Masamichi Yaga could clearly hear that Li Shunchen's calm "I understand" came from the heart.
Those words finally put his lingering worries to rest. His broad, tense shoulders relaxed, and he let out a long sigh of relief.
As a teacher, what he feared most was a gifted student burdened with too much trauma becoming trapped in his own thinking and ultimately going to the extreme of self-destruction.
Now it seemed his earnest persuasion had not been wasted. The boy had taken it to heart.
But this conscientious homeroom teacher would never have understood that Li Shunchen's "understanding" did not mean "setting down his burdens and acting within his limits," as Yaga believed. Quite the opposite: Li Shunchen was pressing forward without hesitation precisely because he fully understood how hopeless and difficult the road ahead was.
Seeing that Li Shunchen's emotions were stable, Masamichi Yaga dropped his stern-teacher demeanor.
He pulled open the bottom drawer of the workbench and carefully took out a wooden box wrapped in layers of talismans.
He opened the box. Inside lay a core pulsing with a faint glow of cursed energy, the very prototype he had recently poured all his efforts into making specifically for "Panda."
But to the present-day Jujutsu Society, the "Fully Independent Cursed Corpse" was, after all, an entirely unprecedented, forbidden field.
Even Masamichi Yaga, hailed as the foremost expert in Cursed Corpse Creation, was still struggling to find his way, with very limited progress.
Masamichi Yaga's rough fingers gently stroked the still-crude core. Behind his lenses, his eyes held a measure of scholarly fervor and candor toward his junior as he spoke to Li Shunchen.
"So, Shunchen, you really don't have to insist on shouldering all the responsibility for what can't be undone by yourself. In fact, you aren't the only