“Welcome…”
My stepping into your shop ought to make it shine with humble pride, old man.
Yasui ignored him, walking straight to the innermost seat and sitting down.
The menu was a laminated sheet of A4 paper, worn to tatters.
He really couldn’t fathom why a menu in a place with so few customers would be so utterly beat-up.
He cast a quick glance over it and ordered a tonkatsu set meal with miso soup.
Ten minutes later, the food was served.
The pork cutlet was fried terribly, covered in an uneven layer of batter.
The instant he took a bite, Yasui’s hundredfold taste perception immediately deconstructed every piece of information about this meat.
The pork was low-quality loin that had been frozen for at least three months.
The batter was mixed with oil that had been reused over and over.
That rancid, sour taste of grease exploded on his tongue, as if someone had shoved a sponge soaked in vomit straight into his mouth.
The miso soup was even more of a masterpiece.
The broth was as murky as pot-washing water, the tofu cubes emitted a subtle sour smell akin to foot odor, and the kelp had the texture of rotten mud that had been soaked for three days and was on the brink of decomposing.
Yasui chewed three times and swallowed with an expressionless face.
“…Truly terrible.”
He hadn’t found any gold, but he had definitely eaten garbage.
Setting down his chopsticks, he stared at the plate of tonkatsu for a few seconds before breaking into a sudden smile.
“For it to be this terrible is almost an art form in itself, isn’t it?”
He didn’t have a habit of wasting food.
Though he had never been poor in his past or current life, his parents often locked him in his room without food when they went off the deep end.
He knew what it felt like to go hungry and had no habit of throwing food away—yet this tonkatsu really exceeded the limits of human digestion.
He genuinely felt like beating the owner up so he would stop wasting ingredients.
Yasui pulled out his wallet from his bag, pressed a ten-thousand-yen note onto the table, and stood up to leave.
As he walked out the door, he heard the owner muttering behind his back, “Young people these days, no sense of taste at all…”
“This pig died in vain, old guy!”
Yasui didn’t turn around, simply raising a middle finger and waving it at the empty air behind him.
Leaving the shop, Yasui strolled down a nearly deserted street.
103 points.
That was what he had amassed before coming to Japan by giving himself a few slashes at home.
“Cursed Spirit Manipulation, 888 points…”
Yasui bit on a freshly bought lollipop, strawberry-flavored, sickly sweet.
“Still short by seven hundred and eighty-five points.”
He had considered Limitless.
That technique was indeed powerful—absurdly so, so much that even a rationalist like him, who in his past life only believed in mathematical formulas, couldn’t help but be tempted.
However, his memories of having read Jujutsu Kaisen told him: Limitless required the Six Eyes to function, and the Six Eyes…
“The Six Eyes are way too conspicuous,” Yasui muttered, pulling the lollipop out of his mouth and staring at the pink sphere of candy.
“The second those eyes are revealed, the entire Jujutsu world will swarm around like sharks smelling blood.
The Gojo family will treat me like a Second Blessed Child, the higher-ups will treat me like an experimental subject, and Suguru Geto will…
well, I actually can’t guess what Geto would think.”
“Speaking of which…
if the school year in Japan starts in April, Satoru Gojo and Suguru Geto haven’t met yet, right?”
He stuffed the candy back into his mouth, his tongue wrapping around the sphere as he felt the cheap sweetness spread across his taste buds.
“Cursed Spirit Manipulation is better after all.
A Pokémon Master: low-key, practical, and besides—”
He licked his lips, a glint of curiosity flashing in his eyes.
I’ve always wanted to know~”
“It made even a sweet-tempered person like Suguru Geto break down.
I’m really curious about the taste~”
The setting sun began to sink westward, dyeing Tokyo’s sky a murky orange-red.
Yasui pushed his earplugs in a bit tighter, pushed his sunglasses back up the bridge of his nose, and continued idling forward.
Then, he stopped in his tracks.
The wind had changed.
It wasn’t the urban breeze carrying car exhaust and the scent of convenience store oden, but a colder, thicker draft, as if squeezed from the deep recesses of a rotting lung.
Woven into this breeze was something that made the hairs on the back of Yasui’s neck stand on end—Cursed Energy.
Along with…
A child’s scream.
Yasui pulled the earplug out of his right ear, pinching it between his fingertips.
His ear twitched slightly, like an alert cat.
“Ah—!!”
The scream was stretched thin by the distance, passing through countless concrete buildings and the clamor of traffic.
Under his hundredfold hearing, compared to the other noises, it was faint to the point of being almost inaudible.
He could discern that it was a girl’s voice, around ten years old, her vocal cords tearing from extreme fear, her pitch rising to a frequency that was almost distorted.
Mingled within the scream was another sound—a wet friction, like a chunk of meat dragging across concrete, accompanied by a low-frequency hiss that lay beyond the normal range of human hearing.
Cursed Spirits.
More than one.
Yasui looked up at the sky.
6:30 PM.
The sun was sinking beneath the horizon, stretching the city’s shadows long.
Dusk—the sunset was quite beautiful.
“Two of them,” he said softly, as if solving a simple arithmetic problem.
“Both are a tiny bit stronger than the Grade 4 I encountered before, but a tiny bit weaker than a Grade 2.
So, Grade 4 or Grade 3?”
He set off, walking toward the direction of the sound.
At first it was a walk, then a fast walk, and finally a run.
Instead of sprinting down the main streets and causing a scene, he ducked into an alleyway, using Cursed Energy to enhance his leg muscles, leaping and darting between the shadows of the buildings.
The abundance of Cursed Energy turned his figure into a blurred black residual shadow, flitting across boundary walls and rooftops.
6:32 PM.
He came to a stop before an abandoned building.
This building was likely a relic of the bubble economy era, a dozen stories high, most of its exterior tiles peeled away to reveal the dark gray concrete skeleton beneath.
Most of the windows were broken, the pitch-black openings like pairs of blind eyes, silently watching the street.
The main entrance was secured with a rusty iron chain, but a side door nearby had been violently broken open, leaving a pitch-black gap.
The stench of Cursed Energy poured out from here, so thick it was almost palpable.
Yasui took off his sunglasses and stuffed them into the pocket of his windbreaker.
His deep purple eyes glowed with a faint, inhuman light in the dim surroundings.
Bending down, he slipped through the gap in the side door.
The interior of the building was a dead silence of darkness.
The air was thick with mold, rust, and a more metallic, sweet reek—the distinct stench of a Cursed Spirit, as if ten thousand dead rats had been stuffed into a sealed jar to ferment for three months.
Yasui’s hundredfold smell immediately revolted, his stomach cramping violently, but he forcibly suppressed the urge to vomit.
His footsteps echoed in the empty lobby.
Having taken just two steps inside, a bone-chilling friction sounded from the ceiling above his head.
Yasui didn’t look up.
He had heard it long ago.
He had already captured that dark shadow diving down from the beam.
It was a Grade 4 Cursed Spirit, its form resembling a lump of black sludge forcibly kneaded together, its surface floating with countless tiny, translucent bubbles.
It lacked a fixed shape, and at its core grew a massive, bloodshot single eye, staring dead at Yasui.
[Cursed Spirit’s aggressive desire toward you: 150%]—Physique effect active.
“Hss—”
The Cursed Spirit let out a sharp hiss, the sound piercing enough to make one’s eardrums throb with pain.
Yasui’s hundredfold hearing captured it with crystal clarity, and blood trickled from his ears.
[Points +3]
It lunged down abruptly, its black body stretching in midair into a twisted whip-like shadow, bringing with it a gust of foul-smelling wind.
Yasui stood his ground without moving.
His dynamic vision deconstructed the Cursed Spirit’s movement into slow motion—he could clearly see the spray direction of every drop of mucus on its body and predict its landing spot 0.3 seconds in advance.
“That really hurts.”
Yasui softly uttered these words.
Then, he clenched his right fist.
Strength: 23.
Enhanced by Cursed Energy, his muscle fibers contracted instantly with an explosive force four times that of an average person.
The instant the Cursed Spirit pounced before his face, Yasui dodged sideways.
The movement was minimal, yet it perfectly avoided the frontal impact of that black sludge.
His right fist thrust out from a bizarre angle, like a precise scalpel, plunging straight into the Cursed Spirit’s body.
“Bang!”
A dull thud.
It wasn’t the collision of flesh against flesh, but the explosive sound of something being violently shattered.
The Cursed Spirit didn’t even have time to let out a second hiss; its entire body, much like a popped balloon, expanded violently before bursting into countless black ashes and completely dissipating.
Nothing was left behind.
[Successfully made Cursed Spirit experience pain, Points +0.3]
[Current Points: 106.3]
Yasui drew back his fist, shaking off the black sludge clinging to his hand.
The moment those secretions touched the air, they evaporated into wisps of black smoke.
“Only zero point three?” His eyes curved softly.
“This thing is a money-losing deal—worth even less than the ones back home.”
[Because it was too weak.]
“I know.
I just like talking trash, leave me be.”
He looked up toward the stairwell.
The girl’s scream had come from above.
Furthermore, that Grade 3 Cursed Spirit was up there as well.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Yasui stepped toward the stairs.
His shadow was stretched long by the setting sun filtering through the broken windows behind him, looking like a ghost.
Check out!