The black Toyota sedan sped down the highway.
The windshield wipers swept rhythmically across the glass, clearing away Chiba Prefecture's relentless rain.
The atmosphere inside the car was oppressive.
In the driver's seat, Assistant Manager Yamada sat ramrod straight, his hands clamped tightly around the steering wheel.
He barely dared to breathe.
Before coming, he had heard a few rumors from colleagues he knew at Jujutsu Headquarters.
The man in the back seat had twisted the necks of two Grade 1 inspectors like pretzels with his bare hands that morning, without using a trace of cursed energy.
Yamada swallowed and stole a quick glance in the rearview mirror.
Yang Jian leaned against the leather seat, holding a half-finished can of ice-cold cola.
The mission file Satoru Gojo had thrust into his hands lay open on his knees. He flipped through it page by page, his expression as bland as if he were reading a supermarket sale flyer in the newspaper.
"M-Mr. Yang," Yamada finally ventured, "we're ten minutes away from the cordoned-off area in Funabashi City."
Yang Jian didn't look up. "Seventeen people have been missing for three full weeks, and you only sent a Grade 2 sorcerer in to investigate yesterday?"
"Because we couldn't find any cursed residue at the scene at first," Yamada hurriedly explained, stammering. "The local police thought it was just an ordinary serial kidnapping case. Only after that Grade 2 sorcerer named Kijima went in and lost contact completely did the Windows detect an abnormal surge in cursed energy. They've provisionally classified it as an imaginary cursed spirit somewhere between Grade 1 and special grade."
"Got it." Yang Jian snapped the file shut and crushed the empty can. "You people work slower than the guy running the furnace at a crematorium."
Yamada didn't dare answer. Cold sweat beaded on his forehead.
Ten minutes later.
The car stopped outside an abandoned commercial complex.
Yellow-and-black police tape surrounded the area. Several police cars sat in the rain, their lights flashing furiously.
Yamada opened his door and hurried over with an umbrella to exchange a few words with the police. Then he turned around and rapidly formed hand signs.
"Emerge from darkness, blacker still than darkness. Purify all that is impure."
A translucent black Veil descended from the sky like an enormous overturned bowl, enclosing the entire aging shopping mall.
The sound of rain outside abruptly vanished, replaced by an unnerving deathly silence.
"Mr. Yang, the Veil is in place." Yamada approached the car with a spare umbrella. "The higher-ups instructed that if you encounter a danger you can't handle inside, your first priority should be to ensure-"
"Lock the car doors. Don't let anyone get in the way."
Yang Jian ignored the umbrella and opened the door to get out.
The rain didn't wet his body.
Without even looking back, he slipped both hands into the pockets of his black coat, walked straight through the police tape, and stepped into the thick darkness.
Yamada stood where he was, watching Yang Jian disappear through the mall entrance. He opened his mouth, but in the end, all he could do was sigh.
This mission could involve a special grade, and he went in with nothing but a rusty Chopping Knife. Was he going in to die or to stock up on supplies?
Inside the mall.
All light was shut out. The air reeked of rust mingled with sewer sludge.
Bzzzt-
The broken overhead light flickered twice, barely managing to cast a faint yellow glow.
Yang Jian stopped.
He found himself standing before an escalator with no end.
The glass entrance doors behind him had vanished, replaced by a wall covered in dark red mold.
An innate domain.
"Hey, mister..."
A faint, tearful voice drifted from deep within the passage.
"I can't find my mommy. Can you help me?"
Yang Jian stared down the dim corridor without making any move to advance.
The surrounding shadows began to writhe. More than a dozen twisted, pale faces squeezed out of cracks in the walls and floor. Dragging their mangled half-bodies, they scurried toward Yang Jian like geckos.
These were by-products spawned from the negative emotions spread by the main cursed spirit: hundreds upon hundreds of Grade 3 and Grade 4 fly heads and low-level cursed spirits.
They took Yang Jian for an ordinary person who had wandered in by mistake and prepared to devour him.
"Quite a few of you." Yang Jian raised an eyebrow.
Satoru Gojo or Suguru Geto would probably have found wasting time on this fodder irritating.
But to Yang Jian, the sight couldn't have been more pleasing.
They were all walking points.
"Who was looking for their mommy just now?"
Yang Jian raised his head, and the flesh between his brows split open.
A scarlet eyeball swiveled once, then abruptly fixed in place.
The next second.
Intense red light burst from the eye and swept wildly in every direction, with Yang Jian at its center.
Before this red light, the once-sinister innate domain was as fragile as paper.
The mold on the walls stopped spreading, and the foul cursed energy in the air began dissolving across vast swaths of space.
[Grade 3 cursed spirit killed. Points +10] [Grade 3 cursed spirit killed. Points +10] [Grade 4 cursed spirit killed. Points +5]
System notifications flooded Yang Jian's mind, blending into a long, dense stream of electronic tones.
Within the area covered by the red light, the approaching low-level cursed spirits didn't even have time to wail. Their bodies collapsed under the Ghost Domain's suppression, dissolving into puddles of foul-smelling pus.
Walking through the red light with his hands in his pockets, Yang Jian stepped leisurely onto the escalator.
The space ahead warped under the Ghost Domain's forced intrusion.
The supposedly endless passage shattered inch by inch, revealing the mall's original interior: the ruins of a spacious atrium.
Human bones and tattered clothing littered the atrium floor.
A deformed monster larger than a truck hung upside down from the center of the ceiling.
It had a centipede-like torso, with seventeen deathly pale human faces packed across its back.
Those faces screamed soundlessly, black sludge streaming from their eye sockets.
Half of a man wearing a Jujutsu High uniform was embedded in the monster's abdomen. Only his head and one hand protruded, and it was impossible to tell whether he was alive.
That had to be Kijima, the Grade 2 sorcerer who had gone missing.
With Yang Jian's Ghost Domain forcibly tearing apart its territory, the quasi-special grade cursed spirit felt an immense threat.
All seventeen faces on its back opened their mouths at once, releasing a piercing shriek that stabbed through the eardrums.
Vast amounts of cursed energy gathered in its mouth, compressing into a dense purple-black energy sphere. With a crushing aura of destruction, it hurtled down toward Yang Jian.
That single strike had enough destructive power to flatten more than half the mall.
Yang Jian lifted his gaze slightly.
The purple-black sphere, brimming with terrifying destructive power, slammed into the red-lit area, but the instant it touched the light-
There was no explosion.
No deafening crash.
The energy sphere was like a stone dropped into a bottomless abyss. It didn't so much as make a splash.
Before the airborne quasi-special grade cursed spirit could react, Yang Jian had followed the red light and appeared out of thin air directly above it.
Behind him, Ghost Shadow stretched out both hands and seized the monster precisely at either end.
Screee-!
The cursed spirit struggled violently, its cursed energy erupting wildly as it tried to break free.
With a teeth-grating sound of tearing bone, Ghost Shadow wrenched his hands apart.
Squelch!
Black blood poured down like a waterfall.
This quasi-special grade cursed spirit, which had occupied Chiba Prefecture for three weeks and devoured more than a dozen people, was torn clean in two by Ghost Shadow through sheer, primitive brute force!
Its remains crashed onto the atrium floor, throwing up clouds of dust.
It was still writhing, trying to reconstruct its body with cursed energy.
Yang Jian walked over and brought the Chopping Knife straight down.
The cursed spirit's already grievously wounded body could no longer hold its form and gradually dissolved into nothing.
[Quasi-special grade cursed spirit killed. Points +1000]
Another crisp notification sounded in his mind.
Yang Jian glanced at the system interface. Clearing this floor had earned him more than eighteen hundred points.
He walked over and used the tip of his shoe to roll the slime-covered Grade 2 sorcerer onto his back.
The man was still breathing. Though his mind had suffered severe damage, getting him back to Shoko should save his life.
Mission complete.
Absurdly efficient.
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