Cries

"Welcome..."

My coming into your shop is an honor, isn't it, old man?

Yan Si ignored him and walked straight to a seat at the back.

The menu was a laminated sheet of A4 paper, badly battered. He really couldn't understand how a shop with so few customers had managed to wreck its menu this badly.

He glanced over it and ordered a pork cutlet set meal and miso soup.

Ten minutes later, the food arrived.

The cutlet was atrociously fried, covered in an uneven layer of breading. The instant Yan Si bit into it, his hundredfold sense of taste broke down every detail of the meat.

It was cheap tenderloin that had been frozen for at least three months, and the breading was soaked in oil that had been reused over and over. The rancid grease exploded on his tongue, as if someone had stuffed a sponge soaked in vomit into his mouth.

The miso soup was even more spectacular.

The broth was cloudy-he suspected it was dishwater. The tofu gave off a subtle sourness resembling foot odor, while the seaweed had the muddy texture of something soaked for three days and already on the verge of decomposition.

Yan Si chewed three times and swallowed without expression.

"...This tastes awful."

Didn't strike gold. Found shit instead.

He set down his chopsticks, stared at the plate of pork cutlet for a few seconds, then suddenly smiled.

"Making something taste this bad is an art in itself, isn't it?"

He wasn't in the habit of wasting food. He had never been poor in either life, but whenever his parents went off the rails, they often locked him in his room without feeding him.

He knew what hunger felt like and wasn't in the habit of wasting food-but this pork cutlet was beyond what a human digestive system could endure.

I really want to beat up the owner and tell him to stop wasting food.

Yan Si took his wallet out of his bag, left a ten-thousand-yen note on the table, and got up to leave.

As he walked out, he heard the owner mutter behind him, "Young people these days. No taste at all..."

"That pig died for nothing, old man!"

Yan Si didn't turn around. He merely raised his middle finger and waved it at the air behind him.

After leaving the shop, Yan Si wandered along a nearly empty street.

103 points. Before coming to Japan, he had cut himself a few times at home.

"Cursed Spirit Manipulation, 888 points..."

Yan Si had a newly bought strawberry lollipop between his teeth. It was cloyingly sweet.

"Still 785 points short."

He had considered Limitless. That cursed technique was powerful-absurdly powerful. Powerful enough to tempt even a rationalist like him, who had believed in nothing but mathematical formulas in his previous life.

But his memories of watching Jujutsu Kaisen told him that Limitless needed the Six Eyes to go with it, and the Six Eyes...

"The Six Eyes would stand out too much."

Yan Si muttered, pulling the lollipop from his mouth and staring at the pink candy ball. "The moment those eyes show themselves, all of Jujutsu Society will smell blood and swarm around me. The Gojo Clan will treat me as divine child number two, the higher-ups will treat me as a lab specimen, and Suguru Geto will...hmm, I honestly can't guess what Suguru Geto would think."

"Come to think of it...if school starts in April in Japan, Satoru Gojo and Suguru Geto haven't met yet, have they?"

He put the candy back into his mouth, rolling it with his tongue and feeling that cheap sweetness spread across his taste buds.

"Cursed Spirit Manipulation is better after all. A Pokémon master-low-profile, practical, and..."

He licked his lips, a curious gleam flashing in his eyes. "What do cursed spirit orbs actually taste like? I've always wanted to know~"

"They drove even someone as good-tempered as Suguru Geto to a breakdown. I'm really curious about the taste~"

The sun began sinking in the west, staining the sky over Tokyo a murky orange-red. Yan Si pushed his earplugs a little deeper into his ears, slid his sunglasses back up the bridge of his nose, and kept wandering.

Then he stopped.

The wind had changed.

The city breeze, carrying exhaust fumes and the aroma of convenience-store oden, was gone. In its place came a colder, clammier wind.

That wind carried something that made the hairs on the back of Yan Si's neck stand on end-a cursed spirit's cursed energy.

And...

A child's scream.

Yan Si pulled the earplug from his right ear and held it between his fingertips. His outer ear twitched slightly, like a cat becoming alert.

"Aah-!!"

The scream had grown faint with distance, passing through countless concrete buildings and the roar of traffic. Even with his hundredfold hearing, it was barely audible beside the other sounds.

He could tell it was a girl, around ten years old. Extreme terror had torn at her vocal cords, driving her pitch so high it was almost distorted.

Another sound mingled with the scream-the scrape of some wet lump of flesh dragging across concrete, accompanied by a low-frequency screech beyond the range of human hearing.

Cursed spirits.

More than one.

Yan Si looked up at the sky. It was six thirty in the afternoon, and the sun was sinking toward sea level, stretching the city's shadows long.

Dusk. The sunset was beautiful.

"Two."

He spoke softly, as though solving a simple arithmetic problem.

"Both are a little stronger than the Grade 4 ones I ran into before, but a little weaker than Grade 2. So, Grade 4 or Grade 3?"

He started toward the source of the sound.

At first he walked, then walked faster, and finally broke into a run.

Rather than sprint down the street and cause a commotion, he turned into an alley, reinforced his leg muscles with cursed energy, and leaped and darted through the shadows between buildings.

His abundant cursed energy turned him into a blurred black afterimage, streaking between walls and rooftops.

Six thirty-two.

He stopped in front of an abandoned building.

The building was probably a relic of the bubble economy era, more than ten stories tall. Most of the exterior tiles had peeled away, exposing a gray-black concrete skeleton. Most of the windows were broken, leaving dark, gaping openings.

Anyone who didn't know better might have mistaken them for pairs of blinded eyes silently watching the street.

The main entrance was secured with a rusty chain, but someone had forced open the side door, leaving a pitch-black gap.

The scent of cursed energy poured out of it, so thick it was almost tangible.

Yan Si took off his sunglasses and tucked them into the pocket of his outdoor jacket.

His deep purple eyes took on an inhuman gleam in the dim light. He bent down and slipped through the gap in the side door.

Inside the building lay deathly silent darkness.

The air was filled with mold, rust, and something with a sweeter, bloodier reek-the distinctive smell of cursed spirits, comparable to ten thousand dead rats sealed in a jar and left to ferment for three months.

Yan Si's hundredfold sense of smell immediately protested. His stomach cramped, but he forcibly suppressed the urge to vomit.

Tap.

His footsteps echoed through the empty lobby.

He had barely taken two steps inside when a teeth-grating scrape suddenly came from the ceiling overhead. Yan Si didn't look up.

He had already heard it.

He had already picked out the black shape diving from a beam.

It was a Grade 4 cursed spirit, shaped like a mass of mangled flesh forcibly kneaded together, its surface covered in countless tiny, translucent bubbles.

It had no fixed shape. A huge, bloodshot eye grew at its core, staring relentlessly at Yan Si.

[Cursed spirit's desire to attack you: 150%]-Constitution effect active.

"Hiss-"

The cursed spirit let out a piercing screech that stabbed painfully at the eardrums.

Yan Si's hundredfold hearing caught it with perfect clarity. His ears began to bleed.

[Points +3]

It lunged down, its black body stretching into a twisted whip in midair and whipping up a foul-smelling gust.

Yan Si stood motionless.

His dynamic vision broke the cursed spirit's movements down into slow motion. He could see the direction of every drop of slime flung from its body and predict where it would land three-tenths of a second later.

"That really hurts."

Yan Si murmured the words.

Then he clenched his right fist.

Strength: 23. Reinforced by cursed energy, his muscle fibers contracted instantly with more than four times an ordinary person's explosive power.

The instant the cursed spirit reached him, Yan Si turned sideways. The movement was tiny, but just enough to evade the black sludge's head-on impact.

His right fist shot out at an uncanny angle, like a precise scalpel, plunging straight into the cursed spirit's body.

Bam!

A dull impact.

It wasn't the sound of flesh striking flesh, but the explosive report of something being violently shattered.

The cursed spirit didn't even have time to screech again. Its entire body swelled abruptly like a punctured balloon, then burst into countless flecks of black ash before dissipating completely.

Nothing remained.

[Successfully caused a cursed spirit pain. Points +0.3]

[Current points: 103.3]

Yan Si withdrew his fist and shook off the black slime clinging to his hand. The instant it touched the air, it evaporated into wisps of black smoke.

"Only point three?" His eyes curved with his smile. "This thing's a money pit. Worth even less than the ones back home."

[Because it was too weak.]

"I know. I just like talking trash. Leave me alone."

He looked up toward the stairwell.

The girl's screams had come from upstairs. And the Grade 3 cursed spirit was up there too.

Without the slightest hesitation, Yan Si headed for the stairs.

The sunset filtering through the broken windows behind him stretched his shadow long.

Haha. Here comes the ghost.