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According to legend, Prince Shotoku could perfectly hear ten people’s conversations at once.
Prince Shotoku must’ve been fucking miserable, thinks Gojo Satoru. He knows he is, and he only has six eyes.
He was also, supposedly, so intelligent that he could listen to these ten people’s conversations and give them all perfect answers.
Yeah, bullshit. No one could do that, no matter how smart they were. Maybe Prince Shotoku was cursed, too.
“You know,” says Suguru, swinging his legs back and forth over the roof, staring at the sun dipping behind the trees surrounding Jujutsu Tech, “I think the emotion I feel the most is pity.”
Satoru glances at him over the rim of his glasses. He knows what he’s talking about just from the way his voice sounds — it’s the only thing they’ve talked about during every quiet moment like this in the last week. Suguru always has one more thought to share. Satoru’s already compartmentalized the memory into small, neat, manageable pieces, and maybe one day he’ll go through them. Or maybe one day he won’t.
“The Time Vessel Association really has no idea what they’re even dealing with. To us, Tengen-sama is someone…” he waves his hands in the air, searching for the right words, “tangible and real. To them, I think Tengen-sama is some thing that exists beyond them-”
“They do,” points out Satoru.
“I mean in a religious sense,” Suguru scowls.
Satoru waits for his point.
“Putting someone on the pedestal of deity is different. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. I pity them because they are so convinced they’re doing the right thing. They- … ugh.”
He sighs, at a loss for words.
“Do you think they’re doing the right thing?” asks Satoru quietly. It’s so simple and yet the mere notion that Satoru might think this of him wounds Suguru to his core.
He whips his head around and stares at Satoru in disbelief. “Fuck, of course I don’t. I don’t agree with whatever twisted idea of enlightenment they have.” He pauses. “I also feel pity for myself. Pitiful that I couldn’t do anything to stop it.”
“Yeah,” Satoru says. He kicks a pebble off the side of the roof, hands in his pockets. Functionally, it ends the conversation.
Prince Shotoku is said to have brought Buddhism to Japan.
He was a devoted Buddhist, credited with the “first Japanese text”, a commentary on one of the most influential of the Mahayana sutras. The Lotus sutra would go on to inspire centuries of Japanese Buddhism, the religion itself used as a tool to establish the Imperial family as the true rulers of Japan.
Despite being credited as the founder of Japanese Buddhism, it is also said that the Prince respected Shinto and never visited Buddhist temples without visiting Shinto shrines, Satoru reads from the page. He’s filling another sleepless night with a mindless Wikipedia dive, and it’s doing nothing to curb his anxiety.
If Prince Shotoku had doubts, they are lost to history.
The wood of the bench is hard on Suguru’s back but he leans against it anyway, too tired to sit up straight unsupported and too proud to slouch. Haibara Yu is to his right, ever the picture of youth and optimism — things Suguru feels are slipping away from him by the day.
“Yu,” says Suguru suddenly, and even he doesn’t know where this question comes from, “Do you like being a sorcerer?”
The other boy hums while he turns his response over in his head, and finally answers with, “I like being able to do something only I can do.”
Suguru is unsatisfied with this response, but he doesn’t pry further.
It’s then that she appears, the special grade sorcerer who lives outside the boundaries of the school and the borders of the jujutsu world. Tsukumo Yuki was born into their reality but removed herself from its confines.
Later, Suguru will wonder if she’s the only one of them with any sense.
“We’re looking at symptoms, not solving the root problem,” she says. She might be talking to him, she might be talking to empty air. “There has to be a better way.”
The things she says to him, things about cursed energy and humanity and the control of sorcerers, they have a certain wisdom to them. Something he can’t quite wrap his head around right now, but it feels like maybe, just maybe, there’s something else.
There’s doubt.
“Exorcising curses is the only way to maintain our stability,” Suguru says, clinging to the part of him that wants to believe in the system.
“There’s a reason,” she says, her voice lowering, “That I’m still a sorcerer and an ally of the school, at least on paper.”
Prince Shotoku was born into royalty, the son of an emperor. The three clans of the Asuka period — the Imperial family, the Soga, and the Mononobe — were tangled into the politics of each others’ lives. They played on a stage the rest of Japan would never see, behind closed doors and drawn curtains, common folk unaware of the true extent these families’ bad blood had on their everyday lives.
But despite the influence of the Soga and the Mononobe — despite Soga no Umako orchestrating the events that led to Prince Shotoku’s regency, despite Mononobe no Futsuhime’s betrayal tearing her family from power — it was Prince Shotoku who rose to fame, who became a legend.
Yu is dead.
Suguru is amazed that Kento is still standing. He himself had collapsed into a chair at the news, and he hadn’t even been on the mission.
Satoru had taken it over when they had failed. Maybe Satoru should take on every mission, from now on.
Satoru had wanted a chance to grieve too, of course. But there is no rest for the Strongest, and he did not have the luxury of choice.
As he sits there, silent, Suguru tries to grapple with the meaning of Yu’s loss. Reasoning slips through his fingers like sand. Ultimately, he comes up with nothing.
He wonders who will be next. Kento? Shoko? Himself?
What will the meaning be, then?
The first step in the quest to end curses, he thinks, is to skirt death.
Yuki doesn’t push him, but her questions do. Yu’s death does. Once Suguru starts looking, he finds what he’s looking for in Taoist magic.
Shikaisen are hermits who try to escape their lifespan by behaving like the dead.
While there are many ways to become a shikaisen, one method is to "completely abandon the body, transfer the soul into a particular object and, when the time comes, the object will take their form while their corpse becomes the object."
Satoru stares at him. “You have a death wish.”
“No,” says Suguru with finality. “I have the exact opposite.”
“You’re asking me to die.”
“I’m asking you to trust me.”
That shuts him up.
Shoko sighs dramatically from the other side of the room, her cigarette balanced between two fingers, elbow propped up on her crossed legs. They both turn to look at her.
“Shoko?” Suguru prompts.
She takes a long drag and doesn’t look at him. “You’re fucking batshit,” she finally says.
“Is that your final verdict?” he asks, trying to sound sarcastic, but it comes out as disappointed instead.
“What do you want me to say? That it’ll work? I have no clue.”
“I just wanted your opinion, because of your-”
“Technique?” She raises a brow. “I don’t know what I’m doing any more than you two do.”
“Fair enough,” answers Suguru. His face screws up into a frown, the cogs in his head turning, and Shoko can almost see the smoke coming out of his ears.
“I’ll do it though,” Shoko says suddenly, and both Suguru and Satoru snap up to look at her. “On one condition.”
“Okay?”
“If you move your entire soul at once, you’ll be effectively dead to the world until you resurrect. The school will figure out something’s up if you suddenly disappear.”
Suguru nods, frown replaced with determination. Shoko should give herself more credit.
“This is just a hunch, but… figure out how to transfer most of it. Enough that when your old body dies, your cursed energy won’t be extinguished. That way it becomes a contingency plan. Then, I’ll do it.”
“All right,” Suguru agrees, his lips already turning up at the possibility of success. Then, he turns to his best friend.
“Satoru?”
It’s a plea.
Come with me.
Finally, after a long pause, Satoru’s face is unreadable as he says, “Okay.”
They each are tasked with finding an object that can hold pieces of their souls. An object with the ability to protect something so fragile and yet so strong, an object with both personal meaning and no attachment, an object unassuming but undoubtedly special.
Shoko chooses a book.
Books are timeless, she reasons, and hold power. Knowledge. It’s fitting for her, a person so simple on the outside. She’s too dense for anyone to peel back the cover and read her pages, but she’s valuable all the same.
Suguru chooses a pocketwatch.
He doesn’t explain his reasoning, and Satoru doesn’t comment that the only thing Suguru Geto has ever been afraid of is time.
Satoru picks a locket, and doesn’t show them the picture inside of it.
“I think love,” he says, when Suguru presses if it’ll be enough, “is the only thing stronger than I am.”
They complete the ritual together, all three of them, and it feels like crossing a line they were never meant to reach, breaking a rule they never knew of. To Suguru, it feels like leaving something behind. He doesn’t know what it is, but it's freeing.
Both Soga no Umako and Mononobe no Moriya were advisors to Emperor Youmei, Prince Shotoku’s father. Shotoku was related to the Soga clan by blood.
The Soga were proponents of the expansion of Buddhism in Japan, while the Mononobe actively opposed it. Their political and religious war culminated in the Battle of Shigisan, where Mononobe no Moriya was killed.
According to the Nihon Shoki , Soga no Umako “gratuitously killed Moriya by carrying out his wife's plot.”
His wife was Mononobe no Futsuhime, Moriya’s younger sister and traitor to the Mononobe clan.
Suguru changes, from then on. Satoru watches it happen in slow motion, too slow for him to recognize until it’s too late.
One day, Suguru kills one hundred and twelve people and becomes a curse user.
In his room — a room far too full with memories of a person who no longer exists — Satoru presses his palms into his eyes and it’s still not enough to block everything out.
Should he tell the school about how killing Suguru would accomplish nothing? Would they even believe him? Should he confess to studying magic outside of jujutsu, dabbling in things he shouldn’t, trying to achieve immortality?
Should he take Suguru’s pocketwatch and destroy it?
He can’t do it.
He breaks into one of the school’s shrines in the dead of night, and finds the miniature mausoleum they had hidden there. It’s a mausoleum in name only, really just a sealed box covered in ofuda , and the only remains it contains are their three talismans.
Shoko had called it bad luck to keep non-jujutsu charms in one of the school’s Pure Land temples. The boys hadn’t been able to tell if she was serious in her conviction at the time, but maybe she’d been right. Maybe this was one more factor in Suguru straying from the right path.
He takes it with him. It’s a risky move, since these days he takes so many high-level missions that he’s rarely home. Even so, he can’t trust himself to leave it there.
If Suguru is going to steal his talisman, Satoru wants him to walk through his room first.
They meet in Shinjuku.
“Here,” says Suguru, holding up his hand. Satoru extends an open palm, and Suguru drops something into it.
“I’m sorry,” he says, as he turns his back on Satoru, “I couldn’t do it.”
“Wait,” Satoru calls after him. “What about Shoko?”
Suguru stops mid-step, hand clenching at his side. “I found hers first.”
As he walks away, Satoru looks down in his palm to see his locket, open but undamaged — and right there, inside of it, smiles back a younger image of himself and Geto Suguru, cropped from a photo of all the students.
When one of Suguru’s curses kills Shoko on December 24th, 2017, Satoru prays for her death.
Instead, his worst fears come true.
Ieiri Shoko, with most of her soul sealed in a now-destroyed talisman, resurrects as a vengeful spirit.
She’s a tame spirit, perhaps because of the shikaisen ritual, perhaps because of her technique, but a ghost all the same. She’s just like herself except a little older, with longer hair that lacks its lustre and dark bags under her tired eyes. Satoru looks down to see her legs replaced with twin ghosttails, flicking idly.
“Shoko-” he starts, only to be cut off.
“Shh,” she says, floating closer. Hovering a few inches off the ground, she can look him in the eyes for once.
Shoko reaches out and holds his head in her hands, pressing her forehead to his. “It’s okay.”
“I’m sorry we dragged you into this.”
“It was my decision.”
“Still.”
“So, are you going to kill him?”
“I don’t know,” says Satoru, and it’s the truth.
In the end, it’s Okkotsu Yuuta who fatally wounds Suguru, and Satoru who finds him already half-dead.
“Where’s your talisman?” Satoru questions.
Suguru laughs. The corner of his mouth is dripping with blood. “I missed you too.”
“Where is it?”
“Why? Are you going to curse me here, at the end?”
Satoru struggles to keep the shake and desperation out of his voice. “Tell me this isn’t you. Either resurrect yourself and come back to me, the way you were — or die, right here.” His voice is so uncharacteristically small. “And don’t come back.”
“I’m sorry, Satoru,” smiles Suguru, genuinely, despite his circumstance, “I truly don’t know. After I stole all three from you, it disappeared. I’ve been looking for it since.”
Satoru waits by his best friend’s body for a vengeful ghost to appear.
He waits months for Suguru to resurrect.
No one comes back.
“Who are you?”
The imposter in front of him touches a hand to his chest and scoffs. “Geto Suguru, of course. Did you forget? How sad.”
“Your body… even your cursed energy… my six eyes tell me you’re Geto Suguru,” Satoru says, slow and deliberate, “But my soul knows otherwise! Hurry up and answer! Who the hell are you?!”
Suguru’s body pulls the stitches at his forehead, showing off its new cursed owner in a gruesome display. Satoru can’t decide if he’s relieved to see that this isn’t the person he knew, the one he trusted, or devastated that even after all this time Suguru still hasn’t resurrected.
He can’t feel any of his own cursed energy, but the energy radiating off Suguru is enough to choke the breath out of his lungs. There, underneath it, is something decidedly not jujutsu yet familiar, covered in layers of seals and barriers, but unmistakably—
The pocketwatch.
He has it.
“Good night, Gojo Satoru,” comes Suguru’s voice, as smooth and beautiful as it always had been. “Let us meet again in the new world.”
“Yeah, maybe it’s goodnight for me,” Satoru scoffs, “But it’s about time for you to wake up.”