Drip…
drip.
Cold and stiff.
That was Kinoshita’s very first reaction upon opening his eyes.
The pungent, stinging scent of disinfectant drifted into his nasal passages.
His eyes, tightly shut from the freezing temperatures, fluttered open slightly.
His line of sight was met with rows of metallic morgue freezers.
Naked from the waist up, Kinoshita’s body lay atop a freezing gurney, shifting and reshaping into an entirely different form as his slowly recovering heartbeat pumped life through it.
“Huuu…”
A breath of icy air dispersed like a plume of white mist.
Kinoshita propped himself up, looking down at a pair of healthy, youthful hands that felt utterly foreign.
“Kenjaku, that bastard… he just dumped me into any random corpse he could find to incarnate me?”
Kinoshita sat up and casually stretched his muscles, his joints popping with a crisp, crackling sound.
He scanned his surroundings, his gaze landing on the digital clock mounted high on the wall, glowing with a faint, eerie blue light.
November 1, 2018, 12:00.
“Ha… looks like I woke up a bit late, didn’t I?”
The corners of Kinoshita’s mouth quirked upward.
He swung his legs off the table.
The memories belonging to the original owner of this body flooded his mind like a tidal wave—betrayed by a woman, betrayed by his brothers, and then, in a fit of agitated distraction, crashing his car.
Heh, typical losers—even when they kick the bucket, they try to take someone down with them.
As he walked out the main doors of the morgue, the security guard on duty was just groggily waking up from a “midday nap.”
Seeing a shirtless man radiating an inexplicable aura of pure intimidation casually strolling out of the morgue, the guard’s phone slipped right through his fingers and clattered onto the floor.
“Yo, nice lunch you’ve got there. Mind pointing me in the direction of the clothes?”
Kinoshita stretched lazily.
Under the guard’s catatonic stare, Kinoshita held out his hand.
Trembling, the guard pointed toward the deceased property storage area.
“Thanks! Better than having to strip a corpse… Erm… this is Sendai, right?”
Kinoshita patted the guard on the shoulder.
“Oh, right. What’s your name?”
“Ah… Mamoru… Mamoru Ito.”
Kinoshita stared at Ito’s face, then nodded.
“Good, I’ll remember your name. Mm… by the way, lend me some cash?”
Taking the wallet handed over by the terrified guard, Kinoshita pulled out a 10,000-yen bill and tossed the wallet back.
Heading in the direction the guard had pointed, he walked into the clothing storage, picked out a set of clothes belonging to his body’s original host, and after zipping up, walked toward the wall, stepping directly into the shadow cast by the corner.
Within a narrow alleyway, Kinoshita’s silhouette materialized out of the shadows.
November in Tokyo—yet the streets were completely deserted.
The wind carried a bone-chilling bite, but to Kinoshita, the air smelled intoxicatingly good.
It wasn’t the burnt aroma of wild roasted pheasant, nor the faint scent of wild berries.
It was a scent etched deep into Kinoshita’s past life, one capable of instantly triggering humanity’s most primal desires: fried chicken.
“Looks like I borrowed that money for nothing… But come to think of it, today is Thursday…”
Of course, “Crazy Thursday” was a promotional event back in his homeland.
The Japanese had absolutely no tradition of going to KFC on Thursdays—well, probably not.
With that thought, Kinoshita tossed the 10,000-yen bill into his shadow.
Stepping out of the alley, Kinoshita caught sight of the red-and-white sign ahead—and from the hazy memories of his previous life, he recalled the mouth-watering old man featured on it…
“Even if there’s no Crazy Thursday, there’s free fried chicken, right?”
Kinoshita caught the rich aroma in the air and started walking toward the restaurant entrance.
However, the moment his foot hit the steps, his pace faltered slightly.
Mixed within that rich, savory scent of fried chicken was a thick, stomach-turning stench of rot.
That was the scent of a Jujutsu Sorcerer.
To be precise, it was the scent of an incarnated player just like him.
“Come to think of it, the Sendai Colony… where was the manga update before I came here?”
Kinoshita narrowed his eyes slightly, carefully searching his memories.
In his past life, the manga had updated up to the point where Yuta Okkotsu was pulling off a 1v4 sweep in Sendai—he had no recollection of anything after that.
As he pondered, Kinoshita’s right hand habitually formed a hand sign, and pitch-black shadows began creeping up, covering his wrist.
“Ha, whatever. Mahoraga, lend me your sw—”
Kinoshita’s breath suddenly caught in his throat.
As a Ten Shadows user from the Muromachi period who stood as the strongest of his era—and likely the only Ten Shadows user in jujutsu history to have actually tamed Mahoraga—he instantly sensed an anomaly within his innate technique.
The connection was severed.
Not just Mahoraga.
Max Elephant, Piercing Ox, Round Deer, Toad…
he couldn’t even feel Nue.
His shikigami felt like kites that had flown deep into a storm cloud; though he still held the string, he couldn’t “see” their existence at all.
Totality?!
Even Totality was gone?
“A side effect of incarnation?”
Kinoshita felt out his technique—alright, it wasn’t that the shikigami were destroyed, but rather that the taming rituals for this body were completely blank.
In other words, he just needed to re-tame them.
…Perhaps it was because he was an incarnated entity.
Of course, the fact that the shikigami taming data had reset meant one other thing.
“Woof!” “Awoo—”
With a flick of his wrist, Kinoshita slammed the black shadow covering his arm onto the ground.
One white and one black giant hound leaped gracefully from the shadows, excitedly circling around Kinoshita.
“Just as I thought, Shiro.”
“Awoo!”
Kinoshita crouched down, scooping up the snow-white Divine Dog and frantically rubbing its head.
“Long time no see, huh? Has it been about six hundred years? Hmm?”
While Divine Dog: Black continued to happily circle Kinoshita’s legs, Divine Dog: White slowly backed away and sat down upon hearing his words, its blood-red eyes filled with a hilariously human expression of sheer exasperation.
“Don’t be like that… we’ve got something nearby to take care of—”
Kinoshita clapped his hands, and the twin Divine Dogs dissolved back into black shadows, returning to his body.
Kinoshita, a rogue bloodline of the Zen’in clan, a Ten Shadows user from the Muromachi period, was the strongest sorcerer of his era, and perhaps the only Ten Shadows user in history to tame Mahoraga.
The Zen’in clan had left no records of him, and no one bothered to look into how long the Ten Shadows technique had faced a generational gap during the Muromachi period.
After all, it was neither an anomaly nor an exception.
Unless you are a Zen’in, you are not a sorcerer; unless you are a sorcerer, you are not human.
Regardless, Kinoshita had absolutely no intention of going back to his clan to look at those old geezers’ faces.
Granted, the Ten Shadows could easily make him the next head of the family, but considering the environment of ancient Japan, he was somewhat afraid of being assassinated on the spot before he could grow.
Of course, after taming Mahoraga, he no longer had such concerns.
Tap.
“Sorcerers, curses, the modern era, the ancients…”
Kinoshita casually stretched his fingers, his eyes carrying a hint of disdain as he looked toward the source of the footsteps.
Tap.
“Hey, you over there with the ridiculous hair. Which category do you fall into?”
Following the distinct sound of leather shoes striking the ground, a figure stood not far down the street.
The man wore a heavy, textured black leather jacket, and the exaggerated pompadour on his forehead remained stubbornly still against the deep autumn wind.
The moment he saw that flamboyant hairstyle and posture, Kinoshita already knew exactly who stood before him.
Ryu Ishigori.
The moment their eyes locked, the cursed energy within their bodies instantly surged, priming for battle.
Ryu Ishigori’s sharp eyes swept up and down Kinoshita’s body, ultimately locking onto Kinoshita’s seemingly “relaxed” stance.
The corners of his mouth turned up into a smile that mixed anticipation with provocation.
“Modern sorcerers probably haven’t even figured out what’s going on yet… I’m not like them. I’m an ancient sorcerer too.”
Ryu Ishigori’s voice was deep.
Within his perception, the cursed energy of the man before him tightly wrapped around his body like a shroud; even the slightest leaks rose and danced like flickering flames.
Furthermore, not only was this man’s cursed energy output far higher than his own, but the sheer “density” of that energy was something he couldn’t even hope to match.
“You don’t seem to be from my era… Are you from later, or earlier…? The cursed energy on you… it’s like a finely aged vintage wine. It really whets the appetite…”