Tengen never took her eyes off his face.
She spoke, her voice a little deeper than before.
"A thousand years ago."
"At the height of Jujutsu."
"Back then, there were more than ten times as many Jujutsu Sorcerers on this land as there were a few years ago."
"Every day, new Cursed Techniques were discovered, new schools emerged, and new barriers were constructed."
"Cursed Energy flowed as abundantly as a great river, and the entire world operated steeped in it."
She paused briefly.
"Then I made a decision."
"Using my own body as the core, I erected an enormous barrier covering all of Japan."
She raised one hand and lightly traced a line through the air with her fingertip.
A faint, almost invisible white light flowed from her fingertip, sketching a hazy, island-shaped outline in midair.
"The purpose of this barrier was simple."
"To draw all the Cursed Energy across the globe into Japan."
Wangchuan said nothing.
He simply sat quietly, his gaze following the lines of that white outline, his expression betraying not a ripple.
Tengen lowered her hand, and the white outline dissipated with it.
"After that, places outside Japan almost stopped naturally producing Cursed Energy and Cursed Spirits."
"Europe, the Americas, Africa, Southeast Asia-the number of Jujutsu Sorcerers in those lands plummeted, and the frequency of Cursed Spirit births declined year after year."
"Meanwhile, the concentration of Cursed Energy within Japan kept rising. There were more and more Cursed Spirits, and more and more Jujutsu Sorcerers."
She stopped, as though waiting for Wangchuan's reaction.
Wangchuan was silent for a few seconds before speaking.
"So you did this."
"You gathered the entire world's Cursed Energy in Japan alone."
He tilted his head and looked at Tengen.
Although he knew why, the act still had to continue.
He could