Slaughterhouse

Night fell over Shibuya.

The last patrol car on the street turned onto a side road.

The entrance to the abandoned subway's third interchange had been welded shut with high-strength blast-resistant steel mesh.

Layer upon layer of dark cordon tape surrounded the perimeter. Warding talismans meant to keep people away were plastered everywhere, even on the bases of streetlights.

The surrounding air was so thick that a fistful of water could have been wrung from it.

With cursed residue this concentrated, even an ordinary person coming within a hundred meters would suffer rapid organ failure.

Yang Jian stood behind a towering streetlight across the road, his black casual clothes almost blending into the night.

Five minutes earlier, Crow's intelligence report had already delivered the barrier layout.

Eight Grade 2 sentries guarded the perimeter, while two Grade 1 Sorcerers controlled operations inside.

The barrier's central anchor was fixed firmly on the third underground level.

He couldn't unleash his ghost domain recklessly.

An excessive energy fluctuation would trigger a chain reaction in the higher-ups' standing surveillance. Draining every ATM required enough privacy.

If that red light erupted, another classified report about him would land on Jujutsu Headquarters' conference table tomorrow.

The shadow on the ground began rippling like water.

Darkness like this was Ghost Shadow's natural hunting ground.

Yang Jian moved along the low roadside wall, his footsteps suppressed to almost nothing.

His shadow had stretched dozens of meters, snaking through the gaps in the steel mesh.

The two Grade 2 Sorcerers guarding the inside of the iron gate leaned against a pillar, puffing away on cigarettes.

One of them cursed as he brushed dust off his clothes.

One of them cursed as he brushed dust off his clothes. "Fuck. Three straight days stuck in this hellhole, and they still haven't approved our allowance."

The other answered lazily, "They want us to hold out another two days, until that thing inside hatches-"

He never finished.

Before the cursing man could bring his cigarette to his lips, a pitch-black shadow rose silently from the ground and clamped over his entire face from behind his head.

The sound of his neck snapping was sickeningly wet.

The man beside him caught a flicker of black from the corner of his eye. His mouth had barely opened to utter a syllable when the same black hand crushed his throat.

The sound of his windpipe collapsing was even softer than the breaking bone.

The two still-warm bodies were roughly dragged behind a dark green electrical cabinet. Their blood was sealed inside them, not a drop escaping.

The harvest of lives hadn't disturbed so much as a fallen leaf.

Yang Jian didn't rush inside.

He worked his way toward the remaining six sentries. Slowly, more slowly than a walking person. But the sentries were watching for movement aboveground. None of them looked beneath their feet.

After disposing of the sentries one by one, he was done.

Yang Jian stepped into the passage.

The farther he descended, the more sharply the temperature dropped.

Dry concrete slabs gave way to slick gravel, and every step squeezed black standing water from beneath his soles.

Black and gray mildew covered the concrete walls. Traces of old blood seeped through the patterns between the tiles, darkened almost to black.

Countless twisted faces of laborers writhed within the patterns on the wall tiles.

Satoru Gojo had been right.

An underground cave-in years ago had buried hundreds of black laborers alive. Not even their ashes had made it out.

These faces weren't cursed spirits, merely physical projections of lingering resentment. Faint and insubstantial, they lacked even the density of a Grade 3 cursed spirit.

They weren't worth any points.

Yang Jian couldn't be bothered to spare them another glance.

At the waiting area on the first underground level, the space abruptly opened up.

Gray, gelatinous cursed energy blocked every route, piled from floor to ceiling, as thick as overmixed cement slurry.

Four or five Grade 3 flylike cursed spirits swam sluggishly within it, their abdomens giving off a murky glow.

Even drawing his blade would have been too much trouble.

Red light spilled from Yang Jian's eyes.

He compressed his three-layer ghost domain within five meters of himself, allowing neither expansion nor leakage. He held its red boundary in a rigid grip, turning it into a tangible meat-grinding drum that rolled straight ahead.

The instant the gray gel touched the boundary of the red light, it evaporated without a sound.

The cursed spirits never even had a chance to struggle.

Anything that touched the edge of the red light was forcibly reduced to nothing.

[Four Grade 3 cursed spirits killed. Points gained: 40.]

[Five Grade 3 cursed spirits killed. Points gained: 50.]

Notifications of accumulating points buzzed like gnats. Yang Jian couldn't be bothered to look.

A Grade 3 cursed spirit was worth only ten points. That wasn't even enough to fill the gaps between his teeth.

The truly valuable goods were farther down.

Most of the escalator leading to the second underground level had long since collapsed. Its metal skeleton was twisted into a corkscrew, and its broken handrail belt dangled in midair.

Yang Jian stepped onto the exposed steel framework and jumped straight down.

The second underground level was likewise clogged with gelatinous cursed energy, two tiers denser than the first.

The ghost domain's grinding drum continued forward, clearing out seven or eight Grade 3 cursed spirits and two Grade 2s along the way.

[Two Grade 2 cursed spirits killed. Points gained: 100.]

Still not enough.

He descended along the collapsed escalator into the third underground level.

His field of view suddenly expanded.

A terrifying force had burst the entire lower transfer platform apart. The originally standard-width platform had expanded to at least five times its size. The ceiling bulged into a vast, enclosed dome, with exposed rebar and shattered tiles hanging precariously around its edges.

The air reeked of rust and the sickly-sweet stench of rotten meat.

A purple-black flesh cocoon more than five meters across hung in midair.

Dense black blood vessels radiated across its surface, connecting to the walls and floor, rooting into every crevice beneath Shibuya.

Those vessels pulsed rhythmically, drawing in an endless stream of low-level resentment and fear from miles around.

This was the embryo of a special grade imaginary vengeful spirit.

The flesh cocoon throbbed violently, each contraction shaking loose great sheets of concrete debris. Fine cracks widened across the dome, and the standing water on the floor rippled in time with its pulse.

Two people stood beside the platform's ruined pillars.

Each held an extremely heavy sealed wooden box plastered with the highest-grade talismans.

They wore protective suits specially made by Jujutsu High, their face shields sealed, each holding an extremely heavy sealed wooden box plastered with the highest-grade talismans.

At least twenty talismans were layered over each wooden box.

Couriers delivering Sukuna's Fingers.

They intended to shove Sukuna's Fingers straight down the special grade cursed spirit's throat the moment the embryo finished forming.

They would use the fingers' malevolence to assault its innate domain and see whether they could erode it from within.

The higher-ups really were willing to spare no expense.

Yang Jian's ankle boots creaked against the metal stairs.

Creak.

The sorcerer on the left whipped around. The light from the talisman in his hand flared as he barked, "Who's there? This is Jujutsu Headquarters' highest-security classified zone. Get out!"

The one on the right reacted even faster, already halfway through forming a seal with one hand. Behind his protective face shield, his eyes locked onto the stairs.

"Your undertaker."

Yang Jian kept walking.

His tone was far too calm.

So calm that both operatives froze for half a beat. In a place where the concentration of cursed energy could drive a Grade 2 Sorcerer into a mental breakdown, he sounded no different from someone ordering at a convenience-store counter.

That half-beat of hesitation cost them their lives.

Without the slightest desire to waste words, he sent the black shadow beneath his feet shooting out like a poisoned arrow loosed from a bow, crossing the thirty-meter vertical drop.

The shadow abruptly rose from the ground, forming two razor-sharp arcs that swept across their necks too fast to track. Both heads separated from their bodies almost simultaneously, tumbling through the air as blood gushed from the severed necks like abruptly uncapped springs.

The headless bodies stood rigid for half a breath, then crashed down like puppets with cut strings, hitting the rubble and stirring up a cloud of dark red dust.

Before the operatives could even get a proper grip on their alarms, it was over.

The wooden boxes fell from their hands.

Yang Jian beckoned with his left hand. Red light curled back like chains, drawing the wooden boxes securely into his palm.

But trouble followed.

The enormous flesh cocoon above unleashed a shrill, agonized psychic sonic boom.

Its absorption had been interrupted.

More importantly, the two operatives' hot blood had splashed onto the network of vessels covering the cocoon.

Their highly concentrated human cursed energy acted as a catalyst, flooding instantly into the embryo.

That was the final straw that shattered the balance.

A bottomless gash tore open down the center of the purple-black cocoon's outer wall.

Foul, blackened amniotic fluid struck the floor, splashing half a meter high. The stench instantly tripled.

A deathly pale, emaciated arm with only three fingers reached from deep inside the split and gripped the shell.

Its long nails dug into the flesh of the cocoon wall, wrenching outward.

The cocoon wall tore with the sound of wet cloth ripping.

An ultrahigh-frequency wave of sound, mingling an infant's cries with a beast's roars, circled beneath the dome and shattered every remaining support pillar nearby.

Chunks of rubble fell. The cracks in the dome spread rapidly, and the entire third underground level shook.

The special grade cursed spirit was forced into the world.

They had pushed its accelerated maturation too far.

Yang Jian's expression didn't change.

He dropped the box containing Sukuna's Finger into his pocket.

His right hand settled on the Rusty Cleaver at the back of his waist.

Rust rubbed off the handle into his palm, its coarse texture making his fingers tighten naturally.

Not a flake of rust had ever fallen from the blade, but every swing could cleave even a ghost.

The embryo overhead was still tearing free.

Its second arm had emerged, just as pale, with the same three fingers.

A head with warped features was squeezing through the gash, its mouth split past its ears.

Yang Jian looked up at it.

No rush.

Let it come all the way out.

A complete special grade. One thousand points.

The system might not count an unfinished one.

With no more restraint, red light erupted from beneath his feet and engulfed the entire underground space.

The dome, the floor, the ruined pillars, the tracks-every surface was coated in a deep, heavy crimson.

With the ghost domain fully deployed, the rules governing Shibuya's third underground level no longer belonged to reality.

The temperature plummeted.

The special grade cursed spirit inside the flesh cocoon finally broke completely free of its shell and fell into the bloody water.

Its body was still incomplete, its spine exposed and half its ribs protruding outside its flesh. But that face with nothing except a mouth had already turned toward Yang Jian.

Its mouth opened wider.

The one-sided slaughterhouse was officially open for business.