[Besides secretly negotiating with those greedy nations across the ocean and finalizing the precise timetable for officially launching the Culling Game, you and Kenjaku also took the initiative to visit some "old friends."]
[It was an underground flood channel abandoned on the outskirts of the city, a place that never saw daylight. The air was thick with nauseating, putrid moisture and a stench of blood so heavy it almost seemed tangible.]
[You trudged through the muddy standing water toward the deepest part of this land of curses. There, several twisted figures radiating suffocatingly terrifying cursed pressure lurked in the shadows, awaiting your arrival.]
[The Special Grade Cursed Spirit Group, led by Jogo.]
[But just as you had calculated countless times in your mind, when you stepped into this darkness again, the lineup before you had long since ceased to be the trio of Jogo, Hanami, and Dagon it had been back then.]
[Among them was a young man with long gray hair and hideous, stitch-like scars covering his face.]
[Mahito.]
[At the sight of that face, with its ambiguous smile and its pure malice and mockery toward life, your heart contracted violently in your chest, almost beyond your control.]
[Of course you recognized him, not merely because you had learned of his existence through those trajectories of fate you had observed in advance, but also because... during that brutal sewer death match in the fifth simulation, it was this fiend, seemingly born from humanity's deepest resentment, who had used his soul-touching hands to crush one of your souls, permanently robbing you of your complete memories of the First Simulation!]
[The agony of having your soul torn apart, the terrifying emptiness of having a piece forcibly gouged out of the very foundation of your self-even in the real timeline, they remained