Blessings Upon This Curse-Filled World

When he woke up, the world was a blinding, almost empty white.

Sunlight pierced through the thin white curtains of the Jujutsu High infirmary like countless tiny silver needles, striking Mizuki Makoto's eyeballs with perfect precision. He tried to move his fingers, but it felt like trying to start a junk truck that had been scrapped thirty years ago—every muscle in his body ached as if ten Todo Aois had taken turns running him over with steamrollers, and every joint seemed packed with rusty iron filings.

Especially his brain.

If last night's battle had been his graphics card overheating, then Mizuki's skull was now hosting a carnival called "Suguru Geto Brawl." A thousand bun-haired cult leaders were swinging that damn three-section staff and pole-dancing on his neurons. Every time they moved, his temples started partying along with them.

"Ugh..." Mizuki let out a weak groan, feeling as though his throat had been stuffed with dry lime.

"Oh, you're awake? Two hours earlier than I expected. Makoto-kun's life force really is as 'tenacious' as a cockroach's. It's astounding."

An exceedingly cheerful voice reached his ears, carrying just enough smugness to make it punchable. He laboriously turned his head as his vision gradually came into focus.

Gojo Satoru was sitting brazenly beside his hospital bed. For once, he was not wearing his signature black blindfold. Instead, a pair of sunglasses hung loosely on his face, and his clear glacier-blue Six Eyes reflected an unfathomably deep light beneath the sun.

At that moment, the "strongest of the modern age" had his legs crossed without a shred of dignity, holding a Kikufuku and chewing it in huge, reverent bites. Cream had even gotten onto the corner of his mouth.

The strong scent of disinfectant mingled with the absurdly expensive sweetness of the dessert, creating an incredibly surreal atmosphere in the infirmary.

"Where's Suguru Geto?"

Mizuki spoke, his voice hoarse as if it had been scraped by sandpaper. Even he found it unfamiliar.

At the mention of that name, Gojo's chewing paused slightly.

He fell silent for a moment and turned to look out the window. Busy shouts drifted over from the athletic field, where the assistant supervisors were cleaning up the aftermath of the Night Parade of a Hundred Demons. His profile looked somewhat cold in the interplay of light and shadow, while his tone remained as flat as if he were talking about a stranger.

"He escaped. The official report I gave those old bastards in the higher-ups was that I'd already 'executed' him. Before leaving, he asked about those 'family members' of his. Once he heard they had all evacuated safely, he walked into the shadows without saying another word."

He turned back, and behind his sunglasses, his blue eyes held a rare seriousness—and a faint, almost imperceptible apology.

"Sorry, Mizuki. As a teacher, I failed to avenge my injured student. Because of some personal feelings I can't put into words... I let an extremely dangerous Special Grade criminal go with my own hands. That isn't fair to you, is it?"

"Ha... Teacher, seeing you apologize gives me goosebumps."

Mizuki gave a self-mocking laugh and tried to force out a sarcastic expression, only to tug at the wound on his face and grimace in pain.

"That kind of monster—even for you, killing him without flattening the school would take some effort, right? Besides, if you really killed him, wouldn't I be completely out of material for Gojo Mai: The Widow Arc? For the sake of artistic diversity in the doujin world, it's better if he stays alive and kicking."

Gojo froze for a moment, apparently not expecting that reaction from his student. Then, as though something had struck his funny bone, he burst into a completely undignified fit of laughter.

"Hahahaha! That's so like you, Makoto! You're still worried about the serialization schedule for your books at a time like this?"

Still laughing, he reached over and ruffled his student's hair. The gesture lacked his usual rough, teasing manner and instead carried an unusual gentleness, like that of an elder.

"As compensation for risking your life to hold him back, this is for you."

He casually lifted a heavy, dark-red object from the shadows beside the bed, one that radiated a vicious aura.

It was the Special Grade cursed tool that Suguru Geto had once wielded like a storm, nearly turning Mizuki, a fragile "little matchstick," into a spinning top on the spot—[Playful Cloud].

"Something Geto left behind. Since you fought like hell to stall him, it's only right that this belongs to you." Gojo tossed it casually onto his blanket with a heavy thud. "It's the only Special Grade cursed tool made purely for physical combat. If you sold it, you'd have enough money to lie around drawing doujins for the rest of your life. You might even get Mei-san to hand you manuscript paper."

Five minutes later.

"Gah—! Ow, ow, ow, ow! I'm dying! I'm seriously dying!"

Mizuki clutched his swollen forehead, tears streaming down his face as he glared at the three damn red sections in his hand. He wanted nothing more than to throw them straight out the window.

"Give it up, Makoto-kun. A creature like a physical-combat idiot will never master a high-difficulty weapon like a three-section staff." Gojo sat in a chair nearby, laughing so hard he nearly fell over. Even the unfinished half of his Kikufuku was trembling in his hand.

This thing is my mortal enemy!

Mizuki had wanted to recreate Suguru Geto's imposing, carefree stance in his mind, imagining that he too could whip the weapon into an impenetrable afterimage. Reality, however, was that a physical-combat idiot with a measly five points in athletic ability—on par with Miwa Kasumi, who skipped gym class every day—had barely attempted to swing it before the first two strikes landed precisely on his left elbow and right wrist.

When he gritted his teeth and tried to perform his third "sweeping strike," the cursed staff seemed to develop a mind of its own. It traced a bizarre arc through the air, bypassed Mizuki's guard, and with a loud bang, struck his cheek with perfect accuracy.

"I don't want something that only beats up its owner... It has to be a curse Suguru Geto left behind. It absolutely has to be!"

Mizuki gritted his teeth, carrying [Playful Cloud] as he limped out of the infirmary.

Gojo was still calling after him, saying something like, "Are you sure you don't want to practice some more?" Mizuki did not even turn around, simply raising his middle finger.

When he reached the old tree by the school gate, Mizuki saw Maki.

She leaned against the trunk, wrapped in quite a few bandages and holding a broken wooden staff. When she noticed the enormous bump on his forehead from Playful Cloud's sneak attack, her expression became incredibly complicated—a mix of pity, confusion, and the realization that this guy really was an idiot.

"Here. This is your payment."

Without any further nonsense, he shoved the heavy, violent dark-red three-section staff into her arms.

Maki went completely stiff. As a cursed tool user, there was no way she could fail to recognize its value. The pressure belonging to a Special Grade cursed tool made even the surrounding air feel heavier.

"You piece of trash, are you insane!?" Her eyes widened as she stared at the heavy object in her arms. "This is a Special Grade cursed tool. Do you know how much this would sell for!? You traded your life for this trophy. I can't take it."

"Take it, Maki-chan."

Mizuki waved a tired hand and turned toward the athletic field, his back carrying a faint air of someone who regarded money as dirt—though the real reason was that it had hurt too much when the thing hit him earlier.

"This staff and I are fundamentally incompatible. Just now, it even tried to assassinate its new owner and become the elder wand of the jujutsu world. In this school, only a muscle monster like you, Maki-chan, can make it look like a proper weapon instead of a torture device for self-harm."

Maki opened her mouth, seemingly wanting to refuse again. But when her fingertips touched the cold, powerful staff, the resonance between them kept her from pushing it away.

Watching Mizuki's receding figure, she muttered softly into the wind, "...Thanks, you infuriating perverted piece of trash."

A week later, the Jujutsu High athletic field had been dyed a warm orange-red by the setting sun.

Okkotsu Yuta stood at its center. Beneath the golden afterglow, his figure looked somewhat thin, yet lighter than it had ever been.

With the final completion of the "unbinding" process, the terrifying and enormous Queen of Curses that had clung to his back, a nightmare to every sorcerer, was gradually shedding her monstrous shell.

The black smoke of cursed energy receded like a tide. What emerged was no longer claws and fangs, but a little girl in a white dress, her smile as pure as fresh snow.

Rika Orimoto.

"I'm sorry... Rika... I'm sorry..." Yuta knelt on the ground, sobbing uncontrollably as tears glimmered under the golden sunlight.

"Yuta, don't apologize." Rika gently wrapped her arms around his neck. Her figure was becoming transparent, turning into countless crystalline specks of light. "From now on, Yuta, you have to live happily too. Don't come looking for me too soon, okay?"

Before everyone's eyes, the cursed pure love that had bound the boy for six years finally became a sky full of fireflies, drifting upward on the warm breeze toward the clear blue heavens.

Mizuki leaned against the rusted railing of the stands, absentmindedly flipping through the battered notebook that recorded all his countless lessons in "faking it" and "running for his life."

On the distant field, Panda was rolling all over the ground after being chased by Inumaki for taking a joke too far. Maki-chan was seriously testing out her newly acquired [Playful Cloud] in an open area, each swing producing a thunderous crack through the air. Gojo, meanwhile, stood atop the highest rooftop, making a childish V sign toward the crimson sky.

Watching that scene, the heart that had been lodged in my throat for so long, pounding hot from overexertion, finally slowly settled back into my chest.

(It worked.)

He said it silently to himself.

There was a secret I had never mentioned to anyone. I had not even dared to leave a single word about it in that so-called "notebook."

On the predetermined path originally called "tragedy," Suguru Geto should have died in that dark alley at the hands of his one and only best friend. Then his corpse would become the breeding ground of the thousand-year-old brain called Kenjaku, and one year later, in the bustling Shibuya subway, become the most lethal "catnip" for sealing Gojo Satoru.

That was the beginning of all despair, the opening act of a collapse.

But now, the man who should have withered away in the snow had walked into the shadows, battered and carrying his unfinished ideals, alive somewhere in this world.

(Suguru Geto isn't dead.)

I raised my head toward the white-haired man's back on the rooftop, a trace of relief crossing my eyes that even I found embarrassingly sentimental.

(As long as Suguru Geto is alive, that thousand-year-old brain can't take his body or his Cursed Spirit Manipulation. White-haired old man... this time, you won't get controlled by that bloody "catnip," then get stuffed into that dark cat cage called the Prison Realm like some stupid cat, right?)

Mizuki reopened his notebook. At the end of his tactical summary titled "How to Scare Off a Special Grade Sorcerer by Pretending to Be Gojo Satoru Number Two," beneath the messy doodles, he wrote down the final words of this journey.

"Curses, in essence, are the heaviest and most hopeless love that humanity leaves behind in this world."

"But looking at these idiots, I suddenly feel that this absurd world may still have a little room left for something called 'kindness.'"

"Then, let us offer the most inappropriate blessing to this curse-filled world."

I closed the notebook as Yuta's laughter broke through his tears beside me.

The smoke and ruin of the Night Parade of a Hundred Demons had already dissipated. The ruins of Kyoto and Shinjuku would eventually be rebuilt. And I, Mizuki Makoto, the greatest "con man" and "artist" in the history of Jujutsu High, seemed to have only just turned to the most exciting—and most ridiculous—page of my story.

After all, that white-haired old man had seemed to be muttering earlier that among the next class of first-years, there was apparently an interesting brat named Megumi Fushiguro.

"Heh. Looks like I'll have to keep preparing new 'scripts.' After all, who knows whether there'll be an even more ridiculous dog cage waiting after we smashed one cat cage?"

I tilted my head back and looked at the purified blue sky, revealing a long-lost smile that no longer carried any trace of deception.

Volume One: Night Parade of a Hundred Demons Arc—End.

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