"Haha… What kind of monster am I raising?"
I stood in the middle of the training ground—a sealed courtyard deep within the Gojo compound that Asahi had claimed as his personal domain—with dust still settling around my feet and four arms folded across my chest in what I'd been told was an infuriatingly smug posture.
The old man was on his knees, his fancy sorcerer robes torn at the shoulder, a hand pressed against his ribs where my lower left fist had connected a second before he'd even registered the movement.
It's been 2 years since I started living with the old man, and even though I was only 6-years-old, I gave Asahi quite the shock.
I learned [Cursed Energy Reinforcement] and [Curtain] after seeing him perform it once.
Once.
He'd demonstrated [Cursed Energy Reinforcement] on a training dummy, explaining the theory in that patient, professorial way of his, and I'd felt the energy move through him, analyzed it with the [Six Eyes], and then done it myself before he'd finished his lecture.
The look on his face when the dummy exploded under my fist was something I still smiled about in my rare moments of downtime.
[Curtain] took longer—almost a whole afternoon—but by the end of it, I'd wrapped the entire training ground in a barrier.
As for completely overwhelming him in pure hand-to-hand combat? That had taken about six months.
Six months of daily sparring, of learning how to coordinate four limbs that wanted to move independently, of figuring out how to use the extra eyes to track angles a normal fighter couldn't even perceive.
By the end of the first year, Asahi had stopped going easy on me. By the end of the second, he'd stopped winning entirely.
I later found out this old man was actually a Grade 1 sorcerer, second only to the clan head in terms of prowess.
He'd been holding back at first, of course. Trying not to hurt the weird four-armed child he'd plucked from a slum.
But somewhere along the way, the holding back had turned into genuine effort, and the genuine effort had turned into desperation, and the desperation had turned into the scene I was currently looking at: a middle-aged sorcerer with decades of experience, sitting on the ground, staring at me like I'd just broken reality.
"Are you sure you're a six-year-old…?" he said suspiciously, as if he was talking to a reincarnated, experienced fighter.
"Hehe. Well, technically four," I replied, in pure glee at my masterful ragebait. "The first two years don't count. I was mostly just trying not to die."
Asahi made a sound that might have been a laugh or might have been a sob. I chose to interpret it as pride.
Nonetheless, I can feel that my cursed technique was extremely close to awakening.
It had been building for weeks—a pressure behind my eyes that wasn't the [Six Eyes], a hum in my chest that wasn't Sukuna's cursed energy, a sense of something waiting just beneath the surface of my consciousness, ready to unfold.
I already knew what cursed technique I would create once I had gotten [Cursed Technique Creation], but I was actually pretty scared of what pain throughout every part of my existence would feel like...
Nah, It'll be fine. Probably.
I rolled my shoulders, feeling the coiled energy in my limbs, the cursed energy that had become as natural to me as breathing over the last two years. "One more round?"
Asahi glared at me from the ground. "I need a drink."
"But master…!" I said, already settling into a stance that used all four arms, my two adorable lips pouting. "Come on. I'm close! I can feel it!"
He sighed—the long, heavy sigh of a man who had made a series of increasingly questionable life choices and was committed to seeing them through—and pushed himself to his feet.
"Hah… Fine. Cheeky brat..."
…
We fought.
I continued to fight the old man and quickly noticed myself falling deeper and deeper into a 'flow' state.
It was the same feeling I used to get in the ring, back when my biggest problem was whether I'd remembered to tape my hands right. The world narrowing to just me and my opponent. The noise of everything else fading to a distant hum. My body moving faster than my thoughts could follow, my instincts operating on a level that bypassed conscious decision entirely.
But this was different. Better. The [Six Eyes] showed me Asahi's cursed energy in ways I'd never been able to perceive my old opponents' intentions. His muscles tensing before a strike, his energy pooling before a technique, his breath catching before a feint. I could see it all, could process it all, could move before he'd even committed to the motion.
And beneath that, something else was building. A pressure. A heat. A sense that I was on the edge of something, that if I just pushed a little further, reached a little deeper, I'd find...
"I see." I murmured, my two mouths speaking in unison as the pieces clicked together in my head. "So that's the optimal way to let cursed energy flow. I just need to activate it..."
The flow state deepened. The world around me slowed, not magically, not through any technique, but simply because my perception had sharpened to the point where seconds stretched like taffy.
Suddenly, black sparks begin to flicker as I threw a straight with both of my right hands.
The sparks weren't just visual—I could feel them, crackling along my knuckles, dancing across the surface of my skin, demanding something from me. A trigger. A release. A moment of perfect timing.
"...At the last second."
[Black Flash]!
The world didn't just slow. It stopped.
For a single, crystalline moment, I existed outside of time. I could feel everything—the space between my fist and Asahi's guard, the cursed energy that had just multiplied in potency, the fundamental nature of what I'd just done.
A [Black Flash]. The distortion of space that occurred when cursed energy was applied within a millionth of a second of a physical hit. A phenomenon that even most Grade 1 sorcerers couldn't perform consistently.
I'd done it at six years old. In my first serious fight.
The world around me slowed down even more.
I could feel it.
The [Black Flash] had done something. Cracked something open inside me. The flow state wasn't just a state anymore—it was a place, a space where I could see the mechanics of cursed energy laid bare, could feel the optimal timing for every strike, could sense the exact moment when my energy and my movement would align into something greater than either alone.
As I continued to fight Asahi, the efficiency and potency of my cursed energy increased by twofold,
[Black Flash]!
Then by 1.5 times,
[Black Flash]!
Then 1.25 times.
Each [Black Flash] was easier than the last. Each one pushed me deeper into that space, that perfect awareness, that moment where the boundary between physical and metaphysical blurred into nothing. Asahi wasn't even trying to hit me anymore—he was just blocking, just surviving, his eyes wide with something that might have been terror or might have been wonder.
I was about to go for another when—
Suddenly, a large stream of information bombarded my head, causing my flow state to abruptly stop as I finally awakened it.
[Cursed Technique Creation].
The knowledge unfolded in my mind like a flower blooming, each petal revealing another layer of understanding. The technique was there, waiting, a blank canvas that I could fill with anything I could imagine. Anything I was willing to pay the price for.
I stumbled, catching myself on three arms while the fourth pressed against my temple, trying to hold my skull together as the information flooded in. Asahi called something—I couldn't hear him, couldn't hear anything over the rush of knowledge, the possibilities, the costs laid out before me like an invoice for services rendered.
Immediately, I willed my cursed technique to create it. The supposed strongest, most broken cursed technique in the entire series.
[Limitless].
The image formed in my mind: A cursed technique that manipulates space at an atomic level, creating, dividing, and distorting "infinity". It acts as a barrier that slows down incoming attacks to a standstill, while allowing advanced users to generate magnetic-like attraction, repulsive force, or teleportation.
I could see it. Could understand it. Could feel the shape of it waiting to be born.
I quickly willed for the cursed technique to be created, and then...
Disaster hit.
"AGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!!"
The pain came from everywhere and nowhere. From my atoms, my molecules, from spaces between spaces that shouldn't have nerves but were screaming anyway.
It was the kind of pain that bypassed your brain entirely and went straight for your soul, the kind that made you forget who you were and where you were and why you'd ever thought any of this was a good idea.
I hit the ground. I think. It was hard to tell when my entire existence had been reduced to a single, continuous shriek of agony.
"What's wrong, Atsuya?! Tell me!" Asahi's voice cut through the red haze, distant and distorted, like hearing someone call from the other end of a very long tunnel.
I felt hands on me—Asahi's hands, lifting me, carrying me. I tried to tell him what was happening, tried to form words, but my two mouths were both occupied with screaming, and my four arms were too busy clawing at my own chest to be of any use.
The next thing I knew, I was on something soft. A bed. A real bed, with sheets that smelled like soap and a pillow that felt like clouds. I'd have appreciated it more if I wasn't busy trying to tear my own skin off.
"It's okay, Master..." I managed to force out between screams, the words coming out in fragments, in gasps, in sounds that barely resembled language. "This isn't you fAAUULTT!!!"
I was once again cut off by the unbearable pain tearing through my body, mind, and soul.
Who even designed this stupid cursed technique?!
"This is..." I panted, the pain cresting for just a moment, giving me enough breath to speak. "Part of my awakened cursed technique...!!"
Asahi's face swam above me, blurry even through the [Six Eyes]. I saw his jaw tighten, his hands clench at his sides.
"…I need to take him to a hospital. But if what he said was true, I'd be exposing him to a lot of danger for nothing in return. The Gojo clan already has enemies… Enemies who would love to know that there was a second Six Eyes user, one who looked much too similar to Ryomen Sukuna himself."
Thinking this, he decided against it.
"Atsuya..."
Asahi's voice cracked. I'd never heard his voice crack before. He was always so composed, so controlled, even when I was embarrassing him in the training yard. But now, sitting beside a bed where a six-year-old—technically four-year-old was writhing in agony, he sounded like an old man who had made a terrible mistake and was watching it unfold in slow motion.
"Please live...!"
His hand found my upper right hand. Held it. Squeezed.
I squeezed back, or tried to. I wasn't sure if my fingers actually moved, but I felt his grip tighten in response, and that was enough.
…
Fuckin' hell.
After a week of pure agony had passed, I was finally slowly getting used to the pain.
By getting used to it, I mean I could finally stay still without screaming every 10 seconds.
Only every 10 minutes now.
The first week had been, as the cursed technique's description stayed ruthlessly true, torture.
The kind of torture that made you understand why people begged for death, why people made deals with things they shouldn't, why people broke under less. The pain hadn't let up, not once, not for a single second. It had just become... familiar.
A constant companion. The background radiation of my existence.
Asahi stayed. I didn't know if he had duties, responsibilities, things a Gojo elder was supposed to be doing, but whatever they were, he abandoned them.
He sat beside my bed for hours, talking to me when I could listen, reading to me when I couldn't, holding my hand through the worst of it.
He told me about the Gojo clan's history. About the previous Six Eyes users. About the Limitless technique that I was apparently destroying myself to acquire.
He told me about his own youth, about the mistakes he'd made, about the people he'd lost.
About the wife who had died before he could have children, about the students he'd trained who had gone on to become something great or something terrible, about the weight of being an elder in a clan that had been making the same decisions for a thousand years.
And after the grueling month finally passed, I was once again bombarded by information as the pain slowly subsided.
[Limitless].
I had it. The technique that would, combined with everything else, make me unstoppable.
When the old man finally saw me stand up from the bed, he was surprised to see the maniacal look on my face.
"FINALLY!!"
I stretched, all four arms reaching toward the ceiling, feeling my joints pop in ways that were deeply satisfying after a month of stillness. My legs held. My arms worked. My cursed energy, which had been completely wiped by the creation process, was already beginning to trickle back, slow but steady.
"What on earth…?" Asahi said questioningly.
He shook his head, but there was something in his expression that I hadn't seen in a long time. Something that looked almost like relief.
The [Limitless] hummed in my chest, waiting to be used. The [Six Eyes] showed me the world in its infinite detail, pushing my cursed energy efficiency to its peak.
And somewhere, in the deepest part of my soul, the cursed technique that made all of this possible sat patiently, ready to create again.
I looked at Asahi, at the old man who had picked a monster out of a slum and called him a prodigy.
"Alright, Master," I said, cracking my knuckles with all four hands. "Let's see what this thing can do."