Chapter Text
Exactly one month had passed since the "click" of Nobara's music lit up the lights in the abandoned attic that was Yuji's mind. A month of slow mornings and afternoons of invisible effort. Itadori had finally begun to babble his first words. They weren't sentences, not even complete thoughts; they were fragments, syllables that floated in the air like soap bubbles, fragile and fleeting.
But for Gojo, Megumi, and Nobara, those sounds were celestial music. They were proof that the tenant was finally coming back home.
Most of his words were short, guttural at first and then clearer. He didn't need syntax to communicate; his gaze and the intonation of his babbling were enough to know what he wanted. If he pointed at the window and said a prolonged "Ah," he was looking for the sun. If he said "No," it was usually because Nobara was trying to put one of her facial masks on him.
It was progress at a turtle's pace, but in Yuji's world, every millimeter gained was a kilometer of freedom.
The day had begun with a deceptive calm, the kind that wraps the Academy in a peaceful silence of incense and old wood.
Itadori was in the common room with Gojo. They were sitting on the floor, surrounded by folders and printed photographs. The goal of the day was simple in theory, but titanic for Yuji: to learn how to describe.
Gojo wanted Yuji to stop being a passive spectator of images and start categorizing the world. He pointed at a photo of a person and Yuji had to say what he saw.
"Alright, Yuji, look at this man here," Gojo said with that infinite patience he reserved only for him, pointing at the photo of a magazine model. "What color is his hair?"
Yuji frowned, concentrating so hard his fingers dug into the tatami. His honey-colored eyes scanned the image, processing information that had once simply bounced off his cornea.
"Y... yel... low," he finally babbled, with a small smile. The man was platinum blonde, but for Yuji's primary vocabulary, only the yellow of the sun existed.
"Exactly! Point for Itadori!" Gojo exclaimed, high-fiving him with exaggerated triumph. "And his eyes? Look closely, they're like yesterday's sky."
Yuji leaned in, almost pressing his nose to the paper. "Bl... blue."
"Perfect. You're doing better than Megumi when he tries to pick his clothes, and that's saying a lot," Gojo laughed and adjusted his blindfold. "Do you know why sorcerers wear dark uniforms? Because if we get stained with blood, it looks like we just spilled coffee on ourselves. It's a style trick, Yuji. Write it down in case you ever want to design your own combat clothing line: 'Itadori Designs: For the sorcerer who doesn't have time to do laundry.'"
Yuji didn't understand the sarcasm, but Gojo's vibrant tone, full of playful energy, was like a warm blanket over his shoulders. He felt safe. He felt at peace. For the first time in his conscious life, the world wasn't scary; the world was simply a puzzle of colors that his "teacher" helped him piece together.
They went through several more photos. A woman with red hair ("Fire," Yuji said), a child with a green umbrella ("Leaf"). Gojo alternated descriptions with absurd jokes about the elders of the council or how much Megumi looked like a sea urchin when he woke up.
Yuji laughed, a raspy sound but increasingly human, enjoying the warmth of the moment.
That was when Gojo moved on to the next image.
---
The movement was casual. Gojo pulled a photograph from an old folder, one that perhaps shouldn't have been in that practice set. In the image appeared a woman with soft features, dark hair, and an expression that conveyed maternal calm. To any observer, it was a beautiful photo.
But for Yuji, the image was a direct shot to a nerve center that had been sealed for twelve years.
Something broke inside his head. The static, that old enemy he thought he had defeated, came back with the force of a black hurricane. The honey color of his eyes dilated until almost no iris remained. That woman's face... the bone structure, the shape of the eyes...
His mind, still fragile and in the process of rebuilding, couldn't distinguish between a memory and a threat.
In his fragmented memory, in that dark place where Sukuna had kept him locked away, there was a shadow. A presence that smelled like wet earth and something rotten. The presence of the one who had "prepared" him. The one who inhabited bodies that weren't his. The parasite. Kenjaku.
For Yuji, that woman wasn't an image; it was Him. It was the monster who had handed him over to curses when he was just a baby. It was the architect of his agony.
The air left his lungs in a single burst.
"...G-gh..." a choked groan came out of his throat.
Gojo, who had been about to crack another joke about how hard it is to style your hair upward, froze. His "Six Eyes" detected the instant change in Yuji's energy flow. It wasn't cursed energy surging; it was the total collapse of a nervous system.
"Yuji?" Gojo's voice dropped several octaves, becoming professional, alert.
Yuji didn't hear him. The world around the photo began to distort. The floor of the common room felt like it was turning into liquid. His hands began to shake so violently his nails dug into his own palms.
"M...! M-ma!" he started to scream. But it wasn't a loving call. It was a cry of pure animal terror.
"Easy, Yuji. It's just a photo. Look at me," Gojo tried to get closer, reaching out to take the image away, but the movement only scared the boy more.
Yuji recoiled, dragging himself across the floor as if trying to escape an invisible predator. His babbling turned into a torrent of incomprehensible sounds, a mix of broken syllables and dry sobs.
"No! B-bad! I-inside! M-ma... bad!" he tried to say that the parasite was there, that that face belonged to the man who lived in corpses, the one who had done this to him. But the words weren't enough.
His vocal cords, still inexperienced, could only produce a tearing noise that sounded like a radio tuning into a thousand channels of static at once.
His heart pounded so hard he could hear it in his ears, a war drum announcing the end of the world. He began to hyperventilate, taking short, erratic gasps of air that failed to oxygenate his blood. Cold sweat soaked his forehead within seconds.
For Yuji, the walls of the room no longer existed.
He was back in the darkness. He was back in Kenjaku's hands. He felt the cold of the parasite's fingers on his three-year-old skin. He felt the invasion of Sukuna's finger burning his throat. Everything was coming back. The safety Gojo had given him crumbled like a house of cards under the breath of a traumatic memory.
"Aghhh! N-no... o-out! G-go... j-jo... b-bad!"
Yuji grabbed his head, yanking at his own pink hair as if trying to rip the thoughts out of his skull.
Gojo realized the fatal mistake. The photo resembled Yuji's biological mother, Kaori Itadori, but Yuji didn't see a mother. Yuji saw Kenjaku's mark. He saw the scar. He saw the death of his childhood.
"Yuji, look at me!" Gojo used his command voice, not to order, but to anchor the boy to reality. He moved with imperceptible speed and wrapped his arms around Yuji, gently immobilizing him so he would stop hurting himself. "He's not here. No one can get in here. You're in the Academy. You're with me."
Yuji struggled. He kicked and thrashed, making noises that didn't sound human. It was the sound of a soul trying to escape a body it felt had been defiled by the mere image of its creator. His babbling turned into hysterical crying, a "ma... ma... ma..." that could refer to the parasite or to a desperate plea for protection he didn't know how to articulate.
"Shhh, breathe. Just breathe with me," Gojo whispered, pressing his forehead to the boy's, ignoring the fact that Yuji was drenched in sweat and tears.
Little by little, the force of Yuji's spasms began to diminish. Not because the fear had gone away, but because his body was reaching the limit of exhaustion. His eyes remained fixed on nothing, terrified, searching for the shadow of the woman who had used him as a vessel for twelve years.
At that moment, the silence that returned to the common room was not the peaceful silence of the morning. It was a silence heavy with a bitter truth that Gojo had just understood: Yuji's wounds weren't only in his lack of vocabulary. They were carved into the marrow of his bones.
The path for Yuji to learn how to describe the world was going to be far more painful than anyone had imagined. Because before he could describe the colors of the sky, Yuji would have to learn to name his own demons without his heart stopping in the process.
Gojo lifted his gaze, his eyes hidden behind the blindfold shining with dangerous determination. If Kenjaku thought he could keep torturing this boy even from the shadows of the past, he was very wrong.
"He's not going to touch you again, Yuji," Gojo promised in a whisper, as the boy finally passed out from exhaustion in his arms. "I swear it on my life."
---
You're absolutely right. If Yuji is in that state of
Yuji is floating. It's not an unpleasant feeling; it's like being submerged in warm water where there is no up or down.
In his mind, everything is white and soft, like a room filled with fog where nothing hurts.
He is trying to remember words. Sun. Food. Friend. The words are like slippery fish he tries to catch with clumsy hands.
"I..." Yuji's consciousness babbles. His voice sounds small, like that of a child who has just woken from a nap that lasted too long. "I... am... here."
A dry, sharp laugh, like the crack of a brittle branch, breaks the mist.
"'I... am... here,'" a voice repeats, loaded with cutting sarcasm. "Wow, what eloquence. At this rate, maybe by next century you'll manage to complete a three-word sentence, brat."
Yuji blinks. The fog parts to reveal a grotesque landscape that doesn't match his peace: a mountain of skulls under a blood-red sky. Sitting at the top, one leg crossed over the other, his cheek resting on the palm of his hand, Sukuna watches him with infinite boredom.
"Who... you?" Yuji asks, tilting his head. His eyes reflect a clean curiosity, devoid of the terror he should feel before the most dangerous being in history.
Sukuna rolls his eyes and lets out a theatrical sigh.
"This is unbelievable. You've become so stupid you're not even useful for entertaining me anymore. It's like trying to talk to a piece of furniture."
Sukuna jumps down from his throne in one fluid motion, landing in front of Yuji. He is much taller, much more imposing, but Yuji doesn't step back. In his new innocence, he doesn't understand the concept of "danger." He only sees a man with too many eyes and strange tattoos.
"You... face..." Yuji reaches out a spectral hand, trying to touch the markings on Sukuna's face.
The curse slaps his hand away brusquely, not out of anger, but out of pure annoyance.
"Don't touch me with those hands full of cheap goodness. You make me sick," Sukuna says, looking him up and down. "Look at you. You're an empty vessel. Everything that made you interesting, that hatred, that guilt that ate you alive... you've erased it. Now you're just a blank canvas waiting for someone else to paint some nonsense on top."
Yuji frowns, processing the sounds. The words "hatred" and "guilt" mean nothing to him right now. They are hollow noises.
"I... don't understand," Yuji says with effort. "I... light. You... darkness."
Sukuna lets out a genuine laugh, full of contempt.
"'I light, you darkness.' How poetic. What's next? Are you going to tell me the power of friendship fixes everything?" Sukuna circles him mockingly. "You're a mistake of nature, Itadori. You've been given a second chance to be 'pure' and all you've managed to do is become an idiot who can barely speak."
Sukuna stops and pokes him on the forehead with his index finger, treating Yuji like an annoying insect.
"Do you know what's the funniest part? That you think you're safe in here. You think this silence is yours." Sukuna leans in, whispering near his ear with a malicious smile. "But every time you try to learn a new word, every time you try to be 'good,' I'm here, getting bored at your expense. I'm the parasite you can't expel because you don't even know I'm here."
Yuji looks at his own hands. They look blurry.
"I... learn," he says with childish determination. "Be... good. Help."
Sukuna yawns so widely his fangs show.
"Yes, yes. 'Help.' 'Be good.' How original," he says as he walks back to his throne, turning his back as if Yuji no longer exists. "Go on, get out of here. Wake up and go babble your nonsense in the outside world. You make me sleepier than usual."
"You... alone," Yuji suddenly says.
Sukuna stops cold. He doesn't turn around, but his shoulders tense by a millimeter.
"What did you say, brat?"
"You... alone," Yuji repeats, with that brutal honesty of someone who has no filter. "On throne... no one else. Sad."
Sukuna turns slowly. For a second, the mockery disappears, replaced by a murderous coldness, but then the mask of indifference returns.
"Sad?" Sukuna snorts with disdain. "Don't project your human weakness onto me. Being alone is the only way to be free. But of course, what would a puppet like you know about freedom?"
With a lazy flick of his hand, Sukuna makes a gesture as if shooing away a fly.
"Out. I'm tired of hearing you babble. Go learn how to speak properly so that when I break you again, at least you can beg in complete sentences. That will be much more entertaining."
The ground beneath Yuji disappears. The mountain of bones and the red sky dissolve into a whirlwind of static. The last thing Yuji sees is Sukuna sitting back down, closing his four eyes with an expression of absolute boredom, completely ignoring the existence of the boy who contains him.
Yuji falls toward the light, with one last word echoing in his mind before he wakes:
"Tomorrow... more... words."
---
Megumi and Nobara were facing, with near certainty, the most suffocating mission of their short careers. It wasn’t a Special Grade with multiple faces, nor an ancient curse on a devastated battlefield. This time, the war was being fought inside a four-square-meter room at the Tokyo Metropolitan Magic Technical College, in front of a wooden table that felt like the last bastion of a sanity slipping through their fingers.
The atmosphere was so dense it felt as though the oxygen had been replaced with lead. Outside, the afternoon sun filtered in with an orange glow, a deceptive warmth that only served to illuminate the frustration carved into the faces of the three youths.
Since that “panic attack”—the euphemism the higher-ups had used to avoid admitting that Sukuna’s vessel had shattered from within—
Yuji was no longer the same. There was a fundamental disconnect between his mind and his tongue; the bridge linking his thoughts to his vocal cords had been demolished, and he was trying to rebuild it with his bare hands, using nothing but the rubble of words.
“Come on, Itadori, breathe. Please, just breathe,” Nobara pleaded, clenching her fists on her knees. Her tone wavered between the authority of a commander and the desperation of a sister. “One word. I’m not asking for a speech, just a noun. What do you want? Food? Ramen? Meat?”
Yuji looked at her. His eyes, once sparkling with loud, vibrant life, were now wells of unsettling purity. He shook his head so vehemently he nearly lost his balance. He pointed to his chest—the exact place where the King of Curses’ malice once pulsed—and then gestured outward, spreading his arms as if trying to embrace the entire horizon.
From his mouth came only broken fragments: “Ka… n… no… ma…”
“Bed? You want to sleep, Yuji?” Megumi asked. He tried to keep his voice flat, but his soul was splintering by the second. Seeing Itadori reduced to that nervous babble, stripped of his radiant joy, was likely the most horrifying sight he had ever witnessed.
Yuji let out a growl of pure frustration. He slammed his palm against the table, not out of aggression toward them, but out of hatred for his own inability. His eyes blurred with tears as his fingers searched the air for something invisible, something slipping away from him.
“It’s not ‘bed,’ Megumi,” Nobara snapped, shooting her partner a tense look. “He’s trying to describe something much bigger. Itadori, look at me. We’re switching to Plan B.”
Nobara pulled out her phone and began scrolling through images, resorting to the basics: visual communication. Photos of food, uniforms, Gojo making a fool of himself, a dog, a flower. Yuji stared at the screen with feverish intensity. His fingers brushed the glass, but his head kept moving side to side: no, no, no. He paused briefly on a photo of a sunrise Nobara had taken the week before. His eyes lit up with a flicker of recognition, but the shadow returned immediately.
“Light… no…” he managed to say. His voice sounded rough, as if he had swallowed sand. “Everything… light… but… nothing.”
“Everything is light, but there’s nothing?” Megumi leaned forward, dissecting each syllable. “Are you talking about what you feel inside? About Sukuna?”
At the mention of the curse’s name, the air seemed to freeze. But Yuji didn’t react with fear. He reacted with absolute confusion, tilting his head as if Megumi had spoken a word from a language dead for millennia.
“Su… ku?” Yuji repeated. The name didn’t evoke a monster; it was just an empty sound in his mind. It was clear: Itadori had no idea who Sukuna was.
“He’s blocked,” Nobara whispered, shoving her phone away with a sharp motion. “It’s like he formatted his own dictionary. Megumi, give him the notebook.”
Megumi extended a notebook and a thick graphite pencil with almost sacred care.
“Draw, Yuji. Don’t think about words. Just put on paper what you saw when everything turned white.”
Yuji gripped the pencil with excessive force, as if it were a weapon. His breathing grew heavy, loud. He hunched over the page, blocking their view. The sound of graphite tearing across paper wasn’t that of an artist, but of a fratricidal struggle. Scratch, scratch, scratch. The pencil moved with violent speed, lines overlapping until they nearly pierced the page.
Nobara and Megumi exchanged a glance.
They could feel Yuji’s energy fluctuating; it was strangely clean, stripped of the poison that had always accompanied it, yet charged with an electric anguish.
After ten minutes of sepulchral silence, Yuji stopped. His shoulders slumped, and the pencil slipped from his hand, rolling across the table before hitting the floor with a dry clack.
“There…” he whispered, pushing the notebook forward. He was drenched in sweat, his hands trembling uncontrollably.
Megumi and Nobara leaned in.
What they saw was chaos: an incomprehensible scribble, a vortex of red and black lines devouring each other without any apparent meaning.
“It’s… a nest?” Nobara ventured, failing to hide her disappointment.
Yuji looked at her. He saw the incomprehension in her eyes. He looked at Megumi, who was searching for some mathematical logic in the disorder. The last spark of hope of being understood died in that instant.
“No…” Yuji’s voice cracked. “No… nest. It’s… it’s…”
He struck his temple with his fist, once, twice, in desperation.
“Itadori, stop!” Megumi grabbed his hand firmly. “It’s okay. It doesn’t matter. We’ll try again tomorrow.”
“Yeah, tomorrow!” Nobara added with forced cheer that sounded like shattered glass. “It’ll be better tomorrow, for sure. Let’s go to the kitchen, I had Panda bring some good meat. Let’s eat something.”
Yuji didn’t respond. He let himself be guided out of the room like a sleepwalker, dragging the weight of a world only he inhabited. As they walked down the halls, Nobara and Megumi exchanged looks of defeat. It felt like they were losing their friend not to a battlefield wound, but to the impenetrable wall of silence.
The room fell into shadow.
The notebook remained open on the table, the scribble almost pulsing under the silver light of the moon.
A moment later, the door slid open without a sound.
Gojo entered with his usual effortless elegance, hands in his pockets, blindfold covering his eyes. He had avoided intervening to let the students connect with Yuji in their own way, but a sharp intuition had drawn him there.
He approached the table. His Six Eyes did not see mere pigment; they saw the flow of information, the residue of mental energy, the geometry of the soul that Itadori had etched onto the page. Slowly, he removed his blindfold. His blue eyes, like endless skies, locked onto the graphite chaos.
In an instant, the perspective shifted.
Gojo didn’t see scribbles. He saw the structure of a domain. He saw a throne of bones blurred by light. The distorted circle at the center wasn’t a mistake; it was emptiness. But not a terrifying void, rather the emptiness of a room purified down to its very foundations.
He lifted the drawing between his long fingers.
“So this is what you were trying to say…” he murmured.
His mind processed the terrifying truth behind the scribble. Somehow, Itadori had held a dialogue with Sukuna while unconscious. The drawing was the record of that silent conversation. And that meant two things that would change the board entirely: Sukuna was not dead, and Yuji, even in his most fragile and innocent state, remained connected to the greatest curse in history by a thread that no one—not even Gojo—could cut.
---
The days at the Tokyo Metropolitan Magic Technical College had taken on a dreamlike quality for Yuji Itadori. After the incident, the world seemed to have been washed in watercolors: colors were brighter, the air sweeter, and the weight he once carried on his shoulders had dissipated like morning mist. However, at the center of that idyllic landscape, there was a persistent static, a hum that did not come from his ears, but from the foundations of his soul.
Walking through the streets of Shinjuku on a free afternoon was, for the “new” Yuji, a sensory adventure. Megumi and Nobara followed a few steps behind, watching him with a mix of tenderness and paranoid vigilance.
Yuji stopped in front of a flower stand. His fingers brushed the petals of a sunflower with almost childlike fascination.
“Yellow. What a vulgar color for a plant that exists only to stare at the sun like an idiot.”
Yuji blinked, tilting his head. The voice wasn’t a physical sound; it was like an intrusive thought, an idea that didn’t belong to him but still took up space. It didn’t scare him, because he didn’t remember what fear was, but it was… annoying. Like a fly buzzing in a sealed room.
“Something wrong, Itadori?” Megumi asked, jaw tightening at the absent look on his friend’s face.
“The flower…” Yuji whispered. “It says something. Not words. But it makes noise.”
“It’s just the wind, idiot,” Nobara said, though she exchanged a nervous glance with Fushiguro.
They kept walking until they crossed paths with an elderly woman struggling with two heavy grocery bags. Before Megumi could react, Yuji was already there, offering his hands with a smile free of any hidden angle.
“I… help,” Yuji said, taking the bags with superhuman ease.
“Pathetic. Using the strength of a god to carry radishes and onions. You’re a waste of skin, brat. You should let them fall; the sound of her bones breaking would be far more entertaining than this sanctimonious silence.”
Yuji frowned as he escorted the woman. He didn’t understand “bones breaking” in that context, but the tone of the inner voice carried lethal boredom.
“You… be quiet,” Yuji muttered inwardly.
“Did you say something?” the woman asked, looking at him with gratitude.
“No… I… music in head,” he replied, scratching the back of his neck.
“Music? You call my voice music? Your taste sits in the same place as your intelligence: in the mud.”
Sukuna wasn’t shouting. He wasn’t trying to take control. He was simply there, commenting on Yuji’s life with a cynicism sharp enough to draw blood. For the King of Curses, Yuji’s innocence was the most boring and ridiculous show in existence, and he couldn’t help but heckle from the front row.
---
That same day, as they walked, Yuji drifted away from the path, distracted by what could only be the sound of sobbing. Concerned, he went to find the distressed person, intending to comfort them.
Instead, he found a small, weeping mass. A curse.
“Hello,” Yuji said, crouching in front of the creature.
The curse hissed, launching a weak swipe that tore the sleeve of Yuji’s hoodie. He didn’t flinch. There was no surge of cursed energy, no fighting stance. Only immense curiosity.
“You… cry,” Yuji observed, extending a hand toward the mass of eyes. “Why… cry?”
“Because it’s trash, just like you,” Sukuna’s voice echoed in his mind, this time tinged with irritation. “Kill it already. Its whining is giving me a headache. One hit and it’s over. Don’t make me watch you try to befriend a stain of filth.”
“No… kill,” Yuji whispered. “It’s… scared.”
The curse, confused by the lack of hostility, prepared a more serious attack. Its jaws opened, revealing rows of shapeless teeth. Outside the warehouse, Megumi already had his hands poised to summon the Divine Dogs, but Gojo stopped him with an arm.
Inside, the curse lunged for Yuji’s neck.
“Stupid brat!” Sukuna roared, and for an instant, the air around Yuji vibrated with a terrifying gravitational pressure. “If you let that thing touch us, I swear I’ll find a way to make you feel every inch of your skin burn. Move!”
Yuji, driven by a mix of residual survival instinct and Sukuna’s shout, dodged the attack with an elegance he shouldn’t possess. He moved like a leaf in the wind, landing softly a few meters away.
“I don’t want… fight,” Yuji said, his voice becoming strangely firm. “You… go. Go… to the light.”
The purity within Yuji at that moment was so absolute it acted like poison to the curse. Positive energy, born from a mind that held no malice or resentment, began to radiate from his body.
For the low-grade creature, contact with Yuji’s aura was like being submerged in acid. It shrank, shrieking, and finally dissolved—not from a physical blow, but because it couldn’t survive in an environment devoid of darkness.
Yuji stared at the spot where the creature had been. He felt sad. He felt like he had failed to “help.”
“Well… now we kill them with boredom,” Sukuna commented with a mental yawn. “That was the most embarrassing display of power I’ve witnessed in a thousand years. Congratulations, Itadori. You’ve invented exorcism by pity.”
“Be quiet,” Yuji replied, stepping out of the warehouse into the sunlight.
---
That night, Gojo entered Yuji’s room. He found him sitting in front of a white wall, a piece of charcoal in his hand. Yuji didn’t notice his presence; he was absorbed, drawing lines that seemed endless.
Gojo observed the drawing. It was a larger, more detailed version of the notebook scribble. But now, the red and black lines were being surrounded by white strokes, made with chalk Yuji must have found somewhere.
“What are you doing, Yuji?” Gojo asked softly.
Yuji stopped and looked at him. There was charcoal on his cheek and exhaustion etched into his expression.
“He… doesn’t stop,” Yuji said, pointing to his own head. “The man with four eyes. Says things… bad things. But… also says truth.”
Gojo tensed. “What truth does he say?”
“He says I am… a lie.” Yuji lowered his gaze to his hands. “He says this light… is a box. And outside the box… there is blood.”
Gojo stepped closer and placed a hand on Yuji’s hair. He knew this “new innocence” was fragile. Sukuna didn’t need to attack physically; he only needed to be the voice of reality Yuji was trying to ignore.
“That man…” Yuji continued, “…is in the drawing. Look.”
Gojo turned to the wall. With his Six Eyes, he saw the full structure. Yuji had drawn the Malevolent Shrine—but as if it were a prison seen from the outside. And at the center, where Sukuna’s throne should have been, Yuji had drawn a small, curled figure: himself.
“It’s not Sukuna who is trapped,” Gojo whispered to himself. “It’s Yuji who locked himself inside this purity so he wouldn’t have to see the monster within.”
The drawing was a silent confession. Yuji, despite his amnesia, knew something was wrong. He knew his peace was artificial.
“Tomorrow…” Yuji said, closing his eyes as he leaned against Gojo’s knee, “…tomorrow I want to learn… the word ‘forgiveness.’ He says it doesn’t exist. But I want… to find it.”
Gojo looked at him with infinite sadness. He knew that as long as Sukuna existed as that “background noise,” Yuji’s innocence would be a slow torture. Sukuna wouldn’t disappear; he would sit there, mocking every act of kindness, every smile, until the glass finally shattered.
“We’ll find it, Yuji,” Gojo lied, covering him with a blanket. “We’ll search for every word you need.”
As Gojo left the room, one last laugh, deep and dark, vibrated in the air—though only Yuji, in his dreams, could hear it.
“Search for whatever you want, brat. But at the end of the day, when the sun sets and the light fades… it’ll be just the two of us left. And I always have the final word.”
--
Time at the Tokyo Metropolitan Magic Technical College seemed to have settled into a fragile, suspended calm. Months had passed since the catastrophic incidents that had nearly fractured the entire sorcerer society. During that semester of shadows, Yuji had fulfilled the grim prophecy placed upon him: all twenty fingers of Ryomen Sukuna now resided within his body.
The process had been agonizing. Each additional finger did not merely increase the pressure on his soul; it gnawed at his sanity, scraping away pieces of himself like waves grinding down a cliff. Yet something unexpected had occurred along the way. As Sukuna approached the fullness of his power, the King of Curses had grown strangely quiet. And Yuji, under the constant supervision of Shoko and Gojo, had slowly begun to rebuild himself.
Yuji was no longer the hollow, catatonic vessel of those first weeks. He had regained his voice and his ability to interact with the world, though a faintly ethereal quality lingered around him, something almost childlike. He moved through daily life with a social clumsiness that resembled a teenager waking from a twelve-year dream. He could hold conversations again, laugh at Nobara’s jokes, and share comfortable silences with Megumi.
To the outside world, Itadori looked like a normal boy his age once more.
To Gojo, he was a bomb with the timer frozen at the final second.
Gojo himself had not wasted a single breath of time. His frequent absences were not only the result of special-grade missions. He had become obsessed with two objectives: discovering the whereabouts of the “False Geto,” the entity desecrating the body of his only friend, and finding a way to remove Sukuna from Yuji without allowing the boy’s heart to stop beating.
The results were bittersweet. The traitor’s trail had gone cold, dissolving into the murky labyrinth of international curse politics. But within the forbidden archives of the Gojo clan, and through his research into the phenomenon known as Soul Resonance, Satoru believed he had discovered a crack in the armor of the King of Curses.
Gojo realized that the relationship between Yuji and Sukuna was not that of jailer and prisoner.
It was the relationship between an architect and his bridge.
Sukuna was an immense force of cursed energy that required a physical and spiritual structure in order to exist in the world. Yuji was that structure. Destroy the bridge, and the energy would disperse, but the architect would vanish with it.
Fighting Sukuna directly was useless.
Sukuna was conflict.
The solution was something far stranger.
Absolute indifference.
---
The underground chamber of the school had been covered with thousands of paper talismans marked with special-grade seals. They clung to the walls, the ceiling, and the floor like pale leaves in an endless winter. The air itself felt heavy, buzzing with a pressure that made the skin on Megumi’s arms prickle.
He and Nobara stood at the perimeter of the chamber, watching silently.
Yuji sat in the center of the ritual circle, bare-chested. His torso was covered in complex lines of black ink that shimmered faintly with blue light, forming a lattice meant to guide the separation of two souls that had been tangled together for far too long.
When the final seal ignited, Yuji closed his eyes.
His consciousness fell downward.
---
Inside his inner world, Yuji found himself once again standing before the Malevolent Shrine.
The landscape stretched endlessly, a graveyard made of bones beneath a sky the color of spilled blood. Towering gates carved from skulls loomed above him. The air smelled of iron and rot.
And there, seated upon his throne of bones, was Sukuna.
The King of Curses leaned lazily against one armrest, his cheek resting on his hand in open boredom. But when Yuji began walking toward him with steady steps, all four of Sukuna’s eyes slowly narrowed.
“So you’ve finally returned, brat,” Sukuna’s voice boomed, making the ground tremble beneath Yuji’s feet.
“Tell me… did you come to beg for mercy? Or did you come so I can finally devour what remains of you now that the cycle is complete?”
Yuji kept walking.
There was no fear in his gaze.
But there was no hatred either.
Hatred is still a bond. It is a thread that ties two souls together.
Yuji had cut that thread.
“I don’t… want you anymore,” Yuji said.
Outside the mental realm, his voice was soft.
Here, it echoed with the quiet authority of someone standing inside his own house.
“You… are noise. I don’t want noise. I want… silence.”
For a heartbeat, the shrine stood silent.
Then Sukuna erupted into a sharp, mocking laugh.
“I am the one who sets the rhythm of this world!” he roared.
“Without me, you are nothing but a corpse that refuses to rot!”
Outside, Gojo began the ritual’s final phase.
He did not unleash Limitless to destroy.
He used it to isolate.
A conceptual void formed around Yuji’s soul, separating it from everything that did not belong to it.
“ITADORI!” Gojo shouted through the veil of energy.
“You are not a vessel! You are not a weapon for the elders or a cradle for monsters! You are just Yuji! Let go of everything that isn’t you!”
---
Inside the inner world, the Malevolent Shrine began to crack.
Stone fractured.
The bone pillars trembled.
Sukuna slowly rose to his feet.
His crimson aura exploded outward like a wildfire, flooding the sky with pressure so immense that it would have crushed a lesser mind instantly.
“You cannot erase me!” Sukuna thundered.
“I am Sukuna! I am a natural disaster given flesh! I am the calamity humanity worships through terror!”
Yuji stopped in front of the throne.
He looked up at the towering four-armed figure.
And for the first time… he did not see a god.
He saw a stain.
An error on a canvas that was meant to be clean.
“No,” Yuji said quietly, placing his hand on the edge of the bone throne.
“You’re just someone bad.”
“…and annoying.”
---
The contact did not cause an explosion.
What followed was something far worse for a being whose existence depended on dominating others.
Transparency.
Sukuna thrived on resistance. On rage. On fear.
Yuji had become something else entirely.
A perfectly smooth surface.
There was nothing for Sukuna’s malice to grip.
For the first time in a thousand years, the King of Curses had nowhere to stand.
---
The expulsion was violent.
Without Yuji’s body to anchor it, Sukuna’s colossal mass of cursed energy burst outward into the real world, distorting the air of the underground chamber like a collapsing star.
But Megumi and Nobara were not mere spectators.
“NOW!” Megumi shouted.
His shadows erupted upward, forming massive pillars that wrapped around the red-black storm of energy.
At the same instant, Nobara raised her hammer.
The nail she struck had been prepared with a reversed resonance technique. It was not meant to damage a soul.
It was meant to pin one in place.
The hammer struck.
A thunderous crack echoed through the chamber.
The cursed energy compressed violently inward.
Together, they forced Sukuna’s will into a single point.
When the light faded, a black crystal remained floating in the air. A gem of absolute darkness, pulsing with powerless hatred.
Inside it, the presence of Sukuna thrashed like a storm trapped in glass.
Gojo stepped forward.
With a calm motion of his fingers, he activated a dimensional transport seal.
The crystal vanished into the void between spaces.
“Safe travels, King of Curses,” Gojo said lightly.