The cursed spirit didn't move.
It clung to the alley wall, its body a writhing mass of fused, melted faces — some screaming, some laughing, some frozen in expressions that had no name. Dozens of distorted eyes locked onto Yuji, unblinking.
And then it spoke again.
"...You don't belong here."
Yuji tilted his head slightly.
In sixty-eight years of fighting curses — of tearing through special grades, of standing in the wreckage of battles that rewrote the world — he had never once heard a low-grade spirit form a complete sentence. Not like this. Not with that weight behind it.
His eyes narrowed beneath the hood.
"Who told you to say that?"
The spirit trembled. Its faces shifted and stretched, mouths opening and closing like broken machinery. A sound crawled out of it — not a voice anymore. Something older. Something that had been buried in the fabric of curses for a very long time.
"...He said you would come. He said to deliver the message."
"He."
Yuji's hand moved before the word even finished leaving his mouth. A single, quiet motion — index finger extended, the faintest whisper of cursed energy coiling around the tip. Not even a tenth of a tenth of what he truly had. Barely enough to fog a mirror.
It was more than enough.
The spirit dissolved before it could say another word. No explosion. No dramatic burst of black smoke. It simply came apart, faces peeling away into silence, until there was nothing left but the smell of rain on concrete.
Yuji lowered his hand.
He stood very still in the alley for a long moment.
Someone sent it.
That wasn't a coincidence. Cursed spirits didn't deliver messages. They didn't wait patiently in hospital alleys. They didn't form coherent sentences unless something far stronger was pulling the strings from behind a curtain.
Someone in this era knew he was here.
And they had gone out of their way to say hello.
Yuji looked up toward the rooftop across the street.
Nothing. Empty sky, grey clouds, the distant murmur of a city that didn't know it was sitting on the edge of something catastrophic.
But the feeling didn't leave.
That prickling sensation at the back of his neck — the same one that had kept him alive through decades of war — told him clearly that eyes were still on him. Somewhere. From a direction he couldn't pinpoint.
He exhaled through his nose.
Fine.
He had work to do.
Miyagi Prefecture looked exactly the way he remembered it.
Smaller than Tokyo. Quieter. The kind of city that felt like it existed at a slightly slower pace than the rest of the world, streets wide enough that the sky felt bigger here, the air carrying the faint salt of the sea.
Yuji walked with his hands in his pockets.
He wasn't rushing. There was no point in rushing. The things he needed to do today didn't require speed — they required patience, and the particular kind of stillness that only came from having lived long enough to stop being surprised by anything.
Sajisawa Third High School came into view just after four in the afternoon.
He stopped at the edge of the fence.
The school grounds were alive with the particular chaos of after-class hours. Club members scattered across the track, voices overlapping, someone laughing too loudly near the equipment shed. The baseball team was doing drills. A group of girls from what looked like the art club were arguing about a poster near the gymnasium door.
Ordinary. Perfectly, painfully ordinary.
Yuji found the track field without effort. He'd been here before, after all — just not like this. Not from the outside, looking in.
He saw them almost immediately.
Three figures near the shot put ring. Two boys and a girl in dark uniforms, and a man the color of tanned leather who was clearly a PE teacher and clearly not taking no for an answer.
Young Yuji Itadori was grinning.
Yuji watched from outside the fence.
It was a strange thing, watching yourself. Not uncomfortable, exactly. More like reading a chapter of a book you'd almost forgotten — the words familiar in a distant way, the shape of the story recognizable even when the details had blurred with time.
That boy over there had no idea what was coming.
He was laughing, full-throated and easy, shoving the PE teacher's hand off his shoulder while his two friends called out something from the side. His uniform was slightly rumpled. He stood with his feet planted wide, the way a person stood when they weren't thinking about how they looked — when the body just moved the way it wanted to because nothing had taught it to be careful yet.
Was I really that young?
The thought arrived without ceremony.
Was I really that loud?
The competition started. The PE teacher threw first — fourteen meters, respectable for a normal human being. Then young Yuji stepped up, rolled his shoulders once, and threw.
Thirty meters.
The silence that followed was the kind that happened when a crowd collectively stopped breathing.
Yuji remembered that moment. He remembered the shock on Takagi-sensei's face, the way Sasaki-senpai had called him a gorilla, the way he'd felt — not proud exactly, more like confused that other people found it surprising. It had just been a throw.
He bent down, picked up the shot put that had been left on the ground nearby.
He turned it over in his hand once.
Then he stepped to the line, tossed it lightly into the air, and flicked.
One finger. Barely any cursed energy. The same motion he'd used ten thousand times in training drills so routine they'd become like breathing.
The iron ball left his hand and became a black streak across the sky.
It cleared the school grounds entirely. Somewhere in the distance, a sharp crack rang out as it punched clean through the trunk of a large tree beyond the fence, leaving a hole perfectly round and perfectly silent.
The crowd erupted.
Yuji was already walking away before the dust settled.
He didn't look back at the commotion. He didn't need to. He already knew what it looked like — he'd been in that crowd once, gaping upward, wondering what kind of person could throw a shot put through a tree.
Now he knew the answer.
An old man with too many regrets and just enough time left to do something about them.
He sensed Fushiguro before he saw him.
The boy was standing near the edge of the field, dark eyes tracking the space where the shot put had vanished, his expression caught somewhere between suspicion and something that hadn't decided what it was yet. He had that quality even then — that stillness. Like a person always calculating three steps ahead but never quite arriving at certainty.
Yuji didn't stop walking.
But he filed it away.
Tonight, he thought, the finger gets revealed. The occult club. The beginning.
The countdown flickered at the edge of his vision.
178 Days. 19 Hours. 41 Minutes. 12 Seconds.
He pulled his hood lower and kept moving.
Behind him, on a rooftop three blocks away, a figure watched his retreating silhouette without blinking.
And smiled.