[Time kept moving whether anyone was ready or not. In what felt like the blink of an eye, you entered your fourth year at Jujutsu High.]
[Compared to the first three, it felt almost hollow.]
[Those earlier years had been loud, messy, full of youth and trouble and the aftershocks of the Star Plasma Vessel incident. Fourth year was different. Quieter. Emptier. There was a kind of loneliness to it that never really left.]
[The boy who used to tie his hair into a bun and wrestle Satoru Gojo around the courtyard like they were still in middle school had become a fugitive Special Grade Curse User. The loudest pair in Jujutsu High had been split clean down the middle. In the end, only Gojo, Shoko Ieiri, and you were left.]
[The New Year's draw showed up right on time, announced by the Simulator's usual cold little chime.]
[Obtained: Divided Attention [R]]
[Divided Attention [R]: Your absolute focus on any single task decreases slightly (10%). In exchange, your multitasking efficiency and neural processing allocation improve dramatically (30%).]
[Most sorcerers would have called that trash. A curse, maybe. In a line of work where a single lapse in concentration could get you killed, taking a hit to focus sounded suicidal.]
[For you, though, this was ridiculous value.]
[It was practically tailor-made for the way you fought.]
[You knew your own strengths and weaknesses better than anyone. Copying nightmare-level techniques like Limitless, maintaining forward Cursed Technique output, and running Cursed Technique Reversal at the same time so you could pin someone down in close combat, that stuff ate processing power like crazy.]
[That extra 30% changed everything.]
[Your brain had basically been running like an overclocked single-core machine this whole time, one bad spike away from smoking itself. Now it felt more like you'd finally upgraded to multiple cores with room left over.]
[That meant building several techniques at once in the middle of a fight. Better reactions. Better combos. Better tolerance for mistakes. Less stuttering when you tried to stack too many things at once. Trading 10% focus for that was a joke. You'd take that deal every time.]
[In practice, fourth year looked a lot like third. A few theory lectures. A mountain of fieldwork. The days blurred together so fast you barely noticed them passing.]
[Still, if you had to pick the most memorable part of that otherwise busy, uneventful year, it wasn't any mission.]
[It was the series of absolutely deranged stunts pulled by the man currently sitting at the top of the jujutsu world.]
[It started on a rare afternoon with no missions, one of the few days when all three remaining classmates happened to be on campus at the same time.]
["Hayase, help me out here. Please? Pretty please?"]
[Gojo pressed his palms together and leaned in with the kind of sweet, drawn-out begging voice that immediately made your skin crawl.]
[A man that tall trying to act cute should've been illegal.]
[Not far away, under the shade of a tree beside a bench, Shoko sat with an unlit cigarette hanging from her lips. There were faint dark circles under her eyes, the kind you got from too many late nights patching people up with Reverse Cursed Technique. She watched the whole thing with the detached interest of someone enjoying free entertainment.]
["...What do you want?"]
[You took half a step back on instinct. Every warning bell in your body had started ringing at once.]
["Oh, nothing big."]
[Gojo hooked a finger under his round sunglasses and tugged them down his nose. The Six Eyes stared at you over the rims, bright and feverish with excitement. He lowered his voice like he was about to share classified information.]
["I've mastered it. Domain Expansion. So I want your help testing it in live combat."]
[You froze for a second.]
[Those two words landed with real weight.]
[The truth was, you knew almost nothing about Domain Expansion. You'd never even heard of another sorcerer who could use it. And now Gojo was standing in front of you, casually saying he wanted to demonstrate it.]
[So that's what the talent gap looks like.]
["You want to test it on me?" You gave him a long look, just to confirm he hadn't finally lost his mind. "Seriously?"]
["Relax. I'm the strongest, remember? Of course I can control it."]
[He thumped himself on the chest with full confidence, then pointed over at Shoko with his thumb.]
["Think about it. Shoko's a total non-combatant. You, on the other hand, are the strongest Grade 2 sorcerer, the guy who soloed his way into the Zenin estate. Plus both you and Shoko can use Reverse Cursed Technique, so we've got double insurance. Even if there's a teeny tiny microscopic problem, she'll run over and patch you up."]
[Then he grinned, obviously very pleased with himself.]
["And if it's you, maybe you can even use that busted copycat technique of yours and steal a little inspiration from my invincible Domain, yeah?"]
[After that, with the kind of brevity only possible when someone is both a genius and deeply annoying, he gave you the basic framework of what he'd named Unlimited Void.]
[You watched him stand there with his hands together, eyes practically shining, and quietly sighed.]
[You understood what was really going on.]
[Under all that smugness, he probably just wanted someone to see it. Someone to witness what he'd finally reached. The person who should have been standing next to him for a moment like this, talking trash and testing limits shoulder to shoulder, was gone.]
[As the classmate still here, you couldn't really turn him down.]
[And from a purely practical standpoint, getting to experience a complete Unlimited Void at point-blank range was the kind of combat data people would kill for.]
["Fine," you said. "I'll be your test dummy."]
[Ten minutes later, you were standing in the deepest underground training hall beneath Jujutsu High.]
[Shoko had already retreated all the way to the emergency exit just in case. The cigarette between her fingers glowed on and off. Reverse Cursed Technique was already circulating through her body, faint but ready. She looked less like a student and more like a trauma surgeon waiting for the patient to crash on the table.]
["Ready, Hayase?"]
[Gojo stood about ten paces away.]
[Every trace of his usual nonsense had vanished.]
[The moment those pale blue eyes locked onto you, stripped of all emotion, the whole room seemed to empty out. The pressure that followed was hard to describe. It felt like standing in the path of something holy and realizing a little too late that holiness could kill you just fine.]
["Do it."]
[He raised his right hand. Index and middle fingers crossed.]
[The sign that would one day be burned into jujutsu history, the Seal of Taishakuten.]
["Domain Expansion..."]
[His voice was low. Barely above a murmur.]
[Something cold and massive pushed into reality, and the laws of the physical world gave way almost instantly.]
["Unlimited Void."]
[There was no explosion. No dramatic shockwave. But the rules of the world peeled apart right in front of you like brittle glass.]
[The dim concrete hall disappeared.]
[In its place was an endless, impossible stretch of cosmic space.]
[Somewhere at the edge of your vision, a black hole turned in silence. Stars stretched into ribbons of light and streamed past in every direction. Hanging at the center of it all was a single gigantic eye, staring down with the detached indifference of something that had made the world and regretted nothing.]
[Perception. Transmission. Every instinct wired into living flesh got hit with a hard stop.]
[Information flooded in.]
[Too much of it. A ridiculous amount. It punched through your mental defenses at light speed and slammed straight into your brain, a whole universe worth of noise and meaning forced through a space far too small to hold it.]
[It was enough information to destroy a normal sorcerer in seconds. Even a Grade 1 would have been lucky to walk away as anything but a drooling shell, standing there blankly because they'd forgotten how to think, speak, maybe even breathe.]
[And yet...]
[You, standing in the very center of that flood, locked up for less than a fraction of a second before something from deep in your mind responded with startling familiarity.]
[Wait.]
[This feeling of having a stupid amount of information shoved straight into my skull...]
[Your newly upgraded, multitasking brain finished the comparison almost immediately.]
[This was basically the same sensation you got every time a Simulator cycle ended. Years of combat data, pain, emotional wreckage, and memory all compressed into a single package, then rammed into your head with zero regard for what that might do to a person.]
[If there was any difference, it was scale.]
[Compared to the Simulator's memory transfers, those soul-deep downloads loaded with entire lifetimes, Gojo's still-developing Unlimited Void felt almost... noisy. Fragmented. Crude, even.]
[For a brain that had already been tempered by multiple rounds of that kind of abuse, this was the difference between a category-ten typhoon and a spring breeze.]
[Outside the Domain, less than half a second had passed.]
[A bead of cold sweat slid down Gojo's temple.]
[This was his first time using it on a living person. Afraid he'd overdone it and turned you into a vegetable, he dropped the hand sign and dismissed the Domain on the spot.]
[The cosmos burst apart like a soap bubble. Fluorescent light from the underground training hall spilled back over both of you.]
["Shoko! Get over here and check him!"]
[Gojo spun toward the door, panic cutting right through his voice.]
[Shoko crushed her cigarette underfoot and launched forward, ready to cross the room in a sprint.]
[And then, right in the middle of that tight, awful second where both of them were clearly bracing for the worst, your voice cut through the hall.]
[Calm and steady. A little confused, if anything.]
["Huh? That's it?"]
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Sorry guys, won't be able to upload the bonus chapters today :( .... I'll upload them tomorrow, and I'll add one extra chapter from my side as well :)