The special grade cursed spirit fell out of the flesh cocoon in an ungainly heap.
It landed in the bloody water, sending up a murky splash.
The lower half of its body was still attached to the cocoon wall by an unsevered black umbilical cord. Its exposed vertebrae were misaligned, and half its ribs stuck out of its body like fish bones that hadn't been properly removed.
Yang Jian's first reaction wasn't wariness.
It was disgust.
Calling something that looked like this special grade was almost an insult to the term.
But it was already moving.
Its head, which had nothing but a mouth, turned crookedly toward Yang Jian. The splits at the corners of its mouth tore past where its ears should have been and kept spreading backward.
The joints of its jaw creaked in rapid succession. Three rows of uneven teeth overlapped inside, their gums black and rotten.
A shriek rang out.
It wasn't a sound wave, but a psychic assault.
High-frequency waves carrying foul, rotting cursed energy blasted from that impossibly wide mouth. The last few load-bearing steel bars still holding on overhead snapped, and huge concrete slabs crashed down with fragments of tile.
Yang Jian stood without moving.
His red ghost domain had already fully expanded.
The falling chunks of concrete lost their weight as they entered the red light, hanging in midair before silently dissolving into gray powder.
Inside the ghost domain, the psychic sonic blast did-nothing.
Not even a ripple.
Yang Jian glanced down at the outlines of the two sealed wooden boxes in his pocket, checking that the tremors hadn't shaken them out.
By the time he looked up again, the special grade cursed spirit had torn through the umbilical cord on its back.
It stood up.
It was taller than he'd expected.
The exposed section of its spine was visibly growing-not healing, but completing itself, to be precise.
New muscle tissue spread outward through the gaps between its bones, dark red and no different in texture from raw pork.
The ribs protruding from its body were also retracting, snapping back into place one after another.
A side effect of forced maturation.
It had emerged incomplete, but its foundation was strong enough that its regeneration far exceeded the norm.
Given another three minutes, the thing's body would be fully formed.
Yang Jian had no intention of giving it those three minutes.
But he wasn't in a hurry to strike, either.
He was waiting for the system's assessment.
Whether the system would award a thousand points for an unfinished special grade was a very practical question. If it only counted as semi-special grade or even a grade 1 mutant, he would be better off waiting until it finished growing before attacking.
The system panel flickered in the lower-left corner of his vision.
[Special grade imaginary vengeful spirit detected (incomplete form). Kill classification: special grade. Estimated points: 1000.]
That was enough.
The rust-mottled blade reflected none of the red light.
Every trace of red that struck its surface was absorbed into the cracks in the rust, turning the entire knife into a silent black silhouette.
The special grade cursed spirit really did regenerate quickly.
In the two seconds it took Yang Jian to draw his knife, it had already grown the full outline of a torso.
Two misshapen legs held it upright. Deep within the split lips of its otherwise featureless face, an orb of purple-black cursed energy glowed, compressed to the utmost limit.
It was charging up.
A textbook response.
The special grade cursed spirit's instinctive ability to judge danger hadn't deteriorated-it knew the thing before it was trouble and immediately chose maximum firepower.
The purple-black orb shot out of its mouth.
It was blindingly fast.
The third basement level wasn't large to begin with. The orb kept expanding as it flew, reducing the thirty-meter distance to less than half a second of reaction time.
The air along its path was instantly ionized, leaving a whitish vacuum channel behind it.
Yang Jian vanished a tenth of a second before the orb reached him.
He hadn't dodged.
He had shifted through space within the ghost domain.
He appeared directly above the special grade cursed spirit.
The Chopping Knife came down.
No fancy swordplay, no wasted motion.
Just a one-handed vertical chop, straight down.
The rusted blade cut into the special grade cursed spirit's left shoulder, traveling down from its collarbone through freshly grown muscle and ribs that hadn't fully closed.
There wasn't much force behind the blow.
What mattered was the Chopping Knife itself.
A supernatural weapon's slash didn't depend on physical destructive power.
What the blade cut wasn't flesh, but the "integrity" that held this cursed spirit together.
It was like pulling a piece out of a jigsaw puzzle. The pattern at the gap wouldn't complete itself-it would collapse outright.
The special grade cursed spirit let out a screech entirely unlike its earlier one.
High frequency became low, and shrillness became a dull rumble.
Its left arm fell off at the shoulder, hit the ground, twitched twice, and went still.
No blood came from the wound, only black smoke. All the muscle tissue that had been regenerating so frantically stopped growing along with it.
After a single slash, the special grade cursed spirit's behavior switched from "charge up and counterattack" to "flee for survival."
Its legs suddenly launched it upward, sending its whole body hurtling toward a crack in the ceiling.
It had chosen its escape route wisely. The crack led to the collapsed area on the second basement level, where the terrain was cramped and complex-poor conditions for pursuit.
But it had forgotten one thing.
This was already a ghost domain.
Yang Jian couldn't even be bothered to chase it.
He loosely curled his right hand, rewriting the ghost domain's spatial rules within the red light.
The special grade cursed spirit's trajectory was forcibly altered.
As it raced upward, the crack in the ceiling grew farther and farther away-not because it was too slow, but because space itself was stretching.
It ran for three seconds.
And returned to where it had started.
Yang Jian was already standing there, waiting for it.
The second slash.
A diagonal chop.
From its right shoulder to its left hip.
Its ribs broke with a deep, muffled crunch.
This cut went much deeper than the first, splitting the special grade cursed spirit's still-unfinished torso in two again.
The instant its upper and lower halves separated, all the organs and tissue it had painstakingly regrown turned into black smoke and dispersed.
The two halves each rolled across the ground.
There were no more screeches.
The sound coming from the special grade cursed spirit's mouth had become a low, broken whimper.
It was trying to piece itself back together.
Its upper half crawled toward its lower half, black smoke frantically pressing together at the severed surfaces in an attempt to reconnect them.
The third slash.
Yang Jian planted his foot on the back of its head and drove the knife's tip through the top of its skull, piercing its cranial cavity and pinning it to the rubble on the floor.
The special grade cursed spirit's struggles stopped abruptly.
It wasn't dead. The Chopping Knife had completely broken apart its bodily structure.
Every severed piece tried to move, but each acted independently. It couldn't even crawl anymore.
That was enough.
Yang Jian pulled out the Chopping Knife and kicked the scattered pieces of the cursed spirit into a pile.
He waited two seconds.
The system notification chimed.
[Special grade imaginary vengeful spirit (incomplete form) ×1 killed. Points gained: 1000.]
Exactly one thousand.
Satisfying.
Yang Jian flicked the black liquid off the Chopping Knife and slid it back behind his waist.
He took the two sealed wooden boxes covered in talismans out of his pocket.
Two of Sukuna's Fingers.
He had fished one out of the Shinjuku sewers last time.
With these two, he now had three in total.
The system wouldn't accept them, but holding on to them wasn't a loss-once Yuji Itadori entered the picture, three fingers would give him three strong cards to play.
He stuffed the wooden boxes back into his pocket.
He surveyed the ruins of the third basement level.
The special grade cursed spirit's remains had already begun to dissipate, their black fragments breaking down faster in the red light.
The remains of the flesh cocoon hung from the ceiling. With their supply cut off, the network of blood vessels rapidly withered and blackened, becoming a mass of brittle, dried threads.
The ghost domain's red light slowly receded.
The whole process had been clean and efficient.
No cursed residue, no flying flesh and blood.
The Chopping Knife's supernatural slashes generated no heat and left no traces. Apart from a few extra scratches on the floor, nothing here suggested that a special grade cursed spirit had just been annihilated.
Yang Jian climbed upward, stepping on the twisted metal handrail.
When he reached the second basement level, he casually collected a few cursed energy cores that hadn't yet dissipated, left behind from his earlier sweep of the grade 2 cursed spirits.
They weren't much use to him, but Shoko might be able to use them as research material.
The first basement level.
The gray, gelatinous cursed energy had already been cleared away by the ghost domain's lingering effects.
Without the special grade embryo's continuous supply, the stuff dispersed quickly.
The passage.
The iron door.
The eight hidden sentries outside had long since gone cold.
Yang Jian slipped through a gap in the blast-resistant steel mesh and stood on Shibuya's late-night streets.
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