[You'd managed to swing Asakirimaru and sever Piercing Ox's head, completing the taming. You were still reeling from the loss of your aerial capability when the anomaly struck.]
[The residual Cursed Energy and shadow-fluid that had once been Nue didn't fade into oblivion. It surged, drawn as if by some invisible summons, flooding toward Divine Dog: Black and Divine Dog: White where they crouched beside you, licking their wounds.]
[Under Gojo's fascinated gaze, cocoons of pitch-black Cursed Energy enveloped both Divine Dogs. When the dark shells cracked apart, what stood before you was no longer a simple black hound.]
[Its frame had swelled an entire size larger. Beneath fur that once lay smooth, coils of explosive muscle now rippled with every breath.]
[Most striking of all was its back. A pair of broad, jet-black wings had torn free from its body. Nue's wings.]
[The newborn Shikigami bared its fangs. Dark violet lightning crackled between its claws and teeth like a second pulse, and every rumbling growl left the tang of scorched ozone hanging in the air.]
[Having inherited Nue's traits, the Divine Dog had evolved into Divine Dog: Totality - Plume.]
[The raw physical dominance of its larger frame was formidable enough, but those powerful wings commanded even more attention. The faint halo of electrical Cursed Energy wreathing its body radiated oppressive force. It combined the bite strength of a canine, the aerial mobility of a bird, and the paralyzing properties of lightning into a single predator.]
[You ran your hand along Plume's faintly tingling fur, and your estimation of this technique climbed another tier.]
[In the course of continued use, you uncovered something else. Something peculiar that only manifested under Phantom Night Parade's simulation.]
[It concerned the core mechanics of your own technique and its compatibility with others.]
[When you replicated Cursed Spirit Manipulation, the moment you deactivated Phantom Night Parade and severed the simulation, the shackles binding you to every Cursed Spirit you'd devoured and subjugated would snap instantly. They'd break free of your control and revert to their feral state. The next encounter with that same spirit would require recapturing it from scratch, turning your collection into single-use disposables.]
[The Ten Shadows Technique operated on an entirely different foundational logic.]
[Its taming ritual wasn't a physical leash enforced by brute Cursed Energy. It was a contract etched deep into the sorcerer's soul and the roots of their shadow.]
[This meant taming progress could be recorded and saved. It didn't reset to zero when you shut down Phantom Night Parade's simulation.]
[Once you'd successfully tamed Piercing Ox, the next time you activated the simulation, it would still be sitting obediently in your shadow arsenal, waiting for your call.]
[The rules, of course, were fair and strict. A soul-bound contract was unique by nature, and exploiting system loopholes was off the table.]
[You'd tried summoning the Divine Dogs, instantly deactivating Phantom Night Parade, then restarting the simulation, hoping to summon a second and third pair to build an invincible wolf pack.]
[The result was predictable failure. Ten shadows meant ten fixed slots. No matter how you toggled your technique, there were only ever two Divine Dogs.]
[But that wasn't the discovery that set your pulse racing. What truly caught your attention was the brief delay that occurred after you deactivated the technique.]
[When you summoned Plume in the middle of combat and then, for tactical reasons, abruptly shut down Phantom Night Parade to switch your Cursed Energy circuits to a different technique... Plume didn't pop like a soap bubble and vanish on the spot.]
[The instant of severance was real. The invisible tether of direct command between you and the Shikigami snapped clean.]
[It lost its adaptive intelligence, its ability to improvise. It would no longer respond to any new orders.]
[But until the reserve of Cursed Energy you'd fed it at the point of summoning ran dry, it continued to exist in the physical world as a solid, tangible entity.]
[Not only did it persist. It carried out your last command before disconnection with the single-minded devotion of a soldier on a suicide mission, charging forward without hesitation or retreat.]
[The parallel to Puppet Manipulation's pre-input system, where commands were loaded into a Cursed Corpse in advance, was uncanny.]
[Your mind seized on the tactical possibilities this mechanic unlocked.]
[Picture it. A battle where milliseconds separated life from death.]
[Your enemy, through whatever intelligence channels, had learned about Phantom Night Parade. They knew you could only run one technique at a time.]
[When they saw a massive wolf-form Shikigami wreathed in crackling thunder barreling toward them, their brain would reflexively conclude that you were currently running the Ten Shadows Technique, that your real body was in the relatively vulnerable state of a caster maintaining summoned creatures.]
[What they could never anticipate was that the rampaging Shikigami was nothing more than a puppet with its strings already cut, coasting on momentum to execute one final kill order.]
[The real you would have already switched techniques the instant the connection severed, cloaked beneath the Shikigami's storm of lightning and shadow, loaded with something far more destructive, poised to deliver a lethal strike the moment the enemy dropped their guard.]
[Using a high-pressure Shikigami assault as both smokescreen and misdirection, baiting the enemy into a fatal misread of which technique you were actually running. Or simply treating a fully charged Shikigami as a ticking time bomb, using the chaos of its final charge as the perfect opening for your real attack.]
[In live combat, it would look indistinguishable from dual-casting.]
[This layered blend of truth and deception, this multi-threaded guerrilla warfare, might as well have been custom-designed for someone fighting in a mortal body.]
["Hhhh..."]
[You exhaled a long, stale breath. A wave of dizziness crashed through your skull, wrenching you out of the tactical reverie. You braced your hands against your knees, gasping, dragging your thoughts back to solid ground.]
[Beneath this seemingly flawless theory loomed the one vulnerability you could never outrun.]
[The Ten Shadows Technique was a notorious Cursed Energy guzzler. Sustaining Max Elephant or maintaining an evolved Shikigami like Plume burned through reserves every second.]
[Every one of these grand tactical designs demanded a Cursed Energy pool so vast it bordered on bottomless.]
[And you were not Satoru Gojo, who could drive consumption to near-zero with the Six Eyes.]
["Cursed Energy capacity..."]
[You murmured the words to yourself. The simulation's post-run reward settlements could steadily raise your upper limit, but that did nothing for you while you were still inside a run.]
[Based on everything you knew, there was no quick fix.]
[All you could do was work around the problem. Lean on the Tryhard card's effects, push your mastery of technique and Cursed Energy control as hard and fast as possible, and squeeze every drop of efficiency out of what you had.]
[As your understanding of the Ten Shadows Technique deepened, you passed each insight along to Megumi Fushiguro.]
[Time flowed on. You brought Megumi on more and more missions, and the fact that he possessed the Ten Shadows Technique inevitably leaked.]
[You only learned after the fact that it had taken a single week for the information to reach the Zenin Clan.]
[At first, you didn't give it much weight. Gojo was handling the Zenin Clan, and in theory, nothing should go sideways.]
[That conviction held until the afternoon you went to pick Megumi up from school for a last-minute Grade 2 mission and found him outside the gates, surrounded by several men in traditional kimono.]
[Something cold dropped through your stomach.]