The blood was mine. I could taste it on my tongue—copper and rust.
My left arm was gone below the elbow, burned shut by one of Sukuna's attacks. The stump still smoked.
Sukuna stood ten meters away, all four arms crossed, grinning like I was a joke he'd already heard.
Behind him, Shibuya burned. Buildings fell. People screamed.
None of it mattered anymore.
I'd already done what I came to do.
"You're still standing," Sukuna said. "I'm genuinely curious how."
I spat blood onto broken concrete. "Stubborn."
That was the last joke I'd ever make. I knew it.
We'd been fighting for six hours, and I had nothing left. No cursed energy. No techniques left to burn. No plan beyond what came next.
The dead were everywhere around me. Hundreds of them. Civilians, sorcerers, curses—all killed in the chaos Sukuna started. Their leftover cursed energy still filled the air like static. It was the only power I had left.
Grave Walker. My cursed technique. Special Grade.
I could pull spirits from the cursed energy of the dead and make them fight for me. Every person killed near me became a weapon.
I'd been saving them all for this.
Sukuna's grin spread wider. "That look in your eyes. You're planning something stupid."
"The stupidest," I said.
I activated Grave Walker's final form.
Every corpse in a three-hundred-meter radius exploded with cursed energy. The ground split open. Shadows ripped upward from every crack, every body, every pool of blood.
A thousand spirits surged from the earth—a screaming, writhing wall of the dead.
Sukuna's grin disappeared.
The graveyard hit him. A thousand dead pulled at his arms, his legs, his cursed energy. They couldn't hurt him. I knew that.
But they could hold him.
They dragged him into a prison of ghosts, a pocket of cursed space where the King of Curses would have to fight his way out.
It would buy time. Minutes. Maybe an hour.
Long enough for the students still alive to get clear.
Long enough for someone stronger to arrive.
My body was coming apart.
The final form was burning through what remained of my cursed energy, and then it started burning through me. My skin split. My bones cracked. Blood poured from my nose, my ears, my eyes.
It didn't matter.
I thought about the students I couldn't save. The ones who died before I got here. Twenty-four years of fighting, and I was still too slow.
But the ones still breathing—they'd live.
That was the deal I made with myself somewhere around hour three, when my ribs first cracked and I understood I wasn't walking out of Shibuya.
Sukuna roared inside the storm of the dead. The spirits were already fading. He was tearing through them too fast.
A minute left. Maybe less.
I smiled.
Then I let go.
Grave Walker took everything—my cursed energy, my life, my soul—and poured it all into the storm.
The wall of the dead doubled in size.
Sukuna's roar became a scream of rage.
The last thing I saw was the sky through the smoke. Red and orange from the fires. Almost pretty if you ignored what was burning.
Then nothing.
This wasn't the darkness of sleep.
This was heavier. It pushed against me from every side until I forgot which way was up.
I floated in it. Or sank. No way to tell.
Then a sound. Not a voice. Something mechanical. Cold.
[INITIALIZING...]
I tried to move. I had no body to move.
[SYSTEM COMPATIBILITY CHECK... FAILED]
[RETRYING... FAILED]
[RETRYING... SOURCE ENERGY DETECTED: CURSED ENERGY]
[ADAPTING... ADAPTING... ADAPTATION: INCOMPLETE]
[WARNING: SOURCE ENERGY INCOMPATIBLE. CORRUPTION DETECTED.]
[CORRUPTED SHADOW MONARCH SYSTEM: ONLINE]
[HOST BINDING: INITIATED]
The darkness cracked.
Blue light leaked through the fractures. The light was broken, shot through with red lines that spread like veins beneath skin. Text appeared in my vision. The letters glitched and repeated.
[HOST SOUL: DETECTED]
[HOST BODY: CRITICAL CONDITION]
[RESTORATION: BEGINNING]
Pain.
Not the sharp pain of a cut. This was everywhere at once. Every nerve fired. My bones felt like they were melting and reforming in the same second. I couldn't scream because there was no air in my lungs and my lungs weren't working.
It lasted seconds. Felt like years.
Then it stopped.
I opened my eyes.
A ceiling. Stained concrete. A single lightbulb flickered above me, dim and yellow.
I was lying on a mattress. Thin. Stained. Barely wider than my body. The room was small—maybe two meters by three. Concrete walls. The air smelled like mold and old sweat.
My body ached. Dull pain in my muscles, my joints, my bones. Like I'd been sick for weeks.
I tried to sit up. Couldn't. My arms shook. My stomach cramped with hunger so bad my vision went white at the edges.
I looked at my hands. Small. Thin. The wrists were bony. A scar ran from my left temple down to my jaw—old and healed.
This was not my body.
I was twenty-four. Special Grade. Kaelen Ryuu. I fought Sukuna and died.
This body was sixteen at most. Starved. Covered in scars.
Two sets of memories pushed against each other inside my skull.
One set was mine—Tokyo, Jujutsu High, six years of war, dead at twenty-four.
The other set was broken and incomplete, and touching it hurt. A boy named Sora. An orphanage. Being beaten for having no quirk. Being worthless.
The two didn't fit. They scraped against each other and the headache nearly split my head open.
I closed my eyes. Breathed through it. My lungs worked different in this body—shallow, weak. I'd need to fix that later.
A notification slid into my vision. The same broken blue interface. The text stuttered.
[DAILY QUEST: SURVIVE UNTIL DAWN]
[TIME REMAINING: 4 HOURS, 17 MINUTES]
[REWARD: +100 XP]
[FAILURE PENALTY: DEATH]
I stared at DEATH for a while.
I'd already died once today. Didn't want to do it again.
Hunger was the real problem. My stomach was eating itself. I needed food and water. I needed to know where I was.
But first I needed to survive the next four hours.
Footsteps outside my door. Slow. Heavy. Getting closer.
They stopped.
Someone was standing on the other side of the thin wall. I held my breath. Every muscle in this starved body locked up.
The door didn't open.
[THREAT DETECTED]
[THREAT LEVEL: UNKNOWN]
[RECOMMENDATION: CONSERVE ENERGY. AVOID CONFRONTATION]
A shadow shifted under the gap beneath the door. Still there. Waiting.
Then it moved. Footsteps again, walking away. Fading down the corridor until they were gone.
I let out a breath.
My hands were shaking. Not from fear—I'd been afraid of worse things than whatever was walking these halls.
From hunger. From the basic animal need to not die again before sunrise.
The blue interface pulsed.
[CORRUPTION GAUGE: 23%]
[NOTE: CORRUPTION STEMS FROM RESIDUAL DEATH ENERGY. IRREVERSIBLE THROUGH CONVENTIONAL MEANS.]
Twenty-three percent.
I didn't know what that meant yet. But "irreversible" and "corruption" in the same sentence wasn't exactly comforting.
I lay back on the mattress and stared at the ceiling. Four hours. I could do four hours.
I'd once held Sukuna inside a prison of a thousand dead—
A shadow fell across my face.
I looked up.
Someone was standing over my bed. In the dark. I hadn't heard the door open. Hadn't heard a single footstep.