Preparations

Yang Jian pulled out a chair, sat down, and set his can of cola beside him.

First, settle the accounts in front of me.

His trip to Shibuya had established one thing: Jujutsu Headquarters had more than one hideout tucked away in the shadows.

The underground laboratory at Shibuya No. 3 Hub had received funding approved by Kusumoto under the budget heading "sealing maintenance."

A cultivation chamber four floors underground, catalytic experiments involving two Sukuna's Fingers, ten guards on the payroll-none of that could have been covered by a single payment.

Site renovation, equipment purchases, personnel allowances, security for transporting cursed objects, barrier maintenance... every expense had to go through the budget.

Kusumoto controlled Jujutsu Headquarters' purse strings.

The budget disbursement records were a road map.

Wherever the money went, there would be a hideout.

Shibuya couldn't have been the only project funded under that heading.

"Sealing maintenance" and "observation facilities"-those two labels probably concealed more experimental bases of the same kind.

They might be smaller than Shibuya, but they would still have plenty of things being raised inside.

Cursed spirit cultivation chambers meant cursed spirits.

Cursed spirits meant points.

Shiu Kong could dig up Kusumoto's accounts.

Rather than using Jujutsu Headquarters' official channels, he could work backward from the contractors and suppliers receiving the budget funds-that was exactly the sort of work an intelligence broker excelled at.

The ledger was a map, the map led to cursed spirits, and cursed spirits equaled points.

The chain of logic was simple.

Yang Jian set down his can of cola, opened his flip phone, and composed a new message.

"Check where Councilor Kusumoto's budget disbursements have gone over the past three years. Focus on funds marked 'sealing maintenance' and 'observation facilities.'

Don't just check the amounts. Pull up every recipient's registered address, legal representative's details, and linked accounts. I want all the addresses."

He thought for a moment, then added another line.

"Also, notify me as soon as those two people Kusumoto sent to Tokyo today arrive. I want to know where they're staying."

He sent it.

He closed the phone, stuffed it between the layers of his mattress, and flopped onto the bed.

The springs creaked. The chopping knife beneath his pillow dug into the back of his head, and he reached over to push it aside.

The fluorescent tube on the ceiling flickered twice. A loose connection made it blink on and off for several seconds before it steadied.

Footsteps came from the far end of the corridor.

Slippers slapped against the wooden floor in a light, jaunty rhythm-Satoru Gojo. The footsteps headed toward the bathroom, followed by the rush of water through the pipes, then humming.

The tune was hopelessly off-key.

Yang Jian listened for five seconds without recognizing the song. Satoru Gojo probably didn't know what he was humming either.

Yang Jian stared at the ceiling.

Over fifty-seven thousand points.

At his current harvesting rate, a Grade 2 hideout yielded an average of two or three hundred points, a Grade 1 hideout seven or eight hundred to a thousand, and a single Special Grade a thousand.

Finding them one at a time on his own was too slow.

Kusumoto's ledger was a shortcut.

Jujutsu Headquarters had spent taxpayers' money raising cursed spirits. Now Yang Jian was collecting the debt on the taxpayers' behalf.

It was only right.

In the bathroom, Satoru Gojo's singing suddenly jumped an octave, followed by a dull thud-probably a shampoo bottle hitting the floor.

"Ah-"

A brief cry of pain, followed by the sound of slippers skidding across wet flooring.

Yang Jian rolled over to face the wall.

The corridor went quiet again.

A few seconds later, Satoru Gojo started humming again. This time, the tune was even more absurd.

Yang Jian closed his eyes.

Starting tomorrow, it's time to dig into Jujutsu Headquarters' dirty secrets.

Shiu Kong's reply arrived at 1:17 a.m.

It wasn't text, but a blurry photo of a spreadsheet.

Yang Jian held his flip phone under the desk lamp and squinted at the words.

Shiu Kong's photography skills were inversely proportional to his intelligence-gathering skills-the focus was off, and half a fingertip blurred into the upper-left corner.

But the contents were legible.

Seventeen payments had been disbursed under "sealing maintenance" over the past three years.

Four had gone through the proper procedures. The recipients were barrier-maintenance contractors working under Jujutsu High, and the amounts were normal. Nothing wrong there.

The recipients of the remaining thirteen payments were all shell companies registered less than two years earlier.

The thirteen companies had several things in common: registered capital of exactly ten million yen, no record of actual operations, and bank transactions that only showed money coming in, never going out.

Once the money went in, it vanished.

Shiu Kong had attached a line beneath the image: "I'm not done checking observation facilities yet. Here's this batch first. I checked the five addresses marked in red on-site. Three are already deserted; two are still operating."

Yang Jian scrolled down.

Of the two addresses still operating, one was in an old industrial district in Ichikawa, Chiba Prefecture. The other was in the mountains of Sagamihara, Kanagawa Prefecture.

The Ichikawa site was registered as "Towa Environmental Technology Co., Ltd." Its legal representative was a seventy-three-year-old retired civil servant who had died the previous year.

The company's registered address was a three-story steel-framed factory building. Satellite imagery showed vacant land all around it, with the nearest residential area two kilometers away.

The Sagamihara site was more elaborate.

Registered as the "Sobu Forestry Management Cooperative," it was affiliated with the local agricultural and forestry cooperative, and used that cooperative's chairman as its legal representative.

The address was halfway up a mountain, surrounded by extensive cedar woods. Reaching it meant turning off the highway and following a dirt road for another four kilometers.

Yang Jian noted down both addresses and switched off his phone's screen.

The Ichikawa factory was on the edge of the urban area, with roads and railway lines nearby and people frequently coming and going. If he struck there, keeping the commotion under control would be difficult.

Sagamihara was in the mountains. Four kilometers of dirt road meant there would be few people around the perimeter. A good place to work.

But Shiu Kong had said it was "still operating," which meant there were people inside.

People meant staffing, staffing meant shift schedules, and shift schedules meant handover times.

The gap during a handover was when vigilance was weakest.

His phone vibrated again.

Shiu Kong sent a follow-up: "One of my people passed the Ichikawa site three days ago. There were two modified vans parked outside, with plates registered to Jujutsu Headquarters' logistics department.

We haven't been to Sagamihara. The road's too rough, and my informants' cars don't have enough ground clearance."

Yang Jian replied briefly: "Check Sagamihara first."

Then he added, "Have those two people Kusumoto sent arrived in Tokyo yet?"

"Not yet. Word from Kyoto is their flight was changed. Tomorrow afternoon at the earliest. I found the tracking sorcerer. His name is ****." The system had automatically censored part of the name, so Shiu Kong sent it again, this time spelled out phonetically.

"His name is Kagekatsu Uesugi. Grade 2, forty-seven years old, specializes in Trace Residue Restoration. An off-payroll operative for Jujutsu Headquarters, paid by the job. I couldn't find anything on the one transferred from Kyoto. They used internal channels. Not even a name listed."

The one he couldn't find was the biggest problem.

Someone who could be investigated left traces, and traces made it possible to anticipate his moves.

Someone who couldn't be investigated was a blank card. You didn't know when he would turn it over, or what it would reveal.

Yang Jian switched off his phone and lay back on the bed.

The springs creaked again.

The handle of the chopping knife beneath his pillow pressed into the back of his head. He had already grown used to the sensation.

The corridor was quiet.

Satoru Gojo was probably asleep already, or scrolling through his phone under the covers with headphones on.

That man's sleep schedule was just like his cursed technique-there was no pattern.

Yang Jian closed his eyes.

He ran through Sagamihara's terrain in his mind.

Halfway up a mountain, cedar woods, four kilometers of dirt road.

If it was an underground facility, the entrance was probably hidden in the woods, using vegetation as natural cover.

Jujutsu Headquarters followed a fixed pattern when building hideouts like these: a Veil around the perimeter, sentries in the middle, and barriers sealing off the core.

The Shibuya site had four floors.

If Sagamihara was smaller, it would have two or three.

Scaling the guard count down proportionally from Shibuya's staffing would put it at roughly four to six people.

Enough.