When he woke up, the world was a dazzling white, so empty it barely seemed real.
Sunlight filtered through the infirmary’s thin white curtains and pierced Mizuki Makoto’s eyes like countless tiny silver needles, every one finding its mark.
He tried moving his fingers, which felt about as promising as trying to start a truck that had spent thirty years in a scrapyard.
His muscles ached as though ten copies of Todo Aoi had taken turns driving steamrollers over him, and every joint felt packed with rusty iron filings.
His brain was even worse.
If last night’s battle had been an overheating graphics card, the inside of his skull was now hosting a full-blown carnival called Geto Battle Royale.
A thousand cult leaders with their hair in buns were pole dancing on his neurons with that goddamn three-section staff, and every move they made sent another throb through his temples.
“Ugh…” Makoto let out a faint groan, his throat feeling as though someone had stuffed it with dry plaster.
“Oh, you’re awake?
Two hours ahead of schedule, too.
Your cockroach-like determination to survive never ceases to amaze me, Makoto-kun.” The voice beside him was so cheerful it practically invited a punch, and he turned his head with considerable effort as his vision gradually came into focus.
Gojo Satoru was lounging beside his bed, having traded his usual black blindfold for a loosely perched pair of sunglasses.
Behind them, his azure Six Eyes were as clear as Arctic ice, their depths unreadable as the sunlight shifted across them.
The strongest sorcerer of the modern age currently had his legs crossed and was devouring a Kikufuku with something approaching religious devotion, apparently unconcerned about the cream smeared at the corner of his mouth.
The rich smell of outrageously expensive sweets mingled with the infirmary’s pungent disinfectant, lending the room a distinctly surreal atmosphere.
“What happened to Geto Suguru?” Makoto’s voice sounded as though someone had taken sandpaper to his throat; he barely recognized it himself.
Gojo paused in the middle of chewing, then fell silent for a moment before turning toward the window.
Outside, the assistant managers called to one another as they worked to clear away the aftermath of the Night Parade of a Hundred Demons.
Light and shadow gave his profile a hard edge, while his voice remained so level he might have been discussing a stranger.
“He got away.
The official report I gave those old men upstairs says I ‘executed’ him.
“Before he left, he asked about his ‘family.’ Once I told him they’d all withdrawn safely, he walked into the shadows without another word.” Gojo turned back, a rare seriousness in the blue eyes behind his sunglasses, along with the faintest trace of apology.
“I’m sorry, Mizuki.
As your teacher, I should have avenged my injured student.
Instead, because of some personal feelings I can’t quite put into words…
I let an extremely dangerous special-grade criminal go.
That isn’t very fair to you, is it?” “Hah…
Hearing you apologize is giving me goose bumps, Sensei.” Makoto gave a self-deprecating laugh and tried to arrange his face into a smirk, only to pull at a wound and grimace in pain.
“Even you would have your work cut out for you killing a monster like that without leveling the school in the process.
“Besides, if you actually killed him, where would I get material for Gojo Mai: The Widowhood Arc?
For the sake of artistic diversity in the doujinshi scene, he’s better off alive and kicking.” Gojo stared for a moment, apparently caught off guard by the response, before something in it struck him as so funny that he burst into wholly undignified laughter.
“Hahahaha!
That’s my Makoto!
After all that, you’re still worried about keeping your smut on schedule?” Still laughing, he reached over to ruffle his student’s hair, his touch lacking its usual playful roughness and carrying an almost paternal gentleness instead.
“Here.
Consider this compensation for risking your life to hold him off.” He reached into the shadows beside the bed and picked up a heavy, dark red object that radiated a distinctly vicious presence.
It was Playful Cloud, the special-grade cursed tool that Geto had whirled like a storm, nearly turning Makoto’s scrawny little matchstick of a body into a spinning top.
“Suguru left it behind.
Since you practically killed yourself keeping him busy, you’re entitled to the spoils.” Gojo casually dropped it onto his blanket with a heavy thud.
“This is the only special-grade cursed tool that relies entirely on physical power, you know.
Sell it, and you could spend the rest of your life lounging around drawing smut.
You might even have enough left over to pay Mei Mei to hand you fresh sheets of drawing paper.” Five minutes later, Makoto was clutching his swollen forehead and staring through tears at those three goddamn red sticks, sorely tempted to fling them straight out the window.
“Ow—!
It hurts, it hurts!
I’m dying!
I’m actually dying!” “Give it up, Makoto-kun.
Someone with your complete lack of hand-to-hand skills is never going to master a weapon as difficult as a three-section staff.” Gojo was laughing so hard he nearly fell off his chair, the unfinished half of his Kikufuku trembling in his hand.
‘This thing is my fucking nemesis!’ Makoto had only wanted to imitate the effortless menace of Geto’s movements, picturing himself spinning the staff into an unbroken blur.
Unfortunately, he was a hopeless martial artist whose athletic ability scored all of five points, putting him on par with Miwa Kasumi, and he still skipped gym class every chance he got.
His first two attempts had struck his left elbow and right wrist with remarkable precision.
When he gritted his teeth and tried a third sweeping attack, the cursed thing seemed to develop a mind of its own, tracing a devious arc through the air, slipping past his guard, and cracking him squarely across the side of the face.
“I don’t want a weapon that only knows how to beat up its owner…
This has to be a curse Geto left behind.
It has to be!” Clutching Playful Cloud and grinding his teeth, Makoto limped out of the infirmary.
Behind him, Gojo called something about giving it a little more practice, but Makoto didn’t even turn around before raising his middle finger.
He found Maki beneath the old tree by the school gates, leaning against its trunk with bandages wrapped around several parts of her body and a broken wooden staff in her hand.
When she noticed the enormous red lump on his forehead, courtesy of Playful Cloud’s sneak attack, her expression became a complicated mixture of pity, confusion, and the weary confirmation that he really was an idiot.
“Here.
Your payment.” Without further explanation, he shoved the heavy, viciously powerful three-section staff into her arms.
Maki froze, recognizing its value immediately; as a cursed tool specialist, she could hardly have done otherwise.
The pressure emanating from the special-grade weapon seemed to make the surrounding air heavier.
“Have you lost your mind, you scumbag?!” Her eyes widened as she stared at the weight in her arms.
“This is a special-grade cursed tool!
Do you have any idea how much it’s worth?!
You nearly died earning this.
I can’t take it.” “Just keep it, Maki-chan.” Makoto waved a tired hand and turned toward the training ground, his retreating figure almost suggesting the carefree generosity of someone who considered money beneath him.
‘Actually, it just really fucking hurt when that thing hit me.’ “That staff and I were never meant to be.
It just tried to become the jujutsu world’s Elder Wand by assassinating its new owner.
“You’re the only musclebound monster in this school who can make it look like a proper weapon, Maki-chan, instead of an instrument of self-torture.” Maki opened her mouth as though to refuse again, but the moment her fingers touched the cold, powerful length of the staff, she felt such an immediate connection that she couldn’t bring herself to give it back.
Watching Makoto walk away, she muttered into the breeze, “…Thanks, you infuriating, lecherous bastard.” …
A week later, the setting sun washed Jujutsu High’s training ground in warm shades of orange and red.
Okkotsu Yuta stood in the middle of it, his figure looking slight in the golden light, but more at ease than it ever had before.
As the final steps of lifting the curse were completed, the enormous, terrifying Queen of Curses that had haunted him—a creature capable of giving every sorcerer nightmares—began shedding her monstrous shell.
Black cursed energy receded like an ebbing tide, revealing neither claws nor fangs, but Orimoto Rika, a little girl in a white dress whose smile was as pure as freshly fallen snow.
“I’m sorry…
Rika…
I’m so sorry…” Yuta knelt on the ground, sobbing so hard he could barely speak, his tears catching the golden sunlight.
“Don’t apologize, Yuta.” Rika gently wrapped her arms around his neck, her figure growing transparent as she dissolved into countless sparkling motes of light.
“I want you to be happy from now on.
Don’t come to see me too soon, okay, Yuta?” Before everyone’s eyes, the cursed love that had bound the boy for six years finally scattered like a skyful of fireflies, rising on the warm breeze into the clear blue sky.
Makoto leaned against the rusty railing of the stands, absently turning the pages of the battered notebook that held everything he had learned through countless attempts at bluffing and running for his life.
Across the training ground, Panda was rolling around as Inumaki chased him for taking a joke too far.
Maki-chan was solemnly testing her newly acquired Playful Cloud in an open space, each swing ripping through the air with a thunderous crack.
Gojo Satoru stood on the highest rooftop, flashing a childish V sign at the red clouds filling the sky.
Watching them, Makoto finally felt the heart that had spent so long lodged in his throat, pounding hot from constant strain, settle back into his chest.
‘It worked,’ he told himself silently.
There was one secret he had never shared with anyone, not even daring to leave a trace of it in his so-called notes.
In the tragedy that should have unfolded, Geto Suguru would have died in a dark alley at the hands of his one and only best friend.
His corpse would then have become a host for the thousand-year-old brain called Kenjaku, serving a year later as the deadliest possible bait for Gojo Satoru in a crowded Shibuya subway station.
It would have been the perfect catnip to lure him into a seal, the beginning of all that despair and the prelude to everything falling apart.
But now, the man who should have died in the snow had disappeared into the shadows, battered and with his grand cause still unfinished, to live somewhere in this world.
‘Geto Suguru is alive.’ Makoto looked up at the white-haired figure on the roof, feeling a rush of fond relief that even he found embarrassingly sentimental.
‘As long as Geto Suguru is alive, that thousand-year-old brain can’t steal his body or Cursed Spirit Manipulation.
‘You white-haired geezer…
Now you won’t get distracted by that bloody catnip and stuffed into the Prison Realm like some idiot cat locked in a cage where the sun never shines.
Right?’ Makoto opened his notebook again to the tactical analysis titled “How to Scare Off a Special-Grade Sorcerer by Pretending to Be Gojo Number Two.” Beneath the chaotic doodles at the bottom of the page, he wrote the final words of this particular journey.
“Curses are, at their heart, the heaviest and most hopeless forms of love that humans leave behind in this world.
“But looking at these idiots, I suddenly feel that this absurd world might still have a little room left for kindness.
“So here’s a thoroughly ridiculous blessing for this world full of curses.” He closed the notebook to the sound of Yuta calling out, his tears finally giving way to laughter.
The smoke of the Night Parade of a Hundred Demons had cleared, and the ruins in Kyoto and Shinjuku would eventually be rebuilt.
As for Mizuki Makoto, the greatest “con artist” and “artist” in Jujutsu High’s history, his story seemed to have only just reached its most exciting—and most ridiculous—page.
After all, hadn’t the white-haired geezer just been muttering that a kid named Fushiguro Megumi in the next incoming class might be interesting?
“Heh.
Looks like I’ll need to keep working on new scripts.
I’ve smashed one cat cage, but who knows whether there’s an even more ridiculous dog kennel waiting down the line?” He tilted his head toward the clear, cleansed blue sky and smiled, free of any trace of deception for the first time in a long while.
End of Volume One: Night Parade of a Hundred Demons.