In late February 2010, the wind was bitterly cold. In a pitch-black alley on the outskirts of Tokyo, a boy in a middle school uniform pulled his clothes tighter around himself and sighed helplessly.
After seemingly muttering a curse at the damned weather, the boy continued down the dark alley, carrying the half-price boxed meal he had just bought.
It was so cold that he had almost instinctively chosen this deserted alley as a shortcut home. At any other time, he would not have set foot in this damned alley even if his life depended on it.
The reason was simple: this was the world of Jujutsu Kaisen!
That was right. The boy's name was Sherlock, and he was a bona fide transmigrator.
In theory, transmigrating should have been a good thing. After all, who wouldn't want to rise above the crowd and live however they pleased?
The only problem was that he hadn't wanted to transmigrate into a world full of lunatics like Jujutsu Kaisen! Joking about it online was one thing, but if it actually happened, how could an ordinary person possibly go exchange a passionate flurry of elbow strikes with the mighty Sukuna?
Did you really think you were Satoru Gojo? Could a little demon brat withstand Sukuna slicing him to ribbons?
Never mind anything else. The moment that insane image came out, Sherlock had acknowledged on the spot that Gojo was a real man. If Satoru Gojo called himself a sissy, Sherlock would probably have put on a skirt right then and there.
Even setting aside the damned lunatic plot, Tokyo's godforsaken environment, with Fly Heads everywhere, was enough to make Sherlock want to die.
And that wasn't even the main problem. The main problem was that Sherlock was a goddamn Jujutsu Kaisen reader who only knew it secondhand! From his transmigration through elementary school and all the way to middle school graduation, the only things he still remembered were those insane Jujutsu Kaisen memes.
Following the basic principle of "don't ask for trouble and trouble won't find you," Sherlock had already planned to sell the property his already-sacrificed parents had left him once he turned eighteen and officially became an adult, then move to a small town and quietly scrape by.
If he got a little luckier and managed to adopt four younger sisters, life would be especially colorful.
After all, if people really had to choose between trading elbow strikes with the mighty Sukuna and becoming a dating sim protagonist, probably more than half would choose the latter, even if that was a loser's way of thinking.
Just as Sherlock was happily imagining his blissful life as a dating sim protagonist, a figure as enormous as a truck suddenly emerged from the shadows farther down the alley.
The thing looked like a dog, but disturbingly, its mouth ran vertically, extending along almost half its body!
"Hungry... so hungry... eat!"
Jumbled, barely coherent words came from the thing that looked like a zombie dog from Resident Evil. Facing it, Sherlock showed no sign of panic and merely sighed helplessly.
"Seriously, I have absolutely no interest in things like you that are so ugly you've started becoming abstract!"
Before his words had even faded, Sherlock vanished from the alley without a trace, as though he had never been there.
Less than a minute after Sherlock disappeared, a white-haired man wearing sunglasses appeared where he had been standing. With a casual toss of a blue orb of light, he reduced the truck-sized zombie dog to ash.
But the white-haired man didn't leave. Instead, he lowered his sunglasses, revealing blue eyes that seemed to stretch out like the sky, and surveyed his surroundings. Only after quite a while did a brilliant smile spread across his face.
"Interesting..."
With that, the white-haired man turned and left.
Meanwhile, in the previously empty entryway of a fairly spacious detached house, a figure suddenly appeared. It was Sherlock, who had just vanished from the alley.
Glancing at a protective charm hanging on the entryway wall, Sherlock sighed helplessly before taking off his shoes and entering the house. Grumbling curses, he switched on the heater, casually tossed his boxed meal onto the table, and huddled under the kotatsu.
That was right. As a transmigrator, Sherlock naturally had a few perks. He had awakened his cursed energy and cursed technique back in elementary school. His technique was quite powerful and suited his name, too. In fact, three words were enough to explain it.
Flying Thunder God!
But to stay alive, Sherlock not only rarely used his cursed technique, he even deliberately suppressed his excessively vast cursed energy. After all, he had been sent here by the god of runaway trucks. The amount of cursed energy brought about by the shadow of death was truly immeasurable.
His reason for choosing this was simple, too. Sherlock genuinely didn't want to fight things that were unsettling just to look at, nor did he want to trade elbow strikes with the mighty Sukuna!
Being reincarnated into Jujutsu Kaisen was bad enough, but he'd even lost his goddamn Chinese citizenship? Sherlock would have to have nothing better to do to get mixed up in all that Jujutsu Society bullshit, especially with those old fossils who did nothing but hold everyone back.
If he really had that much time on his hands, wouldn't he be better off signing up for a fan event? If he happened to be selected, he could even support his favorite actress in person. It would count as finally paying for all the pirated content he'd watched throughout his life before transmigrating.
Thinking of it that way, Sherlock felt that his transmigration wasn't quite so unacceptable after all.
After happily entering his information on his phone and falsifying his age, Sherlock crawled out from under the kotatsu, his mind wandering, and started on his dinner.
If there was anything about this damned Japan that really pissed Sherlock off, it was probably just how hard the winters were to get through.
Every winter, Sherlock missed China's central heating from before his transmigration terribly...
After finishing his boxed meal for dinner, Sherlock thought it over and decisively chose to just sleep under the kotatsu. His room would be freezing anyway, so he might as well stay where it was comfortable.
Growing sleepier the more he thought about it, Sherlock closed his eyes with a blissful expression, never imagining what a bizarre, out-of-control mess his quiet little life would become when he opened them the next morning.
Just as Sherlock fell into a baby-like sleep, elsewhere, Satoru Gojo, who had just emerged from the alley, looked at the screenshot saved on his phone and called the Gojo Clan.
"Clan head."
Once the call connected, a steady voice came from the other end, bringing a hint of discomfort to Satoru Gojo's face. Having only taken over the previous year, he wasn't particularly fond of being addressed as "clan head."
Satoru Gojo sent over the image he had captured from the surveillance footage on his phone, then issued an order in the cool, detached voice unique to the divine child.
"Find out everything about this boy. I want it by tomorrow morning."
With that, he hung up, and a smile of anticipation appeared on his cold face.