Jujutsu Kaisen: Yearning to Become an Immortal God

Jujutsu Kaisen: Yearning to Become an Immortal God Author: Ancient Leaf

Synopsis:

Powerful, invincible, ageless, and immortal!

After transmigrating and becoming Mahito, I was about to set foot on the path to becoming an immortal god!

Of course, there was one prerequisite—

I had to survive first.

1. My Invincible Self Was Born Here (After Chapter 1, the story is told in third person)

The moment my hand gently touched the starving old man before me, I knew my cheat had arrived.

This was the first time since my birth that I had used my innate ability. When I gently touched a human, I could freely alter their soul. By changing their soul, I could indirectly control their body. In just a few seconds, the old man—who had been so hungry he was barely conscious—suddenly opened his eyes. They were as bright as a young man's. By manipulating his soul, I had made his body's latent nutrients take effect. At least for the moment, he felt full.

Was this healing? No, quite the opposite. It was a curse.

I had cursed him, giving him a sense of fullness. From that moment on, he would never feel hungry again. But I had squandered his body's potential. In other words, he would remain full until the day he died. It was like a leaking oil tank: I hadn't made more oil appear inside it; I'd simply shrunk the tank until it was sealed again.

His potential had truly been used up.

But he had survived. He had survived through a curse.

I didn't feel the joy of saving someone. Quite the opposite: I felt unbearably vexed, and instinctively wanted to reverse what I had done, to send the old man I had saved back toward death. It was strange. Before transmigrating, I hadn't been a good person, but I wasn't someone who disregarded human life, either. If someone on the verge of death had been lying in front of me, I would have called an ambulance if I could. If I had the power I had now, I certainly wouldn't have stood by and done nothing. I would have helped him.

But now it was the opposite. I had indeed saved someone, yet the result left me unbearably vexed. Instinctively, I knew this went against my nature. It was like forcing a tiger to eat grass. A tiger could eat grass, of course, but it could never become a herbivore. Its physical makeup made that impossible. For a tiger, eating grass as its main food meant death.

Saving people didn't put my life in danger now. It only made me feel vexed, uncomfortable, and disgusted from the bottom of my heart. It didn't hinder my survival.

But after that, I stopped saving people. I began hurting them.

Of course, I hadn't set out to hurt people at first. I was simply honing my innate ability while observing others. I had discovered that when I walked down the street, no one could see me. I deliberately touched people, and they reacted, which meant I really did exist, but other people couldn't perceive me. Sometimes I wondered if I was a ghost, but I quickly decided I wasn't, since I didn't melt in the sunlight. Of course, depending on the world's rules, there were ghosts who could exist in daylight, too. But compared to a ghost, I seemed more like something else.

A god. I seemed a lot like a god.

Saying that I was like a god myself was embarrassing, but the more evidence I gathered, the more convinced I became that I really might be one.

Before I gave my reasons, I needed to describe the world I'd transmigrated into so you could understand how I felt. So, let me introduce it briefly.

This world was almost exactly like the one I had come from. It was just as modern, with towering office buildings and pedestrians walking with their heads down, staring at their phones. People dressed in modern clothes, too. There were cars, airplanes, and trains, along with supermarkets, ramen shops with pushcarts, and all kinds of snack and dessert shops.

Naturally, there were plenty of entertainment venues, too: parks, arcades, and toy shops.

I wasn't a historian, so I couldn't say exactly how this world differed from the one I'd come from. Before transmigrating, I had been something of a shut-in. I could even see all sorts of enormous anime posters plastered on the walls of school buildings. Naruto, One Piece, and Bleach were obvious, while Dragon Ball and Pokémon were there, too.

Of course, the language here was Japanese, and it sounded very familiar. Now, let me explain my situation.

I had transmigrated into this world. Before, I could only understand a few simple Japanese words, but now I could speak it without studying. I had no trouble reading or writing, and although I hadn't had a chance to speak with anyone, I presumed I wouldn't have any trouble communicating, either.

I could speak Japanese quite fluently even when talking to myself, so that wasn't a problem.

Other humans couldn't see me, but I could still interact with them normally. I could touch them, change them, even destroy or save them. It was all up to me.

I could see human souls and change them. I could make someone who was starving to death remain full forever until they died. I could just as easily make a healthy person remain hungry forever. I could freely change human souls and, by altering them, control people in a different way.

I had a feeling that if I learned to use my ability well, I might even be able to grant someone hundreds of years of life, or even immortality.

The ability to use language and writing without instruction, the ability to see and interfere with souls, and the one-sided ability to interfere with the human race's—

nature.

From this, I easily concluded that I was a god.

And I wasn't just making things up when it came to controlling people. I had actually tried it.

At the time, I was simply thinking about how to train my ability while observing people when I suddenly thought of an idea from my previous life. It was called a Thought Seal. Just as the name suggested, a Thought Seal could fix a person's thinking in place, so that no matter how much they thought, their mind would remain trapped in a particular way of thinking. To some extent, it was the strongest kind of information cocoon. Normally, people could break out of an information cocoon by debating with others, encountering new things, and broadening their horizons. But once a Thought Seal was imprinted, there was no escaping it. It was even more fanatical than religious devotion.

Since I could alter the human body through the soul, of course I could alter human thoughts through it, too.

Naturally, I had some reservations about the experiment at first. I carefully chose my target, and luckily, I found one quickly. He was a gambler—and not just a gambler, but a drug dealer as well. He was the sort of person who deserved to die.

I altered him without hesitation to hone my ability. To my surprise, it was easy. I made him loathe gambling and drugs so much that whenever he came into contact with either, he felt sick enough to vomit. He hadn't quit gambling and drugs; he simply couldn't stand them, so he had no choice but to stay away.

The principle was surprisingly simple, too. Anyone who had really looked into mental illness would know that it wasn't just a psychological problem; it could also involve physical issues. Before transmigrating, I had read a lot about depression. The brains of people with depression really did have functional impairments, and medication was genuinely needed to treat them.

Some mental illnesses couldn't be cured with psychological counseling alone. Medication was necessary, too.

From that perspective, as long as I adjusted the brain's function, I could easily give someone mental health problems. Take this scumbag who gambled and used drugs: by slightly altering his brain's structure, I could make him dislike gambling and drugs, feel disgusted by them, or even vomit as soon as he came into contact with them.

Once his body could no longer tolerate them, no matter how badly he craved them psychologically, he would have to endure the discomfort and stay away. Humans were creatures of habit. Once a habit became second nature, even if he still craved gambling and drugs, he would have no choice but to stop.

And so, I spent my days at ease, experimenting with Thought Seals. One day, I found another test subject.

He was a high school bully, wearing a uniform and surrounded by his lackeys. He fit every stereotype of a bully. In an alley, he and his lackeys were kicking someone in the same school uniform as him, grinning viciously as he enjoyed himself.

I chose him as my target without much hesitation and gently brushed my hand over his head.

Afterward, his expression changed from vicious to bewildered, then from bewildered to ashamed. In the middle of the bullying, he suddenly shoved away the two lackeys who were kicking the victim alongside him, knelt before the person they had been bullying, and kept kowtowing.

I felt satisfied.

It wasn't just the satisfaction of punishing a bully. I felt a genuine rush of pleasure, as if my body and mind were floating.

I realized that it wasn't the moral sense I'd brought from my previous life that made me feel so light. It was the fact that I'd hurt someone with my own hands. In other words, my instincts were reminding me that I had been born to hurt people. It didn't matter who they were: good people or bad people, saints or scumbags, or ordinary people. They were all within my "prey" range.

That was why I had been so active over the past few days. My ability hadn't improved, but experimenting made my body and mind feel good. My test subjects were all scumbags who didn't matter, so I hadn't betrayed the moral code I had brought from my previous life. That made me all the more enthusiastic about these experiments.

I was still trying to understand my instincts when the victim I'd just saved suddenly spoke to me.

He said, "It was you, right? I saw it. You gently touched him, and then he changed like that."

Once I was done experimenting, I had naturally planned to leave. But I hadn't expected anyone to be able to see me. I'd been in this world for over a month. For the first week, I had stayed in the sewer where I had first appeared, too cautious to leave. But then I grew bolder, opened a manhole cover, and came out. After that, I wandered through crowds, but no one had ever seen me. I could still touch other people freely, though.

I'd also come to the conclusion that I was a god during this period.

After all, my ability really did have godlike potential, and I believed that without a doubt.

Besides, I had been influenced by all the novels and anime from my previous life. Although reason told me I wasn't invincible yet and still had plenty to learn about the world, I didn't want to act as timidly as some Overlord, either.

At that moment, I really wondered if I'd transmigrated into some Tokyo god protagonist story. I genuinely believed that was the case. That was why I had brazenly used my ability in public and immediately thought of something like a Thought Seal. I had even been planning to take on a shrine maiden.

Once I had perfected the Thought Seal, I was ready to try firing my ability from my eyes—that is, something like the Sharingan. I thought I could pull it off.

I had thought that, according to the plot of a novel, the first person to see me would inevitably be a pretty girl. I truly hadn't expected that my first sighting would be a bullied, timid boy. Still, the boy might have looked weak, but at least he knew how to repay a kindness. He wasn't completely useless.

"Excuse me, who are you?" the boy asked cautiously.

I looked at the boy before me. He had black hair, and long bangs covered the right half of his face. He was bruised and swollen from the beating he'd just taken, looking pitiful, weak, and ridiculous. His school uniform was covered in dust and completely disheveled. He was the classic bullied-kid type, a real loser.

I thought for a moment, then suddenly smiled. "I'm a god," I said.

The boy was stunned. For a moment, he didn't know what to say.

I became interested in him. My eyes, which could see souls, gazed intently at him. For the past month, I had been using these eyes to observe other people. They could even see deep inside the human body. In my eyes, the body was like the outer layer of the soul, so every bodily reaction could naturally be seen through it.

I easily noticed that the flow of his soul seemed different from other people's, but I couldn't say how. The downside of not having conducted countless reckless experiments on human souls had become apparent: I wasn't nearly as skilled at reading them as I had imagined.

I should have experimented on more scumbags. Even though I'd already conducted nearly a hundred experiments in the past month, at first I had cautiously adjusted the details of the Thought Seal and only carried out one or two experiments a day. Once I got the hang of it, five or six a day was no problem.

I had a feeling that if I kept going, I would eventually be able to imprint a Thought Seal of loyalty deep in someone's brain with a light brush of my hand, making it impossible to remove forever. It wasn't just a matter of ability; it was a physical matter, too. Their brains had been permanently altered by me.

"It's pretty unusual that you can see me. You have talent," I said. The boy froze again. "Me? I have talent?"

"Have you not noticed? Very few people in this world can see me, and you're one of them."

That wasn't a lie. In the past month, I had brazenly walked among crowds, but he was the only person who had been able to see me.

Although I was a little unhappy that the first person to see me was a boy and not a girl, I was also somewhat relieved. Until then, I had really thought I was the protagonist of a novel. With powers as strong as mine, I was surely the hero of some Tokyo god power fantasy. I didn't mind that kind of life, but it would still be nice not to be tied down.

The reason I felt relieved that the first person to see me was a boy instead of a girl was simple. If this were the sort of Tokyo god power fantasy written for readers, and the first person the protagonist met was a boy instead of a girl, the author would surely get torn apart. Who wrote a power fantasy like that? It wasn't even a shrine maiden!

Incidentally, if I had come across a novel like that before transmigrating, I would have given it a one-star review without a second thought.

The boy's expression was strained. "I... I'm special?" "You don't look too happy about it," I said.

"Because, what kind of special ability is that?" The boy looked at himself: covered in dust, bruised and swollen, weak and easy to bully. If he were a girl, he might have been called soft and cute, but he was a boy. What was he supposed to call himself?

I suddenly asked, "Would you be interested in becoming a girl?" The boy jumped. "Huh?"

"If you were a girl, you could be my shrine maiden. A soft, cute girl who gets bullied and cries—that kind of shrine maiden would be nice, too," I said.

That's right, I hadn't forgotten about shrine maidens. I couldn't forget. I was a god, and I needed a shrine maiden to serve me! What kind of god didn't have a shrine maiden? As a god, I had to have one. I absolutely had to!

And my ability would let me easily turn a man into a woman. That was even simpler than changing someone's brain to create a Thought Seal. I hadn't actually tested it, but I believed it would be so easy that no experiment was needed.

The boy couldn't keep a straight face. "N-no, I'd rather not be a girl." "Is that so?" I said regretfully.

The boy's face turned green. "Y-you seem serious."

"Because I am serious," I said earnestly. "Believe me, you'd be better suited to being a girl than a boy. And I really do have the ability to turn you into a girl without any side effects. You could even have children in the future..."

"Please, really don't." The boy's face turned pale as he shook his head over and over. If a girl had made that gesture, it would have been really cute, too.

"Um, are you really sure you don't want to think about it? I'm serious," I said.

"That's exactly why I'm seriously refusing!" The boy's face twisted, and his voice rose from a timid murmur to almost a shout. "Why did this conversation turn into you wanting me to become a girl in the first place? This isn't right!"

"I'm a god, you know," I said, completely at ease. "A shrine maiden naturally follows a god around. But as you can see, I don't have a shrine maiden right now. Unfortunately, anyone who follows me has to be able to see me. So far, you seem to be the only one who can, but you're a boy, so you can't be a 'shrine maiden.' That's why I thought, why not just turn you into a girl? See? Perfect, right?"

"It's not perfect at all!" the boy cried, looking utterly wronged.

I couldn't help smiling. It might sound perverted, but that little prank had genuinely amused me. It might not have been a prank, since if the boy had agreed, I really would have turned him into a girl. How strange. Had I been like this before transmigrating? Or was finding this kind of mischief amusing another one of my instincts, just like instinctively refusing to save people and wanting to hurt them?

The boy took several deep breaths before he finally calmed down.

He bowed to me earnestly. "Thank you so much, Lord God."

I waved a hand. "It was nothing." "My name is Junpei Yoshino. I—"

"Wait, what did you say your name was?" I suddenly interrupted him.

The boy—Junpei Yoshino—jumped again, then asked in confusion, "Junpei Yoshino. That's my name. Is there something wrong with it?"

There was something wrong with it, all right. A lot was wrong with it.

I studied him carefully. His bangs covered half his face, his expression was timid, and he wore a Japanese school uniform. If he hadn't told me his name, I never would have recognized him. But the moment he did, the sense of familiarity hit me like a hammer, leaving me dizzy.

After a month in this world, I had finally figured out where I had transmigrated. I also knew what my ability to see and alter souls really meant.

No wonder my instincts had made me refuse to save people and driven me to hurt them.

No wonder no one in this world could see me, making me think I was a god.

I finally knew whose body I had transmigrated into.

Damn it, I'd transmigrated into Mahito!

Author's note

Ancient Leaf

Only the prologue is in first person.

2. Fervor (5K)

I was such an idiot. Really. After transmigrating, I kept thinking I was the protagonist of some Tokyo god story, without considering anything else. I'd even forgotten about such a classic anime as Jujutsu Kaisen.

Mahito was so embarrassed he wanted to dig himself a three-bedroom apartment with his toes.

But it wasn't his fault, was it? Mahito grumbled to himself. After all, he didn't have a stitched-up face.

That's right. Although he had confirmed that he was the vicious antagonist from Jujutsu Kaisen, his appearance wasn't quite the same as the original. The reason was unknown—perhaps it had something to do with his self-image, though he wasn't certain—but he only had medium-length white hair and heterochromatic blue and yellow eyes. That was all.

His iconic stitched-up face had never appeared. His appearance was completely different from the original, so naturally, he hadn't realized he was Mahito.

Mahito nervously asked, "Um, Mr. Mahito?"

Mahito had just told Junpei Yoshino his name. He had considered using a different name, or even the name he'd had before transmigrating, but in the end he gave up on those options and decided to use Mahito. It wasn't that he thought especially highly of the name. It was simply convenient, and if he ever encountered an Innate Technique that cursed people using their real names, he could use "Mahito" as a decoy. Whether it worked or not, it couldn't hurt.

"Sorry, I spaced out for a moment." Mahito let out a breath and set his embarrassment aside for the time being. "Where was I?"

"You were talking about spirits," Junpei said.

When he realized that this person's name was Junpei Yoshino, Mahito understood that he hadn't transmigrated into some Tokyo god story. He had transmigrated into the anime Jujutsu Kaisen. There was no time to leisurely enjoy himself. He had to start planning for the future. He clearly remembered that the Special Grade Cursed Spirit Mahito was at the center of all kinds of conflicts in Jujutsu Kaisen. If he didn't want to die, he had to find a way to build up his own leverage.

Besides, there was one huge advantage to transmigrating into a world he knew: the power system was clearly laid out before him. He could organize and improve his abilities without blindly fumbling in the dark, relying on established theories instead.

Take the unfinished Thought Seal he'd just developed, for example. It had never appeared in Jujutsu Kaisen, but similar principles had. Mahito also knew exactly what his future self in Jujutsu Kaisen could achieve. He could master those skills in a short time, and becoming even more powerful was all but guaranteed.

Once he found out that he was a cursed spirit, his first thought was: I need to incarnate.

In truth, Mahito had no idea what benefits incarnation offered. But he knew that only after incarnating could he use Reverse Cursed Technique. Ordinary techniques used negative energy, while Reverse Cursed Technique used positive energy. Cursed spirits were beings made of negative energy, so they didn't need Reverse Cursed Technique. As long as their Cursed Energy didn't run out, they could slowly recover even if all that remained was their head. Conversely, because cursed spirits were beings made of negative energy, they simply couldn't use Reverse Cursed Technique.

Mahito didn't need Reverse Cursed Technique, either, but he needed to experience it firsthand. He could do without it, but he couldn't afford not to understand it.

All techniques depended on what came before. If he wanted to go further, he needed to learn as many techniques as possible. Reverse Cursed Technique was an especially important and unusual technique. He didn't have to know how to use it himself, but he had to acquire that knowledge. For that, incarnation was essential.

Aside from Reverse Cursed Technique, Mahito had no idea what other benefits incarnation offered. But everyone who stood at the pinnacle of this world had a body. Even Tengen, who was in the process of ascending into a higher form of life, had maintained a human body for a long time. Mahito didn't know what the benefits were, but following their example couldn't hurt. He could figure out the rest later.