What's the first thing a new student does after enrolling?
Pick up a uniform? NoNoNo….
Ask about the coursework progress? NoNoNo….
The first thing a transfer student does at a new school is, of course, to build good relationships with the new classmates!
Interpersonal relationships are the foundation of a happy school life!
Of course, Mahiru had no great interest in a happy school life—she actually loathed "going to school." But in order to blend into the Jujutsu Sorcerer collective faster, and to lower the risk of being suspected as quickly as possible, she still had to win over her two classmates as soon as possible!
So… "Utahime-senpai, does it feel good?"
"Uu… it feels good, but…"
"Utahime-senpai, don't you like this?"
"I like it… but if it keeps feeling this good… wuaaah!!"
As Utahime, her face flushed red, let out a high-pitched cry—she collapsed limply into the sofa.
"This is the massage package from the gold-medal massage parlor!" Mahiru sat on the table with her legs crossed, waving the several receipts in her hand, her face full of pride. "And it's several of them stacked together."
You have to understand, quantitative change triggers qualitative change.
Even gourmet food, if you eat too much of it, turns into poison.
If Mahiru applied "dozens of times" the "massage service" to a single person all at once, she would either pleasure that person to death or knead them directly into a ball of flesh.
But of course Mahiru would never do such a thing to two beautiful girls.
She chose to warmly treat her two classmates with "double" the massage service, serving Utahime until she was screaming to the heavens.
"Ran-san's Cursed Technique really is convenient." Mei Mei, on the other hand, was completely at ease, lounging in the sofa and enjoying herself leisurely.
All that can be said is, people's constitutions really can't be compared.
Utahime was clearly a bit more sensitive to touch; the shrine-maiden-outfit beauty looked as though she'd been thoroughly ravaged by some invisible hand, until in the end she collapsed on the sofa, spent, her whole body soaked in sweat.
"Uu… I feel like I've been bullied…"
"Ah, sorry, I got a little careless…" Mahiru felt slightly guilty, so she pulled out something else. "How about I treat senpai to a movie?"
Utahime instinctively assumed the "movie" Mahiru mentioned was some kind of slang, and couldn't help shuddering.
Utahime was a cheerful person. After hearing that a new student had enrolled, she was the first to run up to Mahiru to greet and welcome her.
Wow, a beautiful girl!
Wow, a genius beautiful girl!
Wow, a gentle and adorable genius beautiful girl!
Utahime was so happy she could practically fly.
And now, after deeply experiencing Mahiru's "generous hospitality," she was afraid.
She'd thought Mahiru was a gentle, kind angel, but the result seemed to be a demon.
Now Mahiru was pulling out something new again—Nooo! What are you going to do to me this time!
Utahime screamed in her heart.
But then she noticed that what Mahiru was holding was actually a movie ticket.
"You can even watch movies?!" Utahime was shocked.
"You can. Though I collect a lot of movie tickets, I rarely carry them around." Mahiru blinked. "There aren't many I can pick for you right now… want to give it a try?"
The carefree Utahime got interested in Mahiru's "hospitality" again. She leaned in: "Are these all recent movies?"
"That's right."
"Then I want this one."
Utahime picked one. Mahiru handed the movie ticket to her and activated her Cursed Technique; flames burned the ticket to ashes. At the same time, an entire movie's worth of information—including every image, including every sound—was compressed and sent into Utahime's mind.
The shrine-maiden-outfit girl stood in place, and suddenly tears streamed down her face as she cried out loud.
This was because the movie was a rather moving tragedy. Utahime was crying now because she'd been moved to tears.
"They… they really are a pair of star-crossed lovers…"
Mei Mei watched the weeping Utahime and thoughtfully stroked her chin: "It can even do that? …Ran-san, there really are so many things your Cursed Technique can do."
"There are a lot, yeah. Do you want some, Mei Mei?" Mahiru flipped her satchel over, revealing countless receipts—she had practically everything. "Want to taste some gourmet food? Or want to watch a movie?"
"Thank you, but I don't need any for now." Mei Mei declined with a smile. "Rather, I'm more interested in whether your Cursed Technique can be used for transportation. Tomorrow Utahime and I need to go to another city for a mission. I wonder if things like plane tickets and train tickets can be used by your Cursed Technique?"
"Of course they can, though there are some restrictions." Mahiru gave a thumbs up.
Flights, buses—receipts for that kind of fixed-route transportation service are also a type of contract, so naturally they can be recreated by the Re-Contract Technique. In theory, as long as she recreated a flight ticket, she could achieve instant teleportation from the departure point to the landing point.
—But at the same time, a plane ticket can only be used at an airport, and a train ticket can only be used at a train station; using them anywhere else doesn't work.
So during combat, if you want to relocate quickly, it's better to use a taxi receipt that only lists the mileage. That way, though it's slower, it's more flexible.
"But it's not quite the way you're thinking, Mei Mei?"
"Ah, is that so. What a shame." Mei Mei smiled, and there was no way to sense from her tone where she felt any regret at all. "Looks like tomorrow's mission won't be able to save on travel expenses or time."
Mahiru was curious: "What kind of mission are you two going on?"
"Mm…" Mei Mei tilted her head and thought for a moment. "We have to go exorcise a Cursed Spirit at a haunted house."
Mahiru was stunned. She recalled that the beginning of the original Hidden Inventory / Premature Death Arc was Utahime and Mei Mei going to a haunted house to carry out a mission. So the timeline had already reached this point?
Mahiru fell into deep thought.
She suddenly proposed: "How about I go on the mission with you two?"
Utahime was a little surprised and also a little happy to hear this.
Mei Mei, on the contrary, revealed an intrigued expression: "Hm? Why?"
"Is that not okay?" Mahiru blinked. "I just entered Jujutsu High, and I want to carry out missions together with everyone."
"Of course it's okay—or rather, I'd super welcome it," Mei Mei laughed, and it was clear she really was quite pleased. "With a Grade 1 Jujutsu Sorcerer accompanying us, that's more than we could ask for."
Before disguising herself as "Miwa Ran," Mahiru had gone to the "present day" to find the real Utahime and Mei Mei, and asked how she could win over their younger selves.
Utahime was a bit embarrassed to answer that question, but in the end she answered anyway: as long as the person before her was Mahiru, then the young Utahime would slowly and unconditionally be drawn to her.
Upright people are drawn to upright people.
Though nobody knew what standard Utahime used to judge "uprightness."
Mei Mei's answer was extremely simple: money would do.
Mei Mei was a standard money lover. The reason not to use the word "miser" was that Mei Mei purely enjoyed the process of accumulating money, and had no interest in money itself.
It sounds bizarre, but considering there were no normal people among Jujutsu Sorcerers, people simply let it go.
A Grade 1 Jujutsu Sorcerer outside-supporter like Mahiru assisting with a mission usually cost money. So this time, when Mahiru voluntarily offered to be a "free" muscle, she of course received Mei Mei's warm welcome.
This mission was actually nothing much.
Inside the haunted house was a Cursed Spirit that had formed its own Domain. Mei Mei and Utahime would be trapped inside for two or three days, but in fact wouldn't take any harm. Mahiru in the past had probably cleared it even faster, so the girl didn't take the mission seriously at all.
The Kyoto school currently had only these three students. That night Mei Mei and Utahime threw a welcome party for Mahiru, and they had a great time.
The next morning they set off for their destination, the haunted house, and arrived around the afternoon.
After arriving at the place, Mahiru was slightly dumbfounded.
Because—whether or not it was due to yet another butterfly effect… their experience had become different from the original Hidden Inventory / Premature Death Arc.
In the original, the moment they entered here, they would be trapped by a Cursed Spirit in an endless corridor with no escape.
But this time, when they entered this uninhabited haunted house deep in the mountains, Mahiru found that nothing happened.
There was no aura of a Cursed Spirit.
Only some faint traces of Cursed Energy.
This haunted house was also strangely clean.
The three of them explored inside, and weren't attacked like in the original. Up and down, left and right, inside and out… they searched several times over, almost prying up the very floorboards, and still didn't find a Cursed Spirit.
"So the intel was fake," Utahime said.
Both Mei Mei and Utahime believed there was no Cursed Spirit here at all, and even if there was, it had already left.
But Mahiru instinctively felt something was off, though for the moment she couldn't see where the problem lay.
Oh, and then there was a second point that differed from the original.
"Huh? We're going to stay here?" Hearing Mei Mei's words, Utahime's face went pale with fright, and she tightly hugged Mahiru's arm, trembling. "No way… why do we have to stay here…"
"Because it's already very late? It's eight o'clock at night." Mei Mei smiled. "You don't want to walk around the mountains all night either, do you?"
Mei Mei took a pile of receipts from her pocket and handed them to Mahiru.
Mahiru looked—they were for sleeping bags, tents… all kinds of camping equipment. Well now, so she'd been prepared all along.
"Nooo!" Utahime clutched Mahiru's arm, whining and begging for mercy. "A place like this is way too scary!"
"What does it matter? Are Jujutsu Sorcerers actually afraid of ghosts?" Mei Mei smiled. "Besides, isn't Ran-Ran here? She's a Grade 1 Jujutsu Sorcerer."
Mahiru's nickname had gone from "Ran-san" to "Ran-Ran."
Utahime kept protesting, but her protests were completely ineffective. Because Mahiru herself wanted to stay here too, to puzzle out just where it was that made her feel something was off.
Mahiru recreated the tents and everything with Re-Contract Manifestation. The three of them set up camp in the middle of the haunted house's main hall.
"I'm not scared at all! I'm just cold!" Utahime wrapped herself up in a sleeping bag while loudly declaring how brave and matchless she was. "If you run into danger, Ran-Ran, I'll be the one to protect you!"
"Okay, okay…" Mahiru held back her laughter.
The three took turns keeping watch. Mahiru was first.
Before sleeping, they chatted for a long time. From hobbies to dreams, from the renowned Gojo Satoru of the neighboring Tokyo school, to that "Blue Mysterious Existence" that had recently shaken the entire Jujutsu world…
Happy things, tense things, hesitation-inducing things… they talked over all sorts of topics. Mahiru's relationship with them grew closer and closer, and Utahime and Mei Mei trusted Mahiru more and more.
"Is that Blue Existence really that powerful?" Utahime shrank her neck down into her sleeping bag. "It feels… like some kind of super scary monster… will the earth be destroyed?"
"It probably won't be that exaggerated, right?" Mei Mei chuckled softly. "Maybe it'll only destroy one country?"
"Destroying one country is already terrible enough!"
"There's nothing to be done." Mei Mei shrugged. "The development of the [Blue Existence] incident isn't something we can control, so do your best to prepare for the Jujutsu world facing catastrophe."
"Uu…" Utahime hid the lower half of her face in her sleeping bag. "I don't want my hometown to be destroyed… can that Blue Existence please show some mercy…"
There was also no telling what image Mahiru now had in these Jujutsu Sorcerers' eyes.
It felt like the rumors had really spun wildly out of control.
Later on, Mahiru stopped joining the conversation and instead concentrated her attention on the world outside the tent.
As time went on, both girls fell asleep. After Mahiru confirmed they were truly sound asleep, she secretly walked out of the tent, set up Barriers and watchdog clones around their two tents, and then headed toward the depths of the haunted house's basement.
Here there was a tunnel entrance that they hadn't discovered at all during the day.
It was as if it had appeared out of thin air.
Mahiru stepped inside.
She sensed it—an extremely faint yet extremely glaring fluctuation of Cursed Energy coming from the depths.
Eerie, evil, chaotic, twisted… and, immense.
It was as if something possessing immense and terrifying Cursed Energy had just revealed the tip of its iceberg, and what she was seeing now was precisely that tip of the iceberg.
How was that possible? Mahiru frowned. How could something completely outside her expectations appear here?
What thing with such fathomless Cursed Energy would appear here? And moreover, something Mahiru had never even heard of in the original.
The girl's expression grew more and more serious.
She followed the corridor downward.
The Cursed Energy aura in the depths of the passage grew stronger and stronger, and a wind carrying chaotic Cursed Energy blew from over there, stirring her long hair.
Suddenly, she walked into an underground hall.
There was no light; her field of vision was completely dark. But in that moment the girl heard the howls of nearly countless Cursed Spirits—and at the same time, making the girl's pupils contract, a "jingle jingle" noise sounded in her ears, and a golden fluorescent point of light appeared before her.
—"Congratulations on returning to the [Culling Game] as a player—"
"!!!"
So that was it!
This fathomless Cursed Energy, this fluctuation that made Mahiru feel the very reality around her was being contaminated… no wonder the girl couldn't guess what in this timeline could give her these sensations…
It turned out it was because the thing that now appeared before her, just like her, also did not belong to this world!
—The [Culling Game]!
The Culling Game had begun to infect this past parallel world!
And for some reason, this haunted house had, in this very moment, become a door through which the Culling Game led here!
Cursed Energy surged like the tide.
The Cursed Spirits crowded together, wanting to pour from that side over into this world.
"Heh." The blue-haired girl revealed a smile. "Your luck really is terrible."
Though she didn't know why the passage would open right in Mahiru's face… but since you've already opened the passage here and gotten caught by Mahiru, then you can only blame your own bad luck!
This passage that hadn't even taken shape yet—let her be the one to destroy it! "[Re-Contract Manifestation]!" Mahiru pinched a paper scroll between two fingers and drew it from her satchel. A dazzling flash of lightning instantly illuminated the darkness, making the girl's eyes flicker with silver light. "[Tokyo Power Grid]—[Three-Year Tidal Generator Contract]!"
The lightning detonated in an instant. The earth thundered and roared!
____
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