Makoto had been beaten unconscious.
When he woke again, he was already somewhere unfamiliar.
“Yo.
Awake, kid?” The speaker was Toji Fushiguro.
He sat beside Makoto with one leg crossed over the other, watching a boat race on TV out of sheer boredom.
Torn betting tickets lay scattered across the floor.
By the look of it, he had lost money again.
Noticing that Makoto had woken up, Toji finally dropped his bored expression and looked at him with interest.
“You’re special, kid.
What your Heavenly-Restricted Tyrant body gave you should’ve been spiritual power, but the speed your body recovers at is beyond what I expected.” “What the hell are you?” Toji Fushiguro was full of curiosity about Makoto.
According to his guess, the compensation Makoto received for being stripped of the qualifications to become a jujutsu sorcerer should have been an enormous amount of spiritual power, so great that it could condense into form and even manifest outside his body.
In a sense, that was already a disguised kind of cursed technique.
After all, cursed energy was similar to chakra in Naruto.
It was born from a human’s body and spirit.
That was why King Crimson could smash cursed spirits into scraps, while Makoto himself could not exorcise cursed spirits bare-handed.
But Makoto’s physical recovery was too fast.
Fast enough that Toji Fushiguro found it unbelievable.
His muscle density and cellular activity were practically identical to Toji’s own, which made Toji feel as if heaven were being unfair.
“You didn’t kill me.” Makoto did not answer.
He merely shifted his eyes and looked straight at Toji Fushiguro.
He did not look like someone who had nearly been killed.
His gaze was still sharp as a blade.
That was the look.
Toji Fushiguro’s heartbeat quickened slightly.
That gaze, one that treated life and death lightly, that held no interest in the things of the world, as if it would not matter even if the world ended, made Toji feel as though he had found one of his own kind.
No goals.
No hope in sight.
Therefore, no need to consider the consequences of anything he did.
Do whatever he wanted.
Even killing was the same.
Not the slightest burden would appear in his heart.
There was no reverence for life.
Only indifference remained.
No, not quite.
He and Toji were still different in some ways.
“Kill you?” “I’m not killing you.
It’d be a waste for a monster like you to die like that.” Toji Fushiguro dragged his chair closer and leaned in front of him.
“You can sense those cursed spirits, can’t you?” “Cursed spirits?” “The thing you blew apart last night.
In the jujutsu world, they’re called cursed spirits.
You can also call them curses.
Just think of them as the vengeful ghosts from horror movies.” Toji Fushiguro spoke entirely at his own pace.
“In Japan, the average number of people who die unnatural deaths or disappear each year is over 10,000.
Most of them are killed by curses created from the negative emotions released by humans…” Toji Fushiguro told Makoto many things about jujutsu sorcerers and cursed spirits.
That included Jujutsu High, which specialized in training sorcerers, and the jujutsu families whose lineages had been passed down for a thousand years.
“Cursed spirits can never be wiped out completely, but weapons made by ordinary people don’t work on them.
You have to rely on jujutsu sorcerers to exorcise them.” “Of course, there are exceptions to everything.
Like you, kid.
From the moment you were born, you were stripped of the right to become a sorcerer.
In exchange, you received talent far beyond sorcerers: spiritual power and a body like that.” At this point, Toji Fushiguro could not help growing curious again.
A spirit and body this powerful, yet not a single trace of cursed energy could be born from them.
That had never appeared in the history of the jujutsu world.
“Why are you telling me this?
Do you want me to become a jujutsu sorcerer and exorcise cursed spirits?” It was the first time Makoto had heard so much about the other side of this world.
No wonder monsters, or rather cursed spirits, so often appeared in places like hospitals, funeral homes, and orphanages.
“A jujutsu sorcerer?” “No.
Don’t misunderstand, kid.
I’m not a good person.” “…Just think of it as a whim.” At first, Toji Fushiguro had thought that if this kid grew up, he might be able to reach the level of that monster from the Gojo family.
But what meaning would that have?
Toji Fushiguro had always buried a secret deep in his heart, one no one knew.
He wanted to prove to the people in his family who saw him as a disgrace that even without cursed energy, even without inheriting the family’s cursed techniques, he was not trash.
But even if Makoto someday killed that little Six Eyes monster from the Gojo family, what would that have to do with Toji Fushiguro?
In the end, Toji would still not be the one who killed him.
The moment he thought of that, an inexplicable irritation rose in him.
He stood and headed outside.
“Rest for now.
Anyway, I’ll train you next.
After that, what you want to do is up to you.” Makoto could not understand him.
Toji’s way of doing things was impossible to grasp.
He had followed Makoto out of nowhere, fought him out of nowhere, then brought him back here out of nowhere.
In the end, he had no goal at all.
It really was just like he said: everything was on a whim.
To Makoto, the man felt like a lunatic.
Still…
“Jujutsu sorcerers, curses…” For the first time, he had touched the other side of the world.
His mind was a little chaotic now.
What he should do in the future, what path he should walk from now on, those things had been wiped clean from his mind years ago.
Today, after suddenly receiving so much information from that man, Makoto began thinking for the first time in years.
What exactly did he want to do?
“Right.
What’s that guy’s name?” Almost at the same time, Toji Fushiguro, who had already walked out the door, suddenly raised his head.
“Ah.
I forgot to ask the kid’s name…” “Whatever.
There’ll be chances later.” “I’ll ask when I get back.” Makoto and Toji Fushiguro quickly tossed that question to the back of their minds.
Perhaps to people like them, names had no special meaning at all.
They were no different from code names.
Their only purpose was to let others know that such a person existed, not to define what kind of existence they were.