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——————– 1995.
Southeastern Turkey.
Behind the altar at Göbekli Tepe, archaeologists discovered more than four hundred human skeletons.
Human hemoglobin had crystallized on the altar’s surface.
The severed neck vertebrae of the headless skeletons had clean, flat cross-sections.
This is considered the earliest known instance of human sacrifice on record , predating the Agricultural Revolution, a ritual belonging to hunter-gatherer religion.
Primitive humans believed all things possessed spirits.
The most precious offering, a human life, was needed to appease the gods and invite their protection.
It could be interpreted as a ‘misunderstanding’ born from early humanity’s shallow understanding of the natural world.
By now, no one deliberately performs such things anymore.
…..
That is not the truth.
Even in the modern era, many underdeveloped countries still preserve similar customs and traditions.
Even developed countries have regions where transportation, internet access, and education remain severely behind.
And even in the developed areas of developed countries, there are people who perform similar rituals , driven by morbid curiosity, or by something worse.
Humans are truly complex.
[■■ Village, Tone District, Gunma Prefecture.] [2007] [September] [Night] September, and the brutal summer heat showed no sign of retreat.
Without sunlight, it only grew more suffocating, more adhesive , the air thick as unsifted chaff, heavy enough to feel when it settled into your lungs.
The cicadas were screaming.
Insect noise surged from every direction at once, as if the whole village were vibrating with it.
So noisy.
“What is this?” Inside the village chief’s room, the air was steeped in the musty smell of old wood.
Three people stood at the entrance.
At the front, Geto in a black student uniform was the one who’d spoken.
“What do you mean, what is this?
This is the source of the whole string of incidents, isn’t it!” Behind him stood the villagers of ■■ Village.
On the left, a woman with withered white hair plastered flat against her jutting skull , cheekbones high, eye sockets deeply sunken.
On the right, a man whose round, fat face looked like an overinflated ball of dough, a double chin piled onto his thick, short neck.
His eyes were set comically far apart.
His flat nose was lost in surrounding fat.
His lips hung slightly parted, revealing yellowed teeth.
“These two attacked our villagers multiple times!” “My grandson was almost killed!” Before the three of them stood a large wooden cage.
A latticed window cut into the side wall, the daylight it let in broken into scattered fragments by the wooden slats.
Lines crossed lines.
The tatami mats laid inside the cage were frayed at every edge.
In the darkness, two emaciated little girls huddled against each other, watching the three with wide, frightened eyes.
Why did it come to this?
The Kaba sisters didn’t understand it themselves.
In the beginning, when their parents were alive, there had been someone to protect them.
Then their parents died.
Strange incidents started occurring across the village.
And the villagers needed someone to blame , so they turned their eyes on this ‘abnormal’ pair of sisters.
Abnormal.
That was the word they used.
But all the sisters were was born with the ability to perceive Cursed Energy.
Cursed Energy is this world’s particular truth , energy that manifests from the negative emotions of human beings.
Ordinary people emit it too, but they cannot perceive it.
That energy accumulates over time.
What it eventually becomes is a monster called a Cursed Spirit.
This village was being devoured by Cursed Spirits.
The villagers, of course, knew none of this.
They needed a scapegoat.
They needed someone to blame.
The orphaned sisters had no one left to defend them and no right to protest.
The villagers captured them quickly , first came the insults, then the beatings.
Once it was confirmed they couldn’t fight back, they were dragged to this dungeon beside the village chief’s house.
No one had ever maintained this place.
Inside the cage, it was another world entirely.
The ground underfoot had the texture of a hardened crust made from packed filth and rotting straw.
Never cleaned.
The stench saturating the air was thick enough to gag on , rot and fermentation mixed together, layer after layer.
Every breath felt like licking a rotten rag.
Flies were everywhere.
A dense, dark mass of them blanketed the wooden planks, the walls, the floor.
Any movement sent a buzzing cloud erupting into the air.
The girls were on the edge of breaking.
(How did it come to this?) (What will they do to us next.) (The men in the village — even the village chief — have started looking at me and Mimiko with that kind of look…) But, lucky or unlucky as it was , Today, an outsider had come.
The village elders seemed to want someone else’s hands to carry out the Judgment.
Fear drew the two small figures in tight.
Nanako’s arm wrapped around her sister’s neck.
Mimiko’s face was buried in her sister’s shoulder.
Both of them were nothing but skin and bone.
Their hair had matted into separate clumps.
They watched the boy in the uniform.
Wary.
Terrified.
(Are we going to die?) Nanako held her sister tighter, letting what little warmth she had pass through.
(I’m the big sister.
I have to protect Mimiko…) But that thought couldn’t hold.
(It’s so scary…) Because they were children.
Courage couldn’t hold.
Save us…
Prayer is human instinct.
But to whom?
As talented Sorcerers, the Kaba sisters had been able to see Cursed Spirits since they were small.
If things like that could exist , perhaps gods existed too.
But if the gods had watched over everything done to them up until now without intervening, what reason would they have to bother saving them?
Their parents were gone.
There was no one left to call to.
The two children were young.
The only books they had ever read were fairy tales.
Nanako remembered.
The fairy tale book had said a hero would come to rescue an imprisoned princess.
Did such a thing actually exist?
No.
Anyone.
Save her.
Save Mimiko.
Over and over, like a drowning person clawing at the very last straw.
Save us.
She had repeated it countless times before.
But this time.
[Enough.] She thought she heard a voice.
………
….
The insect noise in the countryside was relentless.
The land was vast, so people unconsciously raised their voices when they spoke , a habit that, over time, would warp the facial muscles, leave irreversible damage in a developing throat, and eventually produce a hoarse and grating voice.
Layered on top of that, the local dialect added its own redundancy, its own cumbersome grammar.
Just listening to it would set anyone on edge…
(No , normally, I’d probably find it charming.
‘Local color,’ I’d call it, and laugh it off.) (The truth is, it’s because I’m already irritated.) Suguru Geto was very irritated.
His black hair was tied up in a bun, a few loose strands falling across his forehead.
His eyes were half-lidded.
One hand was raised, fingertips pressed lightly against his brow bone, as if shielding his eyes from the light.
There was no smile on his face.
Suguru Geto.
Seventeen years old.
A Jujutsu Sorcerer.
A Jujutsu Sorcerer is someone who can control their own Cursed Energy , a professional tasked with exorcising curses and driving out Cursed Spirits.
In Japan, countless people die every year in so-called ‘accidents.’ Every single one of those deaths is caused by Cursed Spirits.
The profession exists because someone has to stop them.
Suguru Geto was one of the three Special Grade Jujutsu Sorcerers of his generation.
He had helped a great many people.
And in doing so, he had absorbed an unimaginable weight of negative emotion.
His mood had been terrible lately.
Seeing what was in front of him made it worse.
From his perspective, he was only here on a mission.
The lingering summer heat was already hard enough to bear.
The rural environment was grinding him down further with every passing hour.
After he’d exorcised the Cursed Spirit, the villagers’ fawning, grateful faces had set his teeth on edge.
Then, running on no sleep, he’d been forcibly dragged to the village chief’s house.
They wanted to deal with the source of the curse, they’d said.
This was the source.
A wooden cage.
Girls locked inside it.
They believed the girls were the cause , because they could see Cursed Spirits.
But that was exactly backward.
The girls, capable of perceiving Cursed Energy and wielding it, were gifted.
They didn’t leak it uncontrolled.
They didn’t generate Cursed Spirits.
These villagers, unable to govern their own Cursed Energy, were the real culprits.
And the guilty parties, ignorant and self-righteous, were crushing the innocent beneath them.
The talented, bullied into the ground by the sheer weight of numbers.
Ah.
So irritating.
The finger pressing against his brow bone moved faster.
He’d started doing it to keep himself sharp, but somewhere it had become something else , an attempt to bury the darkness rising in his chest by focusing on the pain.
So irritating.
So irritating.
So irritating.
Why am I even here saving these people?
Everything he’d carried as a Jujutsu Sorcerer was close to crushing him.
What was the point of continuing?
If this was where it ended , with ‘his kind’ persecuted, with mountains of his comrades’ bodies and seas of their blood , Then I would rather .
The man named Suguru Geto stood at the crossroads of his life, about to make a decision.
The sisters named Nanako Kaba and Mimiko Kaba stood at the turning point of theirs.
What was coming was not beautiful.
But it could not be changed.
Because this world had no gods of its own.
Even if it did, they would likely be malicious things.
And whatever gods ruled over the heavens had no spare attention left for so many victims.
And yet.
At that exact moment.
[Enough.] A voice rang out in their minds without warning.
Heavy.
And somehow, warm.
The expressions of the Kaba sisters and Suguru Geto changed in the same instant.
The sisters went blank.
Geto went rigid, combat-ready in a heartbeat.
And then .
[Help me up.] Light.
It spread beneath the sisters’ feet.
Complex geometric patterns bloomed across the ground , circles, triangles, runes that made no sense to read.
They emerged from the filth, spinning at impossible speed, and in an instant the entire pigsty blazed white.
The flies exploded off every surface and scattered.
The air compressed with a deep, resonant boom.
Both sisters felt a sudden sting on the backs of their hands.
Then, like the press of a branding iron, a red mark began tracing itself into existence out of nothing…
BOOM!!!!
The sisters had snapped their eyes open in shock, but the light was blinding.
All they could see was white.
The rush of air whipped their hair straight back.
“Ugh!” Then they opened their eyes again.
And a man was standing in front of them.
A man who was almost unreasonably beautiful.
His hair was a pale, soft water-blue, falling loosely.
His eyes were clearer still — a deep, vivid blue — with a small beauty mark at the corner of one eye.
An indigo long-tailed tunic belted at the waist.
An off-white cape.
An outfit that belonged in a fairy tale book.
He was impossibly clean.
Completely out of place in this filthy pigsty , like a painting someone had pressed directly into a garbage heap.
Moonlight fell from behind him.
He looked down at the two sisters huddled together on the ground, and smiled.
A gentle smile.
Then he spoke.
“I heard the cry for help.” “Hero Himmel.” “Are you my masters?” ➤ Next: Himmel: I Like Brushing My Hair Up Too