[Your hand was halfway to his shoulder when your line of sight cleared his back and landed on the workbench.]
[Every thought in your head derailed.]
[Your pupils shrank to pinpoints.]
[Lying there among screwdrivers, talisman paper, and tufts of cotton stuffing was a panda.]
[A real panda. A tiny one. A baby, maybe twenty inches long, round-bellied and black-and-white and very much alive. Its eyes weren't even fully open yet. Its little limbs twitched helplessly against the cold metal table.]
[You sucked in a sharp breath.]
[Yaga heard you and turned around. His stern face, framed by those usual sunglasses, had just started to ease into recognition.]
["Oh, Hayase. Good timing. Help me take a look at this... hey, where are you going?!"]
[You were already gone before he finished the sentence.]
[You shot to the doorway, stuck your head out, checked the corridor to the left and right, then yanked the heavy workshop door shut with a loud clang.]
[Still not enough.]
[You blurred to the windows and dragged the blackout curtains closed. If you could have thrown up a Curtain over the whole room, you would have.]
[Only then did you turn around, plant your back against the sealed curtains.]
[He stared back, completely lost. One finger pushed his sunglasses up his nose.]
["Hayase... what exactly are you doing? Hiding a body?"]
[You sucked in a breath and cut him off, addressing your respected teacher in the gravest tone you could manage.]
["Sensei. You need to turn yourself in."]
[Every muscle in Yaga's face locked up.]
[For one long second, he looked like a man wondering whether Unlimited Void had quietly scrambled your brain after all.]
["...Huh?"]
[You pushed on, putting every ounce of earnest concern into your voice.]
["I don't know what happened to you lately, or what kind of bizarre hobby dragged you onto this road, but it's not too late to confess. Smuggling and privately raising a protected species at this level could become an international incident. Pandas are a national treasure over there!"]
[Silence.]
[Five full seconds of it.]
[The corner of Yaga's mouth twitched so hard it looked painful. He finally understood how your brain had gotten from point A to point completely insane.]
[Pinching the bridge of his nose, visibly restraining the urge to beat you to death on the spot, he roared:]
["What the hell are you talking about?! It's a Cursed Corpse! I made it! It's not a real panda, you idiot!"]
["...What?"]
[Your righteous momentum died on the spot.]
["A Cursed Corpse...?"]
[Still deeply suspicious, you walked back to the bench and poked the baby's belly with one finger.]
[Warm.]
[The fur felt perfect. The soft rise and fall of its chest looked real too, natural enough to fool anyone.]
[No wonder you'd jumped to the wrong conclusion. You knew Yaga better than almost anyone. You knew he was the undisputed top authority on Cursed Corpse fabrication, a master of Puppet Manipulation. Yet the moment you'd laid eyes on this thing, instinct had overridden knowledge, and you'd pegged it as a smuggled animal]
[Once you were satisfied no international task force was about to kick the door in, you let out a breath. Relief faded fast. In its place came something hotter, sharper.]
[Pure fascination.]
[You looked back at the squirming cub and then at Yaga.]
["Is this it? The ultimate Cursed Corpse you've been trying to make all this time? One that really has... life?"]
[The moment you said life, Yaga's irritation bled out of him. His shoulders slumped. Behind the dark lenses, his gaze settled on the cub, and he let out a heavy sigh.]
["Yeah. But right now... it's another failure."]
[He pointed at the baby panda. Its twitching had grown more violent, less like ordinary movement and more like something malfunctioning from the inside.]
["Don't be fooled by how it looks. What you're seeing isn't struggling. The two Cursed Corpse cores inside it are rejecting each other through the micro-scale Cursed Energy circuits. Those spasms are a side effect of the conflict. It still hasn't produced a consciousness."]
[You closed your eyes and extended your senses.]
[He was right. There was no control thread linking Yaga to the cub. He wasn't operating it. It was just a machine with two incompatible engines jammed into a tiny body, grinding each other to pieces.]
[As Yaga's student, and one of the few people alive who actually understood high-level Cursed Corpse construction, you grasped the deadlock immediately.]
[A Cursed Corpse worked a lot like a battery powering a machine. The more complex the body became, the more faithfully it tried to imitate actual biological life, the more Cursed Energy it needed just to stay functional. If you wanted autonomy and genuine self-awareness, a single core couldn't supply enough output. So the obvious answer was to add a second core.]
[And that was where everything fell apart.]
[Two power sources crammed into one tiny vessel meant conflict. Instability. Contradictory logic. The whole structure turning on itself. It was the brick wall of Cursed Corpse theory, the reason almost everyone in the field considered true life impossible.]
[You stared at the cub for a long second.]
[Then something in the back of your mind lit up. It was such a reckless idea that calling it stupid almost felt too gentle.]
[Your head snapped toward Yaga.]
["Can I try interfering with the Corpse's base logic circuits?"]
[He blinked.]
[As the man who had taught you Puppet Manipulation with his own hands, Yaga knew exactly how good you were at Cursed Corpse work. Maybe you hadn't spent much time on it lately, buried as you were under combat training and everything else, but talent like that didn't just disappear. So he didn't reject you outright.]
[He just asked, carefully:]
["What's your idea?"]
[You answered by reaching into the inner pocket of your jacket.]
[A pulse of Cursed Energy went with the movement. When your hand came back out, it was holding something small and carefully preserved.]
[A tiny artificial core.]
[Wukong's core.]
[Long ago, Wukong had destroyed its own body to protect you, ripped apart by whatever monster Toji Fushiguro had turned into. After that, between the Ten Shadows Technique and everything else crowding your life, restoring it had kept getting pushed back.]
[Yaga recognized the resonance immediately.]
["That's... Wukong?"]
[Your thumb brushed the faint scratches across its surface.]
["Its core. The output isn't huge, but the base feedback loop is extremely stable."]
[You moved beside the workbench and pointed to the two energy vortices inside the panda, already spiraling toward mutual destruction.]
["Both of these cores are on the verge of collapse. Adding a third sounds insane, I know. Like throwing a lit match into a powder keg. But in geometry, the most stable structure is a triangle. Best resistance to distortion. Best mutual balance. I want Wukong to sit between them and act as a buffer."]
[Yaga stared at the core in your hand.]
[Triple-core theory.]
[Even for him, that sounded deranged.]
[The workshop went quiet for a moment. Then the old man drew a slow breath and made the only call left to make.]
[Without intervention, the rejection cascade would rip the panda apart within minutes anyway.]
["Do it, Hayase."]
[His hand came down on your shoulder, heavy and steady.]
[You moved immediately. The talisman sheet covering the cub's abdomen peeled away in one motion, exposing the compact and intricate core array underneath. You took one breath to steady yourself, then began inserting Wukong's core into the linkage point between the other two.]
[The instant it made contact, the rejection went berserk.]
[A tiny Cursed Energy storm exploded inside the cub, small in scale and catastrophic in effect. Another second and the internal circuitry would've been shredded.]
["No good! The rejection's accelerating!"]
[Yaga's face went pale.]
[Then the next thing you did stopped him cold.]
["That's... how are you doing that?!"]
[You hadn't grabbed for a repair tool. You hadn't drawn a rune.]
[At the exact moment the rejection storm was about to tear the entire core zone apart, you activated Limitless directly inside the panda's microscopic internal space.]
[A barrier thinner than a cicada's wing, but absolutely impassable, appeared between the three cores and the crashing energy around them. Infinite space was forced into gaps only centimeters wide, pinning the violent storm inside that tiny world so it couldn't touch anything outside it.]
[That alone would've been absurd.]
[But it didn't stop there.]
[With Divided Attention running at full force, your right hand maintained microscopic Limitless control in the most demanding defensive application imaginable, while your left hand moved with surgical precision, threading Wukong's faint Cursed Energy through the openings and painstakingly building new pathways between all three cores.]
[Yaga watched, stunned.]
[This kid isn't just multitasking, he realized. He's performing simultaneous micro-operations that require completely different kinds of precision.]
[Even he had never imagined solving the problem like this, much less doing it himself. He didn't have the constitution for it, and he definitely couldn't have pictured dragging Gojo into a lab and asking him to use Limitless like some glorified strip of electrical tape for a half-mad experiment.]
[Minutes passed.]
[Sweat started to bead across your forehead. Ten minutes of work like this was more exhausting than trading blows with Naobito Zenin.]
[Then, finally, there was a tiny click.]
[Barely audible. But it was there.]
[The last circuit closed. The three cores settled into a perfect triangular circulation system, Wukong at the center of the balance, each force checking and supporting the other two.]
[You let out a long, shaky breath and pulled your hands away from the cub's abdomen. Limitless dissipated.]
[Physically and technically, you had done everything you could do.]
[And still...]
[The cub had stopped convulsing.]
[But that was all.]
[Its chest didn't move. The faint little cries were gone. It lay there perfectly still, no different from an exquisitely made stuffed toy.]
[Silence settled over the workshop again.]
["Still... not enough."]
[You stepped back, your shoulders dropping.]
[Even this hadn't crossed the final line. Not the triple-core theory. Not the microscopic use of Limitless. Not any of it. Creating a soul really might belong to a place human hands could never reach.]
[Five minutes passed.]
[You and Yaga stood there in silence, watching, and slowly accepted the failure for what it was.]
[Yaga exhaled softly and stepped closer, raising a hand toward your shoulder. He had walked this road alone for years, trying to create life and fill something empty inside himself. He knew this kind of disappointment well.]
["It's fine, Hayase. This isn't on you. Your theory wasn't the problem. Maybe the materials, maybe the timing..."]
[His hand was just about to land on your shoulder when a tiny sound cut through the room.]
["Hff... hh..."]
[A breath.]
[You and Yaga both froze and whipped around toward the workbench.]
[The little black-and-white ball of fur lying on the metal table, dead a moment ago, had a chest that was rising.]
[Slowly.]
[But unmistakably.]
[In rhythm.]
[Then its sealed eyes twitched. One tiny paw lifted, clumsy and sleepy, and rubbed at the black patch around its eye as though it had just woken from a nap.]
[A soft, dazed little noise came out of its mouth.]