ieiri Yuuki behind Ijichi—a fresh face—
The blonde youth with blue eyes wore a sleeveless top, cargo pants, and Martin boots, looking dashing and neat.
A few palm-sized pouches were fastened to the youth’s belt, looking plump as though they contained something.
Officer Sudo told himself not to be curious. He lifted the warning tape and led them into the ominous apartment building that saw no visitors.
Ijichi stood guard outside.
And conveniently set up a veil.
“This apartment has some years on it, but the rent is cheap, and people have always rented rooms here in past years, but weird things started happening just this year,” Officer Sudo said.
Toge and Ieiri followed closely behind him.
Stepping into the domain outlined by the yellow tape, a strange odor immediately assaulted their nostrils…
The two youths exchanged glances: the smell of decay.
Officer Sudo, walking ahead, didn’t seem to notice and continued speaking: “These six tenants have all had their wishes granted since a month ago.”
[Wishes granted?]
Officer Sudo uttered a line written in the investigation report: “As long as anything they said inside the apartment would become reality.”
“They all turned into Cursed Speech users.”