Night had swallowed Miyagi completely by the time the occult research club room went dark.
Yuji didn't need to be inside to know what was happening.
He'd lived it once already.
He stood in the hallway two floors below, back against the wall, hood pulled low, listening to the sounds above him change — the muffled laughter of two teenagers playing at the supernatural, the scratch of talisman paper being peeled away, and then the silence that followed. The particular kind of silence that had weight in it.
He moved.
The stairwell was empty. The lights in the building had already been swallowed by whatever the talisman's unraveling had dragged in — a heaviness that pressed against the walls and made the shadows behave wrongly, pooling in corners where they shouldn't, stretching toward the ceiling like something reaching upward.
Cursed spirits.
Grade three. Grade four. Small and numerous, the kind that formed from accumulated resentment — late nights and failed tests and the grinding misery of people trapped in routines they never chose. They weren't intelligent. They weren't dangerous in the way a special grade was dangerous.
But to two ordinary teenagers in a pitch-black room, they were more than enough.
Yuji reached the fourth floor and stopped at the end of the hallway.
Through the wall — through the particular sensitivity that sixty-eight years had carved into him until it was as natural as breathing — he felt them. Sasaki, paralyzed with genuine terror for the first time, every ghost-hunting instinct she'd built over months dissolving on contact with the real thing. Aguchi, worse, something latched onto his head and driving his legs forward against his will.
Yuji exhaled slowly.
He raised one hand, palm flat and open.
A fraction of a fraction of his power coiled outward — not a strike, not a technique with a name, just cursed energy released with the quiet precision of someone who had spent decades learning exactly how little force was actually necessary. It scattered through the corridor like static electricity before a storm.
Every cursed spirit on the floor went still.
Then they came apart.
One after another after another, dissolving into black vapor before the sound of the first one's dispersal had even finished echoing. Ten of them. Twelve. The hallway emptied in the span of a single breath, and both Sasaki and Aguchi dropped from midair simultaneously — he caught them with two fingers each, setting them down against the wall without ceremony.
He straightened up.
There.
Then the wall behind him exploded inward.
He'd known there were two.
That was the part that bothered him — not the threat itself, but the fact that it hadn't been this way the first time. One grade two cursed spirit, enormous, tick-shaped, compound eyes and six limbs. That was what the original night had held.
Now there were two.
He watched the second one crash through the rooftop access door and slam young Yuji across the concrete with enough force to crack it, and he filed the discrepancy away somewhere cold and quiet in the back of his mind.
Butterfly effect. Or something else entirely.
The first tick was already dead — young Yuji, newly lit up with Sukuna's power burning through one finger, had torn its head off with the particular reckless violence of someone who hadn't yet learned to be afraid of things that should frighten them. It was almost nostalgic.
Almost.
The second one lunged at Yuji's side, jaw unhinging, compound eyes glittering with dumb, hungry malice.
He reached out without looking and grabbed it by the corner of its skull.
One motion. No wasted movement. He brought it down into the rooftop surface the way you'd put down something that had gotten underfoot — not out of anger, just out of the simple necessity of removal. The concrete fractured in a spiderweb pattern spreading ten meters in every direction.
He flicked his wrist.
The tick's five-meter body arced upward, spinning, and came apart from the top down before it reached the apex — dissolving into nothing against the night sky, ash scattered by a wind that hadn't been there a moment before.
Fushiguro stared.
Yuji didn't look at him. He was already watching young Yuji, tracking the moment he'd been waiting for — the shift in posture, the change in breathing, the way the cursed markings spread differently when the consciousness behind the eyes was no longer the same.
The laugh that came out of that body wasn't young Yuji's laugh.
"Sure enough — it's best when you feel the light for yourself."
Sukuna.
Even wearing a teenager's face, wearing a body with only a single finger's worth of his true power, the king of curses was unmistakable. He stepped onto the guardrail like he owned the sky, arms thrown wide, crimson gaze drinking in the glittering sprawl of the city below with an expression of pure, predatory hunger.
Yuji was already moving.
He crossed the distance in silence — no announcement, no wasted motion — and the moment Sukuna turned his head toward the sound of footsteps, a hand closed around his neck.
The force that followed wasn't large.
It didn't need to be.
Yuji drove him straight down into the rooftop surface, maintaining the press with one knee bent, posture almost casual. The concrete screamed. Cracks raced outward in every direction, thirty meters of structural damage delivered as an afterthought.
"Using someone else's body to mess around," Yuji said quietly, "is very rude."
Beneath him, Sukuna's expression went from wild to furious in the space of a single heartbeat. He pushed back — hard, the full weight of one finger's worth of the king of curses straining against the hand holding him down — and found that it accomplished nothing.
Not even close to nothing.
"Bastard—"
His consciousness flickered. Young Yuji was already fighting from the inside, that iron self that had always been the one quality Sukuna could never account for, pushing back upward with stubborn, relentless force.
Yuji pulled him to his feet and steadied him.
"Your future teacher is calling you," he said. "Go."
Gojo Satoru arrived the way he always did — slightly too late to be useful and completely unbothered about it, phone already out, flash going off as he documented the wreckage with the serene detachment of a man at a tourist attraction.
"Wow. You really are beaten up."
He circled Fushiguro once, snapping photos from multiple angles, then looked toward young Yuji with his head tilted like a curious bird.
"So it really is mixed in there."
Young Yuji stumbled forward, raised his hand. "I ate it. I'm sorry."
On the far side of the rooftop, Yuji watched Gojo.
The last time he'd seen that blindfold, that easy posture, that particular brand of casual confidence that only existed in people who had genuinely never encountered their own ceiling — it had been the worst day of the war. A before and after. A line drawn so hard through the world that everything on the other side of it felt like a different story entirely.
He breathed through it.
You kept moving forward after that, he reminded himself. So did everyone else.
Gojo finished examining young Yuji, tossed a bag of Kikufuku toward Fushiguro without looking, and then — with the energy of someone who had just noticed an interesting insect — turned his full attention toward the hooded figure standing at the edge of the rooftop.
"Are you a jujutsu sorcerer too?"
The question landed lightly, the way all of Gojo's questions did. But the eyes behind the blindfold were anything but light.
Yuji considered his answer.
"You could say that."
Gojo's head tilted further. He took a step forward, then another, closing the distance with the particular lack of social awareness that Yuji had forgotten was genuinely just how he was — not a power move, not a test, just pure unfiltered curiosity in the body of the strongest human alive.
One hand reached toward the hood.
The countdown jumped.
Yuji caught Gojo's wrist before the fabric moved.
For a moment they stood there — one hand stopping the other, neither pushing, a brief perfect stillness in the wreckage of a destroyed rooftop.
"You don't like people taking yours off either," Yuji said.
Something shifted in Gojo's expression. Not offense. More like recognition.
He smiled.
"Fair enough. Then what do I call you?"
Yuji thought for a moment.
"Yuenji."
"Old-fashioned." Gojo rubbed his chin. "Sounds honest, though." He paused. "What do you think of the jujutsu world, Yuenji?"
The city stretched out below them, bright and unaware.
Yuji looked at it for a long moment before he answered.