I woke up hearing the sound of a baby crying.
Not just any crying—the kind of wailing that crawls into your chest and squeezes. The desperate, confused shrieking of something that doesn't understand why existing already hurts so much. My eyes snapped open—or whatever passed for open in this vision-state—and I found myself standing in a candlelit room that smelled of blood, afterbirth, and something else. Something wrong.
The baby had four arms.
I blinked, sure I was seeing things. The infant squirmed in the midwife's grip, its four tiny limbs flailing with the uncoordinated desperation of newborns everywhere, except there were four of them. Two on each side, all of them reaching for something, anything. Four eyes stared up at the ceiling, unfocused and wet, two mouths opened wide in twin screams that harmonized into something that made my skin crawl.
The mother lay on the futon, her face slick with sweat and tears, staring at her child with an expression that broke something in me. She wasn't looking at a baby. She was looking at a curse. A punishment. Some divine mistake that had crawled out of her body and kept crawling, and kept being, refusing to be the two separate children the midwives had assured her were coming.
"What..." she whispered, her voice raw from hours of labor, "what is that…?"
The midwives exchanged glances—the kind of glances that said they'd seen things like this before, heard stories, and had hoped never to witness it themselves. One of them reached for the baby, movements hesitant now, no longer gentle but clinical. Measuring. Assessing.
Assessing whether this thing deserved to live.
"No," the mother suddenly lurched forward, all the exhaustion in her body apparently forgotten. "No, give him to me. Give me my—" she choked on the word, on the impossibility of it, "—my son."
The scene skipped.
I didn't choose to move; the vision just shunted forward like a projector jumping frames, and suddenly I was watching the same boy—now maybe five or six, the four arms gangly and uncoordinated, the four eyes too big for his face—cowering as a bowl of rice smashed against the wall beside his head. Grains scattered across the floor. A few stuck to his cheek where a fragment of ceramic had nicked him.
"Piece of shit," his father snarled, already turning away. "Why was a monster like you even born?"
The mother sat in the corner, her back to the scene, her shoulders rigid. She didn't speak. Didn't defend. Didn't even acknowledge the child existed. When the boy reached for her sleeve with one of his small hands, she flinched away so violently she nearly overturned her tea.
"Just what the hell is going on...?" I said, my voice sounding strange in this dreamlike space. I moved through the room like a ghost, passing through furniture and people alike. "Can no one see me?"
No one could. The vision played on, indifferent to my presence, and I watched with a growing weight in my chest as the boy grew. As the beatings continued. As the food grew scarcer. As his mother's gaze went from avoiding him to hating him to eventually—and somehow worse—looking through him entirely.
"Why was I even born...?"
He stopped reaching for her eventually. Stopped reaching for anyone.
What else was a monster supposed to do?
---
The years compressed like a fist.
The boy grew. Of course he grew—that was what living things did, even the unwanted ones. But he grew wrong, or right depending on how you looked at it. By the time he was sixteen, he'd already surpassed his father's height. By eighteen, he was a giant, his seven-foot frame corded with muscle that came from labor and starvation and something deeper, something hungry that the world had put inside him.
He embraced it.
I watched him find sorcery the way a drowning man finds air. It was in the woods outside his village, some forgotten shrine with rotting ropes and a rusted sword that no one had bothered to maintain for generations. He touched the blade and something woke up. His four eyes—eyes that his mother had called "proof of the demon inside him"—saw things they'd never seen before. Cursed energy. The shape of the world beneath the world.
And he was good at it.
Not just good. Excellent. The kind of natural talent that makes other practitioners want to break their own fingers in frustration. Cursed techniques that took others decades to master, he absorbed in months. Barriers that required three skilled sorcerers to maintain, he held alone. The villagers who had called him monster, who had thrown stones and called it pest control, found their homes wrapped in veils they couldn't penetrate, their weapons dissolving in their hands, their rice paddies withering overnight.
He didn't kill them. Not at first. That came later.
"Wait a minute..." I breathed, the pieces clicking together in my head. "Is this Sukuna? THE Ryomen Sukuna? Holy shit!"
"HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! WEAKLINGS! YOU'RE ALL WEAKLINGS!" I watched the rampage begin. Not a battle—a rampage. Sukuna against the Fujiwara clan's finest sorcerers, and it wasn't a fight, it was a lesson. He tore through them like a scythe through wheat, four arms wielding techniques simultaneously, two mouths chanting incantations that overlapped into something that wasn't quite words and wasn't quite silence and was absolutely terrifying.
"That means I'm in..." I felt a grin spreading across my face despite the horror, the pity, the awe all competing for space in my chest. "The Heian Era."
The vision showed me everything.
Yorozu appearing from nowhere, all manic energy and twisted affection, her eyes lighting up the moment she saw Sukuna standing atop a mountain of defeated sorcerers.
Their fight was beautiful and brutal, two forces of nature colliding, and at the end of it, she looked at him—really looked, the way no one ever had—saying "Oh, Sukuna... I love you." with blood streaming down her face and a smile that was half madness, half something I didn't have a word for.
Uraume came next, a child then, starving in the snow, abandoned by parents who couldn't feed another mouth.
"Do you have some spare change, mister...?"
Sukuna passed them on the road and didn't stop, didn't look back—but something must have caught his attention, because the vision jumped and suddenly Uraume was at his side, learning from him, growing under him, their loyalty solidifying into something that would outlast centuries.
Kenjaku appeared in shadows, that perpetual smile never reaching his eyes, always watching, always calculating. I watched him approach Sukuna with an offer that made even the King of Curses pause.
"How about we make a deal, Sukuna? I'll revive you in an era where someone can finally be your match, and you can split your soul into your 20 fingers before I fully revive you. I'll even make a binding vow to ensure that you get your end of the bargain." Kenjaku said as he reached out his hands, Ryomen Sukuna, eyes completely voided of emotion, drowning in the isolation of being the strongest, soon reached out back.
And then the vision kept going.
The Sengoku Period flashed before my eyes—cursed tools forged in blood, domains clashing on battlefields where sorcerers were weapons and samurai were collateral. The Edo Period followed, quieter but no less dangerous, curses festering in the cracks of a society trying to pretend they didn't exist, Kashimo dominating as the era's strongest. The Meiji Period brought modernization and mechanization, sorcerer families scrambling to adapt, the balance of power shifting like tectonic plates.
Centuries passed in heartbeats. Millennia compressed into moments.
And then—the Modern Era.
"Throughout Heaven and Earth, I alone am the Honored One."
Gojo Satoru, born with the Six Eyes and Limitless, rewriting what it meant to be the strongest. Geto Suguru, falling from grace with the weight of a million saved souls on his shoulders. Yuji Itadori, eating a finger he should never have touched. Mahito, laughing as he twisted souls into new shapes. Shibuya burning. The culling games beginning.
All of it, every panel I'd ever read, every chapter I'd ever stayed up too late binging, playing out in front of me like a movie I'd already seen but couldn't look away from.
The vision receded slowly, reluctantly, like a tide pulling back from shore. The images faded to sepia, then to shadow, then to nothing, and I was back in the void—the endless, silent, mercifully empty void.
I stood there for a long moment, processing what I'd just witnessed.
"To think my first realm would be Gege Akutami's masterpiece itself..." I exhaled slowly, shaking my head. "Man, is this gonna be fun."
The interface appeared in front of me, familiar and waiting, with six empty slots where three used to be. The text pulsed gently, patient and expectant.
"Please state your 6 wishes."