The battle—if it could even be called that—ended in the time it took to blink.
Zen'in Naoya's Projection Sorcery, which dissected motion into a 24-frame grid, made him a blur of preordained trajectories, a nightmare for most opponents. He and the blood clone met in the center of the courtyard in a burst of displaced air.
There was no dramatic clash. Just a snap, crisp and final.
They passed each other.
"Naoya!" Zen'in Naobito's shout was sharp with disbelief.
The clone stood unmoved. In its hand, it held Zen'in Naoya's severed right arm, cleanly twisted from its socket. Naoya himself lay crumpled on the gravel, unconscious from shock or pain or perhaps the sheer psychic weight of his defeat.
Zen'in Naobito's aura spiked with fury, a storm about to break over his ancestral home.
Before a word could be uttered, Kamo's voice, calm as a still pond, cut through the tension. "My apologies. The clone can be… excessively literal. I'll rectify it."
He rose unhurriedly, walked to Naoya's side, took the arm from the clone, and knelt. A soft, greenish glow enveloped his hands—Reverse Cursed Technique. With meticulous care, he reattached the limb, flesh, bone, and nerve weaving back together seamlessly.
Naobito's rage subsided, replaced by a cold, sinking dread. His son, a Grade Two prodigy renowned for his speed, had been dismantled by a single drop of blood. The assessment he'd quietly authorized had backfired catastrophically. He shot a glance at his brother, Ogi, whose suggestion this had been. Even if Naoya were crippled, your daughters would never inherit. Was this just petty sabotage?
Now, with no leverage and a demonstrated power that could likely level the estate, he was in an untenable position. Benefits were off the table. Survival was the new goal.
He cleared his throat, the sound dry. "Kamo-dono, my son is… lacking. You have seen our inadequacy. Let us return to the matter of the Prison Realm."
Kamo nodded, wiping a speck of nonexistent dust from his sleeve. "Clan Head Naobito, to be candid, I am here today out of respect for you. But my patience is finite. Produce the Prison Realm."
He paused, letting the command hang. "I am not a thief. In exchange, I offer you information. The fruit of my research."
What information could possibly be worth a Special Grade Cursed Object? Naobito thought, but he dared not voice it. "Please," he said instead, his voice tight.
"You are aware that Fushiguro Toji's son, Megumi, has awakened the Ten Shadows Technique."
"Of course. I have… approached Toji regarding the boy's return to the clan. He declined." A flicker of old frustration crossed Naobito's face. Toji, the family's greatest shame and lost asset, now protected by his own obscurity and, apparently, by something else. "Do you have a method to persuade him?"
"That is a family matter. I do not involve myself," Kamo dismissed. "The information I offer pertains to the pinnacle of your clan's technique: the subjugation of the Ten Shadows' ultimate Shikigami, Mahoraga."
Naobito's entire body stilled. This was the clan's millennial curse. The Ten Shadows was legendary, but its final test, Mahoraga, was an insurmountable wall that had claimed the lives of every user who attempted it. It was the reason the Zen'in had stagnated while the Gojo and Kamo clans advanced—they had a peak, but no one could reach it.
"What… do you know?" Naobito's voice was a whisper.
Kamo Itsuki's eyes held the quiet certainty of a man who had dissected gods and rewritten rules. "I know its mechanism. I know the flaw in its adaptation. And I know a method to subdue it that does not rely on the user sacrificing their life in a mutual annihilation."
He leaned forward slightly. "This knowledge, for the Prison Realm. You secure your clan's future zenith. I secure a catastrophic weapon. Do we have an accord?"
The implication of Kamo's words struck Zen'in Naobito like a physical blow. For centuries, the Ten Shadows Technique had been a crown of thorns—a power whose ultimate form was locked behind a door that seemed to demand the user's life as the key. If Kamo Itsuki truly possessed the method to bypass that…
"If that is truly the case," Naobito said, his voice low with a sudden, fierce intensity, "then the Prison Realm is yours." He gestured sharply. A servant brought forth a sealed, ornate box. Within it lay a simple, dark cube—the Prison Realm, humming with a quiet, terrible potential.
Kamo took it, his fingers tracing its edges as if verifying its reality. "It is genuine."
Naobito did not wait. He stood, then bowed from the waist, a profound gesture from a clan head to an outsider. "Please," he said, the word heavy with centuries of frustrated ambition. "Enlighten me, Kamo-dono."
Kamo acknowledged the bow with a slight nod. "The key," he began, "lies not with a sorcerer, but with Fushiguro Toji."
"Toji?" Naobito's brow furrowed, then smoothed as understanding dawned. "His Heavenly Restriction… you believe it can oppose Mahoraga?"
"Precisely."
Kamo laid out his hypothesis, forged from research and cold logic. Mahoraga's terrifying power lay in its Adaptation. It evolved to negate any cursed technique used against it, making a conventional duel a death sentence—the user would exhaust their arsenal only to face an immune monster.
"The conventional 'solution' is an overwhelming, instant kill," Kamo explained. "But the first nine Shikigami of the Ten Shadows are tools of versatility and strategy, not raw, annihilating force. It's a mismatch. The technique's design seems to preclude its own completion."
He leaned forward, his gaze piercing. "But then, consider your own clan's history. Periodically, individuals like Fushiguro Toji are born—beings with a Heavenly Restriction that grants a godlike physique in exchange for zero cursed energy."
He let the connection hang in the air.
"A Shikigami that adapts to all cursed techniques… and a bloodline that produces warriors with no cursed energy at all. Both phenomena originate from the Zen'in Clan. Clan Head, have you never considered that this is not a coincidence, but a design?"
The question hung in the silent hall, unraveling centuries of assumption. The Ten Shadows and the Heavenly Restriction weren't separate curses of their lineage. They were two halves of a single, brutal puzzle. The technique's final trial wasn't meant to be solved by the Ten Shadows user alone. It was meant to be a clan endeavor. The user, with their arsenal of Shikigami, would control the battlefield, dictate the terms, and create openings. And the clan's ultimate physical weapon—the one with the Heavenly Restriction—would deliver the purely physical, technique-immune blows that Mahoraga could never adapt to.
It was a revelation that recontextualized their entire legacy. The Zen'in's strength was never meant to reside in a single sorcerer, but in a symbiotic duality: the strategist with shadows, and the executioner with none.
"Mahoraga adapts to curses," Kamo concluded quietly. "It cannot adapt to a force that exists entirely outside the system of curses. Toji, or someone like him, is not the cheat code. He is the intended key."
Zen'in Naobito stared, his mind reeling. The Prison Realm in Kamo's hand suddenly felt insignificant. What he had just been given was the potential to unlock his clan's true, lost destiny. The weight of generations seemed to lift and settle anew upon his shoulders, not as a burden of failure, but as a mandate for a new, brutal collaboration.
The deal was done. Kamo had his cage. The Zen'in had their path to the pinnacle. And the balance of power in the jujutsu world had just shifted on its axis, guided by the cold, analytical genius of Kamo Itsuki.
Patreon Seasay