Two o’clock in the morning.
Tokyo Metropolitan Jujutsu Technical College, boys’ dormitory.
“Haa—” Makoto let out a long breath and locked the door behind him.
To prevent Gojo Satoru’s unreasonable eyes from suddenly popping out of the ceiling, he casually spread a book titled Secret Records of the White-Stocking Shrine Maiden across his desk.
He was disguising himself as a perfectly healthy teenage boy preparing for a late-night “Masterbaiting.” This was called professionalism.
After all, Gojo Satoru’s Six Eyes could see through the flow of cursed energy, but they couldn’t see through the pitch-black little heart a boy had polished through sheer survival instinct—a heart filled to the brim with the desire to deceive!
Makoto put on anti-static gloves and took out the old computer Shoko had modified with some “technical guidance.” The signal passed through seven layers of public relays, circling Tokyo, Osaka, London, New York, and Shanghai before finally landing with pinpoint accuracy on the administrative building base station of Kyoto Jujutsu High.
Logically speaking, someone who got torn apart by a Special Grade cursed spirit during the day and had only just recovered from severe injuries should have collapsed into bed.
Yet Makoto had never felt more awake.
As expected, people don’t get tired when they’re doing bad shit.
This forbidden thrill worked better than any stimulant.
Makoto’s fingers blurred across the keyboard, the crisp tapping sounding like a dense chain of incantations.
A “lie,” by nature, was also a kind of curse.
It was born from suspicion, misunderstanding, and twisted amusement between people.
And he was the only person in the world who could drink deeply from such an absurd curse.
As long as the lie he brewed was potent enough, the truth of the entire fucking world would obediently get drunk.
“Real details are the skeleton.
Absurd emotions are the flesh.
Hehehehehe…
Gojo-sensei, are you ready to be socially executed inside the imagination of every sorcerer in Japan?” He slammed the Enter key.
Pen name: Rainy Night Title: A Bitter Summer Through seven layers of physical proxies, the signal made a grand loop around the world before landing precisely on the servers of those conservative old fools at Kyoto Jujutsu High.
‘In short, for the sake of my safety, Kyoto School, please carry this blame properly.’ In this novel, Makoto threw all the fragments Shoko provided—the sugar stains on the collar, the exchanged sunglasses, the sticky cicada cries of that afternoon—into a grinder called “tragic romance.” Then, with prose so melodramatic, depressing, and emotionally poisonous that even a stray dog would want to cry after reading it, he rewrote that piece of history.
[…Gojo Satoru finally realized that Infinity could block every attack, yet it alone could not stop the sight of that man’s back as he walked away.
In the drop of syrup sliding down his collar, he tasted the curse known as “best friend.”] “Huekkk—!” The moment he finished writing that paragraph, Makoto dry-heaved into the trash can.
“Will anyone really believe this industrial-strength artificial sweetener?
The moment this kind of writing goes out, I’m pretty sure my own bottom line is going to defect right along with it.” The answer was: most people were basically reading it for the drama.
But that “drama” itself was a subtle, persistent curse.
In the suffocating, despair-filled jujutsu world, this “top-secret unofficial history between the strongest sorcerer and the strongest curse user” was way more exciting than any Special Grade cursed object!
…
The dark web forum [Eye of Roppongi] exploded instantly.
[1F: Anonymous Sorcerer]: Holy shit…
the writing is ridiculous.
I don’t think a scumbag like Gojo Satoru could ever be this devoted, but that “popsicle syrup” detail…
damn it, I worked part-time at that shop before.
Jujutsu High students really did go there a lot!
[14F: Anonymous Practitioner]: Yare yare, looking at it this way, those two really were kind of fruity back then.
I used to think Geto Suguru defected because his brain glitched, but after reading this novel…
tsk.
What is this feeling of “the whole world abandoned me, but I only didn’t want you to give up on me”?
[45F: Anonymous Sorcerer]: It’s absurd, but with those two scumbags’ personalities, if this was the reason, then somehow…
damn it, everything makes sense!
[77F: Anonymous User]: “I deeply apologize for reading this during my break.
Judging from the details mentioned in the article, the author clearly has a high level of understanding of that period.
As for the content itself…
although, in my opinion, describing that gentleman’s relationship as a ‘tragic romance’ displays an extreme lack of professional integrity, I must admit that, based on my understanding of Gojo-san’s twisted personality, this idea of ‘irreversible regret caused by self-centeredness’ is infuriatingly logical.
Simply put: looking at it this way, it wouldn’t be impossible if there really was something going on between those two.
Gojo Satoru is garbage.
That is all.” Makoto looked at that comment and nearly burst out laughing.
“That familiar roasting style…
Nanami-san, thank you for injecting the heaviest cornerstone into my lie on this overtime-filled late night!” No one had truly been brainwashed.
However, from the moment everyone subconsciously thought, ‘If it’s those two bastards, then maybe it’s not impossible,’ the originally solid truth had been cracked open by that vague uncertainty.
[Technique Judgment: Formula Logic] [Degree of Deviation]: Reframing the strongest man of the modern era as an ugly, melancholic tragic-romance protagonist.
Judgment: Extremely high!
[Target Strength]: Special Grade Sorcerer, Gojo Satoru.
Judgment: Highest level!
[Social Acceptance]: Approximately 500 sorcerers and 2,000 assistant managers experienced a slight cognitive wavering of “it makes sense.” “Ohohohoho~ Dame, dame yo!” Makoto abruptly straightened his back and let out a laugh so broken and sleazy it barely sounded human.
He could feel an ice-cold curse forming in the void.
It wasn’t his own cursed energy.
It was sludge made from humanity’s malicious speculation and pink-tinted fantasies toward “the strongest.” The cruel iron law carved into the DNA of the jujutsu world was this: a sorcerer’s amount of cursed energy was decided at birth.
It was a class system you were born into, an unreachable sky ordinary people could spend their entire lives trying and failing to touch.
But right now, Makoto was elegantly holding a straw called A Bitter Summer and drinking wildly from the curse known as “lies” that the world itself had released.
This was how you fought using the curse of “falsehood.” It didn’t require everyone to believe without question.
They only needed to entertain the thought that ‘this possibility exists.’ That collective, distorted perception turned into false power, forcibly filling in the defects Makoto had once been unable to reach.
There was no such thing as a miracle born from nothing in this fucking world.
All he had done was refine every “but what if?” and every “damn, that’s spicy” in existence into fuel he could spend however he pleased.
He felt the thick, frenzied cursed energy inside him, so swollen it nearly burst through his blood vessels, and raised his bandage-wrapped right hand, loosely gripping the dark air.
Vmm—!
The spatial repulsion that should have shredded a beginner apart now gathered obediently at his fingertips like a docile cat.
A deep blue sphere, like a miniature black hole, spun silently and violently in his palm, pulling the surrounding light into a faint distortion.
“This is…
Blue.” This time, his muscles didn’t tear apart piece by piece because they couldn’t withstand the load.
His bones didn’t make those tooth-aching cracks from the backlash.
There was no agonized roar that felt as though his very soul was being wrung dry.
Makoto stared at the deep blue orb, a technique representing the ceiling of the jujutsu world, and felt the earth-shaking transformation inside his body.
The corner of his mouth curled into an extremely shameless smile as he murmured softly.
“Just one piece of entertainment let me jump past the death line I was born with…
though I’m probably still not even as good as Nanami during working hours.
About semi-Grade 1 level, maybe?” He pushed up his glasses, tilted his head toward the empty room, and revealed a bright smile with zero sincerity in it.
“As expected of the strongest, Gojo-sensei.
Even the tiny bit of ‘romantic afterglow’ leaking from you has benefited me greatly…
Daisuki desu!
Love you~” …
At the same time, outside a convenience store.
Gojo Satoru was staring at his phone, the red bean paste and whipped cream daifuku in his mouth stuck in his throat before he could swallow.
As the “strongest sorcerer of the modern era,” he had dealt with countless kinds of curses in his life: Special Grade, ancient, and even those involving rule-based phenomena.
But he never imagined that one day, he’d be pierced straight through by a malicious force called “pure love.” “Kyoto School’s…
‘Rainy Night’-kun?” He pulled down his blindfold, and under the cold glow of his phone screen, his Six Eyes flickered wildly.
“What the hell is this?!” Gojo Satoru let out a completely undignified wail in front of the convenience store, causing the passing office workers to glance over one after another.
Then, after seeing his face clearly, those same workers began giving him a strangely subtle look that seemed to say, ‘Oh, it’s the tragic-romance protagonist.’ He, Gojo Satoru, twenty-eight years old, sexual orientation as straight as steel—probably.
Current number of relationships: zero.
After all, in this rotten jujutsu world, he spent every day balancing the higher-ups, teaching students, and exorcising cursed spirits.
He even had to squeeze out time for sleep by relying on teleportation, so where the hell would he find the mental space for some “bitter summer tragic romance”?
“‘In that drop of syrup, he tasted the poison called best friend’…
Ugh.
Who came up with that line?
Back then, I just thought the damn popsicle was too sweet!” What truly made his skin crawl was that the details in that novel were accurate to an almost eerie degree.
Even his own brain was starting to develop a strange, false association.
Every time he recalled those old memories, the cringey dialogue from the novel would automatically pop up and spam his mind like rogue software refusing to leave his memory.
“The details are all right, and even Nanamin commented that ‘it’s not impossible’…” Gojo Satoru rubbed his aching temples.
Although physical space remained stable as ever, he could feel a vast, sticky “curse of gazes” gathering toward him from every corner of Japan.
It was the collective malice of thousands upon thousands of readers after finishing the novel, all looking at him with the implication of, ‘So that’s the kind of person you are.’ “Hey, hey, this is going too far.
A public-opinion curse targeting my ‘pure and innocent body’ is honestly harder to deal with than Toji…” Gojo Satoru revealed an extremely broken, twisted smile.
“Rainy Night-kun, was it?
If I find you, I’m definitely going to let you experience what ‘Limitless’ means on a physical level.”