Mount Sumeru is the cosmic center of Buddhist cosmology: unfathomably massive, piercing the heavens, utterly indestructible, acting as the very pillar of the world. *Vajra* represents that which is hard, sharp, and imperishable, often symbolizing a ritual thunderbolt or the absolute power of the Dharma. The *Karma Wheel* is the cycle of fate, cause, and effect.
The implication of this Domain Expansion was clear: it represented the beginning and end of the cosmic cycle, the locus of absolute truth.
Mahito suddenly remembered the inner monologue Yuki Tsukumo had right before her death in the original manga. In Yuki's mind, the ultimate destination of this cosmic truth was likely one thing—
A black hole.
This was the *Sumeru Vajra Karma Wheel*.
"Simple Domain!"
Driven by his willpower, Mahito's Cursed Energy violently breached his body's confines, expanding outward. A domain with a radius of exactly 4 meters silently formed around him. He lowered his stance, his hand resting on the hilt of his blade, his body coiled in an Iaijutsu posture. It was the textbook, standard activation stance for a Simple Domain.
For most sorcerers, the radius of a Simple Domain was only 2.25 meters—the maximum reach of an Iai slash. But Mahito was different. Gripping *Mirokuji Kirigiri*, the combined length of the nodachi and his arm span pushed his lethal attack range to 4 meters, matching the exact radius of his current Simple Domain.
He had completed his Simple Domain, and pushed it even further!
The problem was the fraction of a second it took to cast. While maintaining Simple Domain, his Cursed Techniques were severely restricted; outside of *Idle Transfiguration*, he couldn't use *Soul Creation*—meaning his Limitless was offline.
Yuki Tsukumo's read on him was dead accurate. She had instantly grasped his weak point.
She flashed a feral grin. "Jackpot! You didn't cast your own Domain to clash with mine, which means you flat-out don't know how. Lord of Cursed Spirits, did you really think a measly Simple Domain could hold out against my Domain Expansion?"
Mahito's expression didn't waver. "Simple Domain was invented a thousand years ago specifically to counter the endless tides of Curse Users and Cursed Spirits. Dealing with the average fodder is one thing, but sorcerers and Curses capable of Domain Expansion are lethal threats. To survive them, Simple Domain was born."
"Right now, I am walking that ancient path. I hold no fear in my heart."
Yuki's smile faded. She stared hard at Mahito.
His expression truly hadn't shifted. His Simple Domain was rock-solid. *He's telling the truth. He's walking the ancient path without a trace of fear... huh,* Yuki praised internally.
It was only at this exact moment that Yuki Tsukumo finally had to admit something to herself—something she had found incredibly hard to believe. She looked at Mahito, her voice entirely serious. "I owe you an apology, Mahito."
"What?" Mahito blinked, completely taken aback. He hadn't expected her to say something like that *after* popping her Domain. Weren't they in the middle of a deathmatch?
"Ever since you annihilated the Zen'in Clan, I've been tracking you. I heard about everything that's happened since your appearance from Tengen. You strictly regulate the Curse Users working with you. You keep a tight leash on your intelligent Cursed Spirits. You actively seek coexistence with human society."
Yuki spoke slowly, her words heavy.
"Gojo once told me that the entire Jujutsu world seemed much more stable after you showed up—right up until the Zen'in Clan tried to sideline Gojo and monopolize your immortality technique. Outraged by the insult, you lashed out in the most brutal way possible."
Mahito felt a wave of bewilderment. *Is she... talking about me?*
Of course he regulated his Curse Users! Those guys were essential cannon fodder for overthrowing Jujutsu Headquarters. Letting them run wild now would just be spoon-feeding free kills to Satoru Gojo. With the entire Jujutsu world hunting him, he was obviously paranoid that one of those idiots would accidentally leak his location.
It wasn't baseless paranoia. Hardened by his past life as an internet keyboard warrior, Mahito fully understood how terrifyingly easy it was for a nation-state to track a single individual. That was exactly why he rarely used a smartphone—in fact, ever since Kinji Hakari joined him, he had stopped using one altogether.
He outsourced all his diplomacy to Hakari. Sure, part of it was because he trusted the guy, but it was primarily a countermeasure against government surveillance. Better they wiretap Hakari than the King of Curses directly.
Japan's surveillance might not be as draconian as America's, but Mahito wasn't about to roll the dice!
And keeping his intelligent Curses in check? Also obvious. Strictly speaking, while he had gathered a decent number of human followers, his core foundation—his ultimate voter base—was the intelligent Cursed Spirits. They required careful management.
As for snapping and going on a murder spree because he was insulted...
Well, Yuki was half-right about that. If he hadn't been pushed to the brink and absolutely certain Gojo couldn't make it back in time, he never would have revealed himself during that period.
It was precisely because of that humiliation that he finally embraced the reality of his situation, stepping onto the bloody path of sustaining war with war.
"I used to think your kindness was just hypocritical PR—a facade to help you overthrow the Jujutsu world," Yuki continued. "I thought your identity as a Curse guaranteed you would eventually treat the world with boundless cruelty. I assumed you were just burying your darkness deep, waiting until you conquered Jujutsu society to let your true, monstrous nature loose."
Yuki slightly raised her hand, as if cradling something invisible. Hovering just above her palm, a microscopic, pitch-black void slowly began to rotate.
Instantly, Mahito's survival instincts screamed. It was the spine-chilling terror of an ordinary office worker suddenly locking eyes with a starving apex predator in the wilderness. The dread almost short-circuited his brain.
"But I was wrong," Yuki said softly. "You genuinely seem to possess a compassion that Curses inherently lack. Your acquired education has overridden your innate nature, allowing you to present something truly beautiful to the world. I'm starting to understand how Hakari feels about you... You really do possess the caliber and charisma of a sovereign ruler."
Mahito's eyes remained glued to the tiny black void in Yuki's hand. He licked his lips. "Your current actions seem to contradict your words."
"No, I just see you more clearly now." Yuki's voice grew grimly resolute. "Precisely because you are so beautiful—precisely because you can earn everyone's love and loyalty despite being a Cursed Spirit—I finally made my decision."
Her voice boomed, carrying the weight of an executioner's gavel:
"Mahito, you. Must. Die!"
Mahito flinched, his brow furrowing. "Why?"
Even if it was built on a massive misunderstanding, receiving such high praise from Yuki Tsukumo had actually made Mahito think her hostility was fading. He had genuinely thought this fight might end peacefully.
Yuki bared her teeth, a low, guttural growl vibrating in her chest like a leopard preparing to pounce.
"—Because, you are not human."
*It didn't matter how kind he was. It didn't matter if he was a perfect ruler. It didn't matter how beautiful his new world might be—*
*—He was not human, and that single fact invalidated his entire existence! He had to die!*
Yuki hurled the miniature black void directly at Mahito.
Without a second's hesitation, Mahito bolted. As he moved, the structural framework of his Simple Domain began to violently fluctuate. It was entirely possible to move while maintaining a Simple Domain, but it required god-tier technical skill. The original manga had shown several masters pulling it off.
And the most famous example of that was the woman standing right in front of him. Yuki Tsukumo had once sprinted through Kenjaku's Domain Expansion with her Simple Domain deployed.
—Exactly like Mahito was doing now!
Mahito vaguely realized his body was burning up. This custom-built vessel of his had detected an apocalyptic threat, its internal alarms shrieking like air-raid sirens, begging him to run faster.
The tiny black void radiated a terrifying, infinite gravitational pull. Floating meteors within the Domain were violently ripped into fragments, dragging themselves toward the void. At first, the process was excruciatingly slow, but its velocity multiplied by the millisecond, accelerating until it felt like it was warping time itself.
*Domain Expansion: Sumeru Vajra Karma Wheel.* This Domain granted Yuki the ability to aggressively apply Virtual Mass to anything inside it, except herself. She remained immune, while all other matter suffered the catastrophic, reality-bending weight of her technique.
It was an unspeakably horrific fate. Anything subjected to this Virtual Mass would be crushed alive by localized gravity. By instantly deploying his Simple Domain, Mahito had neutralized the Domain's sure-hit effect, buying himself a sliver of breathing room. But the grim reaper was still breathing down his neck.
Simple Domain only nullified the *sure-hit* targeting; it did not neutralize the Cursed Technique itself. And right now, Yuki Tsukumo had freely applied Virtual Mass to the very air in her palm, birthing an infinitely collapsing sphere of oxygen.
Then, she hurled it. The sphere's astronomical mass turned it into a supreme gravitational singularity. Just as the planets of the solar system orbit the sun, this infinitesimally small sphere of air dragged the trajectory of every single meteor within the Domain Expansion toward it.
In Mahito's eyes, it looked as if the entire world was caving in on that single pocket of air. And that collapsing singularity—was aggressively tailgating him.
Right now, that sphere of air was Mount Sumeru, the center of the cosmos. The resulting celestial catastrophe was the wrath of the Vajra Buddha, an inescapable karmic retribution bearing down on him.
It was an apocalyptic sight. Mahito's heart hammered against his ribs like a heavy metal drummer blasting blast beats. He watched as—
—An entire galaxy was hurled directly at his face.
"I see," Mahito muttered, a grim realization washing over him. "So this is Star Rage. This is... the Sumeru Vajra Karma Wheel!"
He didn't need to test it. He knew instinctively that not even *Idle Transfiguration* could save him from this.
Just as the strongest ant cannot stop a rolling boulder, this planetary-scale impact instilled a pure, unadulterated terror of death deep within his soul.
Since transmigrating into this world, Mahito had never been this close to utter obliteration. The flesh he had crafted, his soul, his very consciousness shrieked inside his mental landscape. A monolithic wave of fear swallowed his mind whole.
And amidst the trembling, Mahito started to laugh.
He remembered his battle with Naobito Zen'in. He remembered the old man telling him exactly what a true Jujutsu Sorcerer must do when faced with overwhelming terror.
*"To convert anger and fear into tangible Cursed Energy... that is what makes a true Jujutsu Sorcerer!"*
Right now, in this exact moment, Mahito finally understood.
He was running, but his trajectory was no longer a retreat. When an entire celestial event is dropped on your head, where exactly do you run? Like a tourist sunbathing on the beach when a tsunami hits—there is nowhere to hide.
*If I can't dodge it, then I won't.*
He forced that primal terror, that suffocating dread of death, to violently compress into raw, physical Cursed Energy. With the reaper's scythe inches from his neck, he abandoned the concept of mortality entirely. Stepping fully into his role as a Jujutsu Sorcerer, he redlined his Cursed Energy output, determined to—
—Surpass everything.
*BOOM!*
Just a split second before the astral impact struck, Mahito stomped the ground, launching himself furiously into the air. Even mid-leap, his body remained locked in the perfect Iai posture.
Suddenly, the world went completely dark. Mahito didn't need to look up to know the celestial mass was already upon him. An apocalyptic gravitational force violently grabbed at everything in the vicinity—including Mahito himself! His Simple Domain flickered violently like a candle in a hurricane. The crushing pressure was enough to pulverize the fabric of reality.
Mahito's brain vividly simulated the next few milliseconds:
He would take a direct hit from the astral mass. Because the difference in physical mass was so astronomically immense, his body would begin atomizing before it even made physical contact. His Simple Domain would shatter instantly, purely because the overwhelming mass would literally crush his Cursed Energy. Once the domain broke, the rate of his cellular disintegration would skyrocket.
Finally, he would be completely ground to dust.
His *Idle Transfiguration* would furiously try to maintain his soul's shape, but his soul itself wouldn't be able to escape the gravity well. He would be trapped in an agonizing, infinite loop of death and regeneration.
Thanks to Kinji Hakari's Special Grade template, Mahito's Cursed Energy reserves were functionally infinite. Theoretically, as long as an attack didn't directly target his soul, he could endlessly resurrect by just holding his soul's shape together.
But the crushing weight of this astral mass could breach the shores of the soul itself. The sheer density would warp everything in the localized space. Mahito's soul would be thrown into a cosmic meat grinder, pulverized over and over again like soybeans in a mortar.
Before this absolute mass, where not even light could escape, he would be ground down until he reached true, permanent—death.
Suddenly, Mahito's Cursed Energy exploded!
Tasting the genuine possibility of death sent his negative emotions into absolute overdrive. The Cursed Energy Core inside his Half-Curse body hyper-processed these rampaging emotions. The relentless cycle of generation spiked his raw power to near-infinite levels.
He had actually done it. He had transmuted pure terror into Cursed Energy, just like Naobito Zen'in.
*Mirokuji Kirigiri* hummed with a clear, resonant chime, like running water.
Mahito drew his blade.
The entire world seemed to freeze before his eyes. He slowly looked up. The astral mass, mere inches from his face, was suspended like a fly trapped in amber. Mahito had entered a state of perfect, mirror-clear tranquility.
His subjective consciousness dilated time. In his eyes, the world was utterly static. Only he could move. But his own movements felt agonizingly slow, like playback on a high-speed camera. His draw speed felt like a turtle's crawl, every micro-adjustment as precise as an old grandmaster correcting a novice.
*"Mirokuji Kirigiri, Tsukumogami Release—Cleaving! Line!"*
A streak of pitch-black lightning coated Kirigiri's edge. *Black Flash!*
The moment he swung the blade, Mahito's conscious thought vanished entirely. He surrendered his body to the arc of the slash. His Simple Domain pulsed and expanded like a lung taking a breath. A Simple Domain is the physical extension of a sorcerer's will, and right now, Mahito's entire will was hyper-focused into a single, atomic point.
*Cleave this astral mass in two!*
In this fraction of a second, Mahito shattered his limits. The Black Flash coating Kirigiri's edge warped the very fabric of space. Within this transcendent slash, Kirigiri's Innate Technique was violently carved directly into the astral mass—just as it had once carved its Cleaving Line into the hyper-compressed wind blades of Ame-no-Habakiri.
A gargantuan fissure violently erupted from the center of the celestial sphere. The air pocket, imbued with infinite Virtual Mass, was sheared cleanly in half. The instantaneous deletion of its monumental mass caused the orbiting meteors to violently slingshot outward via explosive repulsion.
A detonation rivaling a supernova ripped through the space.
The infinite mass had been breached. The absorbed energy violently vented in all directions. The catastrophic shockwave shook the entire Domain Expansion to its core, generating a pressure wave so intense it blasted the localized area into a vacuum. A terrifying backdraft immediately followed, sucking everything back toward the epicenter.
Then—a secondary detonation!
Yuki Tsukumo frantically layered high-mass air barriers around herself. The collision of the two titanic forces crashed like apocalyptic thunder. Her pupils shrank to pinpricks.
"Im... pos... sible?!"
Her brain shifted into overdrive, instantly isolating the variable: "That nodachi isn't just a Cursed Tool—it's a Tsukumogami! You were maintaining a Simple Domain, meaning you couldn't use your own Cursed Technique... but you still split my mass! It wasn't just because you hit a Black Flash—it's because the Tsukumogami fired off its own technique at the exact same time!"
Even a Black Flash couldn't punch through a celestial mass head-on. The sheer weight would crush it; spatial distortion alone couldn't simply repel it. But a Black Flash *stacked* with a specialized Cursed Technique? That changed the math.
Realization dawned on Yuki. No wonder *Ame-no-Habakiri* had sliced through that sandstorm so effortlessly earlier. The divine blade hadn't been the main damage dealer—it only provided the AoE! The thing that actually butchered the sandstorm was the Tsukumogami in Mahito's hands!
No wonder his slashes felt so impossibly clean. She had thoroughly reinforced her arm with Cursed Energy, yet this longsword had lopped it off like a hot knife through butter.
"Her name is Kirigiri," Mahito whispered into the chaos. "Mirokuji... Kirigiri."
Yuki laughed out loud. "A blade that cuts gods and buddhas alike, huh? You arrogant bastard!"
A flash of silver abruptly filled Yuki's vision. The blade's reflection stretched infinitely, stopping mere millimeters from her corneas. The tip threatened to pierce her eyeball and scramble her brain.
Kirigiri had arrived!
Yuki violently snapped her head back. The tip of Kirigiri sheared straight through the top of her ear. A spray of crimson painted the blade, but vanished a millisecond later as Mahito aggressively flicked the blood off with a sharp *Chiburi* before resetting his stance.
Mahito exploded into motion, his consecutive slashes raining down like a localized hurricane.
*New Shadow Style: Sarumawashi!*
Mahito wasn't just blindly swinging; his footwork synchronized perfectly with the arc of his blade. His steps were incredibly tight, yet he flickered in and out of Yuki's vision like a phantom, bounding around her like an agile monkey navigating a dense canopy.
It was a relentless, high-speed barrage paired with phantom footwork. Even with Yuki's immense combat experience, she was entirely locked down, unable to mount a counter-offensive. The world had become a blender of silver flashes. Kirigiri was a nodachi over two meters long, giving Mahito the effective range of a spear. Fighting barehanded, Yuki couldn't even close the distance.
Suddenly, Yuki viciously stomped the ground.
*BOOM!*
Massive kinetic force violently ruptured the earth. Mahito's blade storm evaporated as the sudden destruction of his footing broke the rigid rhythm of his *Sarumawashi*, snapping his high-speed combo.
"Your fundamentals are sloppy, Mahito!" Yuki barked a laugh. "A true master of Sarumawashi could keep swinging without blinking, even if the earth beneath them rolled like the ocean! You've got monstrous talent, but your actual combat experience is pathetically shallow!"
"I didn't realize Ms. Tsukumo was also versed in New Shadow Style," Mahito said, aggressively restabilizing his stance.
"I hold a Kaiden license in New Shadow Style! I know your Simple Domain inside and out!" Yuki vaulted backward, soaring like an eagle. "I specialize in the 'Floating Boat' stance. Ambush tactics are my bread and butter."
She reached behind her head. The Shikigami *Garuda*, which had been slowly rotating behind her like a halo, dropped heavily into her grip. She whipped Garuda forward, its massive attack radius swallowing everything in front of her.
"Let me ask you this, Mahito," Yuki roared over the gale. "How much longer... can your Simple Domain hold out?!"