"Excuse me, please come see Fumihiko Takaba's solo stand-up show!"
The man stepped forward and handed over a gaudy flyer.
The pedestrians around them instinctively tried to avoid him, but to the man's astonishment, Lu Ping voluntarily reached out and accepted the flyer.
"Mr. Takaba, right?" Lu Ping glanced down at the name on the flyer.
"I like comedy too. I hope your show goes well."
"Ah! Really?! Thank you so much! You have great taste!" Fumihiko Takaba said excitedly, almost tripping over his words as he hurriedly pulled out his phone.
"Um, if you don't mind, could we exchange contact information? I can give you a discount whenever there's a new show!"
Lu Ping took out his phone, scanned the code with practiced ease, and added him as a friend.
He did not mind having another friend. More connections meant more options.
Shoko watched from the side with narrowed eyes, the corner of her mouth twitching. "Lu Ping, your taste is as unfathomable as ever."
Lu Ping put away his phone and swept his gaze over the pedestrian street.
The Pan Star Religious Group recruiters he had seen here last time were nowhere to be found today.
"No need to look." Shoko slipped both hands into her pockets and spoke indifferently.
"After that fight at the rundown shrine last time, the higher-ups at Jujutsu High finally got serious. They sent people to uproot every Pan Star Religious Group lookout around Shinjuku and Shibuya. The barrier around the shrine has been reinforced too, so those two little girls are safe for now. I heard the assistant supervisors will arrange for them to attend an ordinary elementary school before long."
As she spoke, a faint glimmer passed through Shoko's dead-fish eyes.
"Geto has been smiling less lately because of this. Jujutsu High pulling it off was thanks to you, in a way."
"You being there helped too." Lu Ping's expression remained calm.
As they spoke, the three of them entered the newly opened hot pot restaurant.
The interior was decorated in an exotic style, and the air was thick with the spicy fragrance of rich beef tallow and Sichuan peppercorns.
A server led them to a four-person table by the window.
Kamo Chitsubaki and Ieiri Shoko naturally sat on the same side, while Lu Ping took the bench opposite them alone.
"Hey, future head of the Zenin Clan, your big sister here nearly died saving you today." Kamo Chitsubaki picked up the tablet menu and curled her lips into a mischievous grin. "You don't mind if I order a few slightly expensive things, do you?"
Without waiting for Lu Ping's answer, her fingertips began tapping wildly across the screen.
Ten plates of top-grade Kobe beef. Five plates of premium black pork belly. Three plates of freshly sliced beef tongue.
"As long as you can finish it." Lu Ping poured everyone a glass of water.
"I won't hold back. Change it to the biggest size!"
Hearing Lu Ping agree, Kamo Chitsubaki decisively changed her medium beer to an extra-large one.
Even as the total on the tablet continued to soar, Lu Ping's expression stayed composed.
His old spending habits still made his wallet ache, but once he remembered that he was now the Zenin Clan's heir, he let it go.
Money was just a number. It only meant something once spent.
"This day was bound to come sooner or later."
Lu Ping opened his phone and checked his balance.
Sensing its host's emotional fluctuations, the Three Corpses within his body immediately grew active. Surging negative emotions transformed into pure cursed energy and rushed through his meridians.
For jujutsu sorcerers, this technique was critically important, even comparable to mastering the Cursed Energy Core.
It was a Binding Vow: using what one already possessed as collateral for the future in exchange for power in the present.
Lu Ping had already used this technique in advance.
It was called taking out a loan.
On the way to the hot pot restaurant, he had taken the time to apply for several loans and sent the bills to the old clan head.
Now, looking at the extra zeros in his account balance, Lu Ping was not worried in the slightest.
Shoko, seated beside him, reached out and leisurely lit a cigarette.
"A doctor's recommendation is a balanced diet. Your blood vessels were just cleaned out. Eating too much high-fat red meat will cause your blood lipids to spike. You should get some mushrooms, tofu, and fresh vegetables too."
Lu Ping ordered a standard set from the menu and looked at the two women across from him.
A chain-smoker and a drunkard. No wonder they got along so well.
Ding dong, ding dong.
With Shoko's added suggestions, Chitsubaki quickly checked off more items on the menu and finished ordering.
Not long after, a red-and-white divided hot pot broth and dishes of every kind filled the table.
Special beef tallow bubbled away in the pot, its scorching fragrance rushing toward them with the steam.
Kamo Chitsubaki was clearly starving. All her sharp battlefield presence vanished as she grabbed her chopsticks and started wolfing down food, stuffing mouthful after mouthful of fatty beef coated in sesame sauce into her mouth.
Lu Ping used the serving chopsticks to place a piece of tofu into the clear broth, then asked, "Where are Gojo and Suguru Geto? I seem to have seen them around school less often lately."
Shoko poked at the duck blood in her bowl with her chopsticks and gave a self-mocking laugh. "Those two busy people? The stronger you are, the more crap you have to deal with. They've basically become Jujutsu High's tireless model field operatives."
"Satoru recently made another breakthrough in the fine control of his technique. He has initially mastered a method of using [Limitless Technique: Blue] to move rapidly over long distances between two fixed points. Put simply, targeted teleportation. Because of that, the old men at Jujutsu Headquarters treat him like free labor and send him to remote cities outside Tokyo every day to exorcise high-grade cursed spirits. Any job that comes up gets thrown at him. Who knows which mountain he's flying over right now."
Shoko took a sip of iced coffee and continued, "As for Geto, his [Cursed Spirit Manipulation] is more flexible than Satoru's when dealing with complex environments and group curses. Rare cursed spirits hiding in corners of the city, with special hallucination or mental attack abilities, are basically all handled by him. I checked the field assignment records this morning. It looked like he'd been sent to an isolated mountain village on the outskirts of Tokyo Metropolis to exorcise some strange curse born from the villagers' superstition."
Lu Ping nodded and fished the cooked tofu into his bowl.
Outside the window, sunlight was gradually obscured by dark clouds drifting in from nowhere, and the bustling streets of Shinjuku began to look somewhat gloomy.
Steam filled the hot pot restaurant. A television mounted on a nearby wall was playing boring entertainment news.
Just as the three of them were about to finish their meal, the image on the wall-mounted LCD television suddenly flickered.
The cheerful background music cut off at once, replaced by a rapid, muffled alarm.
At the bottom of the screen, a line of glaring bold red text appeared:
[Emergency broadcast: A large-scale unidentified gas leak has occurred in an isolated mountain village near Tokyo Metropolis. Multiple villagers are missing.]
The footage immediately switched to an aerial view.
Deep in the mountains dozens of kilometers from Tokyo, a backward, isolated village was tightly shrouded in an unnaturally dense gray fog.
The thick forest swayed violently in the cold wind, while the entire village lay as silent as a massive graveyard.
The editor's voice-over carried barely concealed terror and urgency.
"...According to the latest information sent back by reporters at the scene, the mountain village completely lost contact with the outside world at around ten this morning. Local police encountered an unknown emergency while sealing off the area, and multiple officers vanished after entering the mist. Officials have currently classified the incident as a 'major natural gas leak accident,' and chemical defense units are rushing to the scene..."
At the hot pot table, Kamo Chitsubaki, who had been wolfing down food, abruptly froze with her chopsticks in hand.
The cigarette in Ieiri Shoko's hand burned quietly.
Lu Ping stared at the panoramic shot of the village flashing across the television screen.
That desolate mountain village swallowed by the fog was precisely the location and destination of Suguru Geto's solo mission that morning.
Before you continue