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The night had deepened.
The last faint echo of bowls and chopsticks faded into silence.
The steady breathing of two children drifted through from the next room.
Toji Fushiguro sat cross-legged on the tatami in the center of the living room, and closed his eyes.
He turned every sense inward.
The warm meal.
His daughter’s soft embrace.
His son’s awkward, genuine “Dad”, like a low, steady fire, they burned in his chest, slow and sure, burning away the cold that had accumulated across two lifetimes.
But warmth alone wasn’t enough.
Toji’s consciousness sank deeper.
The flesh of the Heavenly Restriction was a vast, dead wasteland.
No streams of Cursed Energy.
No trace of it anywhere.
And he was going to carve a path through that wasteland, a path that had never belonged here in the first place.
He started the way he remembered.
Squeezing.
Extracting.
Coaxing from the deepest recesses of his cells that faint, almost negligible flicker of life energy.
The process was painful and tedious.
Like grinding diamond against bare flesh, every sliver of progress bought with equal torment of mind and body.
This was Chakra.
This was the foundation of the Eight Gates Released Formation.
Faint as it was, it was there.
This body, the one the Jujutsu world had written off as worthless, could carry the power of an entirely different system.
Perfectly.
The corner of Toji’s mouth curved.
Give him time.
He’d bring the Eight Gates Released Formation back to its peak, and when that happened, his strength would dwarf anything he’d had in his previous life.
And then, Special Grade Cursed Spirits, the Three Great Families, Jujutsu Headquarters, he’d take the iron fist of youth and smash every last piece of that rot to rubble.
He was still sinking into that focus when he heard it.
The faintest rustle.
Fabric brushing tatami.
Here we go.
Toji didn’t open his eyes.
His breathing didn’t change.
But that terrifying perception, the one that had made him the Sorcerer Killer, had already locked onto the small, tense figure lurking behind the door.
Megumi.
Little brat.
Middle of the night, and he’s not in bed.
What’s he plotting?
Toji felt a flicker of amusement and decided to let it play out.
Through the crack of the door, one green eye was watching.
Megumi Fushiguro couldn’t sleep.
He’d been tossing under his blanket for what felt like hours, his mind turning over the absurd, utterly sincere story his father had told at the dinner table.
That “Dad”, 4 years late, landing like it had always been there.
Everything felt like a dream.
But when he crept out of bed and pressed his eye to the gap in the door, what he saw was stranger than any dream.
His father, that wall of muscle, sat cross-legged in the dark.
No lights.
And yet Megumi could see it clearly: faint wisps of pale blue drifting from his father’s body, like mist slowly rising off still water, forming a blurred halo around him.
What was that?
Was that why he’d changed?
“Enjoying the view?”
A lazy voice filled the silent room.
Megumi’s whole body locked up.
He nearly sat straight down on the floor, a fawn frozen in headlights, unable to go forward or back.
“Come out.
You’re going to get cold standing there.”
Toji opened his eyes.
In the darkness, those green irises were startlingly bright, turned toward the doorway with undisguised amusement.
Megumi shuffled out from behind the door like he was walking to his own execution.
His head stayed down.
Both small hands twisted the hem of his shirt.
He couldn’t look at Toji’s face.
He’s going to yell at me.
The man had changed, a lot, but when he lost his temper, he was still terrifying.
Except the roar never came.
A broad, rough, calloused hand came down on top of his head.
It ruffled his messy sea-urchin hair, clumsy and warm.
“Still up this late?” Toji’s voice had a smile in it.
“Decided you want to join Dad for some late-night youth bonus training?”
Megumi hunched his shoulders slightly.
The warmth of that hand was unexpectedly, unsettlingly, reassuring.
He gathered himself.
Looked up.
Those green eyes, so identical to Toji’s own, were wide with the purest confusion a child could hold.
“Dad…” He hesitated.
“What you were doing just now — was that training?”
A pause, then quieter.
“And that place you mentioned.
‘Jujutsu High.’ What is it?”
The smile on Toji’s face settled into something quieter.
Here it is.
He’d known this was coming.
He looked into his son’s clear eyes, and something in his chest pulled in two directions at once.
Lie to him?
Tell him the world was sunshine, no monsters, that Dad was just doing some strange calisthenics in the dark?
No.
He killed that thought the moment it formed.
In this rotten Jujutsu world, Megumi carried Zenin blood.
That innate talent was going to find him whether Toji wanted it to or not.
Better to arm him now, with his own hands, than to let him be dragged into the darkness blind, handed off to those decaying old men to be used as a tool.
Let him have the right to choose.
Let him have the power to say “no” to this shitty world.
“Megumi.”
Toji withdrew his hand.
He sat straight, legs crossed, and his expression went fully serious.
“Sit down.
What I’m about to tell you matters.
Pay attention.”
Megumi sat down in front of him without a word.
“This world isn’t just tall buildings and television sets.” Toji picked his words carefully, trying to find the shape of something a four-year-old could hold.
“In places we can’t see, there are monsters, born from humanity’s worst emotions.
Hatred.
Fear.
We call them Cursed Spirits.”
“And Jujutsu High is a school.
It trains people to fight those monsters.
Those people are called Jujutsu Sorcerers.”
Megumi’s eyes lit up, piece by piece.
Monsters.
Fighting.
That gray, boring world, kindergarten and expired milk, day after day, tore open on his father’s words, and behind the rip was something vast and strange and dangerous and completely, blindingly alive.
“Our Fushiguro family…” Toji paused.
“No.
It should be the Zenin family.” Something moved behind his eyes when he said the name, brief and cold.
“One of the biggest Jujutsu Sorcerer families there is.
And you, Megumi, their blood runs in you too.”
His tone eased.
“Dad is a failure.
Born without Cursed Energy, so the family threw me out.
What I’m training now is power from a different world entirely.
It’s brutal, and it’s dangerous, it’s not for you.”
He could see it already.
Megumi’s body was flexible, naturally gifted, but his constitution was nothing like Toji’s pure Heavenly Restriction.
The self-destroying grind of the Eight Gates Released Formation would break him.
“But you are different, Megumi.” Toji’s gaze seemed to push past skin and bone, reaching toward something coiled deep in that bloodline.
“You might actually have the talent.
The talent to become a Jujutsu Sorcerer.”
Megumi’s small hands curled into fists without him noticing.
He looked up.
Held his father’s eyes.
And with a steadiness that had no business living in a four-year-old’s voice, he said it one word at a time.
“I want…
to become strong too.”
Toji went still for a moment.
Then he shook his head with a short, rueful laugh.
“Silly kid.
If you ended up a ‘failure’ like me, I wouldn’t be happy about it.”
He knew exactly how much scorn and contempt a person without Cursed Energy had to swallow in this world.
He’d lived it.
He wasn’t going to let his son walk that same road.
He wanted Megumi to claim his Cursed Energy properly.
Standing tall.
Becoming a Jujutsu Sorcerer people respected.
Then something crystallized.
“Megumi.” He looked at his son’s face, still tightly composed, but the excitement leaking through the cracks, and made his call.
“You want to find out if you have the talent?”
Megumi nodded hard.
That little sea-urchin head bobbed like it might fall off.
“Good!”
Toji’s grin split wide across his face, teeth and all, and just like that, the hot-blooded muscle-headed idiot was back.
“Tomorrow, Dad takes you to Jujutsu High.
We’ll have that old man — the principal — run a test on you.”
“Let’s go find out exactly what kind of youthful talent is hiding inside the son of Toji Fushiguro, the Blue Beast!”
Megumi was on his feet before the words finished landing, eyes blazing with something he couldn’t hold back even if he wanted to.
A Jujutsu Sorcerer.
He was going to become a Jujutsu Sorcerer.
➤ Next: A Father’s Request, Megumi’s Talent Test
Jujutsu Kaisen