Three in the morning, outside a convenience store in Shinjuku.
The vending machine's cold light cast a small patch of brightness on the asphalt. Yang Jian cracked open a chilled soda with one hand and typed on his flip phone with the other.
[Arakawa sewage outlet cleared. The rat's dead. Took a wooden box.]
Shiu Kong's reply came just ten seconds later.
[A wooden box? You got that thing? The higher-ups at Jujutsu Headquarters have been leaning on Jujutsu High for three days to find it. You beat the gangsters to it, and now I've got one hell of a mess to clean up. That's a Special Grade Cursed Object. Watch yourself. I'll send you the new coordinates in Nagoya tomorrow morning.]
Yang Jian didn't reply. He snapped his phone shut.
A Special Grade Cursed Object-Ryomen Sukuna's Finger.
He had just tried submitting the dead finger to the system. A line of cold, impersonal text had appeared on the panel:
[No vengeful ghost puzzle piece detected. No system recycling value.]
It didn't fall within the category of supernatural power. He couldn't sell it for points.
Yang Jian hefted the finger twice in his hand.
Withered flesh wrapped around its joints, and its sharp nail was peeling away. It looked grotesque.
Without talismans sealing it off, the finger should have radiated enormous amounts of ominous cursed energy, attracting all the negative energy around it.
But right now, suppressed by Ghost Shadow's pitch-black, deathly stillness, it couldn't release even the slightest fluctuation. It looked like a cheap, dried-out handicraft.
He couldn't exchange it for points.
Still, it would make a decent tool for giving those old men some grief.
Red light swirled through his eyes.
The next second, he vanished into thin air beneath the streetlight. Not even a ripple stirred the surrounding air.
Tokyo Metropolitan Jujutsu High School.
On the second floor of the dormitory, Satoru Gojo's door stood slightly ajar.
Light flickered across the television screen, accompanied by the racket of video game sound effects.
When Yang Jian pushed the door open, Suguru Geto was using a controller to take down a monster on-screen. Satoru Gojo lay sprawled on the carpet, opening a bag of strawberry-flavored snacks.
"Back pretty early." Suguru Geto put down the controller and glanced at the clock. "Yokohama and Shinjuku, across districts in three hours. With that kind of errand-running efficiency, you could probably bankrupt the whole delivery industry."
Satoru Gojo tossed a snack into his mouth and smacked his lips. "I told you he was up to no good, sneaking out at midnight. Lately, the high-level cursed spirit readings reported across Kanto keep cutting out for no reason. Those old fossils at Headquarters are tearing their hair out, thinking some new type of curse has appeared."
Yang Jian walked over to the low table, pulled out a chair, and sat down. Then he casually tossed the thing in his pocket onto the middle of the table.
Bone clacked against wood. It rolled twice and stopped beside Satoru Gojo's hand.
The air in the room froze for a full two seconds.
The cup Suguru Geto had just picked up hung suspended in his hand.
Satoru Gojo stopped chewing. He abruptly sat upright and slid the round sunglasses down his nose, his azure eyes fixed on the severed finger.
"Sukuna's Finger?" Suguru Geto's brow twitched. He leaned closer, then noticed something wrong. "Where's the seal? Leaving it out in the open like this will attract special grades... no, wait. I can't sense any cursed energy at all. What did you do to it?"
"Put something on the dead flesh." Yang Jian tapped the table expressionlessly. "Is this one of those things you can't destroy no matter what you do?"
Satoru Gojo leaned over and poked the shriveled Sukuna's Finger, his voice unusually serious.
"This thing's classified as special grade contraband. In theory, none of the methods currently available to Jujutsu Society can destroy it.
"It's an aggregate of curses condensed to the absolute limit. But you've completely cut off the aura around it. How'd you do that? Your shadow?"
Through his six eyes, he could see a layer of black substance clinging to the finger's surface, thin as a cicada's wing yet intensely cold and sinister.
That black substance had forcibly severed the Special Grade Cursed Object's connection to the outside world.
"More or less. Since I can't cash it in, it's not much use to me." Yang Jian leaned back in his chair.
He had originally planned to try splitting the finger with the Chopping Knife, or crushing it outright with his ghost domain.
But with a shortfall of several hundred thousand still waiting in the System Shop, wasting his spare time on trash he couldn't sell for points wasn't a worthwhile deal.
"Take it and turn it in," Yang Jian said.
"Using us as shields?" Suguru Geto took an empty snack box from nearby and swept the finger into it.
"You cleaned out the Shinjuku sewers. Anyone Headquarters sent to follow the trail must have come up empty.
"If we turn this finger in now, those old men will think we were the ones who swooped in and took it."
"We already get blamed for everything. What's a couple more things?" Satoru Gojo pushed his sunglasses back into place and flopped down again.
"Besides, watching those old men choke on their frustration makes my day. Geto, go turn it in tomorrow morning. Tell them we ate too much, went for a walk by the river, and found it."
"You really do thrive on chaos." Suguru Geto sighed.
Over the past year, Suguru Geto's rigid convictions about "protection, order, and righteousness" had been battered to pieces by Yang Jian's brutally efficient methods.
He had once believed subduing cursed spirits was his duty to ordinary people. Yet he had watched Yang Jian wipe out entire packs of cursed spirits at the slightest provocation and pocket hefty information fees along the way.
That remarkably smooth way of operating was far less trouble than being a dog for the rotten higher-ups.
That slide in his thinking was a dangerous sign.
Suguru Geto knew it, but he had no intention of hitting the brakes.
"Headquarters has planted some short-term operatives in Nagoya. You'd better watch yourself if you go there over the next couple of days," Suguru Geto said.
"There's a lot of talk going around. They're planning to have someone else do their killing. They'll let certain special grade seals loosen and use those rampaging cursed spirits to test what you've got up your sleeve."
Yang Jian finished the last mouthful of soda and tossed the empty can into the wastebasket in the corner.
"Let them loose. I'm not picky."
He stood up and opened the door.
"If the higher-ups investigate where the finger came from, pin it on me-the guy who doesn't officially exist. Tell them I forced it on you.
"If they're scared, they'll keep testing me with dirty assignments. Saves me the trouble of wandering around looking for work."
The door closed.
Only the noisy background audio of the game remained.
At noon the next day.
Yang Jian was working his way through a pork chop near a cafeteria vent.
Sunlight fell through the glass onto him, unable to warm the sinister chill seeping from deep within his bones.
By now, Ghost Shadow had long since taken control of Yang Jian's body.
Humans died without food or water. Now, he ate only to preserve one final habitual semblance of being human.
To keep it from being erased completely.
A few shuffling footsteps sounded behind him.
Shoko Ieiri approached in a white coat and slapped a stack of reports down in front of Yang Jian.
She lowered her head, fished out a lighter, and lit a cigarette, only to stub it out after one drag.
It was an odd habit she had developed while forcing herself to quit.
"Calling these readings absurd doesn't even begin to cover it." Shoko had severe dark circles under her eyes.
"Behind the old men's backs, I took some of the blood you left on file and made a culture. I found something that goes completely against biological logic.
"That blood sample consumed the living cells I added to it.
"If I transfused your blood into a critically injured patient, would they recover, or would they be assimilated into a new corpse?"
Yang Jian glanced at the data, red flags all over the page, without much reaction.
"You could catch a few stray cats and try it." Yang Jian pushed the lettuce aside with his fork.
"I tried." Shoko pulled out a chair and sat down, haphazardly smoothing her long hair.
"I injected a lab mouse with barely 0.1 milliliters. It died.
"It died in a very strange way. Its organ functions were forcibly reduced to zero by some rule that had absolutely nothing to do with medicine.
"No traumatic damage. It was like a toy with its batteries pulled out."
She stared straight at Yang Jian. "What exactly is inside that shell of yours now?"
Yang Jian set his knife and fork on the ceramic plate. His normally flat, unchanging eyes met Shoko's.
"I'm not completely dead. At least I can still sit in the cafeteria and eat this pork chop that's as hard as a rock. Living another ten or twenty years shouldn't be a problem now."
Shoko understood what lay beneath those evasive words.
She rubbed her brow and stuffed the reports back into her pocket.
"Cut back on this high-intensity work that sends you hundreds of kilometers at a time. A body's a container. Keep stuffing random things into it, and sooner or later it'll burst.
"I can stitch Satoru Gojo's guts back together after they've been shredded by a knife, but I can't even figure out why your skin is that temperature.
"If you really fall apart one day, I won't be able to piece together so much as a scrap of flesh."
"I don't need Reverse Cursed Technique to save my life." Yang Jian wiped his hands repeatedly with a napkin. "Where are those two walking nuisances? Did they get held up after going out early to turn that thing in?"
Shoko let out a long yawn.
"Pretty much. They took an unsealed Sukuna's Finger and tossed it right in the receiving supervisor's face. Two people passed out on the spot.
"The old geezers are making a huge fuss about quarantine and questioning. But knowing those two, the meeting room wallpaper is probably in for another beating."
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