[In the distance, atop the Throne piled high with countless pale, deformed skeletons of enormous animals, Ryomen Sukuna slowly raised his head.]
[His scarlet eyes held a rare haze of confusion and bewilderment, as though he had just awakened from a nightmare so profound it was almost impossible to escape.]
[He narrowed his eyes slightly, his gaze passing over the nauseating, dark-red Blood Pool to settle on the incongruous scene ahead-and on you, standing there.]
[Sukuna's brows knitted tightly together. Clearly, this King of Curses from a thousand years ago had not understood this utterly bizarre situation the moment he opened his eyes.]
[After all, on some microscopic level of cause and effect, he really had only just "awakened."]
[And this was by no means a normal awakening that followed the usual rules.]
[Before this, the nineteen Great Sage Cursed Corpses had merely used the Cursed Energy contained within Sukuna's Fingers as a kind of highly dangerous "Cursed Energy battery."]
[The Great Sages had merely used physical means and barriers to collect, store, and exploit the vast Cursed Energy constantly radiating and spilling into the air. As such, their actions had fundamentally neither touched nor drawn upon the soul fragments deep within the cores of Sukuna's Fingers.]
[As far as this finger was concerned, it had merely "moved house" from a sealed Wooden Box into a Cursed Corpse. It had remained suppressed, sealed, and dormant.]
[The Cursed Corpse's cold stuffing and artificial core had provided him with no flesh in which to undergo "incarnation." Naturally, they could not trigger the underlying binding vow or cause Sukuna's sleeping soul within to awaken on its own.]
[Thus, Sukuna could genuinely feel that he had been forcibly disturbed and torn at by Idle Transfiguration-an external soul power of incomprehensible brutality, unrelated to incarnation-and