Sōjun Minamoto brought Riko Amanai to his home in Sendai.
The two walked down the street together.
At the moment, Sōjun Minamoto seemed rather idle. The human side had already reached its limit—even if a sorcerer died, their spot would be quickly filled. The Cursed Spirit side was still lacking, not yet full. Once the Disaster Cursed Spirits fully matured, it would be about right. That was why he'd kept them around.
Otherwise, aside from Mahito, he actually valued the techniques of the other three Cursed Spirits and would have assimilated them long ago.
Riko Amanai followed by his side, occasionally falling a few steps behind, then hurrying to catch up, cheerful and light on her feet. Even the dogs passing by seemed to want to step on her shadow.
Sōjun Minamoto glanced at her. She quickly clasped her hands behind her back and obediently followed behind him.
...
Jujutsu High hadn't suffered major losses this time—no sorcerers had died—but their pride definitely took a hit.
"Gather all Grade 1 sorcerers and above," Masamichi Yaga instructed the staff behind him. "Prepare for an emergency meeting."
The staff quickly dispersed, leaving only members of Yaga's faction behind.
The atmosphere was somber as they made their way to the Taiji Hall, silent the entire way.
Other personnel arrived soon after. A quick inventory revealed the actual damage: a few cursed tools had been stolen from the Forbidden Vault, Tengen had vanished, and naturally, the Ten Great Barriers had also shifted. The specifics still needed investigation.
There seemed to be no connection between the individual losses—either completely trivial or potentially massive in impact. Yet none of it had shown any concrete effects, good or bad. The Ten Great Barriers remained stable, aside from the previously strange shift in the sky.
But that only made them more uneasy.
Jujutsu High being breached was one thing—but what exactly was Sōjun Minamoto planning?
Orders were issued swiftly, the system kicked into motion: investigating the situation, maintaining social order... and soon the attendees dispersed.
Masamichi Yaga sat at the head of the table, frowning. He looked up at the sky through the window. The Barrier was already beginning to mend, and that towering white tree still stood at the heart of Jujutsu High, swaying in the breeze.
For now, no one knew what to make of the tree, so they treated it cautiously, choosing not to act.
Yaga had already checked deep within the forest via a puppet. The Barrier there remained stable, unaffected.
"What's Sōjun thinking?" he muttered to himself, unable to figure it out.
"I'll go ask him," Satoru Gojo said as he adjusted his blindfold. "He might know something. They've been in contact quite a bit."
"That guy..." Yaga paused for a moment.
He clearly knew who Gojo was talking about. After giving Gojo a look, he waved him off, his face turning even more exasperated.
"No one ever gives me a break."
"Then I'm off," Gojo said, standing up.
Yaga was about to respond when a sudden commotion erupted outside.
"What now?!"
"Several delegates are dead!" a sorcerer reported almost immediately.
...
Yaga rushed to the scene—beneath the Bone Tree. Five representatives were skewered through the chest by its branches, hanging from the tree like tattered rags, swaying in the wind.
He didn't even need to ask to know what happened. Seeing Sōjun Minamoto wasn't around, they'd tried to cut the tree down...
He rubbed his temples. Maybe they were trying to shirk responsibility, or maybe they thought they could redeem themselves somehow—either way, it was a senseless move.
Anyone with a brain could see the tree was linked to the Barrier. Based on the state of the Sacred Tree, it had likely become tied to the Ten Great Barriers themselves.
What were they thinking? Chop it down?
Even setting aside the consequences...
Yaga knew Sōjun Minamoto too well. He even suspected the tree might be one of Sōjun's incarnations. But with no response to repeated probing, he kept his suspicion to himself.
The Barrier was already in recovery. As he stared at the tree, a quiet conclusion began to form:
Sōjun Minamoto would continue maintaining Jujutsu High's Barrier, and he wouldn't use it against the school. There was a mutual, unspoken understanding between them.
Yaga let out a long sigh, frustrated that casualties had occurred even after everything had seemingly ended.
They had just agreed in the meeting to treat the Bone Tree with caution—and already someone had gone behind their backs and taken action.
When it came to Special Grade Cursed Spirits, the headquarters' officials always shrank back, too afraid to step up. They took up positions, hogged resources, but were utterly useless.
Good for nothing but getting in the way.
Yaga felt nothing but disappointment.
He decided not to bother anymore. Let them handle it however they wanted. He'd report that the Bone Tree had become linked to the Ten Great Barriers—what happened next was their problem.
He didn't even bother retrieving the corpses. Yaga simply turned and left.
The others followed suit and dispersed.
The branches swayed gently in the breeze. Between the leaves, a black vortex flickered briefly—then vanished completely.
...
On the other side, Sōjun Minamoto had already returned home with Riko Amanai.
It was her first time there, and she acted nothing like her usual self—sitting stiffly and quietly on the sofa.
Sōjun Minamoto reached into the void and retrieved five black spheres, each about the size of a fist. Their glossy, crystal-like surface resembled black jade.
"Here." He handed the black jade orb to Riko Amanai.
"What is this?" she asked, puzzled, as she took it.
"Cursed Energy. Just part of the total," Sōjun Minamoto explained.
"Huh?" Remembering what he'd said earlier, she couldn't help but ask, "You mean I can eat it and absorb it at the same time?"
Pushing aside her doubts, Riko Amanai began examining the black orb closely.
An odd craving stirred within her—a desire to consume it. It wasn't overwhelming, still well within her control, and she trusted the person in front of her completely.
"Ah—"
She opened her mouth and tried to swallow it whole, but it was too big to fit.
"..."
Just as Sōjun Minamoto was about to say something, he watched as she instinctively extracted the Cursed Energy from the orb, as if refining it herself.
'Sharp instinct,' he thought, brushing off her earlier attempt to eat it.
These residual energies had appeared after the deaths of the five delegates, absorbed on the spot by the Bone Tree and then transferred here.
Like the source of Cursed Energy, "residual" was a conceptual existence—normally unobservable. But Sōjun Minamoto could make it visible.
Since they were only temporarily anchored, they could last half a day at most, meaning he'd need to secure them more permanently soon.
Watching Riko Amanai enter a focused state, cultivating and unlocking her innate potential, Sōjun Minamoto let her be.
He turned and retrieved a strange, bone-like object from the shadows—a skull shaped like an inverted bucket, narrow at the top, wide at the base, with four eye sockets.
This was something born from his assimilation of Tengen—Tengen's actual skull, unmistakably different from any human's.
Eleven barbed nails were embedded in the cranium, hammered from the inside with their tips facing outward. They were fingerbone wedges—eleven in total—that he had placed there long ago.
They had played a crucial role during his assimilation of Tengen.
He hadn't expected Tengen's survival instinct to be so strong after the barrier was breached. It had significantly slowed down his assimilation progress. If it had dragged on any longer, Jujutsu High might have had time to react.
So he had directly awakened the wedges. Working from both inside and out, he quickly completed the assimilation, leaving only this skull behind.
Sōjun Minamoto held it up.
He hadn't erased Tengen's consciousness. Instead, he sealed it within the skull—saving it for future use.
Opening his Star Eyes, he scanned the interior of the skull inch by inch, locking onto Tengen's soul.
The [Immortality] technique imprint was clearly visible—this was the missing half of the [Immortality] technique.
From his fingertip, a pale-blue blade extended half an inch. Following the imprint, he carefully pierced into the soul, extracting the lines of the technique with precision.
He was preparing to complete the [Immortality] technique—and he was confident he could fully control it.
If needed, he could always remove it again.
By now, his mastery over technique extraction and embedding was absolute. Especially after assimilating the non-physical realm, his understanding of techniques had grown even clearer.
Before long, the hollow, fragmented lines of the technique were extracted—exactly half of it.
Sōjun Minamoto pressed the blade to the surface of his own soul. The technique merged smoothly with its counterpart, drawn in and integrated under the domain of [Unlimited].
The two halves of the Immortality Technique resonated, agitating briefly, but he suppressed them with ease.
After waiting a few seconds, the technique fully stabilized.
Yet he shook his head, unsatisfied.
The "immortality" of the technique was primarily resistance to aging. But after spending centuries in the non-physical realm, he already possessed a high degree of time resistance. For him, this was just a marginal enhancement.
He split the technique again, separating it into two parts: [Immortality] and [Evolution].
"What if I merge the immortality part into the Mahoraga Ring?" he muttered, glancing at the golden pattern on his wrist.
His decision to retrieve this half of the technique had stemmed from a desire for perfection—it wasn't something he truly needed.
Still, it occurred to him that the Mahoraga Ring's adaptation to time was painfully slow. Or perhaps, time simply couldn't be fully adapted to, since it, too, was a form of infinity.
Infinity couldn't contain infinity.
But if he merged [Immortality] into the Mahoraga Ring, at the very least, it would move the progress bar into safer territory. He could then fully adapt to the time discrepancy between the physical and non-physical realms—no more needing to reset every time he crossed over.
With that in mind, he moved the extracted technique from his cerebral cortex and into the wrist pattern.
Golden thorns were soon interwoven with streaks of black.
The Mahoraga Ring was part of his physical body, and it had a corresponding structure in the soul—perfect for hosting the technique.
Gold and black fused in growing harmony. Sōjun Minamoto clapped his hands with a satisfied grin.
"Just a few more days, and it'll fully integrate into [Unlimited]."
His domain of techniques expanded once more.
His current composition was truly a mix—Human? Cursed Spirit? Shikigami? Or the embodiment of a technique itself?
But neither form nor label mattered.
What mattered was how he saw himself.
And in his eyes, he was still human—so he was.
...
(40 Chapters Ahead)
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