A one-sided massacre

Yang Jian activated his ghost domain in an instant.

The dozen or so curse users below had no time to react.

The bright, dancing flames in the Kerosene Drums were snuffed out by the thick, dark red flooding in.

"What's going on? Who put up a Veil?"

A curse user with a scar on his left cheek stepped back warily and yanked a cursed-energy-infused Short Blade from behind his waist.

The next second, the shadow beneath his feet bent into a right angle without warning.

There was no windup, no sign of a cursed technique activating.

The shadow rose upright, its pitch-black hand clamping precisely around the scarred man's head.

A scream escaped his throat. His head fell to the ground, still alive.

But all he could do was watch his body collapse. No blood flowed from his neck.

His life slowly ebbed away.

The sudden scream shattered the crowd's composure.

"We're under attack! It's the bounty target!"

The hooded leader shrieked, frantically forming hand signs.

Several misshapen grade 2 cursed spirits burst through his cuffs, wrapped in a foul-smelling whirlwind as they lunged straight at Yang Jian's face.

Yang Jian stood where he was, holding the mottled, rusty Chopping Knife in one hand. He did not retreat even half a step.

The cursed spirits failed to stir so much as a ripple inside the ghost domain.

[Three grade 2 cursed spirits killed. Points gained: 150.]

Before the system notification had even finished sounding, Yang Jian was standing in front of the hooded man.

Space here was nothing more than a prop he could reshape at will.

The hooded man's pupils quivered wildly, half a chant lodged in his throat.

Yang Jian's left hand had already reached out. His palm, stiff and cold as a corpse's, clamped around the man's windpipe.

"Thirty million." Yang Jian's voice was flat. "And they sent this bunch of trash to die?"

Crack.

The bones in his neck snapped apart.

His corpse was then hurled against the rock wall.

The remaining curse users and remnants of the Time Vessel Association completely lost their minds.

How was this a jujutsu battle?

Every attack vanished like a clay ox sinking into the sea, while their opponent simply walked over and tore off limbs as easily as snapping dead branches.

Climb!

Several people clawed madly at the walls of the mine pit. Their nails tore loose, leaving long red streaks across the stone.

The towering walls of the ghost domain offered even less hope than the rock.

The red light was like a sealed concrete shell. The harder they struggled to escape, the more they were forced back to where they had started.

Ghost Shadow spread flush against the dirt, triggering the Chopping Knife's medium.

Yang Jian delivered several slashes at every figure that appeared before him.

One bone-cracking sound after another slammed into the bottom of the pit.

In less than a minute, the enormous mine pit was deathly silent.

The scattered limbs could barely be pieced together into a few complete corpses.

Yang Jian stepped past the wreckage and stopped in front of a black metal Leather Suitcase.

The Leather Suitcase had been knocked slightly open during the escape, revealing neatly stacked Gold Bars inside.

The Time Vessel Association's operating funds, meant to buy their lives.

Yang Jian bent down, fastened the Leather Suitcase, and picked it up.

It weighed close to twenty kilograms, at least.

The haul from this little act of opportunistic theft was better than he had expected.

He took out the unmarked Flip Phone, snapped several wide shots of the corpses scattered across the ground, and sent them to Shiu Kong.

[All cleaned up. Cancel the thirty-million bounty. Count these pieces of trash's heads toward information on a special grade, too.]

The screen lit up in less than five seconds.

Shiu Kong's reply was brief: [You're a real lunatic. I'll get on it right away.]

A second tip followed immediately: [The special grade lead you wanted. There's an abandoned subway station in Tokyo's Shibuya district that the higher-ups forcibly sealed off.

A collapse during underground construction suffocated over a hundred illegal laborers years ago. Four grade 2 sorcerers have gone missing in the area over the past month.

Jujutsu Headquarters has already established a special grade security perimeter, but they still haven't sent any grade 1 sorcerers down to investigate. They're waiting for that menace to fully take shape.]

An abandoned subway station in Shibuya.

Yang Jian slipped the phone back into his pocket. Another promising cash machine.

Those old bastards at Jujutsu Headquarters certainly knew their way around cultivating monsters.

They were deliberately allowing highly concentrated cursed energy to fester, most likely intending to keep it as a trump card for purging their opposition.

The falsified records Crow had produced in Nagoya had apparently led the higher-ups to seriously misjudge the situation.

The Ghost Eye opened wide, and red light surged into the heavens.

Yang Jian vanished from the bottom of the mine pit, leaving only severed limbs and the slowly burning-out Kerosene Drums.

At noon the next day, in Tokyo Jujutsu High's Underground Dissection Room.

The sun slanted overhead.

Yang Jian carried the extremely heavy black Leather Suitcase into the cold, stark white light.

Shoko was curled up by the window smoking as usual. The shadows beneath her eyes had deepened, and her white coat was stained with unidentified chemicals.

Hearing footsteps, Shoko spoke without looking up. "Satoru Gojo tore down a wall in the first-year classroom building this morning. Yaga's so mad he's ready to tear his hair out. You picked a great time."

Yang Jian set the Leather Suitcase on the Metal Lab Table. The sharp snap of its clasps opening was jarring in the room.

The gleam of the high-purity gold bars stabbed at Shoko's eyes.

"Recovering the Time Vessel Association's remaining value." Yang Jian pushed the case toward her. "Keep it here for now. I'll come back for it later."

With the cigarette between her lips, Shoko reached out and picked up a gold bar, feeling its heavy pull.

"For locking up those unkillable monsters you talk about again?" She exhaled a plume of white smoke.

As they spoke, the Dissection Room's door was kicked flat.

Satoru Gojo strode in wearing small, round sunglasses and carrying three large paper bags of limited-edition desserts.

"Shoko! Geto took another out-of-town job. I brought the new Strawberry Daifuku from Ginza!"

Halfway through his rapid-fire chatter, Satoru Gojo's gaze settled on the Gold Bars on the table and Yang Jian beside them.

"Well, look who struck it rich." Satoru Gojo set the bags aside and reached over to rummage through the gold bars. "Raid an underground vault last night? By this morning, the news about that one-sided massacre at Kyoto's Black Market Gathering had already turned into a ghost story on the dark web."

"Just taking out the trash." Yang Jian's tone was stiff.

Satoru Gojo lowered his sunglasses an inch, his azure Six Eyes locking onto Yang Jian.

The information they returned was still that same unnerving mass of deathly stillness.

No matter how many people Yang Jian had just slaughtered, there was not a trace of cursed residue on him, nor any lingering brutality from the killing.

He was like a corpse washed clean in clear water.

"Jujutsu Headquarters held an emergency closed-door meeting this morning." Satoru Gojo unwrapped a daifuku and popped it into his mouth. "You played the Crow angle just right. The old men got that half-true, half-false report and genuinely believed you only had a knack for dealing with incomplete special grades.

Now they're finding all kinds of ways to use you as a testing stone. Did Shiu Kong tell you about the Shibuya subway station?"

"He spilled the details," Yang Jian said. "They want to cultivate a full-fledged special grade down there."

"Don't give them that much credit," Satoru Gojo corrected him, unusually shedding some of his flippancy. "The higher-ups installed a special Attraction Barrier beneath Shibuya, funneling all the low-level resentment from miles around into it.

They want to force a special grade to mature under their control, then use it to field-test something they dug up."

Yang Jian frowned.

"What did they dig up?"

"Sukuna's Finger." Satoru Gojo tugged at the edge of his blindfold. "After you handed the one you intercepted in Shinjuku's pipe network to those old fossils, they found that ordinary cursed fire couldn't burn it.

Now they're planning to gamble on using a special grade cursed spirit's innate domain to corrode it in reverse."

Yang Jian gave a cold laugh.

Those higher-ups were rotten to the bone.

They were treating an unpredictable, nuclear-level time bomb as experimental material, without considering that if they failed to contain it, hundreds of thousands of lives across Shibuya would pay the price.

The abandoned subway station was such a perfect place to cast a line and cash in. How could he simply hand it over?

"When are you planning to head out?" Satoru Gojo watched his back. "If you wait until the old men send their technique operators down there, it'll turn into a complete mess."

"Tonight." Yang Jian stood up. "Before the barrier starts to loosen."

"Nice enthusiasm." Satoru Gojo let out a long whistle. "But a word of warning: they dug four extra levels beneath Shibuya back then. Hundreds of laborers were buried alive down there, and not even their ashes made it out.

The resentment born there runs deep. Even my Six Eyes see through a layer of bloody grime when I look inside."

"Makes no difference how many levels there are. I'll just flatten them." Yang Jian headed into the corridor without looking back.