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In the shadows of the dense forest behind the shrine, the fluctuations of the technique maintaining a hidden barrier suddenly became erratic.

"Tap, tap..."

Soft footsteps stopped before the wooden ruins consumed by raging flames.

A tall, brown-haired man slowly withdrew the fingers pressed against his ear, his expression so gloomy it seemed ready to drip water.

The radio held nothing but dead, crackling static. The several lookouts he had stationed on the perimeter to monitor Jujutsu High's rescue efforts had abruptly cut off all contact two minutes ago.

What he found even harder to accept was that, on the front-line battlefield, the cursed energy signatures of the three Grade 2 curse users he had regarded as chess pieces had all gone out in an instant, like candles snuffed by a gale.

"Useless trash. You couldn't even deal with two second-year brats from Jujutsu High."

The man snorted, and a streak of cruel savagery flashed through his eyes.

He was the mastermind behind this shrine terror attack, as well as a veteran Grade 1 curse user with a consistently high bounty on the black market—Miwa Seigen.

As an outcast from the Miwa Clan, he had reached his current position solely through the three terrifying shikigami under his command, whose abilities complemented one another and left virtually no blind spots.

Swish—

As his fingertips tapped rhythmically, the talismans in his hand split apart like a surging tide.

The first to appear was a gigantic iron-plated centipede four meters long—"Centipede."

Its entire body was covered in a thick, rust-colored shell like heavy armor. Its countless segments made an ear-grating mechanical clatter as it crawled, while the two dark-red antennae protruding from its head continuously emitted faint red light.

Then, a layer of damp mist spread through the air.

A translucent jellyfish roughly one and a half meters in diameter—"Sea Moon"—floated eerily into the air.

Its bell was a sickly pale blue, and intricate cursed energy channels flowed within it like blood vessels. Twelve fluorescent tentacles, each three meters long, slowly writhed through the empty air.

Although it moved extremely slowly and its body was exceedingly fragile, the potent paralytic toxin in its tentacles and its Fog Curtain, capable of covering a fifteen-meter radius, made it the perfect tool for battlefield control.

The last one was the subterranean scorpion lying silently beneath the shadow of a tree trunk—"Hooktail."

It was nearly two meters long and covered in a rough sandstone shell. When motionless, it was indistinguishable from an ordinary rock. Its bizarre emerald-green stinger, half a meter long, was raised high, and the viscous liquid dripping from its tip corroded the ground with a sizzling hiss.

This assassination-type shikigami excelled at burrowing through the earth and launching surprise attacks. Once it injected its toxin into a target, the victim would die within ten seconds.

The three shikigami complemented and supported one another. They were the foundation of Miwa Seigen's strength.

Miwa Seigen deftly mounted Centipede's cold, hard back and drove the massive centipede shikigami through the bushes, racing toward the front plaza at full speed.

He had to end this battle before the barrier completely shattered.

Everyone believed that the Pan Star Religious Group had launched such a massive operation merely to destroy the public's faith in this ancient shrine, gather followers in the process, and make money as they always did.

Yet only someone in the upper ranks like him knew that the true purpose of this attack was to search for a Sukuna Finger that was highly likely hidden within the shrine's central altar.

The Pan Star Religious Group's doctrine was pure and extreme—Lord Tengen was the only eternal being in the world.

In their eyes, the remaining body parts of that King of Curses from a thousand years ago were nothing more than the "poison of a false god" and "a trespass upon divine territory." They all had to be thoroughly purified.

"Damn it, the Sukuna Finger isn't in the storeroom. Where the hell did this shrine hide it?"

Miwa Seigen cursed as he looked at the intelligence on his phone, which the Pan Star Religious Group had bought from conservative upper echelons of the jujutsu world.

Money could make even ghosts turn millstones. That was an unshakable truth in the jujutsu world as well.

But though the intelligence was genuine, it was incomplete. He had failed to locate the Sukuna Finger within the allotted time. Someone had most likely used a barrier technique to hide the finger in advance.

There was a very high chance that those two brats at the shrine's front gate had done it!

Hiss—

Centipede's antennae shook violently, and their red light flared.

Miwa Seigen gazed toward the shrine's front gate, now close at hand, and curled his lips into a cruel smile. "Found you, little rats of Jujutsu High."

"Lu Ping, that cursed energy... it's Grade 1!"

Ieiri Shoko's face turned deathly pale in an instant.

The cursed energy rolling in from the forest behind them was thick and cold, carrying the bloody stench of someone who had waded through mountains of corpses and seas of blood. It was nothing like the Grade 2 curse users from before.

Through the long-range senses of the Three Corpses Manipulation, the opponent seemed to have given up concealing his presence. His cursed energy fluctuations were exceptionally obvious.

Lu Ping did not waste a single word.

"Run!"

He did not even have time to finish off the lead curse user on the ground, whose backlash had left him near death and terrified. He grabbed Shoko's cold wrist and kicked hard against the ground, fleeing wildly toward the outskirts of the shopping district like an arrow released from its bow.

Yet the true value of a Grade 1 had never been limited to superior cursed energy.

Boom!

Lu Ping and Shoko had barely run thirty meters when the bluestone pavement ahead of them exploded without warning.

A gigantic black scorpion covered in sandstone armor, Hooktail, burst from the earth. Its half-meter stinger, gleaming with bizarre emerald light, became a blur as it stabbed viciously toward Lu Ping's face with a shrill tearing whistle, cutting off their escape route.

Clatter, clatter!

The piercing sound of metal grinding came from ahead. The four-meter iron-plated centipede, Centipede, carried Miwa Seigen and blocked the middle of the street at a speed utterly disproportionate to its enormous size.

Above their heads, a massive pale-blue jellyfish had somehow begun floating in the air.

Its twelve fluorescent tentacles intertwined into an impenetrable electric net, while dense blue mist rapidly spread outward, sealing off the entire airspace.

There was no way to the heavens and no path into the earth.

With three shikigami of entirely different functions, Miwa Seigen alone had constructed a near-perfect lethal encirclement across land and air in this narrow shopping street.

"Oh? I thought Jujutsu High had sent some Grade 1 sorcerer to wreck the place. Turns out it's just a Grade 2 brat who hasn't even grown all his hair yet, plus a medic with no combat ability?"

Miwa Seigen looked down at Lu Ping from above, his eyes full of mockery and contempt.

Yet beneath that arrogant exterior, the hands hidden in his sleeves were rapidly forming seals. Sea Moon silently increased its release of poisonous mist, dyeing all the air within fifteen meters a faint, ghostly blue.

Too many genius curse users had died on the black market because of carelessness. What had kept him alive until now was the caution ingrained in his bones.

A pungent, sweet stench flooded his nostrils, and the Azure Corpse within Lu Ping immediately sounded a piercing alarm. It was the sign of inhaling a high concentration of paralytic toxin.

And yet, faced with the hopeless pressure brought by this Grade 1 sorcerer, Lu Ping showed no fear at all.

Through the extraordinary cursed energy senses granted by the Three Corpses Manipulation, he clearly "saw" two terrifying cursed energy signatures in the dark night two kilometers away. Like the cores of storms, they were overwhelmingly powerful to the point of being unreasonable, tearing through every obstacle in their path as they raced toward this location with a fury nearing the speed of sound.

They were Satoru Gojo and Suguru Geto.

Jujutsu High's "strongest duo" had arrived.

Lu Ping let out a long breath of relief inwardly, then turned his head and spoke rapidly to the girl beside him in an extremely low voice. "Take a deep breath and hold it. For the next three minutes, don't say a word."

A trace of surprise flashed through Shoko's clear eyes, but out of the trust they had built over this time, she did not hesitate in the slightest. She immediately took a hard breath of fresh air, then tightly sealed her lips.

Once Shoko was settled, Lu Ping slowly stepped forward and rested the battered Tozama imitation on his shoulder.

He looked at Miwa Seigen atop the giant centipede, slowly raised his right hand, and instead of forming a seal, flashed him the middle finger.

"Let me make one thing clear first—you're the challenger."