“I’m sorry I couldn’t satisfy you, Lord Julian…”
Kashimo stood amidst the smoking ruins of the mall, looking at Julian with a faint, weak smile.
His legs trembled as he struggled to maintain his footing.
“To think you forced me to discharge the entire building just to catch you…” Kashimo muttered, his breathing ragged.
“It was an unpolished tactic, but it proved effective.”
To guarantee maximum destructive output, Kashimo had converted nearly his entire energy pool into opposing charges, pouring them directly into the structural frame of the complex.
At this moment, his core was completely drained.
His remaining reserves were barely enough to keep him standing.
Just as he raised his iron staff to finish the fight, the smile on his face froze.
His pupils shrank to pinpricks.
A fist wrapped in a dense, blinding aura of blue cursed energy materialized an inch from his face.
Standing before him was Julian—not the charred, broken figure who had been leaning against the rubble a second ago, but a pristine, completely uninjured warrior.
The severe burns across his skin had vanished.
The torn muscle tissue had knitted back together entirely.
Reverse Cursed Technique?!
Kashimo didn’t even have time to raise his arms.
Before the fist made contact with his skull, time seemed to slow to an absolute standstill.
Kashimo’s vision blurred, shifting away from the ruined mall into a quiet, sunlit forest.
He was standing beneath a canopy of tall trees.
He looked down at his hands, noticing they were weathered and wrinkled—the hands of his original, elderly body from four hundred years ago, long before he had signed Kenjaku’s binding vow.
He remembered a lesson an elder had taught him in his youth: when a powerful sorcerer meets their end, their soul senses death long before the physical frame collapses.
In that final fraction of a second, the mind returns to the place it yearns for most.
Kashimo let out a short, quiet chuckle.
“I thought the last thing I’d see was Sukuna.
I didn’t expect to end up back here.”
“How was the Culling Game?” a familiar voice called out from behind him.
“Are you satisfied?”
Kashimo turned.
Kenjaku was standing near the edge of the clearing, draped in his ancient robes.
“It was genuinely entertaining,” Kashimo replied, a faint smile touching his lips.
He looked at the monk with mild surprise.
“I never imagined you’d be the one standing in my final vision.”
“I’m as surprised as you are,” Kenjaku said pleasantly.
The figure standing in the forest was not the real Kenjaku, but a lingering memory projection constructed by Kashimo’s fading consciousness.
“It’s a pity, though.
I don’t think my opponent even had to go all out.
He was monstrously strong…
I doubt I could have beaten him even if I activated Mythical Beast Amber.”
Kenjaku’s projection raised an eyebrow.
“You hold him in such high regard?”
“I do,” Kashimo murmured, his voice fading as the forest began to dissolve into white light.
“My only regret is that I couldn’t give Lord Julian a fight worth his time.”
The vision vanished.
In the real world, Julian stood over Kashimo’s fallen body, his jaw slack and his hands trembling in sheer panic.
“Kashimo?!
Hey!
Can you hear me?!”
Julian dropped to his knees beside the ancient warrior.
He had wanted to test his own limits and see Kashimo’s single-use technique, Mythical Beast Amber, in person.
He had never intended to land a lethal strike.
He hadn’t realized that Kashimo had poured almost all his cursed energy into the environmental discharge, leaving his physical body completely unreinforced.
Without a defensive layer of energy, an ancient sorcerer’s physical frame was no more durable than an ordinary human’s.
When Julian’s Special Grade fist connected, the impact had shut Kashimo’s brain down instantly.
Pop.
Kogane materialized beside Julian’s ear.
“Points +5.
Player’s current total: 10 points.”
Looking at the floating point notification, Julian let out a long, heavy sigh.
“Man…
I’m sorry, Kashimo.
Next time we run this back, I’ll aim for the chest.”
He scratched his head awkwardly, looking down at his burned clothes.
The environmental discharge had incinerated his jacket and shirt, leaving him standing in the crater in tattered trousers.
“First order of business…
I need to find a clothing store.”
Julian stood up, leaving the smoking ruins of the mall behind.
He looked up toward the western skyline of Tokyo Colony No.
2, his eyes narrowing slightly.
“Hmm?”
Uraume, walking beside him, stopped and frowned.
“What is it?”
Kenjaku smiled smoothly, waving his hand.
“Nothing major.
I simply felt a sudden, massive collapse of cursed energy within Tokyo Colony No.
2.”
As the administrator of the Culling Game’s foundational ritual, Kenjaku possessed unique sensory privileges over the barriers.
One of the core functions of the colony barriers was to absorb the massive spikes of cursed energy released when high-tier sorcerers died in battle.
A moment ago, a massive wave of energy had been absorbed by the barrier’s outer rim.
“A high-tier sorcerer died?” Uraume asked, his tone laced with utter indifference.
“Besides Lord Sukuna, no one in this era qualifies as powerful.
A dead sorcerer is just trash.”
Kenjaku shook his head with a mild chuckle, choosing not to argue.
He knew Uraume’s worldview began and ended with Sukuna.
But internally, a flicker of genuine curiosity stirred in his mind.
Who could have fallen on the very first day of the game?
There were very few ancient sorcerers deployed in Tokyo Colony No.
2.
Aside from a few mid-tier reincarnations, the only heavy hitter placed in that barrier was Hajime Kashimo.
Kenjaku considered the possibility for a brief second, then dismissed it with a faint laugh.
Kashimo was one of the strongest ancient sorcerers he had contracted across four centuries.
His combat instincts and electrical output placed him at the absolute peak of the colony.
The probability of any modern sorcerer in Tokyo Colony No.
2 defeating Hajime Kashimo on day one was practically zero.
Kenjaku turned his gaze back toward the road ahead, his smile returning.
“It doesn’t matter,” Kenjaku murmured to himself.
“The outcome remains unchanged.”
To a force like Sukuna, whoever survived in that colony would simply be another toy to break before being cut down by a World-Cutting Slash.