"Ah..." Kenjaku stroked his chin, thoughtful. "So she can change back after all?"
Of course she can change back!
And by all rights, Itadori should have changed back yesterday after she left—so why was he still a girl now? What on earth was going on?
"Because yesterday I discovered that Yuuko had run out of Cursed Energy and dropped out of her transformation... I actually thought it was your mistake," Kenjaku answered with a smile. "So I topped her Cursed Energy back up."
"...Oh." Mahiru listened, barely managing to keep her poker face.
Itadori, I hereby give you permission to flee your birth family, truly. Sigh—Mahiru had it all figured out now.
This Kenjaku fellow may have deeply immersed herself in the role of Itadori's mother, doting on Itadori with the love a mother has for her son, but at the same time, her fun-loving, mischief-making nature hadn't changed one bit.
Itadori had been turned into a magical girl by Mahiru, and the one most excited about it was actually Kenjaku. She seemed absolutely delighted to witness such a thing. She was even egging it on from the sidelines. Mahiru was truly at her wits' end.
But it was fine. Mahiru wasn't worried that the true intentions behind what she was doing to Itadori would be exposed.
And Kenjaku had gone and interpreted Mahiru's actions on her own as experiments and preparations for assimilating the world... which actually worked out conveniently for Mahiru.
If Kenjaku ever asked Mahiru why she still hadn't gotten started on assimilating the world, Mahiru now had an answer ready—What's the rush? Can't you see she really is signing up magical girls?
Don't worry; ask, and the answer is: still signing them up.
"Anyway, the ID's already been changed, and everyone else's memories—including Itadori's grandpa's—have been altered too, so I can't be bothered to change them back." Kenjaku patted Itadori's head. "From now on, Yuuko is just Yuuko."
...Are you really his birth mother?
Mahiru realized she might have accidentally done something that shifted the timeline by quite a lot.
The young Itadori had been brought before Mahiru by his mother, and he had no idea what the situation actually was right now.
In his eyes, his mother had always been very mysterious, and now he'd even discovered that his mother apparently knew about magical girls too. That made little Itadori's imagination run even wilder.
"Mama, are you a magical girl too?" The pink-haired little girl blinked her big eyes up at Kenjaku.
"Mm... that question, well, that's a secret," Kenjaku said with a squinting smile. "I'll tell you when you grow up. No—your mother isn't a magical girl. She's an evil female executive."
Mahiru sighed inwardly, watching Kenjaku coax little Itadori and lead him away from there, feeling a touch melancholy.
The sunny, cheerful, big-puppy-type boy was about to become a sunny, cheerful, big-puppy-type beautiful girl.
Fate really does love to toy with people.
And because of her, Kenjaku apparently no longer intended to let Itadori roam free either. Tch.
To keep little Itadori from being raised crooked by Kenjaku, Mahiru felt she had to take responsibility and properly instill the correct values in Itadori.
Still, since things had already come to this, surely Kenjaku wouldn't pull anything even bigger?...
"There's also these... these are the children I've handpicked as suitable to be raised into magical girls." Having sent Itadori home and come back, Kenjaku spread a row of files across the table with a beaming smile.
Mahiru looked down, looked up, looked down, looked up, glancing back and forth, utterly dumbfounded inside.
So there really were other schemes afoot.
No, seriously—your initiative is way too strong, isn't it?
I'm just signing up one magical girl. What exactly are you trying to do, getting this worked up?
And as Mahiru looked down at those documents, she found there was actually more than one acquaintance among them.
Toji Zenin's son Megumi Fushiguro, several of the Zenin estate's heirs, including Naoya Zenin and Maki Zenin, and Mai... they were all listed in the documents.
Who knows what Kenjaku had imagined this time; she'd hauled over the files of every child with the potential to become a Jujutsu Sorcerer.
No, what are you trying to do? What are you going to do to these innocent, adorable children?
You evil old thing, the world of magical girls is cruel! Doing this will only drag these innocent children into the darkest world of all!
Doesn't your heart ache at all?!
—"What? Turn the past me into a magical girl?"
But when Mahiru once again opened her Domain to communicate with the present-day Mai, Mai, upon hearing Mahiru's words, couldn't help but burst out laughing: "Sure, sure, that would be great... it's a deal. I'm counting on you for this."
Regarding this plan Kenjaku had cooked up, Maki said she didn't care, while Mai raised both hands and both feet in approval.
Actually, it was understandable.
When they were young, none of them had lived happy lives.
Mai and Maki had suffered endless oppression in the Zenin estate, and Megumi Fushiguro had been sold off by his own biological father as a bargaining chip.
Although after growing up—whether through their own efforts or with Mahiru's help—they had escaped the shadows of those days, whenever they recalled their childhoods they still couldn't help fantasizing: if only there had been someone who, just as Mahiru had saved their grown-up selves, would go and save their younger selves... how wonderful that would be.
Huh? Wasn't this a perfect coincidence?
That very someone who had saved their grown-up selves had actually traveled back into the past.
Then... didn't that just mean they could happily trouble Mahiru one more time, and have her save their past selves along the way?
"Uh..." Mahiru was stumped for a good while, saying nothing, and in the end didn't know how to answer, so she could only change the subject. "Anyway... you're sure Itadori hasn't turned into a magical girl right now, right?"
"That, he hasn't."
"Then it's fine." Mahiru breathed a sigh of relief.
This proved that no matter what she did in the past, it wouldn't affect the future—the past and the future were, in essence, already two different timelines.
"However, I've got a very important piece of information to tell you," Mai said.
Mahiru was startled. "What important information?"
"Satoru Gojo was sealed by the Prison Realm."
"Satoru Gojo being sealed—of course I know that."
"And now, the Prison Realm can't be found."
"..." Mahiru's eyes went wide, and she froze for quite a while. "...No, wait, what do you mean by that? What's gone missing? The Prison Realm that sealed Satoru Gojo has gone missing??"
"That's not what you all said before!"
"That really wasn't what we said at the time... but that's because we were deceived by the jujutsu higher-ups." Mai sighed. "The jujutsu higher-ups claimed they'd recovered the Prison Realm, but they actually hadn't at all... the Prison Realm's whereabouts are now unknown, and our most likely guess is that it got swept by a Black Hole into the turbulent currents of time..."
Oh, crap.
Mahiru listened, the corner of her mouth twitching. Now things weren't looking good at all.
In the modern world, there was nothing that could break the Prison Realm's seal.
But the "past" world where Mahiru was—there was.
Her original plan had been that once she found a way back to the present, she'd bring the Inverted Spear of Heaven or the Black Rope along, and then she could undo Satoru Gojo's seal.
But now, great—the Prison Realm was lost too.
So much for undoing the damn seal.
Once it got swept into the turbulent currents of time, even a god would have trouble finding it.
"So Mahiru, maybe now... it can only be up to you again," Mai said. "If you can figure out how to time travel, and find the traces of time-crossing within the flow of time... then please, we're begging you—go and bring the missing Satoru Gojo back... truly, right now you're our only hope..."
This was an arduous task, and also one that probably only Mahiru could possibly accomplish.
Yuki Tsukumo couldn't time travel freely, and since Mahiru could hold conversations across time and space, it meant she had already faintly touched the threshold of crossing timelines.
The Culling Game in the modern world still hadn't ended; maybe Sukuna wasn't dead at all, and maybe afterward they'd face even more powerful enemies, forced into a decisive battle against a Sukuna who had made a comeback and grown even more dangerous.
So Satoru Gojo's power was indispensable.
They had to bring Satoru Gojo back. This was of the utmost importance.
"So this just added a new main-story quest for me," Mahiru sighed.
Why did it feel like, ever since she took out Kenjaku... the troublesome matters had only kept piling up more and more?
She pulled from her pocket the new phone she'd recently bought with Kenjaku's money, feeling helpless.
She knew that, in order to grasp information about time-crossing faster, she ought to go find this era's Yuki Tsukumo and have a good "chat" with her.
Beneath Tokyo Jujutsu High—the Palace of the Fallen Star.
Behind ten-thousand layers of Barriers and ten-thousand layers of mist, a silver-haired, languid woman was reclining half-submerged in the waters of a hot spring, eyes slightly narrowed, watching the steam rise ceaselessly toward the sky.
She was Tengen.
In "Jujutsu Kaisen," she was one of only two Jujutsu Sorcerers who, like Kenjaku, possessed an immortality technique and had lived for a thousand years.
She was regarded as a god by the entire Tokyo jujutsu world.
Her Barrier techniques were on par with Kenjaku's.
She was the highest-ranking venerable of the jujutsu world; her Barrier alone covered all of Japan, her watchful eyes spread across the whole nation. And here—this Barrier called the Palace of the Fallen Star that belonged solely to her—was her palace, her cozy nest.
In fact, Tengen's method of eternal life was, compared to Kenjaku's, actually even more pathological.
She needed to continuously assimilate with a Star Plasma Vessel in order to maintain her immortality.
But at the same time, throughout the process of eternal life, her humanity would be continuously worn away, and she would become unable to perceive the human heart. Even more, if she failed to complete assimilation with the next Star Plasma Vessel within a fixed time limit, her body would transform in an unknown direction, becoming something akin to a Cursed Spirit.
In the modern timeline, it was precisely because her Star Plasma Vessel was killed that Tengen was forced to evolve, thus falling into the Cursed Spirit state that Kenjaku could manipulate at will.
But in this current timeline, she had not yet been forced to evolve—she still maintained her human form.
"Lord Tengen, the Star Plasma Vessel named Riko Amanai will assimilate with you next month—that is, in about two weeks..."
Tengen's expression didn't waver in the slightest, and she casually waved away the message-bearing Shikigami by her ear.
She slowly rose from the bath, and the steam automatically formed itself into a bathrobe upon her body.
This space, filled with white mist, had already turned into an endless, empty pure white. Before her eyes she conjured a small pavilion, sat within it, and reached out to brew tea.
Regarding the matter of Star Plasma Vessel assimilation, she didn't care.
If the Star Plasma Vessel died to prolong her immortality, she would not grieve over it.
And if the Star Plasma Vessel chose to flee, she would not be angered by it either.
A thousand years of time, the same unchanging cycle of events, had long since ground Tengen's soul smooth.
The woman could hardly empathize with anyone anymore, and could hardly think as a human being anymore.
At this moment she sat within the Palace of the Fallen Star, caring neither about herself nor about the world, waiting with a go-with-the-flow mindset for the world to develop forward according to its predetermined fate.
Whether assimilation happened or not, she would look on coldly, running herself like a machine—just as dull and ordinary as it had been for these thousand years.
But things seemed to be different.
Right at this moment, the ever-placid Tengen suddenly felt her heart give a violent tremble.
Some kind of most dreadful terror-warning abruptly surfaced from the depths of her heart.
She whirled around, her eyes revealing a shock that could never possibly appear on her.
Within her Palace of the Fallen Star, an utterly evil and chaotic power was suddenly manifesting, slowly seeping in from some unknown gap.
As far as her gaze could reach, filthy black and red colors were spreading like a virus across the horizon of the space.
Cursed Energy channels carrying an evil aura—like blood vessels, like fungal hyphae—began to climb and infect throughout her Palace of the Fallen Star.
What's going on?
Someone was invading her Palace of the Fallen Star!
Was there a gap somewhere in her Barrier? No—there wasn't. Tengen urgently inspected it once over; there was no problem whatsoever with her Barrier.
She had absolutely no idea where this strangely seeping thing had come from—it was as if this evil power had originally existed within her Barrier all along.
"Hahahaha... we meet again, Tengen!" The black and red dyed the entire space, the twisted colors like a nightmare, condensing before Tengen into a wildly laughing demonic face. "Your Barrier techniques are as troublesome as ever! So to you, curling up like a turtle in your shell to wait for death is such an interesting thing, is it!"
"...It's you?" The woman recognized the other party, her eyes widening in shock. "You actually didn't die?... Why?"
Tengen's Barrier was still resisting the other party's power, but the woman had already discovered that her communication with the outside world had long since been cut off. It seemed she had stepped into the other party's trap, becoming a turtle in a jar.
"An old friend is still alive—shouldn't you be happy?" The demonic face smiled. "Don't worry, no one will notice your withering... and before that, you still have a little time to reminisce with me."
The demonic face's power was steadily encroaching upon Tengen's Barrier, bit by bit.
In this past timeline, twelve years before the present, a mutation utterly different from the original story was quietly taking place. And up to this point, no one had yet noticed it.
Jujutsu High didn't know, Satoru Gojo didn't know, Mahiru didn't know, and even Yuki Tsukumo—the current nominally strongest special-grade Jujutsu Sorcerer—didn't know either.
The most terrifying mutation had already bared its fangs. However, Yuki Tsukumo wasn't entirely cut off from the world either.
She was supposed to know nothing. But something had quietly pulled her back onto the track of history.
"...Hm?" Yuki Tsukumo was staring blankly at her phone.
In this era, transoceanic calls were usually very expensive. So when she saw that her most private phone number had actually been dialed through, and the incoming call was even shown as coming from within Japan, she was genuinely taken aback.
After hesitating briefly, she still chose to answer the call.
"Hello?" she asked, her eyes revealing suspicion. "Who are you?"
____
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