Chapter Text
***
A knock, too polite to be urgent, rapped twice against the wooden-paneled door.
Utahime’s hands stilled mid-motion—gloved, poised in the act of winding a scarf around her neck. Her gaze flicked toward the sound—not startled, precisely. More like someone bracing for what they had already expected.
She rose without a word. The hem of her long coat shifted with the movement, brushing softly against her hakama.
When she slid open the door, Ijichi stood there, as punctual as ever—buttoned-up, deferential, his hands neatly clasped behind his back. The dawn had already touched the sky, but the hollows beneath his eyes still held the shadows of a long week.
“Ijichi,” she said, calm, composed—her voice steadying the air around them.
He inclined his head in a crisp nod. “Iori-senpai. The car is waiting.”
Of course it was. She had been ready for the better part of half an hour—boots laced, coat fastened, breath held in something like anticipation.
Yet she didn’t move immediately. Instead, she lingered at the threshold.
The question pressed against her chest. Her hand drifted to the strap of her tote, smoothing down fabric that needed no straightening. A breath caught in her throat, then slipped out—soft, uncertain.
“How is he?” she finally asked, barely above a whisper.
Ijichi hesitated. His gaze shifted to the side—one of those small, practiced gestures she recognized. He only did that when a question pulled him into places his protocol couldn’t follow. When the truth outpaced his clearance.
“Quieter,” he said after a moment. “Looking slightly tired.”
A pause. Then he adjusted his glasses and added, more gently this time, “He fell asleep in the car after I picked him up.”
Ah.
There was no sudden strike of revelation in it. Just a slow, steady acknowledgment that he had already joined the mission.
Despite the fact that he was still healing.
Despite the strain carved into the new shape of his cursed technique—strain that could not be soothed by mere will, nor reversed through mastery. The change had been one-way, sealed by his vow. What remained now was not exactly the power he was born with, but the price of choosing to live.
And his heart—still so proud, so infuriatingly stubborn—had not yet made peace with that price.
Not when she last saw him.
He had been pacing then, restless and barefoot across the floor of his office at Tokyo High, refusing to sit in the expensive chair he’d once sprawled in with effortless ease and a brazen grin. His eyes had been sharp but unmoored, fixed somewhere beyond the windowpane, his breath shallow with the strain of trying to wrestle control back into something that had once come to him like breathing.
His enhanced cognitive perception of cursed energy flow—once a blade honed to the edge of precognition—now tired him quicker than it should have. The way he’d used Limitless with near-zero cursed energy cost and split-second precision his whole life—now drained him after only a few hours of use. Every calculation took a few seconds longer. Every shift in Infinity, every flicker of spatial control—it all had to be consciously activated, sustained with effort, and meticulously managed.
She had noticed it in his hands. The slight flexing of his fingers after teleportation, as if checking for numbness. The flicker of discomfort behind his gaze when he used Blue for something simple, and his body had flinched as if the cursed energy burned hotter in his veins than it ought to.
And worse than that—his RCT, the trick that once made him invincible, had begun to act traitorously. His breathing grew uneven when he used it too often, and multitasking while healing had grown harder.
He never spoke of his struggles.
But she had seen the signs. The fatigue he masked. How he slept more. The way he scowled, uncharacteristically, when no one was looking—not from fear, but from unfamiliarity. Like a pianist returning to the keys after injury, fingers remembering the notes, but not quite the rhythm.
What he’d given up—what he’d traded—had left a mark deeper than the pale white pupil of his one eye, now devoid of that vibrant sky-blue glow.
And yet, he had left his apartment this morning and come.
She dipped her head in a quiet nod to Ijichi—the smallest gesture of understanding.
The door clicked shut behind her as Utahime followed the driver down the corridor, her steps unhurried.
***
Utahime slipped into the car with careful grace and closed the door with a soft click, muted deliberately—an unspoken kindness. She didn’t look at him right away. Just enough, through her peripheral vision, to perceive that he was still asleep, seated beside her in the back seat.
Then, as the car began to move, she finally looked.
Gojo was folded into the corner with the casual abandon of exhaustion. One arm hung limply between his knees, gloved fingers resting just above the floor mat, while the other was curled against his side, elbow jammed awkwardly against the door. His head was tilted toward the window, temple pressed to the cold glass, the curve of it fogging slightly with each slow, even breath. His sunglasses had slipped askew down the bridge of his nose, one temple arm dangling precariously off his ear.
He no longer wore the black eye cover. Said he didn’t need it anymore—not with the cursed energy flow dimmed, no longer screaming through his senses or inducing the splitting headaches it once had.
He looked... human, in a way she hadn’t seen in years. Vulnerable, even. His long coat was a shade softer than his usual black uniform—charcoal wool lined in fleece—and his scarf, loosely looped at his neck, was an oatmeal beige.
Infinity—he didn’t keep it on all the time anymore. Said it wasn’t worth the energy drain, especially not before a mission, when he needed to manage his reserves. So instead, he dressed for the season. Bundled like the rest of them. Mortal.
His legs were sprawled carelessly, one foot braced against the back of the front seat, the other angled awkwardly beneath him. A patch of light—a narrow sliver of winter sun—crept through the tinted window and settled across his cheekbone, illuminating the faint shadows beneath his eyes and the contrast of his pale lashes against his skin.
Utahime took it all in quietly, her shoulder a careful inch from his, then reached for the mission file tucked between the seats. She had already read all the details in the email the previous day, but she always checked again on the way to the site.
The report read:
MISSION BRIEFING – INTERNAL USE ONLY
Location: Mount Nakatani Shrine Ruins
Assigned Team: Satoru Gojo (primary), Utahime Iori (secondary)
Background:
Over the past two weeks, three sorcerers—ranging from Grade 2 to Semi-Grade 1—have failed to return from an investigative assignment near Mount Nakatani, where local villagers reported “wailing in the mountains,” particularly near the remnants of a long-abandoned shrine.
Only one sorcerer was found alive: Kanda Ryuki (Semi-Grade 1). He was recovered by a field team after vanishing for 48 hours inside the suspected cursed domain.
Subject Status:
Ryuki was found curled beneath the shrine steps—conscious and verbal, but nonsensical. Since his rescue, he has entered a state of cognitive collapse, occasionally muttering phrases such as:
“I couldn’t say it. I didn’t say it. I didn’t—”
No physical trauma was identified. However, residual cursed energy detected within his spirit aligns with signatures of deep sorrow manipulation —an ancient technique long absent from modern jujutsu logs.
Reverse Cursed Technique yielded no improvement.
Dr. Shoko Ieiri’s diagnosis: “Soul-fracturing domain effect. May be permanent.”
Curse Hypothesis:
We believe this domain forces intruders to experience emotionally charged scenarios, gradually unraveling the soul. As the mind deteriorates, identity and will begin to disintegrate.
Due to the curse's uniquely psychological mechanism, only sorcerers with proven emotional restraint—or a documented resilience to trauma—are being dispatched.
Objective:
Investigate the location, confirm the existence of the domain, and exorcise the curse.
Utahime eyed the phrase “documented resilience to trauma” and sighed.
How clinical. How detached.
On paper, Gojo was the most suitable person for this assignment—undeniably so. His abilities, his success rate, his fearlessness—all called for it. But suitability wasn’t the same as readiness. Every human being had a breaking point, even ones like him.
Especially now.
Her fingers curled subtly around the edge of the file, thumb tapping against the page. The inside of the car was warm, weighted with silence, and the steady motion of the wheels had become hypnotic—so much so that when Ijichi hit a pothole, it startled even her.
The car jolted. A hollow clunk echoed beneath them, the tires dragging roughly over gravel.
Gojo stirred at once.
His brow furrowed, lashes fluttering with the slow reluctance of someone dragged too early from sleep. He exhaled sharply through his nose—half sigh, half grunt—lifting his head from the glass with a soft scrape, blinking at the light in confusion.
His sunglasses, which had been tilting, finally gave up their grip and slid down the bridge of his nose, hanging lopsided at the tip. He frowned at nothing in particular, still disoriented, and reached up to adjust them.
His gaze—bleary but recovering fast—slid across the car and landed on her.
"...Mornin'," he rasped, voice hoarse with sleep.
Utahime didn’t answer immediately. She watched him with a neutral expression.
“Have you read the report?” she asked at last, flipping the folder shut and offering it toward him.
Gojo gave her a slow, crooked smile. “Guess I needed a nap to activate the emotional resilience,” he muttered, letting her know with a cocked brow that he had already read it.
He rubbed a hand through his hair, white strands sticking up at odd angles, and leaned back into the seat with a faint groan. The sunlight had shifted across the car, catching in the pale haze of his left eye—the one that no longer glowed.
Utahime glanced at him carefully, then asked, “Why the sunglasses? I thought you decided not to cover your eyes anymore.”
Gojo chuckled, low and offhand. “It’s for you, senpai. Don’t wanna scare you. One blue, one white—looks weird. Better to cover it up.” He paused, then added, almost as an afterthought, “Scared myself half to death last night in the mirror.”
His smile didn’t reach his eyes. It rarely did these days.
Utahime opened her mouth to protest, but he pulled the scarf higher around his neck and cut her off before she could speak. “Tell me your assumption.”
She shut her lips and made a conscious decision. Later—she’d tell him, later, that he didn’t need to cover his eyes for anyone’s comfort, least of all hers. But now wasn’t the time.
So instead, she returned to the file and said, “It sounded like regret. From the quote. Like he didn’t say something to someone he should have. Held it in too long.”
Gojo didn’t respond straight away.
His gaze remained on the window, watching as the city gave way to wilderness—houses growing sparse, shops thinning into clusters of old roadside buildings and shuttered inns. Power lines dipped lower between the poles. The hills in the distance were dusted white, their silence growing louder the farther they drove.
The car hummed steadily beneath them, and for a while, neither spoke. Utahime gazed at him—once, then again. His posture hadn’t changed, but something in the quiet tension of his profile told her his mind had gone elsewhere.
Eventually, he began.
“Deep sorrow manipulation,” he said slowly, his voice still husky at the edges. “A curse that manipulates emotional currents—quietly invading its victims’ subconscious with targeted precision. No wounds. Not even brain trauma.”
His tone wasn’t clinical. If anything, there was something unnervingly respectful in it. As if he were almost… impressed.
“It’s… fascinating,” he murmured. The fields beyond the glass now passed in a blur, bleached and brittle with frost. His expression in the reflection remained unreadable.
After a beat, he went on.
“It would’ve helped if Ryuki could tell us whether it was real—if the visions he saw were his own memories or some twisted what-if the curse fed him. Either way…” He paused, fingers idly caressing the bridge of his sunglasses. “It knew exactly where to press. Pushed the right button long enough, and turned a semi-grade one pro into a blabbering idiot.”
Utahime shifted slightly, angling toward the front as the road narrowed. Snow crusted the shoulder of the pavement now, and the sky hung low and pewter-colored above the trees.
“I’ve come across curses that made victims experience their phobias,” she said. “Spiders crawling up their legs. Being buried alive. That kind of thing.” Her fingers moved absently to her wrist, adjusting the threads of the suzu bells woven through her bracelet. “But Ryuki’s words didn’t sound like fear. They sounded like remorse. Something… deeply personal.”
Gojo made a low, unintelligible sound in his throat—noncommittal. He leaned his temple lightly against the windowpane again, and the faint fog of his breath returned to the glass.
Utahime didn’t press. Silence settled between them—brittle, but not uncomfortable.
Then the GPS’s mechanical voice broke through the quiet: “Estimated arrival in thirteen minutes.”
Outside, the trees had begun to rise taller, darker, hemming in both sides of the road. Cedar and pine climbed in quiet ranks, their branches whispering as the wind stirred through them.
The temperature inside the car seemed to dip—a shift in the air, charged and expectant.
Utahime cleared her throat. “Thanks,” she said, voice even and low. “For recommending me for the mission.”
Gojo exhaled. It wasn’t quite a laugh—more a breath turned sideways, humor worn thin.
“It’s not like I did you a favor, Utahime,” he replied, eyes still on the trees. “I need the boost. I’m not the same, remember?”
Neither of them looked at the other again until the car rolled to a stop before a moss-laden staircase that clawed its way up the mountainside—steep and crooked, the stone steps half-swallowed by centuries of creeping earth.
They stepped out from either side of the car almost at the same time. The air here was wetter, heavier—smelling of rain that hadn’t yet fallen.
Above them, nestled beneath a canopy of skeletal trees, the shrine waited—broken, half-consumed by ivy and silence. Its torii gate tilted to one side, lacquer peeled away by time, and the forest around it seemed to lean in, listening.
***
Stone steps groaned beneath their boots as Gojo and Utahime stepped across the shrine’s threshold. The air inside was even colder, the silence so dense it felt padded—like sound might fall and shatter if dropped too quickly.
The main hall had long since fallen into disuse. Tatami mats lay curled and blackened in the corners. Shoji panels leaned from their frames, torn through by wind. The altar stood at the far end, crooked and low, draped in shadows.
Gojo’s Infinity flickered to life with a near-imperceptible hum as he scanned the room. His gaze drifted over collapsed beams, spiderwebbed ceilings, the shrine’s offerings turned to rot and ash. But nothing shimmered with threat. No cursed energy bloomed in his vision. No distortion of space, no pressure in the air that would suggest a domain.
Nothing. Except—
A glint.
Resting on the altar, delicate and misplaced, lay a hairpin.
Thin, gold, flower-tipped. Clean. Untouched by dust.
Gojo took a slow step toward it, the wooden floor creaking beneath his weight. Another step. And another.
Utahime’s voice snapped from behind. “Don’t touch it.”
He paused—but only for a breath. “It looks harmless,” he murmured, not turning. His voice had gone oddly flat. Distracted.
Utahime stepped forward, her hand lifting slightly—uncertain whether to reach for him or pull her cursed energy into a defensive shield.
Because she could see what Gojo couldn’t.
A heavy flow of cursed energy was coiling from the hairpin like smoke from an extinguished fire. It clung to the object like sorrow, as if someone had once wept while holding it. As if a soul had cracked, and a fragment of it had taken root there.
A cursed object. And somehow, Gojo was already under its spell.
Her eyes widened. “Gojo—don’t—”
But his fingers had already closed around it.
The instant he touched it, the world fractured.
Sound collapsed inward—the birds, the wind, the soft groan of wood—sucked from existence like breath into a vacuum. Light twisted, dimmed, then split into streaks and shards, bending unnaturally.
Gojo staggered, but didn’t fall. His face turned slightly, confused—but only for a heartbeat. Then even time thickened. Honey-slow. Amber-still.
His eyes—those one-blue, one-faded eyes—went distant, already slipping under. The shrine, the forest, the cold, the present—none of it remained. He was seeing something else. Somewhere else.
“Damn it,” Utahime hissed—and moved.
She didn’t hesitate. Her feet skimmed across the floor with the precision of muscle memory, the bells at her wrists jingling sharply as she surged forward.
And the moment her hand met his shoulder, anchoring him—
—the curse’s domain closed like a mouth around them both.
And the world they knew vanished.
***
They were standing in a long, narrow hallway.
The clean wooden floor stretched beneath them with uncanny symmetry, polished smooth and dark like still water in moonlight. Doors lined either side—identical, unmarked, and closed.
They lost track of time, unable to fathom how long they had walked. The corridor seemed endless, always bringing them back to the same stretch. The same doors. The same silence.
Utahime turned slowly in place, her boots brushing the floor, her eyes narrowing.
No windows. No entries or exits.
She reached for the wall and pressed her palm against the surface. It was solid—too solid.
Gojo blinked beside her, a thin line drawn between his brows, as if still waking from some deep and disorienting slumber. His coat hung askew, his scarf had slipped, and in his hand—gripped so tightly the veins showed—was the hairpin.
Utahime’s eyes dropped to it.
“Why?” she asked, voice low but firm. “Why did you pick it up?”
Gojo didn’t answer at once. The long line of his throat moved as he swallowed.
Then, quietly—almost as if confessing something to himself—he said, “It looked like something that belonged to my mother.”
Utahime inhaled through her nose. That was all she needed to know.
Not a coincidence.
Seduction.
She turned her gaze back to the hallway, her voice tight with analysis. “The curse is fast,” she muttered. “It bypassed your spatial defense entirely. Your Infinity didn’t matter. The moment you stepped into the shrine, it went straight for your soul.” She paused, then carefully added, “Targeting a memory.”
Gojo said nothing. His eyes had begun to clear—but only just.
Utahime pressed her fingers to the suzu threads at her wrist, grounding herself. “The hairpin was bait. Emotional resonance. The curse projected an object from your past to lure you in,” she continued. “The illusion began the moment you intended to reach for it. That’s why it looked ordinary to you. Why you couldn’t sense the cursed energy at all.”
Gojo’s mouth curled—not in a smile, but in something closer to wonder.
Utahime stepped toward one of the doors. She placed her hand on the frame but didn’t open it. Her voice was quieter now, less clinical. “This loop won’t break on its own. We have to go through them. One by one. I don’t think the curse will let us out until you’ve seen whatever it wants you to see behind the doors.”
Gojo exhaled—slow and shallow. “I’m its target. You don’t have to—”
“I do,” she cut in. Her gaze didn’t waver. “It dragged me in too. And now, we finish it together.”
For a long moment, neither of them moved. The hallway flickered slightly, like a memory refusing to stabilize. One of the doors shivered faintly on its hinges.
Gojo looked down at the hairpin in his hand, then slid it into the inside pocket of his coat. At last, he stepped forward.
He reached for the first door on his right.
Utahime braced herself.
***
The door opened with a creak.
What lay beyond wasn’t anything either of them expected.
Gone were the dim corridors and warped, polished floorboards. In their place stood the refined courtyard of an aristocratic Japanese estate, bathed in pale daylight and threaded with the sharp, earthy scent of incense. Winter sun filtered through a high lattice of bare branches overhead, casting dappled shadows across stone and snow.
And there were people.
Dozens of them—men in layered formal samurai robes, their expressions composed in a hush of reverent anticipation. Women in folded silks sat with backs straight and eyes lowered, their painted fans fluttering just once as they glanced forward. All knelt in seiza, silent and still, facing the same direction—a raised platform at the far end of the garden—draped in ceremonial white.
At its center stood a boy.
He couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen, the folds of his kamishimo too formal and heavy for his narrow frame. A ceremonial headpiece rested atop his neatly trimmed white hair. His head was bowed slightly.
From their angle, his expression was hidden.
Utahime halted mid-step. Her breath caught sharply in her throat. The scent of burning sandalwood settled on her tongue like a forgotten memory.
She scanned the gathering—flicking from face to face, uncertain, searching. Looking for herself.
“Wait,” she whispered, her voice suddenly fragile with recollection. “I’ve attended ceremonies like this as a Miko trainee when I was a teenager. It’s a genpuku—”
“It’s my ceremony,” Gojo cut in beside her, his voice flat and grave.
***