A chill wind swept through the broken window frames and into the dust-covered corridor. The cold of the concrete floor seeped through his clothes and pressed against his back.
"Where am I..."
Feng slowly opened his eyes. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, sensation gradually returning to his body.
The last thing he remembered was finishing a day off and lying down beneath soft, fragrant bedding. That clearly had nothing to do with this damp corridor.
"No way... it feels so real..." Feng pressed a hand to his forehead and tried to stand.
"Am I dreaming? No... did I get transported to another world? That doesn't seem likely... sleepwalking?"
The emergency exit light at the end of the corridor emitted a faint, unsteady green glow, casting flickering shadows across the mottled walls.
A slender figure slowly emerged from the shadows at the corner.
He wore a loose, dark hoodie, his long gray-blue hair casually tied into two bunches that hung over his chest.
Most impossible to ignore was his face, covered in stitch marks-dark lines like grotesque centipedes stretched across his nose and the corners of his eyes, forcibly joining patches of skin with different textures.
His mismatched eyes gleamed with twisted delight in the gloom, the left pale and translucent as a cicada's wing, the right sunken in darkness.
"Ah... found you."
Mahito tilted his head, his stitches looking even darker in the moonlight. He raised his long fingers, lightly rested their tips against his chin, and gave a cheerful laugh utterly devoid of warmth.
"Why does this guy look so familiar..." Feng lightly pressed his forehead and began to rise, looking at Mahito as both his body and mind slowly grew clearer.
"How strange, these fluctuations in cursed energy... you don't feel like a vessel with a soul. More like a mass of flowing, beautiful water?"
"Seriously, dude, who the hell are you?"
Feng was puzzled, but he also felt he had seen this man somewhere before.
Mahito did not approach right away. Instead, he stopped three paces away, leaning forward slightly in curiosity.
His eyes stared ahead without blinking, like a mischievous child discovering an exquisite toy he had never seen before.
That blend of pure malice and probing curiosity seemed to weigh down the very air around them.
"Hey, can you hear me? Where did you crawl out from?"
Mahito ran his tongue over his dry lips, his fingers unconsciously making a grasping motion in the air.
"I don't know who you are, but if I crush you... I should get to see some very interesting colors, right?"
Above the corridor, a cloud quietly obscured the moon. A faint trace of moisture seemed to emerge in the previously dry air.
"This guy..." Feng thought hard, sensing an extraordinarily dangerous presence.
"Holy shit, Mahito! Run!"
As the curse burst from his lips, Feng pushed himself up from the dusty concrete floor. Without a moment's hesitation, he spun around and sprinted toward the unfathomable darkness at the other end of the corridor.
His hurried footsteps kicked aside broken glass and discarded syringes, sending sharp clattering sounds echoing through the empty building.
Mahito's casual movements abruptly stopped the instant he heard his name.
His mismatched pupils suddenly contracted beneath the dim green light, then widened in disbelief.
The amusement in his eyes, as though he were looking at a novel toy, gave way to a feverish excitement mingled with bewilderment and a sense of absurdity.
A stranger who bore no known traces of Jujutsu Society, whose cursed energy flowed like a pool of stagnant water, had identified him by name at their very first meeting.
"Huh?"
Mahito let out a short, stuttering syllable. His tilted head slowly straightened, his gaze locked on the retreating figure rapidly pulling away.
"Ha... hahahahaha!"
The next second, unrestrained laughter exploded through the cramped corridor, thick with a cloying, hair-raising madness.
"What's going on? Why do you know my name?
Hey, just what are you?"
Mahito did not run after him. He stood where he was and abruptly raised his right arm.
With a teeth-grating sound of flesh and bone tearing apart and reforming, his pale, slender arm swelled and stretched like melting rubber in the blink of an eye.
The bones at the end of his wrist pierced his skin, transforming into a thick bone whip lined with barbs.
With speed and force that defied physics, the dark red bone whip skimmed the corridor's mottled wall and lashed viciously at the fleeing figure.
Boom!
As the whip swept past, it scraped a huge chunk of plaster from one wall. Rubble and white plaster dust burst violently into the air, instantly filling the passage.
Reeking of blood, the whip slashed sideways through the narrow space, cutting off every route of escape to either side. With a sharp rush of wind, it bore straight toward Feng's running calves.
"Hey, don't run. Stop and answer my questions properly."
Mahito's voice pierced the noise of falling rubble, as clear as if he were speaking right beside Feng's ear, carrying twisted excitement and a cruel warning.
"Otherwise, having your legs cut off will hurt so much you won't be able to walk!"
The gust raised by the bone whip was already closing on his ankles. It swept dust from the floor and drove it against his skin with a faint sting.
"No way!"
The dark red bone whip tore through the air with a shriek that stabbed at his eardrums.
Whoosh!
The instant his cry fell, the thick, barbed whip swept past at a speed almost too fast to see.
The sharp bone blade sliced through both of Feng's running legs without resistance.
Yet the expected dull crunch of breaking bones never came. Instead, there was a strange, slight resistance, like a blade slicing through a pressurized water bag.
With his legs no longer supporting him, his body's tremendous momentum pitched him forward, sending him straight into the rickety glass window at the end of the corridor.
Crash-boom!
The wooden window frame shattered completely under the impact. Countless sharp shards of glass reflected icy white light beneath the pallid moon, like an explosion of hail.
Amid those shattered crystals, Feng lost his balance completely and plunged from the third floor toward the dark, cluttered courtyard below.
Inside the corridor, the rushing wind abruptly ceased.
Mahito remained where he stood, his feverish smile freezing for a moment.
The barbed bone whip rapidly retracted like an ebbing tide. With a teeth-grating scrape of bone, it turned back into a pale, slender human hand.
He slowly raised his right hand before his eyes.
In the corridor's dim emergency lighting, Mahito's mismatched pupils contracted slightly.
There was no sticky, bright red blood on his fingers. Instead, a few drops of clear liquid gathered along his pale fingertips, then fell with a soft plop onto the dusty concrete, spreading into a small, dark water stain.
"...Water?"
He slowly rubbed the lingering moisture on his index finger with the pad of his thumb. His brows drew together slightly, a trace of rational scrutiny passing through his eyes.
He was certain that his strike had severed the target's feet precisely, but the sensation it had returned was completely wrong.
There had been no resistance of muscle fibers parting, no hardness of tendons and bones being cut, and no contact with the contours of any "soul."
It had felt as though he had simply lashed through a stretch of rushing water.
"Something's wrong. An ordinary person's body would never react like that when cut apart.
And... there's no sweet scent of blood at all."
Mahito lowered his hand. The confusion on his face vanished in an instant, replaced by an even stronger, almost pathological desire to investigate.
Ignoring the rubble scattered across the floor, he walked straight to the window frame with the huge hole smashed through it.
The cold night wind poured through the opening, stirring his long gray-blue hair.
Mahito braced both hands on the splinter-covered windowsill and leaned out, looking down at the courtyard piled with weeds and discarded medical equipment.
A fall from the third floor, coupled with severed legs, would leave even an ordinary Grade 2 Jujutsu Sorcerer seriously injured, with no way to absorb the impact.
Yet his keen senses caught neither the crack of human bones striking the ground below nor any cries of agony.
"It's not an illusion, or some simple trick..."
Mahito murmured to himself, running his tongue along the edge of his stitches.
"He knows my name, there's no sensation of a soul, and his flesh is like flowing water.
I see. Is it some special cursed technique, or an entirely unknown existence?"
Without hesitation, Mahito pushed off the windowsill with one hand, his slender body leaping out like a night bird.
Following the path of Feng's fall, he plunged straight toward the deep darkness of the courtyard below.
Before you continue