Inside the sealed Western-Style Mansion.
Darkness had completely swallowed the end of the corridor. Utahime Iori leaned against a mildew-covered wall, gasping for breath. Two straight days of running had pushed her stamina close to its limit.
Mei Mei stood two steps away, looking down as she straightened her dust-stained sleeves.
There was no exit.
No matter where they ran, they always passed the door to the seventh room. The barrier had folded the space completely, joining its beginning to its end.
"Find the node and break it, or destroy the spatial structure through brute force." Mei Mei flicked her fingertips, and two crows under her control landed on the window frame. "The barrier itself is extremely sturdy. Conventional methods won't work."
No sooner had she finished speaking than something changed.
The darkness before them began to shift. This was not a fluctuation caused by cursed energy, but a purer form of oppressive force.
Red light flared at the end of the corridor.
It was not firelight. It was a red that stripped away reason and perception.
Beneath the red light, the twisted, folded space was forced straight like a bent iron wire. The seventh room's door vanished into thin air. The wallpaper yellowed and peeled away, revealing rotten wooden supports.
A young man stood at the source of the red light.
He wore an ordinary dark gray long-sleeved shirt.
Mei Mei's gaze settled on his face. In the middle of the man's forehead, flesh peeled back to either side, and a bloodshot eyeball twisted and rolled beneath his skin. The red light came from that eye.
At the man's feet, his shadow did not lie flat on the floor. For some unknown reason, it stood upright, forming a human silhouette that clung tightly to his back and radiated an unrelenting chill.
He looked over.
Their eyes met.
Mei Mei felt no emotional fluctuation whatsoever, not even the slightest hint of killing intent. Those eyes held nothing but utter numbness and deathly stillness.
This was the true reason the barrier was collapsing. The red light had severed its loop, forcibly rewriting the rules here.
A second later, the red light withdrew. The eye on the man's forehead closed, and the oppressive force around them receded.
The Western-Style Mansion unraveled from within. At that moment, Satoru Gojo and Suguru Geto simultaneously demolished the building's physical structure from outside, letting sunlight pour in again.
The view returned to reality.
At the edge of the ruins.
Utahime Iori was complaining to Shoko Ieiri about Satoru Gojo's earlier antics. Nearby, Satoru Gojo loudly proclaimed how much he had contributed, while the cursed spirit Suguru Geto had summoned swallowed the rubble mouthful by mouthful.
Mei Mei ignored the three noisy people. She turned away and headed toward the dirt road outside the ruins.
Yang Jian stood in the shadows. The peeled-back flesh on his forehead was gone. Were it not for his corpse-cold body temperature and absurdly low heart rate, he would have looked no different from an ordinary person. These were the side effects of controlling a ghost.
He held the black cloth bag filled with gold in one hand, its bottom sagging under the weight.
"Tools made from pure gold of this quality must cost a fortune." Mei Mei stopped two steps away, maintaining the optimal distance for either attacking or retreating. "A salary from Jujutsu High couldn't cover that expense."
Yang Jian looked at her.
"The Gojo Clan has money."
"He's very generous," Mei Mei said.
Wind rustled through the treetops.
"What happened in there just now..." Mei Mei dispensed with any further small talk. "That wasn't a cursed technique at all. The rules that broke the loop fall outside the framework of cursed energy."
Accustomed to assessing the value of everything, she had found herself without a starting point for the first time when evaluating a power. Cursed energy, martial skill, information-she could put a price on all of them. Only the power system of the man before her lay beyond her understanding.
"What sort of check would I need to write to hire that power of yours?" Mei Mei put forward the proposal that interested her most. Relationships that could be measured in money were the best kind.
Yang Jian kept his left hand in his trouser pocket, his expression unchanged.
"Coming into contact with the supernatural usually means misfortune." His tone was flat, without inflection. "If you don't want to die before you've spent all your money, forget that idea now."
Mei Mei stared into his eyes without speaking.
"Once your life is gone, everything is gone," Yang Jian added. "I don't take that kind of work. If you really encounter those things, money can't buy your life back."
Just then, Satoru Gojo bounded over from the ruins and planted both hands on his hips.
"Miss Mei, are you poaching Jujutsu High's people?"
Satoru Gojo pushed up his sunglasses, his gaze moving between the two of them.
Mei Mei dropped the subject.
"I was just saying hello."
Satoru Gojo gave a couple of snorts and did not press her.
Masamichi Yaga's orders had already come through. Rescuing Mei Mei and Utahime Iori had merely been an incidental extra assignment.
A thin mist hung over Tokyo's streets in the early morning. A vending machine's compressor hummed. Coins disappeared into the slot, and the digital screen displayed the balance. Satoru Gojo pressed a red button, and two cans of cola rolled into the collection tray one after the other.
He bent down to retrieve the cans, then tossed one behind him with his right hand. The metal container sailed through the air, droplets of condensation scattering to the ground in its wake.
Yang Jian raised his left hand and caught it steadily. The can's exterior was cold. He flipped up the aluminum tab with one hand, releasing a surge of bubbles, then tipped his head back and took a sip.
"I can understand the curse user group Q." Satoru Gojo drank his cola as he walked, his stride casual. "But why does the Time Vessel Association want to kill that kid?"
Suguru Geto rested his hands loosely against the edges of his jacket pockets and answered with his back slightly hunched. "Because they worship Lord Tengen in his pure form. They won't allow a Star Plasma Vessel... an impurity, in other words, to become part of him."
Hearing this, Yang Jian held his aluminum can without offering any comment.
The three rounded a street corner, and a high-rise apartment building stood before them. Its glass exterior reflected the glaring morning sunlight.
"I'm going to the breakfast shop on that corner to get something sweet to fill my stomach." Satoru Gojo stopped beside a planted strip at the intersection and tipped his chin toward the apartment entrance ahead. "You two go upstairs and bring her down to meet me."
Suguru Geto agreed to the division of labor. He and Yang Jian entered the building's ground-floor lobby.
The elevator doors closed. The light on the numerical display climbed from floor to floor.
The metal walls reflected the outlines of the two men. Yang Jian stood beside Suguru Geto. In a cramped, moving space like this, the warmth of human bodies would normally linger, but Suguru Geto's keen senses detected no heat from circulating blood around Yang Jian. There was no rhythmic resonance of a heartbeat, and even the faint rise and fall of his torso from breathing was exceedingly rare. The basic signs of life were utterly absent from his companion.
Suguru Geto took out his phone and called Satoru Gojo.
The rustle of someone rummaging through a convenience store paper bag came from the other end.
"There's no need to worry about the Time Vessel Association. They're just ordinary people," Suguru Geto said, getting straight to the point. "Focus on Q."
"What's there to worry about?" Satoru Gojo drawled from across the street. "We're here. The strongest duo took this escort job. Those old geezers at the top only assigned it to Jujutsu High because they knew it would be a sure thing."
That unabashedly arrogant declaration drew an exasperated sigh from Suguru Geto.
"What? Got a problem?"
"Nothing. Satoru, I already told you... forget it."
Ding. They had reached their floor.
The twelfth floor.
The metal doors slid smoothly open. Dark brown soundproof carpeting covered the long corridor. The two walked to Riko Amanai's door, and Suguru Geto reached out to ring the bell.
A crisp electronic chime sounded inside the apartment.
The shuffling of slippers came from within. "Coming." A girl's voice, slightly hoarse from lack of sleep, drifted out.
The alloy door handle turned downward. The hinges rotated.
An explosive weapon detonated.
The explosives' chemical reaction ripped through the wooden flooring and the concrete beneath it. Extreme heat and expanding force toppled the load-bearing wall at the front of the living room. The heavy door warped severely under the immense pressure, tore free of its screws, and hurtled straight at the two men outside.
Without a moment's hesitation, Suguru Geto planted his feet firmly on the carpet. The black remains of a cursed spirit surged up from beneath him, its broad, viscous body forcibly blocking a mass of metal fragments and masonry. Flames swallowed the corridor, and paint peeled away.
The building's exterior suffered extensive damage.
One second, Riko Amanai's thumb had still been on the interior door lock. The next, her entire body was thrown backward uncontrollably. She smashed through the balcony's floor-to-ceiling window and fell beyond the edge of the building.
With nothing left to support her, gravity took hold of Riko Amanai's body.
She plummeted from over a hundred meters in the air. Great gusts of heat-distorted air flooded her nose. The concrete road below rapidly expanded in her vision. Death rushed up to meet her, leaving only two seconds for anyone alive to react.
Satoru Gojo had just finished the last bite of his Cream Daifuku when the thunderous blast overhead, mixed with the whistle of falling concrete, interrupted him.
Holding the phone, which was still connected, he asked into the microphone, "Still alive?"
The line was filled with static.
"I'm still alive, at least."
Tilting his head back, his Six Eyes caught the small figure plunging rapidly from above. He pulled his left hand from his pocket, ready to rise into the air and save her.
Red light seized everything. Yang Jian's ghost domain had opened.
(Guys, from now on, chapter updates will be fixed at 11:30 p.m. Otherwise, they get stuck in review after midnight.)
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