Northern India, a remote village.
At some unknown point, this inconspicuous village began to be enveloped by a massive Barrier Technique.
However, in this country with an extremely large population but few Jujutsu Sorcerers, this Barrier Technique did not attract attention.
Perhaps it once did, but those who noticed it all disappeared in the end.
Kenjaku, who had been away from Japan for several years, leisurely walked into the village.
"I wonder how the experimental progress is here."
Ever since Kenjaku learned a few years ago that Suguru had returned to Japan, he found a way to hand the Time Vessel Association over to Suguru as a base.
After that, his life became more difficult with each passing day.
First, the Zen'in Family and Gojo Family among the Big Three Families, along with other Jujutsu Sorcerer families affiliated with them, began heavily pursuing any Curse User with stitches on his forehead.
This made Kenjaku's movements much more difficult.
The key point was that this was a nationwide manhunt.
The south was personally handled by the Gojo Family and Zen'in Family, and inspections were extremely strict.
The central region was overseen by the disciples of Shinkage-ryu and some neutral Jujutsu Sorcerer families.
The north was jointly searched by the Isayama Family and Tsuchimiya Family.
For a time, even many ordinary people and cosplayers with patterned foreheads or wearing strange decorations were taken away for inspection.
Originally, Kenjaku planned to hide in Hokkaido to avoid the commotion.
However, when he arrived, he discovered that although the Jujutsu Sorcerers of Hokkaido were not widely pursuing a stitched-forehead Curse User, the police in Hokkaido were heavily pursuing terrorists with stitches on their heads.
The Hokkaido police department stated that, considering such a large donation, they only needed to pay attention to someone with such obvious features when dispatching officers.
Arrangements absolutely had to be made.
Helpless, Kenjaku could only leave the country to avoid the limelight.
Kenjaku truly racked his brain but could not figure out how he had been exposed.
He was not the public spokesperson for the Time Vessel Association, nor was he the one who interacted directly with Suguru.
He was not the one who connected with Suguru, nor was he the one who helped Suguru become the master.
Why was he the only one on the wanted list?
Kenjaku felt completely bewildered.
At the same time, he also sighed at how several 'little guys' in his eyes had grown to such an extent.
Not only in strength, but also in influence.
They mobilized forces from all over the country in just a few days.
For several centuries since taking control of the Kamo Family, Kenjaku had always relied on the Kamo Family's power to scheme against others.
This was the first time he himself had been targeted in such a manner.
Because of this, Kenjaku hid in the Kamo Family for a long time, but he found that everything he did was restricted. In the end, he simply left the country temporarily to avoid the situation.
After leaving Japan, Kenjaku remotely operated the Kamo Family to gather various intelligence about Suguru and the Jujutsu world of Japan.
At the same time, he began a new experiment.
The experiment to create Special Grade Imaginary Vengeful Spirits.
The inspiration for this experiment actually came from Eichi's Special Grade Imaginary Heroic Spirits.
In his view, both Special Grade Imaginary Heroic Spirits and Special Grade Imaginary Vengeful Spirits were products that turned imagination into reality.
He had seen many such phenomena.
Most of them manifested in the form of various yokai.
He had personally studied their principles.
He simply had not expected that someone could use this method to create Heroic Spirits indistinguishable from an Immortal Master.
Kenjaku, unaware of the System and the Holy Grail, believed that Eichi must have used some special method to transform Heroic Spirits from imagination into reality.
Kenjaku believed that as long as this concept could be proven feasible, then he, a master of Cursed Energy who had studied it for a thousand years, would certainly be able to replicate it.
Therefore, he needed a place where he could properly conduct experiments.
A place with a large population, chaotic conditions, and poor local government control, allowing him to do as he pleased.
In the end, Kenjaku chose India.
First, the population of this country was extremely large.
Second, the overall education level of this country was poor.
Many ordinary people in India received very perfunctory compulsory education.
Many students even passed exams through cheating.
Because of this, one school once announced stricter anti-cheating measures, which led to a large number of students abandoning the exam and waiting for a retest.
If Japan's reverence for gods and spirits came from its culture and external influence, then India's situation was largely due to inadequate education, which led to superstition born from ignorance.
For Kenjaku, such a population was exactly what he needed.
Because they believed in these things the most, Kenjaku only needed to perform a few tricks to gain a large number of believers.
These believers would continuously provide the 'gods' created by Kenjaku with Cursed Energy produced from negative emotions. Over time, these imaginary gods would gradually transform into true Imaginary Vengeful Spirits.
However, this required solving three problems.
The first problem was the need for a Barrier Technique with functions similar to the Barrier Technique established by Tengen in Japan.
Through such a Barrier Technique, Cursed Energy would not dissipate and could remain stable, allowing it to continuously concentrate and flow toward the Imaginary Cursed Spirits.
This was the easiest issue for Kenjaku to resolve.
Because Kenjaku was the foremost expert in Barrier Techniques after Tengen.
Moreover, Kenjaku had lived for more than a thousand years. Even though he did not specialize in Barrier Techniques almost exclusively like Tengen, Kenjaku, who was also a genius, had extremely high attainments in Barrier Techniques.
Therefore, after selecting a location, Kenjaku spent only a few days setting up a Barrier Technique in a village.
Later, in order to speed up the process and conduct comparative experiments, Kenjaku found more than a dozen additional villages.
By connecting the Barrier Techniques of several villages, he could conduct multiple Imaginary Cursed Spirit creation experiments simultaneously while maintaining similar population sizes.
The second problem was the need for a dense population.
If the number of people was too small or too scattered, the convergence of Cursed Energy would be slow, which would delay the formation of Imaginary Vengeful Spirits.
This issue was perfectly solved by the densely packed villages of India.
Kenjaku connected the Barrier Techniques of several villages, allowing multiple villages to simultaneously provide Cursed Energy for one target.
Since these villages were located close to one another, implementing this was not difficult.
The third problem was the need for an environment suitable for stable experimentation.
Simply put, because his experiment involved too many people, the process could easily produce strange phenomena that might attract the attention of local authorities.
Therefore, to ensure the experiment could proceed smoothly, he either had to control the local authorities or ensure they would not interfere with him.
Kenjaku found such a place in northern India.
How chaotic was northern India?
A large number of ordinary people there were using drugs or substances with similar effects.
Many who could not afford them even actively caught venomous snakes and lizards.
They would then allow these animals to bite them, relying on the poisonous and hallucinogenic effects to relieve their symptoms.
However, animals did not understand what the humans were trying to do. In panic, they would simply strike with full force.
As a result, these people could not control the dosage, and many died from these incidents every year.
According to estimates from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, more than 180 million people in India used drugs or abused substances.
Police even once seized more than one hundred kilograms of powdered chocolate that had been sold to children at the entrance of an elementary school.
Moreover, it had happened more than once that over a hundred kilograms of confiscated contraband disappeared from police stations.
The police department publicly announced that these items had been eaten by rats.
This clearly demonstrated how chaotic several regions of northern India were.
For Kenjaku, this was the perfect experimental site.
Even if someone escaped while he was away, people would only assume that the person had taken too many drugs and gone mad.
They would not suspect that Kenjaku was conducting strange experiments here.
The mad scholar of Cursed Energy had found his perfect experimental ground.
(To be continued.)
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◇ One bonus chapter will be released for every 200 Power Stones.
◇ You can read the ahead chapter on Pat if you're interested: p-atreon.c-om/Blownleaves (Just remove the hyphen to access normally.)