The courtyard was dead silent.
The traditionalists—like Naoya, Ogi, and the surviving elite Hei members—were completely pale. They were slowly realizing that their sacred, thousand-year-old religion of bloodlines and cursed techniques had just been violently bought out by something vulgar. Something they pretended to hate, but secretly worshipped: money.
Meanwhile, the Kukuru unit, the servants, and the outcasts were staring at the employment contracts in their bruised hands. For the first time in their miserable lives, they held physical, quantifiable proof of their actual worth.
Millennia of cruel, abstract traditions were being completely wiped away by cold, hard capitalism.
Still, while Suzuki was offering them comfortable salaries and medical benefits, he expected their absolute, unquestionable loyalty in return. If they betrayed him, he would wipe them out. The fundamental rule of Jujutsu society hadn't changed: the strongest decided everything.
Suzuki had won. He could do whatever he wanted. But more importantly, he knew he could control the vast majority of the Zenin Clan with cash. Lack of money was the root cause of almost every problem in Jujutsu society. After all, if sorcerers were actually paid fairly, why would they ever resort to doing dirty, dangerous, underhanded work?
Yet, there was one massive, glaring problem with Suzuki's grand vision.
"Where exactly are you going to get the money to pay for all this?! You are going to bankrupt this entire family!"
As Suzuki finished his speech and ordered the clan to assemble tomorrow at eight o'clock sharp, Naobito immediately pressed him. The former Clan Head knew perfectly well that despite his son's brilliant coup d'etat, the math simply didn't add up.
"Father," Suzuki asked calmly, turning to the old man. "How much liquid cash does our family actually have in the bank?"
"I'm not giving you a single yen!" Naobito refused without hesitation. "If I give you all of our money, it will disappear by tomorrow! We might be a wealthy family, boy, but we are not a cash-rich family!"
Naobito was right. The Zenin Clan had accumulated massive wealth over a thousand years, but almost none of it was sitting in a bank account. Their wealth was locked up in physical assets: priceless collections of Special Grade Cursed Tools, and massive, barrier-protected real estate scattered across Japan.
They had some cash, of course, but it was barely enough to maintain the massive compound, feed the hundreds of clan members, and pay the mandatory, exorbitant taxes demanded by the Jujutsu Elders.
The Elders were a group of corrupt, ancient officials who managed the Jujutsu world with absolute authority. Why did the Zenin Clan have to pay them off? Simply for convenience. Managing a massive political entity like the Zenin Clan was exhausting. Naobito was lazy; he just wanted to drink his alcohol and be left alone. So, he paid the Elders their cut, kept the elite members comfortable, and gave the lower-tier members the bare minimum to survive—exactly how feudal lords treated their peasants in the past.
But Suzuki was a capitalist. He wanted his employees well-fed, energetic, and highly motivated. He knew that the harder they worked, the more the entire organization would profit.
The traditional Jujutsu society just blindly accepted the status quo. They used brutal, abstract methods to solve problems. Suzuki's method was completely practical.
Naobito simply couldn't wrap his head around it. Spending millions of yen on the "servants" of the family sounded like absolute madness to him.
Yet, compared to the rest of the elders, Naobito wasn't entirely stuck in the past. After all, his innate technique—Projection Sorcery—was based on the concept of "24 Frames Per Second." The concept of camera frame rates didn't even exist until the invention of motion pictures in the late 1800s. Naobito's power was literal proof that he could adapt to modern concepts. His vision was just entirely too small.
Suzuki decided it was time to educate his father.
"Mai, hand me my laptop," Suzuki said, holding out his hand.
"Huh?" Mai blinked, entirely confused, but she quickly reached into his bag and handed him the sleek, silver device.
"Watch me closely," Suzuki said, opening the screen.
"...."
Naobito, Maki, and Mai all leaned in, looking at the screen cautiously.
"...What exactly are you going to do?" Naobito asked, narrowing his eyes at the glowing charts and graphs.
Maki and Mai stayed quiet. They didn't think they were smart enough to understand whatever hyper-advanced physics equation Suzuki was about to pull up.
But Suzuki wasn't doing physics. He opened his FOREX (Foreign Exchange) trading account.
"Trading," Suzuki answered simply.
"I can see that," Naobito grunted. "But why?!"
"Just watch," Suzuki smirked, his fingers hovering over the keyboard. "Did you really think I only developed the Manager and my Projection Sorcery just to punch people faster?"
"Eh?"
Suzuki's current account balance sat at exactly 10 million Yen (approx. $65,000). It was his entire life savings.
Was that a lot of money for a teenager? Naturally. He had worked incredibly hard taking on dangerous Cursed Spirit bounties. It was during those missions that he realized how much he deeply hated the Jujutsu Elders. While other sorcerers were blind to it, Suzuki realized the Elders were nothing but leeches. They took a massive cut of his mission payouts, claiming it was for "administrative necessities."
He risked his life, and they took half his money just for sitting in a safe room. It infuriated him. In fact, his desire to beat the Elders at their own financial game was exactly why he had pushed his cursed technique to the absolute limit.
"Do you know why the Jujutsu Elders are so powerful in the eyes of society?" Suzuki asked, his eyes locked on the scrolling market data.
"...Why?" Naobito asked.
"Because they control the money," Suzuki replied coldly. "But they don't understand modern leverage."
Suzuki quickly adjusted his trading settings. "In the financial world, 'leverage' is a cheat code. The trading platform allows me to multiply my actual cash. Right now, I'm using a 1:100 leverage. That means my 10 million Yen has instantly transformed into 1 billion Yen of actual buying power."
The twins gasped.
"It's incredibly dangerous for normal humans," Suzuki explained, his fingers beginning to blur. "If the market moves against you even a fraction of a percent, you lose everything instantly. But I don't guess."
With his Manager AI reading the global financial algorithms, and his Projection Sorcery allowing him to execute trades in zero seconds—faster than any Wall Street supercomputer—Suzuki became a god of High-Frequency Trading. He could see the market shifts fractions of a second before they actually happened.
The three of them fell completely silent, holding their breath as they watched the green numbers on the screen violently tick upward.
In a matter of minutes, his balance skyrocketed. It didn't stop until it hit $11,000,000 (Approx. 1.6 Billion Yen) in pure, liquid cash.
Suzuki calmly closed the laptop and looked up at his stunned father.
"So," Suzuki smiled warmly. "How much liquid cash did you say we had again, Father?"
Naobito stared at the blank laptop lid for three full seconds. Then, without a single word of hesitation, the former Clan Head dropped to his knees and offered his deepest, most respectful bow to the new Head of the Zenin Clan.
"Please wait just one moment, My Dear Son," Naobito said with absolute sincerity. "Let me go get you the master keys to the treasury."