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Life had settled down almost eerily easy after the Shinjuku Showdown.
The area was a war zone, but now it was disturbingly quiet, like the world was eager to forget what had happened.
It would be nice if the survivors could do the same thing.
For the first day or two, the rest of the living sorcerers in Tokyo were busy cleaning up the aftermath of the fights. Sukuna was gone, defeated, but the scars he left behind felt permanent. With his defeat and the end of Mei Mei’s live broadcast, word had spread that people could safely enter the area again.
But it wasn’t until the third day that news reporters from all over Japan started to pour into Shinjuku.
Hikari saw familiar faces from her old Kyoto morning news team. They hugged, talked, cried, and shared the same relief that the horror was over. However, she refused to appear on the news, even though people had been demanding an explanation for her involvement in the jujutsu world.
“Just say that I’m a jujutsu sorcerer who loves to cook,” she said.
A week passed in a blur, and as the rubble cleared, so too did the illusions of heroism. She heard reports from the students and auxiliary managers about their encounters with families searching for loved ones among the ruins.
It certainly wasn’t a pleasant experience. The scorn they received was understandable. The fearful looks directed at them as if they were wild beasts were also understandable. There was nothing the sorcerers could do but trying to help at a distance, knowing that their presence only deepened the wounds.
“This has turned out to be quite bothersome,” commented Principal Gakuganji on one evening, when everyone was in the dining room.
No one refuted him, for it was true. Tiredness was evident on many sleepless faces, especially the young students. Perhaps they hadn’t realised how heavy a cross they were carrying as jujutsu sorcerers from non-sorcerers’ eyes. Now that the whole world knew about their existence, had heard, seen, or experienced the power of the King of Curses, they demanded the same peaceful life they once had.
Not so easy now, was it?
It was always easier to not know too much. There was a good reason why they said ignorance was a blessing.
Out of other things that she had to do, Hikari dreaded taking care of Satoru Gojo’s cremation more than anything. The strongest of them all had gone, and yet the world went on without him.
She couldn’t let Megumi handle it, as the boy had gone through enough horror of a lifetime for someone his age. It wouldn’t be fair to him. Satoru had been more than a teacher or a benefactor; he was a pillar, a connection to a past that Hikari herself barely understood.
Just like with Suguru, she didn’t know how deep the bond between her senpai and the curt-looking boy was. Losing him was one thing, but being the one to erase his physical body was another thing altogether.
Besides that, there was also a problem of where to cremate Satoru. Sending his body back to Kyoto would be pointless, as he held no particular strong memory with anyone at the Gojo Residence. Yet, he didn’t have any other relatives in Tokyo who would keep a shrine with his ashes in their house.
Because Hikari didn’t want to be that person.
She didn’t want to be reminded that he was gone. The mere idea of it was too painful, too real. The wound was still raw, bleeding at the slightest touch.
And she wasn’t his kin either.
However, as one would expect from a mega-rich head of a clan, he had made arrangements. It was as if he had planned for this.
Sometime later, a lawyer arrived at Tokyo Jujutsu High. He came with formalities and documents that Hikari didn’t want to deal with, yet had no choice but to face. She led him to Yaga-sensei’s former office, where at least it offered them some privacy. She asked Megumi to join them as well, but the boy assured her that there was nothing for him in the will.
She didn’t have the usual peppiness to argue with the boy, so she just nodded and promised to let him know what was written in the will.
But the reading came as a blow to Hikari as she was apparently Satoru’s sole successor.
“’To Hikari Takashi’,” the lawyer began, “’everything that I own is now yours’.” And the lawyer showed the deeds of properties, bank statements, and other lists of fortunes that belonged to the white-haired sorcerer. There were even assets listed in other countries, places so foreign to her that they sounded like made-up names.
By the end of the reading, the table was covered with formal documents.
Not only had he chosen her without telling her, but his will was prepared since he became the head of the Gojo clan. It showed that he had been thinking of his own death more too often than she had initially thought. She had been oblivious, as usual, when it came to his inner feelings. For her, it was like adding insults to injury.
“What does that mean?” Hikari asked flatly. It all felt absurd. Her mind struggled to catch up with the information.
“It means, Satoru Gojo-sama has left everything to you, Takashi-san.”
“What about Megumi Fushiguro? Or Tsumiki Fushiguro?” she pressed after a pause, frowning haughtily at the papers. “Is there nothing for them?”
The lawyer looked uncomfortable. He shifted in his seat before showing the last paper from the stack in his hands.
“Satoru Gojo-sama has amended his will. A month ago, he suddenly asked for the will to be updated, stating that you are the sole heir.”
He showed the original will, in which Satoru actually planned to leave his assets to the Gojo clan, or to Masaharu, to be precise. Her name was also mentioned in the original document, but only to inherit some of his property.
If it was a month ago, that would be after he was released from the Prison Realm. Was that the small hiccup that he said he had to finish first?
What’s this? Hikari asked herself, only half listening to the explanation of details. What kind of a joke was this?
Did he think she would just accept it? That she would be okay with it?
“Yesterday Once More,” she whispered.
“Excuse me?” asked the lawyer.
“It’s a Hong Kong rom-com film,” answered Hikari in a dreamy voice, more to herself than to anyone else in the room. “It’s about a divorced jewel thief couple who seem to be at odds with each other at first. They were happily married, until one day the husband asked for a divorce and left with no explanation. Throughout the film, they’re trying to show each other that they are smarter, richer, happier, and better at stealing. But in the end, we find out that the husband is dying of an illness and bequeaths all of his wealth to his ex-wife.”
The lawyer, who clearly didn’t anticipate Hikari to suddenly talk about a film, or perhaps he had never seen it before, could only stare in confusion. She looked down on the will, at the red seal of the Gojo clan next to Satoru’s full name.
“I feel like I can understand the husband’s motive for leaving his wife, yet I also can’t understand it,” she continued with a frown. “Wouldn’t it be better if he’d just come clean with her so they can spend more time together? Does he think he’s doing her a favour by relieving her of the duty to take care of him when he’s dying? What does he think about the bond between them? Just black on white?”
She reached for a deed to Satoru’s apartment. The one where they spent his last days together. It felt like eons ago.
“If I refuse to accept the will, what will happen to his assets?”
The lawyer cleared his throat. He said cautiously, “As there are no direct descendants or next of kin, the country will take care of them.”
That was when something snapped inside her mind. Out of nowhere, she threw her head backwards and burst into laughter.
“The country?” she asked, not sure why the notion sounded extremely funny to her grieving ears. “The country will take care?” she repeated between laughs, holding her stomach. She wiped a single tear from the corner of her right eye and then sniffled. “Ah… That was hilarious.”
Her smile was cold and distant.
Satoru Gojo, a man who defied worlds, reduced to a name on a government ledger? Get the hell out of here.
“No country is good enough to hold the memory of Satoru Gojo,” she growled in a low voice.
The lawyer shrank back. He avoided her eyes and fumbled with the papers, reading the next clause hurriedly. “In the event that Hikari Takashi refuses to accept the assets, Satoru Gojo-sama has named Manabu Gojo, if still alive, as his successor.”
“What?!” Hikari’s anger flared. She glared at the poor man. “No! I hate it even more!”
The lawyer nodded and proceeded to read the next point. “Satoru Gojo-sama also says that if Hikari Takashi agrees that ‘Uncle Manabu’,” he looked desperate to be anywhere but in that room, “’is a huge pain-in-the-arse’ and hates the idea of ‘the old turd’ owning his assets, she should have agreed to be his successor.”
Hikari let out a shaky breath, her emotions a storm of grief, anger, and exhaustion. It seemed like the world had conspired to test her resolve.
But at the end of the day, she relented. She signed everything without bothering to read the will properly, not wanting to exhaust herself with unnecessary things. When she left the principal’s office, she was richer that she could ever imagine.
She didn’t even realise that the lawyer was a non-sorcerer. If she did, she would have been kinder with her whole attitude. Perhaps she came a bit too strong at him, considering the way he cowered in his seat during the reading. But did it matter?
The next days arrived without fail. It seemed that some sorcerers were worried she had become so detached from the world, wishing to be invisible and not disturbed most of the time. She withdrew further into herself, dropping a conversation (right in the middle of talking) when there were too many people, and wandering around like nothing was wrong but looking empty with a blank expression.
Shoko, ever the practical one, told others, “Everyone deals with grief in different ways. Hikari has always been a quiet student since I can remember. Just give her some time to talk to you first, but don’t force her to open up when she’s not ready.”
She only let several people in to pry open her robotic façade: Kiyotaka, Megumi, and Shoko. Other than those three, she would only give minimal responses when asked.
Gone was her warm smile that had lit up rooms. Gone was her gentle laugh that people loved. It was as if her face was perpetually shrouded by dark clouds.
The problem was, she thought, the moment she let her blank mask crack—even a tiny bit—she was afraid that she would fall into a spiralling black hole from which there was no escape. The back of her skull felt like it was being squeezed and she found it was difficult to process reality.
It felt as though she was living in a fog. Every day was a struggle for her to remember why she was still here when her reason to live was gone, horrifically taken from her.
But she had cried enough, she decided. Tears wouldn’t bring Satoru back, so there was no point in crying him a river.
Then grief turned into rage. Did he honestly think that she would be alright if he was gone? Had he ever stopped to think how much he meant to her? She had mentioned it many times, on many occasions, that she was born for him and that she didn’t mind laying down her life for him.
And this—these unbearable waves of pain that were lapping at her feet, raising slowly but sure to drown her—was what she got in return?
The strongest jujutsu sorcerer only cared about fighting, didn’t he? He saw everything as a game to kill time.
She had never meant that much to him, had she?
The darkness, once again rearing its ugly head, whispered the words of comfort. It was inviting her to its home. But she didn’t even have the energy to listen to it, nor to entertain the thought of surrendering to the void.
During this time, Shoko kept Satoru’s body in the mortuary fridge. After Yuta had finished with it, Hikari begged Shoko to put Satoru’s brain back into his original body, to let him be intact once more. She visited every day to make sure that the body was still there. She didn’t want the same twisted fate that befell Suguru to happen to Satoru.
Even though she had been assured that Kenjaku was dead, she vehemently believed that the universe still had something in store for people in mourning—something disgustingly sickening.
She ended up spending hours sitting in front of the closed fridge, thinking about Satoru’s cold body on the other side of the door. They were so close physically, but the distance between them could cross the deepest abyss.
“I’m not strong enough, Senpai,” she whispered painfully one day, resting her forehead on the cool door. “What makes you think I’ll be fine?”
She felt like betraying him by letting him die first. There was an inexplicable urge to bang her head against the fridge door, the metal sink, or any hard surface she could see.
Kiyotaka or Shoko had to come fetch her when she forgot to eat or rest. If left alone, she would most likely sleep there too.
One thing she noticed every time Shoko pulled out the roll-in tray (to show he was still there) was that ice looked good on Satoru. His white hair and pale skin didn’t look dull or lifeless. He looked peaceful, like a sleeping ice fairy who would open his eyes anytime, if only she believed hard enough.
“You can’t keep him here forever, Hikari-chan,” said Shoko after another week had passed. And Hikari knew she was right.
Although she wasn’t exactly qualified as a psychologist, Shoko acted as her therapist without complaint. She was one of the few people who had known Satoru the longest, one of the few that he trusted. She knew more or less what was going on in his life, and Hikari found out he told her things that even Hikari didn’t know.
“Gojo once told me his power was annoying,” the doctor said, blowing smoke from her second cigarette. “He might have been born ridiculously strong, but it came with a lifetime of unwanted trouble too. And I don’t know if he was serious or just joking as usual.”
They were walking around the school grounds to talk, since Hikari was still uncomfortable to face the crowd back in the school building. But she must have looked so pathetic that Shoko suggested the idea first, saying that it would do her good to get some fresh air.
The younger woman listened with a heavy heart. She had so many questions for the slain sorcerer, but who would answer them now?
Hikari didn’t know that Satoru had seen himself that way. She reminded herself that he trained so hard to master his technique, that his title as the strongest didn’t come to him overnight. His power didn’t grow automatically only because he wished for it. It was all the result of his work.
But because the gap between him and others was so great, many seemed to forget that he too, was just as human as the rest of them.
And weren’t there also times when she saw him as larger than life—someone untouchable by the same fears and doubts that plagued ordinary people?
Why hadn’t he ever said that to her, though? Shoko was his best friend, yes, but so was she. Right? She wasn’t the only one who thought she was quite special, right?
She was even more than that. She was his designated Shadow. She was born to protect the Six Eyes and Limitless user. Why couldn’t he let her perform her duty as his Shadow then?
He was chained, wasn’t he? Weighed down by his role as the strongest. Who else could wipe people’s arses like him? So even though he was smiling, was he actually withering inside?
But why hadn’t he tried to rely on her? She couldn’t be that useless to him, right?
All of those questions haunted her every day. Hikari couldn’t let go. At least not yet. It was so unfair. Everything was too sudden and unexpected. Even a nightmare wouldn’t be this dramatic.
It wasn’t until Megumi came to her one afternoon that she regained some of her old strength. Yuuji and Nobara were nowhere to be seen, so Hikari knew the boy came not because of something jujutsu-related.
With Yuuji’s help, he made a pot of egg porridge with lots of sliced ginger. He brought two bowls to Hikari’s room because she hadn’t eaten anything since the previous day.
“Smells good,” was what she muttered when he handed her a bowl.
She had locked herself in her room without turning on the heather. Her room was chilling to the bone and dark, and she let it that way because it perfectly reflected the numbness she felt inside.
“Why don’t you eat, Megumi?” she asked when the boy only cradled his bowl in silence.
They sat on the wooden floor, hard and freezing, leaning back against her bed. Megumi had kindly turned on the light, the heater, and opened the curtains to let in more natural light, then sat down quietly next to her.
“I’ll eat if you eat,” he answered.
Touché, she thought, but made a conscious effort to move her hand. The warmth of the porridge spread through her cold limbs. It was a familiar taste—too familiar, actually. She stared down into the liquid meal.
“I tried to make it like yours,” Megumi answered her unspoken question. “Sorry if it’s not good.”
A smile, the first in many days, appeared rather stiffly on her face, as if she had started to forget how to smile. “I couldn’t make it any tastier.”
She could see the boy’s face light up. Still the same cute little kid like years ago, wasn’t he?
But his stoic expression returned almost immediately.
“Are you going to leave me as well, Hikari-san?” asked Megumi in a deadly flat tone.
Hikari’s mouth fell open. “What?”
“Tsumiki is gone. Gojo-san is gone. Will you too?”
Her Damascus dagger wouldn’t even hurt her that badly if she was stabbed with it.
What had she done to make a 16-year-old say something like that?
“Oh… Oh…” Her trembling fingers went to her eyes, and she finally let go of her restraint.
That day, they watched the sunset together huddled under the same blanket, heads touching, eyes wet.
It took Hikari a month after the end of the Shinjuku Showdown to find herself sitting outside the crematorium, waiting for the whole process to be over. The chimney let out black smoke, and she remembered thinking she was half-hoping to see blueish smoke. Weird, she knew, but grief made her think strange things, twisting her thoughts in ways that didn’t make sense.
It felt like the whole school had come to pay their last respects to Satoru. The January cold was barely felt—it was nothing compared to the icy emptiness inside her. The air around her was heavy, suffocating, as if the world itself mourned his loss. But maybe precisely because of that, she thought the crowd around her wasn’t so bad.
As Satoru had no immediate family, it was Hikari and Megumi who went in to collect the bones. When she first entered the crematorium room and saw what was left of the once mighty sorcerer, she froze.
For a split, pathetic second, she was expecting his body to still be intact.
Megumi did most of the work, as Hikari felt too numb to function. Her fingers didn’t seem to be able to hold the chopsticks properly, so she ended up watching as the boy carefully picked up the pieces of bone and placed them in a neat pile inside the urn, a solemn look on his face.
The urn was expensive and very pretty. She commissioned a ceramic artist to make it in the colour of Satoru’s brilliant eyes, but no one could ever understand how beautiful they were in her mind, no shade of blue could ever truly capture their depth. Adorning the surface were flying birds and camellia blossoms, painted in gold paint made from real gold powder, a symbol that the beauty of his freedom came at an expense.
Megumi handed the closed urn to the crematorium staff, who then put it on one of the shelves on the columbarium wall. It wasn’t a common practice to leave the ashes of a loved one there, but everyone agreed that neither Hikari nor Megumi should be burdened with the responsibility to keep it at home.
The Gojo clan acted like Satoru was a distant relative instead of their head clan. No one came to represent the clan, as if he meant nothing to them now that he was dead. It infuriated Hikari, but considering that he spent most of his life in Tokyo, it made sense that both parties didn’t see each other as family.
They had informed her that they would hold a private wake while choosing the new head clan.
She didn’t attend the ceremony, for she wasn’t exactly invited.
A Buddhist priest started to chant a Sutra about Nirvana and rebirth. Hikari mulled over the irony that a God-like figure was being read a Sutra by a non-sorcerer.
If reincarnation existed in Nirvana, what would Satoru’s next life be like? For once, he should be able to relax without being burdened with such heavy responsibilities.
And if they could meet again, lives intertwined once more, she thought that would be nice.
No matter in which form he appeared in front of her, Satoru would always be Satoru.
When finally the last person had offered a prayer and incense to the urn, the crowd began to disperse. Auxiliary managers were gone to start the cars and Kiyotaka was busy handing out small packets of salt for purification to people.
Yet, Hikari was still there, not moving a muscle.
She only stared and stared with her hands in her coat pockets. Satoru’s full name was carved on the urn, not too big or too small. Her eyes followed every stroke created, probably memorising every tiny detail she could see.
Satoru had never specified his funeral arrangements, so Hikari did her best to give a proper burial.
Was it enough? Would he prefer it somewhere warmer? Or exotic?
Should she follow a more religious custom? Would he like that? Or would he complain, if he could, that everything was very uptight and no fun?
In a quiet moment, Yuuji approached her, his face full of sympathy. “Hikamin.”
His voice broke through the haze of her thoughts. Next to him, Megumi and Nobara stood silently.
Those kids had gained so much, lost too much, and yet they still stood there, trying to be strong. She admired that about them. Their resilience. Their determination. Their friendship.
She could see a bit of Satoru in each of them, and that warmed her heart.
Hikari offered Yuuji a rueful smile. The boy had always been such a positive existence. What had happened to him was very unfortunate. Maybe it was a bad fate that he had to have Sukuna’s finger that night. Maybe it was a bad fate that Satoru Gojo was born 13 years before him, making him an adult in Yuuji’s life.
It might also have been a bad fate that she was the one left behind to mourn.
But she knew the chance to know Satoru wasn’t a bad fate.
And she also knew exactly what he thought about his students, especially Yuuji and Yuta.
“Live, Yuuji Itadori, and be free. Do what kids your age do. That’s what Satoru-senpai would’ve loved to see.”
Her fingers instinctively came up to feel the pendant’s surface around her neck, which was once imbued with her senior’s cursed energy. But every last bit of his cursed energy had gone. The pendant was now just that—a pendant.
She cast another sad glance at Satoru’s urn. She could almost hear his silly voice saying something ridiculous, something that would anger others but only make her laugh.
“Hikari-san, let’s go back,” Megumi said politely.
She looked at the students. Now, it was her turn to watch them enjoying their youth—to live.
Undisturbed.
Unbroken.
Unburdened by the weight of saving the world.
“Isn’t that right, Senpai?” she whispered to the air, hopeful.
When they walked to the cars, she tilted her head to see the sky was the very beautiful blue that she loved.
I’ll live as well, to remember you.