The beginning of chaos

During the minute that the Evil Eye's illusion remained active, Kenjaku used every means currently at his disposal to attack Tan Man's phantom.

But just as the scene before Kenjaku's eyes showed, every attack was utterly meaningless against a phantom that had never existed in the first place.

If not for the knowledge and experience Kenjaku had accumulated over thousands of years, if he had merely been a novice jujutsu sorcerer who exhausted everything he had ever learned without achieving any effect, his very understanding of reality might have collapsed.

In fact, Kenjaku had already begun to suspect something during the process.

Only when the full minute ended and Tan Man's figure vanished completely from his sight could Kenjaku confirm that he had probably just experienced an illusion.

Yet the heavy smell of blood in the air and the wreckage of the Time Vessel Association's buildings proved that his attacks had indeed had an effect.

Kenjaku seriously reflected on why he had fallen under an illusion.

At his current level, given the distance between him and Tan Man just now, Kenjaku should have been able to detect the fluctuations in cursed energy and react whenever the other man used jujutsu.

But that was precisely the problem. From Kenjaku's perspective, Tan Man had made no move at all at the time.

Although Tan Man's cursed energy was not among the very highest levels possessed by jujutsu sorcerers, it still placed him in their upper tier. Yet it had remained as still as stagnant water.

[The upper tier here did not refer to the level of Satoru Gojo and Yuta Okkotsu, but included classifications such as Grade 1 Jujutsu Sorcerer.]

That was why Kenjaku had been willing to employ most of his methods in the hope that his attacks would work against Tan Man's phantom.

The situation itself was simply too abnormal and counterintuitive. He needed to use those attacks to verify that his reasoning was sound.

Kenjaku swept his gaze over his surroundings. After a minute of frenzied attacks from his Womb Profusion, the place had become a sea of blood and ruins.

Then he looked toward the car speeding away in the distance, its taillights trailing two long red lines through the darkness, and murmured to himself.

"Tan Man Zenin, was it? You really are interesting."

Despite those words, Kenjaku knew perfectly well that his plan seemed to require some changes.

Whether Tan Man's claim that he had the Star Plasma Vessel was true or false, the extent of his information, combined with his ability to draw Kenjaku into an illusion without his noticing, meant the original plan was no longer viable.

In reality, Tan Man had used nothing more than the Evil Eye's ability against Kenjaku, subtly distorting his perception to alter how he identified and assessed his attacks.

It made Kenjaku believe that he had aimed properly and successfully launched lethal attacks against Tan Man and Toji.

In reality, the Evil Eye's effects had allowed Toji to take Tan Man away immediately.

However, this was really another application of an information advantage. After all, with Kenjaku's open domain, if he had discarded the feedback he received about the outside world and simply unleashed his cursed technique at full power throughout its range, even the Evil Eye could not have changed the final output. Tan Man would have been unable to avoid that damage through such clever tricks and would have had to face it with raw strength.

At this point, Tan Man was undoubtedly at a disadvantage in raw strength alone, so he did everything he could to prevent that situation.

Still, the current result was quite good. At least with Kenjaku's "help," Tan Man had not needed to personally eliminate the Time Vessel Association, which meant he would leave behind no information connected to him, particularly cursed residue.

Domains, however, remained a sore point for Tan Man, since he still lacked the ability to deploy one.

Although the Eight Hot Hells could use sin to strengthen his cursed technique's effects and expand its moves, it could not rapidly master a domain for him.

Tan Man's studies in barrier techniques had been noticeably difficult.

Tan Man was no genius. He merely understood the workings of this world better than other people did.

For something as concrete as barrier techniques, the help his experience could provide was relatively limited.

Thus, even after nine years, Tan Man had yet to grasp how to use a domain.

So he settled for the next best thing, first seeking methods that could resist domains to some extent.

Aside from his own Evil Eye, whose illusions could provide some defense against domains, his first step had been learning Falling Blossom Emotion from Naobito Zenin, a method unique to the Three Great Families.

As for Simple Domain, Tan Man was also waiting for a suitable opportunity to approach someone and learn it. He simply did not want these trump cards exposed to everyone too early, so he had done everything in secret.

Driving the car, Toji looked through the rearview mirror at the Time Vessel Association's buildings destroyed by Kenjaku's "Womb Profusion" and remarked.

"That was some ridiculous power. Was that thing a domain?"

Although Toji could not directly observe Kenjaku's domain, his keen senses, together with the destruction its gravitational effects caused to the surroundings, still allowed him to get a fairly clear sense of just how powerful it was.

"That guy's domain is rather unusual," Tan Man explained. "It would be more accurate to call it an open domain. By giving up restrictions on entry and exit, he strengthens the effects of the cursed technique itself."

"Were you there to find her?" Toji continued.

[Regarding "she" and "he," the Kenjaku Toji observed was a woman using Kaori Itadori's body, while Tan Man referred to Kenjaku's true nature.]

"He's the client who wanted you to accept a commission to kill the Star Plasma Vessel, preferably killing Satoru Gojo of the Six Eyes along the way."

"So it was her. What's she doing all this for?"

After all, judging by the strength she had just displayed, Toji felt that Kenjaku should have been capable of accomplishing this herself. Yet she had chosen not to act personally, instead going to such lengths to commission him. The reason made Toji curious.

"He probably just doesn't want to expose himself too early. After all, his ultimate goal is to assimilate everyone in Japan with Tengen, creating one enormous cursed spirit with the cursed energy of a hundred million people."

"Tengen can do something like that?"

Toji was a member of the Zenin Clan, after all. Even though he was not a sorcerer himself, he was quite familiar with information about Jujutsu Society because of his work hunting sorcerers.

"That's a long story. Once Tengen fails this time, that guy can seize the body of a sorcerer with Cursed Spirit Manipulation and use the technique to control the evolved Tengen, who will be closer to a cursed spirit than a human. Then he can force Tengen to obey the command to assimilate with everyone in Japan."

As Toji listened to Tan Man explain all this, he felt no fear. He merely found it rather interesting and continued asking questions.

"Then what's the point of him doing all that?"

"He can switch between different bodies through his brain, giving himself something like immortality. Having already lived for thousands of years, he just wants to see what will emerge afterward, whether that enormous cursed spirit will be something so absurd that it makes him roar with laughter."

It was not as though Toji could not understand that. After all, viewed through his own way of thinking, it was actually rather similar to his own situation.

With Tan Man's help, Toji had now obtained more wealth through cheating than he could ever spend.

Precisely because he had acquired that wealth through cheating, he now wanted to gamble more purely, relying on luck alone to find the simplest kind of enjoyment.

Toji could more or less imagine that, after living through such an immense span of time, a long-lived fellow like that might find only one thing meaningful anymore: how to entertain himself.

Perhaps because driving late at night was boring, Toji casually continued asking questions.

"What next, then? What do you want to do now?"

"Next, of course, I'll make the situation even more chaotic. Whether it's Jujutsu High, the Three Great Families, or Jujutsu Headquarters, I'll drag them all into it. Only then will my performance leave a deep enough impression to make me the one person everyone can trust and needs, allowing me to gradually infiltrate and take control of Jujutsu Society."

Toji glanced sideways at Tan Man in the passenger seat, whose face was full of excitement as he said those words.

Although Toji did not particularly agree with Tan Man's twisted fixation on being needed by others, after spending nine years together, he could still understand part of it.

Toji had no objection to helping Tan Man.

Their relationship was no longer the purely transactional one it had been at the beginning. It had become something more like a bond between brothers.

Compared with Kenjaku's ultimate desire to blend a hundred million people into an enormous cursed spirit, Toji was more interested in seeing what outcome Tan Man's twisted, "self-scripted and self-performed" approach would produce.

If the audience being kept in the dark eventually learned the whole truth, could the ending he hoped for really still come to pass?

After all, with financial freedom and Tan Man's arrangements allowing him to kill as he pleased, finding amusement was the only thing Toji needed to consider anymore.