Challenger

"Looking for death!"

Veins bulged on Miwa Seigen's forehead. He had ruled the black market for years; when had a mere Grade 2 Jujutsu Sorcerer with so little experience ever humiliated him like this?

"Hooktail, pierce him!"

The Burrowing Scorpion lurking behind Lu Ping obeyed. Its eight short legs frantically clawed at the ground, its black body turning into a blurred streak of light. Its emerald venomous stinger, potent enough to paralyze a Grade 1 Sorcerer's cursed energy, shot straight for Lu Ping's back with murderous fury.

Faced with a desperate pincer attack from both sides, Lu Ping's expression grew even calmer. This was precisely the moment he had been waiting for—the moment his opponent lost patience and made a move.

As long as he held out until Satoru Gojo and Suguru Geto arrived, he would win.

...But that was the mindset of a loser.

Hope bred complacency, and fear invited death.

Only a life-and-death struggle was the fastest way to improve one's jujutsu!

Opportunities to fight a Grade 1 Curse User were rare. This was the perfect time to test just how much damage his technique could inflict at maximum output!

"Crimson Shadow! Explode!!"

Rather than defend, he poured every bit of the chaotic resentment he had forcibly extracted and devoured through the Three Corpses into the dark-red beast already covered in cracks, holding nothing back.

"Roar—!!"

The three-meter-long Crimson Shadow let out a shriek so miserable it was almost bloodcurdling.

At that moment, flames of cursed energy ignited within its six scarlet vertical pupils, and every bone spur along its back burst apart.

It ignored the Burrowing Scorpion behind it. Instead, with the tragic momentum of one charging toward certain death, it transformed into a blazing dark-red meteor and rammed headlong into the Ironhide Centipede and Miwa Seigen before it!

It was a mad act—detonating the very origin of the technique in an instant!

As the technique's wielder, Lu Ping naturally knew that once a shikigami died completely, it could never be summoned again. Its abilities could only be passed down to the next shikigami according to the established inheritance rules.

However, Crimson Shadow was not entirely formed from his own cursed energy at the moment. It was also mixed with crude cursed energy transformed by the Three Corpses from the negative emotions in the environment. In other words, this was—

An incomplete manifestation of the shikigami.

As long as the shikigami was not completely destroyed and still had a breath left in it, it could be summoned again!

That was also why, when Lu Ping summoned Crimson Shadow earlier, he had it bite off Shadow Wolf's head and store it in the Shadow Space immediately.

"Rumble—!!"

An incomparably violent dark-red explosion erupted through the narrow alley, and the terrifying shockwave instantly tore several old wooden buildings around them into scraps that filled the sky.

The destructive force unleashed by that savage energy at its center had truly reached a level capable of threatening a Grade 1 Sorcerer's life!

"Damn it! This lunatic! Centipede, Ironclad Lotus! Defend!!"

Miwa Seigen had never dreamed that this Grade 2 student from Jujutsu High would flip the table and resort to self-destruction right from the start.

Faced with death rushing at him, his expression changed drastically as he frantically manipulated his technique.

The four-meter-long Ironhide Centipede let out a piercing cry. In an instant, its enormous body coiled layer upon layer into a massive steel sphere without a single blind spot, protecting Miwa Seigen firmly at its core.

And at the critical instant when the sky full of flames and the terrifying explosion completely obscured everyone's vision—

Lu Ping hooked an arm around Ieiri Shoko's slender waist with his left hand. The shadow beneath his feet rippled violently at that instant like boiling ink.

"Sink!"

With no spare cursed energy left to maintain his form, Lu Ping and Shoko tilted sideways and sank smoothly into the Shadow Space behind him as though falling into a bottomless abyss.

"Splash."

The shadow on the ground rippled with a circle of black waves, then completely swallowed the two of them.

Inside the shadow was an absolutely silent, viscous void dimension without even a trace of air.

An intense feeling of suffocation flooded their minds like a tide, and their faces soon gradually reddened from the lack of oxygen.

Lu Ping understood the limits of the Ten Shadows Technique very well. At his current level of cursed energy, forcing someone into the Shadow Space with him could only last three short minutes at most.

If they did not come out before time ran out, they would suffocate to death.

But to Lu Ping, three minutes were already enough to complete this gamble.

"Boom—"

The aftershocks of the explosion outside gradually subsided, while thick smoke carrying a pungent burnt smell drifted through the air.

"Click, click."

The layered coils of the Ironhide Centipede, "Centipede," slowly unfurled its charred body. This shikigami, famed for its defensive power, had already lost nearly half of the hard scales on its body, scales comparable to cursed tools. Flesh that continuously seeped dark-green fluid was exposed beneath them, leaving it in a miserable state.

Miwa Seigen, seated atop the centipede's back, coughed several times in utter disarray. A flying stone had scraped his temple, and a trickle of blood slowly ran down his cheek.

"You bastard... you actually wounded me!"

Miwa Seigen stared fixedly at the ground ahead, where the explosion had blasted out a huge crater. His eyes were filled with almost twisted malice.

He had originally planned to use Hooktail to carve that arrogant brat into a human stick as soon as the blast ended. But when he spread his senses across the battlefield, he suddenly froze.

The crater was empty.

There were no corpses, no cursed residue, not even the faintest sound of fleeing footsteps.

Two living people had simply vanished into thin air.

Standing amid the charred ruins, Miwa Seigen closed his eyes and pushed his cursed-energy senses to their limit.

A moment later, he snapped his eyes open and stared at the faint remnants of unique cursed energy on the ground, heavy and viscous, not yet fully dispersed, as well as a patch of thick shadow still rippling.

As a veteran Grade 1 Curse User who had operated in the shadows for years, his knowledge far surpassed that of the low-level cannon fodder under his command.

A terrifying technique that could sink a physical body into shadows, command wolf-like shikigami of bizarre form, and unleash damage far beyond its current rank even at Grade 2...

"Shadows... shikigami... spatial storage..."

Miwa Seigen's legs suddenly trembled, and an indescribable chill surged from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head.

"This, this is definitely no ordinary shadow-manipulation technique... This absolute performance of a supreme inherited technique... Could it be the terrifying technique passed down by the Zenin Clan of the Three Great Families for over a thousand years, said to stand alongside the Six Eyes—[Ten Shadows Technique]?!"

The moment that possibility occurred to him, dense cold sweat seeped from Miwa Seigen's forehead.

Others might not recognize its worth, but having once lived among jujutsu families, he understood all too well the weight behind this technique.

In the modern jujutsu world, what did it mean for a Zenin bloodline to awaken the [Ten Shadows Technique]?

It meant that this boy before him was very likely the Zenin Clan's designated next absolute ruler—the future clan head!

That ancient house, passed down for over a thousand years, not only possessed the massive Kukuru Unit, personal troops composed of non-sorcerers, but also Hei, an elite force formed from skilled sorcerers that held absolute authority on both the front lines and in high-level meetings! It was a behemoth consisting of twenty to thirty registered Grade 1 and Grade 2 Sorcerers of terrifying strength.

In the eyes of unaffiliated rogue Curse Users like them, the Zenin Clan was practically an inviolable little court perched at the very peak of the jujutsu world!

Kill the Zenin Clan's future head?

What awaited him would be the endless, frenzied pursuit of the entire Japanese jujutsu world. There would be nowhere for him to survive, no matter where he fled!

"Damn it, knowing too much has come back to bite me..." Miwa Seigen's expression shifted.

Overwhelmed by shock and the lingering fear the Three Great Families had instilled in him for so long, he hesitated where he stood for a full three seconds.

And those mere three seconds made him completely lose his final chance to strike.

"Hum."

The last lingering ripple in the shadow on the ground abruptly calmed and fully merged into the boundless darkness around it.

The entrance had been completely sealed from within by Lu Ping.

Miwa Seigen clenched his teeth, his face ashen.

He knew the two of them had to be hiding nearby in some crevice by exploiting the shadows' properties. As long as he patiently dug three feet into the ground, he could surely force out the two people holding their breath at their limit.

But the signal flare overhead, which had been radiating brilliant white light not long ago, hung in his memory like a Sword of Damocles at his throat, frantically warning him.

A Grade 1 Curse User was certainly powerful, but before those true elite monsters at the top of Jujutsu High's pyramid, he did not even have the right to look them in the eye.

Especially... the divine child of the Gojo family who had awakened the Six Eyes in this generation.

"Retreat! Retreat immediately!"

Without the slightest hesitation, the greed in Miwa Seigen's heart was utterly worn away by fear in that instant.

He flipped off the centipede's back, reached down and grabbed his white-robed companion who had already gone into shock, slung him over his shoulder, and prepared to leap onto Centipede's back.

However, he was ultimately too slow.

"Boom—!!"

The indestructible black Curtain above the shrine was suddenly torn into four pieces from directly overhead by an unreasonable, violent force!

A dazzling azure radiance abruptly lit up the formerly dim night sky.