Interest

"Within half an hour."

"Twenty minutes will be enough."

Satoru Gojo picked up his shopping bag and headed toward the dorms. As he passed Yang Jian, he tossed out a remark without looking back. "I'll dismantle the Veil, but you'll have to deal with the stuff on that door yourself. Kusumoto also stuck Trace-Fixing Talismans on the steel mesh. If I touch those, the fluctuations from my Six Eyes will go on record."

His footsteps faded into the distance. The rustle of the plastic bag only disappeared after he rounded the corner.

Trace-Fixing Talismans.

Yang Jian stood there and clicked his tongue.

Now the steel mesh carried not just physical traces, but an extra layer of Cursed Technique tracking.

The talismans were active, running passively. Once damaged, they would immediately relay information back to the caster.

Who touched them, when, and how much force they used-all of it would be packaged up and delivered to Kusumoto's desk.

Helping dismantle the tracking Veil was already as far as Satoru Gojo could go.

Dismantling the Veil counted as "clearing the site." Jujutsu Headquarters wouldn't be able to find out who had done it.

But the talismans were different. They were products of a Cursed Technique bound to a specific target. Touching them with the Six Eyes would be the same as handing Kusumoto a business card.

So Yang Jian had to handle the talismans himself.

He leaned against the stone pillar by the school gate, his right hand in his jacket pocket, and ran through a plan.

Anything swallowed by the Fifth-Layer Ghost Domain left no fluctuations behind.

The talismans were attached to the steel mesh.

Then he would swallow the entire steel mesh gate, talismans and all.

The Cursed Technique would lose track of its target, and all it could transmit back would be a blank.

It was like watching a feed on a surveillance monitor. The image hadn't switched, gone black, or turned to static, but the thing you were watching was no longer in the frame.

You knew something had gone wrong, but you couldn't get any useful information.

The only problem was that the disappearance of the steel mesh was itself a signal.

A blast-resistant gate weighing several tons, evaporating into thin air.

The embedded fittings in the concrete frame, the welded joints, the expansion bolts-all of them would vanish without a trace.

Anyone with a brain who saw the scene wouldn't immediately think, "A Cursed Spirit did this."

When Cursed Spirits destroyed things, they left debris, traces of Cursed Energy corrosion, and a mess all around them.

Removing a door cleanly? Cursed Spirits couldn't do that kind of work.

But compared with leaving the traces on the steel mesh for someone to track back to him, a missing door was merely a puzzle.

Without physical evidence, a puzzle would always remain a puzzle.

Even if Kusumoto guessed someone had done it deliberately, there would be no evidence to produce.

Without evidence, a matter couldn't pass through the procedures at Jujutsu Headquarters. Without those procedures, no case could be opened.

The greatest weakness of bureaucrats wasn't inefficiency. It was their inability to do anything without procedure.

Yang Jian waited by the school gate.

The night wind blew in from the west, carrying the chill of early autumn.

The leaves of the camphor trees inside the walls rustled in the breeze.

The campus streetlights were on, with a few tiny insects flying beneath their pools of light.

The Flip Phone vibrated.

Shiu Kong had sent a message: the outer Veil around Shibuya's No. 3 entrance had disappeared.

Yang Jian checked the time.

Twenty-three minutes had passed since Satoru Gojo walked away.

He'd said twenty minutes would be enough, but he'd taken three extra.

He'd probably doubled back to the convenience store for an ice pop after dismantling the Veil.

Yang Jian put his phone away.

A sliver of red shone from the fissure in his forehead in the darkness.

Instead of spreading outward, the Ghost Domain compressed into a narrow, elongated passage centered on Yang Jian. It ran straight southwest through three city blocks, two residential buildings, and half a subway tunnel's concrete shell.

Red light enveloped his body, bypassing the ground beneath his feet, the ceiling overhead, and the pipes on either side.

Yang Jian stood before the entrance to the Shibuya No. 3 Hub.

Faint marks remained on the ground where the tracking Veil had been dismantled. Several curved lines had already begun to dissipate.

Satoru Gojo had worked efficiently. Every anchor point of the Veil had been erased, and barely any residual Cursed Technique remained.

The steel mesh gate stood before him.

Yang Jian didn't act right away.

First, he surveyed the surroundings.

Outside the entrance, the nearest personnel from Jujutsu Headquarters were in a temporary command tent over four hundred meters away.

There were two of them, one on the phone and the other leafing through documents. Their heart rates were normal; neither was on combat alert. There were no living creatures within fifty meters of the No. 3 entrance.

There were no fresh footprints on the ground.

The concentration of Cursed Energy in the air was low, within Shibuya's normal background levels.

No one was watching this place.

Satoru Gojo had dismantled the Veil so cleanly that Jujutsu Headquarters hadn't even noticed yet.

Yang Jian brought his gaze back to the steel mesh gate.

Four yellow paper talismans were stuck to the frame.

The ink was fresh, and the strokes still carried faint pulses of a Cursed Technique.

These weren't mass-produced talismans. The links between strokes showed individual habits-most likely handwritten by a barrier specialist working under Kusumoto.

Someone had sprinkled a layer of fine powder over the gate's hinges.

It was grayish-white, with particles so fine they were almost invisible to the naked eye.

Yang Jian leaned closer and sniffed it-odorless.

This wasn't ordinary fingerprint powder. It was probably a contact tracer that would cling to skin or clothing, couldn't be washed off, and could be located remotely with a specific Cursed Technique.

Talismans, tracer powder, and trace fixing.

To find out who had interfered with the Shibuya site, Kusumoto had stacked three safeguards on top of one another.

The old fox certainly knew how to earn that paycheck.

Yang Jian took a step back.

He hadn't touched the gate.

Red light seeped from the Ghost Eye in his forehead.

The Fifth-Layer Ghost Domain activated silently.

The red light fell on the steel mesh gate, and the gate vanished.

It didn't shatter, dissolve, or get dragged into some spatial rift.

It simply vanished.

The four paper talismans disappeared along with the frame.

The powder disappeared along with the hinges.

The lock, welds, expansion bolts, and angle steel embedded in the concrete-every part that belonged to "this gate" lost its presence the instant the red light covered it.

From start to finish, Yang Jian's hands hadn't touched any part of the gate.

Only a neat rectangular opening remained.

Yang Jian lowered his head and glanced at the cut surface.

Too neat.

The exposed concrete was smooth enough to reflect light. Its edges were sharply defined, with no burrs along the ninety-degree corners.

In the real world, only a water jet cutter or a diamond saw blade could achieve that kind of precision.

At the entrance to an abandoned tunnel in the Shibuya subway hub, anyone investigating would know at a glance that this wasn't natural damage.

Yang Jian crouched down, grabbed a handful of stone chips from the pile of broken bricks by his feet, and flung them at the cut edges of the opening.

The chips bounced against the exposed concrete, and a few embedded themselves in its surface.

Not enough.

He kicked the lower edge of the opening twice, grinding the corners blunt with his sole to create the rough texture of a collapse under stress.

Then he pulled a loose tile from nearby and struck the exposed surface twice, leaving irregular impact marks.

Finally, he stepped back two paces and looked over the overall result.

Good enough.

It didn't exactly resemble a natural collapse, but at least it no longer looked as though precision equipment had cut it out.

When the people from Jujutsu Headquarters came to investigate, at most they would think the way it had collapsed was a little strange. But there was a world of difference between strange and "enough to substantiate suspicion."

Three seconds later.

Yang Jian stood beneath the streetlight at Jujutsu High's gate.

A stray cat crouched on the base of the lamppost, licking its paw. At the sound, it pricked up its ears and glanced at him, then jumped onto the wall, ran a few steps along the top, and disappeared into the darkness deeper inside the campus.

Yang Jian brushed the dust and concrete powder off his jacket sleeves and ambled toward the dorms.

His phone vibrated again.

He took it out and flipped it open. Shiu Kong's message contained only two words:

"The gate?"

Yang Jian typed one-handed and sent back two words:

"It's gone."

The other end fell silent for almost a minute.

During that minute, Yang Jian passed through the dorm building's access-controlled entrance, climbed to the second floor, and turned into the corridor.

Only then did his phone vibrate again.

"...What can I say? That's you all right?"

Yang Jian didn't reply.

He snapped the Flip Phone shut, stuffed it into his trouser pocket, and pushed open his dorm room door.

The lights were off.

The curtains were half drawn, and the moonlight streaming in divided the desktop into two sections, one bright and one dark.

A can of cola had appeared on the bright side.

A thin layer of condensation coated the can. It hadn't been out of the fridge for long.

A sticky note lay beside it. Satoru Gojo's handwriting was crooked and uneven in size, about as sloppy as a grade-schooler's when forced to copy out a passage as punishment:

"Veil's down. The cola counts as interest.-Satoru (*￣m￣)"

He'd even drawn a little face at the end.

Yang Jian peeled off the sticky note, looked at it for two seconds, then crumpled it up and tossed it into the trash.

He opened the cola and took a sip.

A little too sweet.

Satoru Gojo's taste in drinks always leaned sweet. The last can had been the same.

The man probably assumed everyone in the world loved sugar as much as he did.

But it was cold, and at this hour, it hit the spot.