What a wonderful day.
The smell of rat shit. The constant presence of filth and trash. The comfortable feel of my cardboard bed.
Good stuff.
I lay there, staring up at the sliver of sky visible through the gaps in the makeshift roof above me, listening to the sounds of the slum waking up around me. Somewhere nearby, a woman was shouting at her husband. Somewhere further, a baby was crying—the normal kind, with two arms and two eyes and one mouth.
It's been 4 years since I was born in this shithole of a slum.
Even though this was near Tokyo, the people who lived here consisted of the poorest, most pitiful sacks of poverty Japan could offer.
My mom died right after I was born and my dad just outright abandoned me after seeing my four arms and eyes, as well as two mouths.
Classic.
I'd been left in a basket outside what passed for a temple, and the temple had left me outside what passed for an orphanage, and the orphanage had left me outside what passed for a garbage heap.
By the time I was three months old, I'd learned that people would step over you if you looked too strange to acknowledge. By the time I was six months, I'd learned how to crawl fast enough to grab food before the rats got to it. By the time I was one, I'd learned that crying for help was a waste of breath that couldn't be used for anything useful.
Now I was four. And I was done waiting.
Also, I've made it my goal to return to my original realm.
I flexed my lower arms experimentally, watching the small fists clench and unclench. Even at four, I could feel it—the cursed energy humming beneath my skin, waiting.
Since my body was still young, I hadn't fully inherited Sukuna's CE reserves. But I'm getting there.
The Six Eyes I'd been born with showed me the world in layers I was still learning to process, the flows of energy that moved through everything, the curses that clustered around the slum like flies around a wound.
I'd spent the last four years watching. Learning. Waiting for my body to grow strong enough to carry what I'd been given.
But more than that. More than the power, more than the training I knew I'd need, more than the task I'd been given to become the strongest in this realm—
I really need to get back home.
The faces appeared in my mind, the same way they did every night when I closed my four eyes. Mom, laughing at something Dad had said, reaching across the table to squeeze my hand. Dad, standing at the corner of the ring, arms crossed, watching me fight with that look of fierce pride he never put into words. Kenshin, my little brother, barely up to my knees, tugging at my sleeve and demanding I tell him another story before bed.
I know they're still waiting for me over there.
I just know it.
Whatever this Grand Tournament was, whatever realms I had to conquer, whatever power I had to accumulate—I'd do it. I'd become the strongest in every world they threw at me, and then I'd find my way back. Back to the people who actually mattered.
A shadow fell over me, blocking the meager light that had been warming my face.
I tensed, every instinct I'd developed over four years of survival screaming at me to roll, to hide, to make myself small and invisible the way I'd learned to do whenever adults got too close. But something stopped me. Something in the way the shadow fell, in the quality of the cursed energy that came with it.
I looked up.
"W-what are you...? Are those the Six Eyes?"
The man standing over me was middle-aged, with sharp features and expensive clothes that looked wildly out of place against the filth of the slum. His eyes—dark, intense, calculating—were fixed on my face. Or rather, fixed on my eyes. All four of them.
I stared back, my mind racing even as my two-year-old body lay still. This was it. This was the moment I'd been waiting for, the opportunity I'd known would come eventually if I survived long enough. A sorcerer. A Gojo, judging by the way he'd recognized the Six Eyes. And he was looking at me like I was something valuable instead of something to be disposed of.
He stared at me for a long time, seemingly contemplating something behind those sharp eyes. I watched the calculations run through his expression—the risk assessment, the cost-benefit analysis, the decision forming behind his eyes. His gaze swept over my four arms, my extra eyes, the two mouths that were currently pressed into a line as I tried to look as harmless as a four-year-old abomination could look.
"This may be the chance of the century. I can't believe it—that Satoru kid was also born with the Six Eyes, and now a seemingly random... thing in the streets also has them."
I watched the man's face shift as he worked through the implications, the possibilities. A second Six Eyes user. A second potential strongest. An anomaly that shouldn't exist, standing right in front of him, filthy and starving and looking up at him with the eyes that could change everything.
"I have to seize this opportunity!"
"My name is Gojo Asahi." His voice was steady, measured, but I could hear the undercurrent of something beneath it. Excitement. Fear. Ambition. All the things that made sorcerers dangerous.
"Take my hand, and I will raise you to become the strongest."
Hmm... This is tricky.
I'm surprised he's even offering me his hand right now, given how I look. The Gojo clan was one of the three great families. They had standards. They had traditions. They had a thousand years of history telling them exactly what to do with things that looked like Ryomen Sukuna. And yet here he was, hand outstretched, waiting for a decision from a four-year-old who shouldn't even understand what he was being offered.
Nevertheless...
I let my face shift into the best approximation of childlike curiosity I could manage, my four eyes going wide, my two mouths forming a small 'o' of wonder. I reached up with one of my upper hands—the smaller one, the one that looked less threatening—and slowly, deliberately, took his hand.
His fingers closed around mine. Warm. Steady. And trembling, just slightly, at the edges.
"…Oh wow."
As I was lead into the estate into the Gojo clan, I underestimated just how fucking rich the big three actually were.
The car we rode in was the first clue. I'd never been in a car before—had barely been in any vehicle at all in this life—and the sheer softness of the seats was enough to make my brain short-circuit for a solid minute. Silk cushions. Wood paneling. A window that showed the slum shrinking behind us, the streets getting cleaner, the buildings getting taller, the people looking less like they were waiting to die.
I mean, what am I even looking at? This estate is basically an entire city at this point!
The Gojo compound sprawled across a section of Tokyo that had apparently decided that walls and gates and enough barriers to choke a curse were reasonable things to have around a residential area. Guards at every entrance. Sorcerers moving between buildings with the kind of quiet efficiency that spoke of centuries of practice.
"This is where you'll be staying."
Asahi's voice pulled my attention from the view, and I followed his pointing finger to—
I then looked at a massive mansion the size of the entire slum I was just living in an hour ago.
My brain, which had been doing a remarkable job of processing the absolute insanity of my existence so far, briefly gave up and rebooted. The slum I'd been born in had housed maybe two hundred people, packed into crumbling buildings and cardboard shacks and doorways that barely kept the rain out. This building—this house—was easily two times that size. Just sitting there. Waiting for me.
I could have fit the entire population of my former home in this building and still had room for a soccer field.
"I've placed multiple barriers to prevent the detection of any cursed energy fluctuations." Asahi was speaking quietly now, his eyes scanning the compound as if expecting someone to jump out at any moment.
"Even as an elder of the clan, I can't let anyone find out about you. You resemble... Him far too much." He ran a hand through his hair, a gesture that looked like it came from a much younger man, and let out a breath that carried something that might have been a laugh or might have been a sigh. "Hah... What the hell am I doing?"
Well, I guess that makes sense. I'd probably be kicked out immediately if anyone else other than this crazy guy found out about my freak of a body.
The Gojo clan had produced the Six Eyes before. They'd produced Limitless users before. But they'd never produced anything that looked like me, and I had a feeling their historical records would have some very strong opinions about what to do with someone who combined the Six Eyes with the body of the King of Curses.
Still. A whole mansion. Just for me. Because one crazy old man looked at a four-year-old monster and decided to roll the dice.
"It's okay!" I said, making sure my voice came out high and innocent, the way I'd heard other children speak when they wanted something. "At least I get to live in a big house like this! Will I get to eat once every day?"
I put everything I had into looking as pathetic and grateful as possible—the wide eyes, the small voice, the slight tremor in my lower lip that I'd perfected over months of practice. I prayed to every god that had ever existed that this man wouldn't abandon a 'cute' little Sukuna like me.
Asahi stared at me for a long moment. Then, slowly, something in his expression shifted. The calculation didn't leave, but something else joined it. Something softer. Something that looked almost like regret.
"This kid..." he said quietly, almost to himself. Then, louder: "I'll raise you well, my boy." He crouched down, bringing himself to my eye level. "Do you have a name?"
After thinking for a while, I eventually just stuck to my original name.
"Atsuya Nagasaki!"
Asahi nodded slowly, his lips curving into something that might have been a smile. "Atsuya. That's a good name." He straightened up, and for a moment, he looked almost proud. "Well then, Atsuya. Let's get you inside. There's much we need to discuss."
He turned and began walking toward the mansion, his footsteps steady on the stone path, and I scrambled to follow—all four limbs working together in a gait that was still clumsy, still learning, but getting faster every day.
As I passed through the gates of the Gojo compound, my four eyes taking in the barriers and the guards, I felt something settle in my chest.
Not satisfaction.
Not yet.
Certainty.
I was here. I was alive. I had six wishes burning in my soul and a goal that nothing in this realm or any other was going to stop me from achieving.
The strongest in every realm.
And then, home.