Creak... squeak~
Watching the late-night bus pull to a stop, Kenjaku raised a hand and patted Kana Shizumi on the shoulder, speaking with considerable sentiment.
"Work hard. I still have high expectations for you."
"Father, I'll do my best."
Since he had barely any luggage to begin with, Kana Shizumi tightened the backpack on his shoulders and was about to board.
Then, as if recalling something, he pointed at Hanami beside him.
What about that one?
Meeting Kana Shizumi's gaze, Kenjaku smiled faintly and answered in an exceptionally calm tone.
"Ordinary people can't see cursed spirits, so it doesn't need a ticket."
As for transportation—
Hanami obediently curled into a ball and squeezed into a corner of the lower luggage compartment.
"..."
For a villain, this guy was almost excessively well-behaved.
Forcibly suppressing the urge to complain, Kana Shizumi rubbed his temples and finally gave an awkward smile.
"Then I'm off..."
"Mm. Remember to report the mission results promptly."
As the bus gradually drove away, Jogo, who had maintained an indifferent expression the whole time, turned halfway around.
His single eye swept toward Kenjaku's back, his voice tinged with confusion and incomprehension.
"You dislike this 'son' of yours that much?"
The man in Buddhist robes raised an eyebrow slightly. Even as he glanced sideways, the smile on his face did not diminish in the slightest.
"No. I rather like him... Why do you ask?"
"Then why are you sending him to his death?"
Jogo added flatly.
"This mission only needs Hanami to complete it. You insisted on stuffing him into it. There's no point in doing that."
Mahito, standing nearby with his hands on his hips, grinned as he chimed in.
"Yeah. Retrieving Sukuna's Fingers is pretty troublesome, right? I hear highly concentrated Cursed Objects like those easily draw the attention of low-level cursed spirits. Once they swallow one, the explosive increase in cursed energy makes them extremely powerful."
Well~
"Not as powerful as us, of course."
Retrieving Sukuna's Fingers.
As everyone knew, the difficulty of that job varied from person to person... Looking at the original Juvenile Detention Center arc, the cursed spirit that absorbed a finger beat Itadori until he cried.
Dealing with some Grade 3 Sorcerer would probably be like running over a rotten orange with a dump truck.
It would crush him without even slowing down...
Kenjaku merely smiled as he gazed into the distance, his tone entirely devoid of emotion.
"To be precise, cursed spirits containing Sukuna's Fingers are at least Special Grade. Hanami can certainly handle it. The Form of Purity will probably struggle, but..."
Following the steps was the lowest form of thinking.
"If you want to cultivate someone and make them grow quickly, you need to subject them to the greatest possible pressure at all times. Let me make this clear first: I have never considered gradual progress to be a particularly superior educational philosophy."
If Kana Shizumi heard that, he would probably roll his eyes.
Still, Kenjaku was certainly someone who practiced what he preached.
After all, that was exactly how he treated his beloved eldest son, Itadori...
He applied pressure however he could. In just the few months covered by the main story, he and Sukuna—two ancient monsters who had lived for a thousand years—managed to break the sunny, cheerful boy several times.
Now that was what it meant to be strict because you cared deeply. Leans back tactically.
Mahito stuck out his tongue and muttered, "What a sadist."
After realizing that their ways of thinking were completely incompatible, Jogo seemed to give up on communicating altogether.
He merely spoke in a conversational, almost wistful tone.
"How far do you think he can grow?"
"I don't know. He's a prototype, after all. I'm hoping to see some even more unconstrained imagination from him... Honestly, no parent wishes for their child to turn out worthless, right?"
Kenjaku shrugged. Though he appeared utterly unconcerned, his tone shifted at the end.
"But regardless, I sincerely look forward to his progress."
After all...
"The overly stable, unchanging Jujutsu Society is simply far too dull."
As the late-night bus gradually drove farther away, Kana Shizumi finally felt as though he could catch his breath.
From the moment he had arrived in this world until now, only a little over an hour had passed... Compared to the records of other transmigrators, who landed and rapidly developed until their stats exploded, Kana Shizumi felt as if he had grievances he could not voice.
But thankfully, he had escaped.
Though he still did not know the exact mission... when the cart reached the mountain, there would be a road through it. A living man couldn't let himself be suffocated by piss, could he?
Besides, Kana Shizumi could use this opportunity to carefully consider his next course of action.
There were surprisingly few passengers on the late-night bus, and without interruptions, Kana Shizumi quickly settled into a focused state.
Sitting in his seat, he pressed a hand to his temple and roughly reconstructed the plot in his mind.
First came the Four Calamities.
Jogo and Hanami were both quite old, at least several centuries old, so they could not serve as references.
Octopus Balls and Mahito were on the younger side, but there should have been a few years of buffer time between their births and now.
That time frame was still too broad to use as a reference, so he needed to narrow it down further.
Kenjaku had already successfully taken over a body, which meant...
"So it's already after the Night Parade of a Hundred Demons timeline?"
That was a very important point in time.
Kana Shizumi began counting on his fingers.
"The Night Parade of a Hundred Demons ended on Christmas Eve, so there shouldn't be long until Itadori eats a finger and enrolls at Jujutsu High."
At most, half a year.
Considering that Itadori enrolled at Jujutsu High in June, Kana Shizumi took out his phone and glanced at it.
Holy shit... It was already February?!
There were only four months left before the main plot officially began. The schedule could not be any tighter.
But thankfully, four months was enough time to organize and prepare... Jujutsu Kaisen's plot itself was extremely compact, so he only needed to exert himself at certain key points.
And based on the system's activation conditions, if he wanted to earn points and grow stronger, the main thing was still to alter the main storyline.
He would properly build himself up before the plot began, then elbow the plotline hard and improve ruthlessly!
As everyone knew, a sorcerer's growth in strength was never linear—it required 1% inspiration, supplemented by 99% talent, plus unprecedented imagination...
Then you could learn a half-finished Domain Expansion. Wait, what?
Back to the point.
Kana Shizumi gathered his wandering thoughts and reevaluated his status panel.
Three free attribute points.
It was not hard to see that he needed to manually choose exactly how to improve himself...
Based on his current panel, Kana Shizumi needed to choose between four branches: "total cursed energy," "efficiency," "output," and "physical combat."
So the question was—
Which one should Kana Shizumi level up first?
Before you continue