Saving the Little Girl

Before he even rounded the stairwell corner on the third floor, Yan Si heard a faint voice, along with the breathy sounds someone could only make with something squeezing their throat.

With his senses amplified a hundredfold, the sounds were painfully sharp and unmistakable.

His ears told him where to go.

He kept moving, fast, and the first thing he saw was a grotesquely misshapen creature.

A grade 3 cursed spirit. It really hadn't put any effort into its appearance.

Its flesh looked as though someone had mashed it to pulp and kneaded it back together. Its features were misplaced, several pairs of eyes growing where they had no business being. Now they all swiveled toward Yan Si, filled with a murky but unmistakable malice.

Its fingers were shriveled, like twigs or dried-up rats.

Those disgusting dried-up rats were clamped tightly around a little girl's neck, holding her feet off the ground.

The little girl looked about four or five. Her long, aqua-blue hair stood out sharply in the dim, abandoned building, making her small face look even paler.

Her face was covered in tears, the tip of her nose red. Her mouth was open, but no sound came out; only fat tears kept falling. When she saw Yan Si, a glimmer of pleading instantly appeared in her eyes.

The cursed spirit said nothing. Yan Si didn't even know whether this grade 3 cursed spirit could talk.

But it made itself perfectly clear.

The dried-up rats around the little girl's neck tightened a fraction, then loosened a fraction. Its seven or eight pairs of cloudy eyes stared at Yan Si. The meaning couldn't have been clearer-one more step, and it would snap the child's neck.

This felt a little familiar. Nobara Kugisaki seemed to have run into the same predicament.

Yan Si tilted his head at the sight, wearing exactly the same bewildered expression as an innocent bystander browsing video comments who suddenly got accused of, "And you watching through the screen think you're blameless?"

"Hey."

He spoke in a lazy, drawn-out Kansai dialect.

"Are you a fucking ★ idiot? Threatening me with someone else's life?"

As he spoke, he kept his hand in his pocket and leaned off to one side, as though the place was too dusty for his liking.

"What's that got to do with me?"

Then, as if something amusing had suddenly occurred to him, he opened the System Shop in his mind. A hundred points wasn't much, but it wasn't nothing either-just enough to buy something he'd glanced at before.

The next second, a black boning knife appeared in his hand out of thin air.

The blade was pitch-black all over. It didn't look like metal, but rather like the shadow of something condensed into solid form.

Its blade was extremely thin, almost transparent along the edge. Holding it, he could feel a chill shoot from his palm straight into the crevices of his bones.

Yan Si lowered his head and turned the knife over and over, as though admiring a work of art.

This thing would definitely make quick work of a pig.

He'd seen people use boning knives to butcher cattle, sheep, and pigs.

The knives were fast, and the people skilled.

The system interface helpfully popped up a description before his eyes:

[Boning knife: special cursed tool. Ignores cursed energy defenses to attack the target's soul/body directly.]

[Usage requirements: the user must make a blood sacrifice personally. Once used, it will be bound to the user for life.]

[Warning: with each use, there is a sixty percent chance that the user's attack will affect not only the target, but the user as well.]

"Tch."

After reading the last line, Yan Si's lips curled upward.

"Fun."

The grade 3 cursed spirit stared at the black boning knife that had suddenly appeared in Yan Si's hand. A clear flicker of bewilderment and confusion passed through its misplaced eyes.

It wasn't very intelligent, but it knew enough to understand that "producing a weapon out of thin air" wasn't quite right. Its disgusting finger pressed harder against the skin of the little girl's neck. A few beads of blood seeped out and trickled down her throat.

Then it looked at Yan Si again, an unmistakable warning in its cloudy eyes.

Put down the weapon. Be a good boy and let me threaten you.

But when it turned its head, all it saw was a dark blur already right in front of it.

The grade 3 cursed spirit: ?

It didn't even have time to finish forming that question.

The boning knife was already buried completely inside its body.

The moment the blade touched the cursed spirit's body, cursed energy defenses and the intangible physiology unique to cursed spirits ceased to mean anything before this knife.

Yan Si's fist was just as fast as the knife.

Under the combined assault of the boning knife and his fist, the cursed spirit's body began to disintegrate. Like burning paper, it cracked and flaked away outward from the wound. Then the wind blew, and hey-

Guess what?

Gone. Nothing left.

Yan Si went back to admiring his knife.

Just like that, the grade 3 cursed spirit was gone.

It hadn't even had time to scream.

Yan Si put the boning knife back into the system's storage space, turned around, and bent down to pick up the little girl, who had fallen to the ground and was still dazed.

Her whole body was stiff. Her little hands clutched his clothes, her eyes wide. Clearly, she hadn't recovered from what had just happened.

Yan Si leaned close to her face. His Japanese, spoken in a Kansai dialect with a slightly lazy lilt, sounded unexpectedly pleasant.

"Hey, whose kid are you? Do you know where you live?"

The little girl stared blankly at the face that had come so close.

His hair was long, tied in a low ponytail that lay over his shoulder. The lines of his features weren't particularly soft, but his pale skin and long lashes made him impossibly beautiful. His face was exquisite, strikingly gorgeous, with slightly curved purple eyes.

Combined with that lazy expression, it was hard to tell at first whether he was a big brother or a big sister.

The little girl stared at him for several seconds, her face slowly, slowly turning red.

She lowered her eyes and timidly gave him an address in a tiny, soft voice.

Yan Si raised an eyebrow when he heard it.

That place wasn't anywhere near here.

What was this little brat doing coming so far on her own?

He didn't ask any more questions. First, he looked her over while holding her, then freed one hand and gently brushed aside the bloodstained strands of aqua-blue hair beside her neck, exposing the wounds.

The cursed spirit's nails had left them. The cuts weren't deep, but they had broken the skin and drawn a few drops of blood. They didn't look serious. Still, a cursed spirit had inflicted them-who knew whether they could cause some weird infection or other?

Did Jujutsu Kaisen mention that?

He hadn't paid attention, so he didn't know.

If he didn't know, he'd ask.

So he called out to the system in his mind.

"Quick question. Can wounds like these get infected?"

[No infection will occur.]

The system answered without hesitation, still using that revolting voice that was presumably meant to sound cute and always made him want to strangle it.

Yan Si thought for a moment, then said, "If you're lying, may your whole family drop dead."

The system: ...

Are you sick in the head?

[This system takes responsibility for everything it says.]

Its voice was still revolting, but it paused for a very subtle fraction of a second before adding, [By the way, dear host, I have no family.]

"Got it, orphan." Yan Si sounded casual, as though it wasn't anything worth caring about.

He was an orphan too. He was very familiar with this sort of thing.

The system: ...

[That's not how being an orphan works...]

"Oh, right, you're a system," Yan Si interrupted, brushing it off dismissively. "You don't have human rights, so you don't fall under the definition of an orphan. All right, all right."

While bickering with the system in his mind, he spent 0.3 points in the System Shop on the supplies he needed to treat the wounds-povidone-iodine, cotton swabs, and a small roll of breathable gauze.

He set the little girl on a relatively clean concrete ledge nearby and crouched down. His movements were surprisingly gentle. He dipped a cotton swab in the iodine, carefully cleaned around the bloody scratches on her neck, then cut off a little piece of gauze and applied it.

The whole process was quick and quiet. The system was still muttering in his head about how "inhuman you are, host, lacking even a basic sense of compassion."

He continued to ignore it completely.

Once he was done, he picked the little girl up again and headed toward the address she'd given him.

The little girl obediently looped her arms around his neck, her whole body red as a shrimp. She hardly dared hold on to Yan Si, her breathing soft, as though she were trying to confirm that his embrace was real.

The entire exchange between man and system had taken place in his mind. The little girl hadn't heard a word of it.

After a few steps, Yan Si suddenly spoke. "Hey."

The little girl lifted her head a little. "Hm?"

"Why'd you go play in an abandoned building?"

His tone was casual, as though he were just making conversation.

"And so far from home, too."

The little girl stiffened immediately. She fiddled with her fingers and lowered her head, the tips of her ears visibly reddening. After mumbling hesitantly for a long while, she finally spoke, her voice as faint as a mosquito's whine. "I... I was playing hide-and-seek with my friends. I thought if I hid farther away, they wouldn't be able to find me..."

"Oh, I see." Yan Si nodded, looking very serious and very understanding.

Then he smiled.

"Got it. I'll have your parents give you a good spanking when we get there."

The little girl: !

The little girl's head jerked up, her eyes instantly filling with tears. Both little hands grabbed his clothes, and her voice changed in her panic. "Big sister... could we maybe not...? My mommy really will hit me..."

Her mother normally forbade her from playing around these unfinished buildings because they were haunted.

She'd sneaked here by herself today. If her mother found out, a spanking was guaranteed.

Her mother's spankings really hurt.

Maybe her father would spank her too.

"Hee-hee, I can't hear you~"

Yan Si turned his head aside and raised his chin slightly, looking as punchable as humanly possible.

An arrogant cat.

He didn't correct the little girl's mistaken form of address.

Because he couldn't be bothered.

He couldn't be bothered to correct a four- or five-year-old and explain why a boy had long hair. Too much trouble. She could call him whatever she wanted.

The little girl looked at him pitifully. Tears circled in her eyes before finally dropping with a plop.

Yan Si didn't give her the slightest attention. He carried her down the street in the evening light, his steps light, cheerfully humming some unidentifiable tune.

After humming for a while, he glanced down at the tearful little girl in his arms and spoke with a smile, his voice brimming with delight at her misfortune:

"Someone's getting a spanking... let's guess who it could be~"

The little girl cried even harder, her shoulders trembling. Her tears soaked a small patch of the clothing on his shoulder.

"Hahahaha..."