Undercurrents Stirring

"Excuse me, please come see Fumihiko Takaba's solo stand-up show!"

The man strode forward and handed over a gaudy flyer.

The pedestrians nearby instinctively tried to avoid him, but Lu Ping took the flyer himself under the man's astonished gaze.

"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 became so excited that he could barely speak coherently, hurriedly pulling out his phone.

"Um, if you don't mind, could we exchange contact information? I can give you a discount whenever I have 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. The more connections, the better.

Shoko watched from the side with narrowed eyes, the corner of her mouth twitching. "Lu Ping, your taste really has always been impossible to figure out."

Lu Ping put away his phone and swept his gaze across the pedestrian street.

Last time, he had seen quite a few Pan Star Religious Group recruiters here. Today, not a single one was in sight.

"No need to look." Shoko slipped both hands into her pockets and spoke calmly.

"After that fight at the crappy shrine last time, the higher-ups at Jujutsu High got serious. They sent people to remove every Pan Star Religious Group lookout around Shinjuku and Shibuya. The barrier around the shrine was reinforced too. At least those two little girls are safe now. I heard the assistant supervisors will arrange for them to attend an ordinary elementary school before long."

As she said that, a faint glimmer passed through Shoko's dead-fish eyes.

"Ever since then, that guy Geto has been wearing his fake smile a lot less. Jujutsu High pulling this off was thanks to you, too."

"You helped as well." Lu Ping's expression remained calm.

As they spoke, the three of them entered the newly opened hotpot restaurant.

The interior was filled with exotic decor, and the air carried the rich, spicy aroma of beef tallow and Sichuan peppercorns.

A waiter led them to a four-person table by the window.

Kamo Chitsubaki and Ieiri Shoko naturally sat on the same side, while Lu Ping sat alone on the bench opposite them.

"Hey, future head of the Zenin Clan, your big sister here risked her life to save you today." Kamo Chitsubaki grabbed the ordering tablet, curling her lips into a grin like a prankster who had gotten away with it. "You don't mind if I order a few slightly expensive things, do you?"

Before Lu Ping could answer, her fingertips began tapping wildly across the screen.

Ten plates of premium Kobe beef. Five plates of top-grade 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 stand on ceremony. Change it to the biggest size!"

The moment Lu Ping agreed, Kamo Chitsubaki decisively changed her medium beer to an extra-large one.

Watching the total on the tablet climb higher and higher, Lu Ping's expression remained unchanged.

His habits from the past made his wallet ache, but when he remembered that he was now the Zenin Clan's heir, he let it go.

Money was just a number. It only had meaning once it was spent.

This day was bound to come sooner or later.

Lu Ping opened his phone and checked his balance.

Sensing the host's emotional fluctuations, the Three Corpses inside him instantly stirred. Surging negative emotions transformed into pure cursed energy and coursed through his meridians.

For jujutsu sorcerers, this technique was critically important, enough to rival mastery of the "Cursed Energy Core."

It was a "Binding Vow": using what one already possessed to mortgage the future and obtain a technique in the present.

Lu Ping had already used this technique in advance.

It was called "taking out a loan."

On the way to the hotpot 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 did not panic in the slightest.

Shoko, sitting beside him, lazily lit a cigarette.

"Doctor's advice: keep your diet balanced. Your blood vessels were just cleared out. Eating too much high-fat red meat will cause your blood lipids to spike instantly. You should have some mushrooms, tofu, and fresh vegetables."

Lu Ping ordered a standard set from the menu and looked at the two people seated opposite him.

A chain-smoker and a drunkard. No wonder they got along so well.

Ding-dong, ding-dong.

With Shoko's additional suggestions, Chitsubaki quickly checked off the items on the menu and finished ordering.

Before long, a red-and-white divided broth and dishes of every kind covered the table.

The specially made beef tallow bubbled away in the pot, and the spicy scent rushed toward them with the steam.

Kamo Chitsubaki was clearly starving. All the sharpness she had displayed on the battlefield was gone as she picked up her chopsticks and began stuffing herself, shoveling down mouthful after mouthful of fatty beef coated in sesame sauce.

Lu Ping used the serving chopsticks to place a piece of tofu into the clear broth and asked, "Where are Gojo and Suguru Geto? I feel like I haven't seen much of them around school lately."

Shoko poked at the duck blood in her bowl with her chopsticks and gave a self-mocking laugh. "Those two busybodies? The stronger they are, the more crap they have to deal with. They're basically Jujutsu High's tireless fieldwork model students now."

"That guy Satoru recently made another breakthrough in the fine control of his technique. He has preliminarily mastered using [Limitless Technique: Blue] to move rapidly over long distances between two fixed points. Put simply, targeted teleportation. Because of that, those old men at Jujutsu Headquarters treat him like free labor, sending him to remote cities outside Tokyo every day to exorcise high-grade cursed spirits. Whenever there's work, they throw it at him. Who knows which mountaintop he's flying over 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 the corners of cities, with special hallucination or mental attack abilities, are basically all handled by him. I checked the fieldwork records this morning. It looked like he was assigned to an isolated mountain village on the outskirts of Tokyo Metropolis to exorcise some strange curse born from the villagers' superstitions."

Lu Ping nodded and scooped the cooked tofu into his bowl.

Outside the window, the sunlight was gradually obscured by dark clouds drifting in from somewhere unknown, and the bustling streets of Shinjuku began to look somewhat gloomy.

Inside the hotpot restaurant, steam billowed through the air. A television hung on the wall nearby, broadcasting some 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 instantly, 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 a remote 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 central Tokyo, an underdeveloped, isolated village was tightly shrouded in an unnaturally dense gray fog.

The dense forest swayed violently in the cold wind, while the entire village was as silent as a vast mass grave.

The chief editor's voice-over carried barely concealed terror and urgency.

"...According to the latest information from 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 lost contact after entering the fog. Officials have currently classified the incident as a 'major natural gas leak accident.' Chemical defense units are rushing to the site..."

At the hotpot table, Kamo Chitsubaki, who had been happily stuffing herself, abruptly stopped moving her chopsticks.

The cigarette in Ieiri Shoko's hand burned quietly.

Lu Ping stared at the panoramic view of the village flashing across the television screen.

That desolate mountain village swallowed by the fog was precisely the location Suguru Geto had gone to alone for his mission that morning.