Jujutsu Kaisen — Chapter 37 - Gate of Life Erupts — The Ferocious Blade That Tears Infinity
"Throughout Heaven and Earth, I alone am the honored one."
Azure Six Eyes gazed down at the ruins below.
Sunlight hit his blood-streaked face and refracted something that made the skin crawl. Not beauty. Divinity.
At the edge of the tree line.
Shoko sat on a bench with a cold cola bottle in her hand, squeezing it hard enough that the plastic let out a long, grinding creak. Soda overflowed and soaked her fingers. She didn't notice.
"Hopeless." She snapped back to herself and covered her eyes. "That line is so chuunibyou it hurts. Which third-rate shounen manga did he crawl out of? I'm about to dig a hole through my shoe with my toes."
Beside her, Megumi Fushiguro hugged his knees. His mouth was slightly open. He was completely, genuinely dumbstruck.
That white-haired guy in the weird round-bottomed sunglasses was floating in the sky.
Satoru Gojo can fly?!
Megumi turned his head and looked down at his father. The man who had been utterly dominant moments ago, grinding someone into the dirt, was now just standing there, craning his neck, staring up with nothing to show for it.
His old man usually bragged loud enough to rattle the rafters. The sweat of youth conquers everything. Ten thousand punches can shatter any rule. That was the speech, delivered on a daily basis.
And yet. The other guy just ignored the laws of physics and ascended on the spot.
"Old man." Megumi's voice came out of nowhere, quiet and unhurried, cutting clean through the silence of the training ground. "Can you fly too?"
Toji's eye twitched. He pretended not to hear.
Suguru Geto did not laugh.
He tilted his head back and stared hard at his best friend, suspended in the sunlight above them.
Completely transformed.
Before, Satoru Gojo's Limitless had been like a heavy machine burning through fuel at a maddening rate, always one step from overloading. That frantic, near-exhausted edge had lived in him constantly.
Now it was gone. Replaced by something absolute and self-renewing. A fullness with no bottom.
"He mastered Reverse Cursed Technique." Suguru Geto murmured. "This guy... has no weaknesses left."
In midair.
Satoru Gojo extended his right hand and curled his index finger slightly.
The Reverse Cursed Technique he had just learned brought far more than physical healing. If negative Cursed Energy multiplied against itself to produce positive energy, then what would happen if he pushed that positive energy into the Lapse of Limitless, the side built for attraction?
His mind was already running the numbers. His instincts had the answer before his thoughts caught up.
Devastating.
"Cursed Technique Reversal."
A blinding red light ignited at his fingertip.
Pure force. Absolute repulsion. The kind that rejected everything it touched.
"Red."
BOOM——!
No hand seals. No wind-up. A repulsive force of terrifying magnitude, like a physical cannon of compressed air, came pouring down.
Toji's pupils snapped shut.
Too wide to dodge. The coverage was total.
"Tsk!" He drove his foot into the ground with explosive force, green Chakra surging down to anchor him. On pure animal instinct, he wrenched his body hard to the right.
The beam grazed his left shoulder and hit the training ground.
The earth-shattering impact carved half the training ground out like something invisible had taken a massive scoop. Soil and rock pulverized into powder on contact. The shockwave kept going and shaved a distant hillside flat.
Toji caught the edge of the blast and was sent spinning sideways like a kite with a snapped string, crashing straight through the chain-link fence.
He hadn't even hit the ground before Satoru Gojo vanished.
Spatial compression. Limitless folding the distance to nothing.
Satoru Gojo appeared directly above Toji with no warning. His long right leg screamed downward, tearing the air open, driving straight for Toji's chest.
"Hehaha, too slow, you big idiot!" Satoru Gojo laughed without a shred of restraint.
BANG!
Toji crossed his arms and barely got the block up in time. The downward force didn't care. It drove him into the ground like a nail, legs sinking in to the knees.
"Cough!" He spat a mouthful of blood-tinged saliva.
The brat's state reset had cranked his speed and power both up by a full tier.
They crashed back into each other.
More accurately: it had become one-sided.
Satoru Gojo was using Reverse Cursed Technique to flush out his brain fatigue in real time. The Limitless barrier had stopped flickering. He didn't need to track attack trajectories anymore. He just left the cheat on and tanked everything.
BANG BANG BANG BANG!
Toji's iron fists wrapped in gale-force wind hammered out in a chain.
Dense, muffled impacts detonated one after another. Each one raised nothing but faint ripples on that layer of absolute infinity.
He couldn't punch through it anymore.
"What's wrong? Has your youth burned out?" Satoru Gojo hovered half a meter off the ground, both hands in his pockets. That insufferably arrogant look was fully back on his face. "Go on. Hit me with your unenlightened fists."
Toji backflipped clear of a suction vortex that erupted under his feet and landed steady on a broken wall.
Can't crack the turtle shell?
Then push the power up another dimension.
He spread his legs slightly and drove both fists into the ground.
The bright green Chakra around his body suddenly contracted inward and then detonated outward with twice the fury.
"Eight Gates Released Formation, Third Gate: Gate of Life!"
"Open!"
BOOM!
The air ignited.
Green energy was visible to the naked eye as it roared into the sky. Toji's skin flushed a furnace-deep crimson. Veins bulged and writhed across his body like living things.
The ground beneath his feet cracked outward in a spiderweb and kept cracking.
Even light bent around the concentration of energy.
"Hey, hey... you've got to be kidding me." Shoko shot to her feet in the distance.
Suguru Geto's face went hard.
No Cursed Energy. None at all. But that aura, a mixture of pure physical limits and something unclassifiable, was something the Jujutsu world had never produced. A Heavenly Restriction body carrying a suicidal burst and amplifying it exponentially.
A monster.
Satoru Gojo, still hovering, blinked once.
The Six Eyes ran their analysis at full speed.
Couldn't read it. It fell outside the entire category of Jujutsu.
So what.
One hand still in his pocket, his grin spreading wide: "Good fighting spirit. But what's the use if you can't land a hit? Big gorilla, you can't even touch a single hair on me."
Toji raised his head slowly.
Under that burning-red skin, blood was surging.
He bared his teeth.
"You really think that turtle shell makes you invincible?"
The rock beneath his feet turned to powder before he finished the sentence.
Too fast. The field of view collapsed into afterimages.
Satoru Gojo caught one thing: a green blur coming straight for his face.
Can't dodge. No — no need to dodge.
Against infinity, physical force sinks into the abyss every time.
Toji halted dead in the air half a meter from Satoru Gojo's face.
No punch. His right hand reached behind his back at a completely wrong angle.
Inside the Six Eyes' field of view, a short blade appeared in Toji's grip. Unusual shape. Forked tip. Zero Cursed Energy signature. But it gave off something else entirely, the absolute stillness of a dead thing.
Toji gripped the hilt. One casual upward slash, bottom to top.
The blade met the Limitless barrier.
It did not slow down.
That layer of space, the one that stopped cannonballs, parted in front of this blade like hot steel through butter.
RIIIP,—!
The cursed technique was forcibly dispelled.
Cold metal grazed Satoru Gojo's cheek without resistance.
Sharp pain.
He snapped his head back. His body retreated dozens of meters through the air before he stopped. He raised one hand and touched his left cheek.
Blood ran down his jaw and dripped off.
"What the hell... is that thing?"
He clenched his jaw. Cold sweat was already running down his forehead.
Limitless, broken. If that slash had been aimed at his throat —
Toji gave the blade a casual spin and grinned. "Special Grade Cursed Tool: Inverted Spear of Heaven. Forcibly dispels all cursed techniques. Specifically designed for turtles who hide in their shells."
The color drained from Satoru Gojo's face. The arrogance of his fresh awakening had just been split open by a single slash.
Toji turned the Inverted Spear of Heaven around and slid it back into the Cursed Spirit on his shoulder.
"What are you doing?" Satoru Gojo stared.
"Putting it away." Toji rolled his neck. "This was an assassination scenario. Your head would already be gone."
He nodded at the steam still rising from the green aura around him. "Using a weapon to beat down someone who can't fight back is an insult to this sweat."
Without waiting for a response, Toji unhurriedly bent down and unwrapped the bandages around his legs.
Satoru Gojo watched him. What was this guy doing now.
Toji pulled two pitch-black weights from under the bandages and dropped them casually to the ground.
BOOM. BOOM.
The hard-packed earth cratered. Two clear, deep depressions, just from the drop.
Satoru Gojo's pupils contracted.
This guy had been fighting him this entire time with those on his legs.
A wave of pure, burning humiliation hit him. He ground his back teeth to dust.
Completely and utterly looked down on by a monkey with zero Cursed Energy.
"Bastard, stop looking down on me!" Red light blazed at his fingertip. "I'm going to blast you to pieces!"
"Try it!"
Toji kicked off the ground and the air tore.
Without the weights, his speed jumped another full level.
He gave Satoru Gojo no window to aim. One flicker and he was gone from Satoru Gojo's line of sight entirely.
The next instant, Toji came in from a blind angle.
A perfectly timed bicycle kick connected squarely with Satoru Gojo's chin.
BANG!
Satoru Gojo had no time to react. He was launched skyward like a cannonball.
Before he could stabilize, Toji was already above him, appearing like a ghost.
"What was this move called again..."
Toji ripped the remaining bandages from his arms and snapped them out hard in the rushing wind.
The black bandages coiled like venomous snakes and locked Satoru Gojo's arms and torso in place.
"Front Lotus!"
Violent green Chakra became a spiraling storm in midair. Toji clamped his legs around Satoru Gojo's shoulders and they plunged. Head-first. Straight down. Like a meteor falling.
The wind pressure was enough to force Satoru Gojo's eyes shut.
Limitless had reactivated. But the sheer physical kinetic force bearing down on them meant that if his skull actually hit the ground, the inertia would concuss him regardless.
Gonna die gonna die gonna die,
He was cursing in his own head at full volume.
Cursed Technique Lapse: Blue. Reversal is Red.
Smash both infinities into each other at the same time.
He wrenched his bound right hand against the bandages and hooked his middle finger onto his thumb.
Blue and Red, both representing the absolute extreme of their respective poles, were torn free and forced together at his fingertip.
His bones screamed under the load.
They fused. Red into Blue, Blue into Red. A deep purple ignited, so dense it swallowed the light around it.
"Enough with the arrogance! Take this!"
"Hollow Technique."
"Purple!"
Time stopped.
The purple light ignored physics. It punched through space instantaneously, carrying enough destructive force to annihilate everything it touched, and slammed into the ground.
Every hair on Toji's body stood straight up.
He felt the kill threat and reacted without thinking, releasing his legs and wringing his entire body's Chakra reserves to twist out of the way.
BOOOOM——!
Not an explosion. Erasure.
Soil, rock, and air within a 100-meter radius were simply gone the moment the purple light touched them.
A massive hemispherical crater carved itself into existence from nothing.
A furious hurricane of debris swept outward like a tsunami.
"Rainbow Dragon! Cursed Spirit Shield!" Suguru Geto roared and formed hand seals, hurling dozens of defensive Cursed Spirits forward in a wall as he hauled Shoko and Megumi back in a dead sprint.
The defensive Cursed Spirits collapsed in layers, each one buying a fraction of a second.
Suguru Geto clenched his teeth and drained every last drop of his remaining Cursed Energy until there was nothing left, barely holding a pocket of safety at the edge of the storm for the three of them.
2 full minutes before the wind died down.
Dust hung over the entire training ground like dense fog.
Suguru Geto set Shoko and Megumi down. All three of them breathed quietly and stared at the crater at the center of everything.
The dust slowly cleared.
A crater. Over 200 meters across. The ground at the bottom had vitrified into glass.
Satoru Gojo was flat on his back, arms and legs spread wide, lying on that glassy surface. White hair grey with dust. The expensive shirt was shredded rags.
Reverse Cursed Technique had patched the lethal wounds. But he had burned through Limitless, Reversal, Cursed Technique Lapse: Blue, Red, and finally forced out a Purple. His Cursed Energy was at absolute zero. He couldn't lift a finger.
Less than 3 meters away, Toji was down in the same position. The green Chakra had gone completely dark.
Forcing the Gate of Life open and then dodging the edge of Purple at point-blank range, the Heavenly Restriction body was running severely past its limit.
"Hah..." Toji wheezed like a broken bellows, staring up at the sky. "You brat. You really don't hold back. No respect for your elders at all."
Satoru Gojo turned his head away with a huff. "Musclehead. Looks like your precious youth got blasted to pieces."
"Bullshit." Toji twitched the corner of his mouth and sucked in a sharp breath from the pain. "If I hadn't put the Inverted Spear of Heaven away, you'd already be in the Sanzu River waiting in line to drink the soup."
"Stop flattering yourself." Satoru Gojo gave a cold snort. "Even with that blade, I would've blasted you to pieces before it landed."
"Stubborn brat."
Toji scoffed and let it go.
He looked at his own hands. They were shaking.
That fight had been deeply, thoroughly satisfying. Since his rebirth, this was the first time he had pushed the Eight Gates this far. The kid's talent was the real thing. A genuine monster in the making.
If this had been a real battlefield with real stakes, who walked out alive today was genuinely an open question.
Satoru Gojo went quiet too.
He stared at the blue sky. That "Throughout Heaven and Earth, I alone am the honored one" arrogance had cooled the moment Purple left his hand.
Someone existed in this world who could push him to the edge with nothing but a physical body and a strange martial art that had no name in Jujutsu.
Fifty-fifty.
Neither of them had won. Neither of them had lost. They both knew it without having to say it.
"Old man!"
Megumi Fushiguro appeared at the crater's edge on his short legs and came stumbling and sliding down the slope.
Suguru Geto and Shoko followed.
Suguru Geto looked at the two wrecks lying side by side at the bottom and let out a long, slow breath.
"You two lunatics." He walked between them and stared down, the vein on his forehead visibly pulsing. "If Principal Yaga sees what you've done to the back mountain, he'll have you scrubbing toilets for a full year."
"Not my problem." Satoru Gojo was completely shameless about it. "This monkey was the one who dragged me into this."
"You brat. Say 'monkey' one more time." Toji fixed him with a glare.
Shoko crouched down and looked at both of them. The injuries were ugly. She sighed.
"Alright, both of you shut up. You made this much of a mess over a sparring match." The soft glow of Reverse Cursed Technique lit up at her fingertips and she pressed them against Toji's mangled shoulder.
Megumi crouched beside Toji's head and poked his father's cheek with a stick.
"Old man. Your flying just now was really ugly."
Toji nearly choked on his own blood.
Satoru Gojo, flat on his back 3 meters away, burst out laughing. Loud, completely unrestrained, echoing off the walls of the crater and sending every bird in the distant tree line scattering into the sky.
That sound was what finally brought the real judgment down on them.
A tall figure appeared at the edge of the crater. He looked out at the back mountain, at what had clearly been subjected to something approaching a missile strike, and he went completely still. Then the sharp intake of breath came.
The residual Cursed Energy. The landscape flattened to nothing. This level of destruction was only possible when Special Grade Jujutsu Sorcerers fought at full force.
The brief shock burned off fast. What came after it was volcanic.
Principal Yaga's temples pulsed. He pointed at the two figures lying flat in the rubble and his voice came out like a thunderclap.
"Satoru Gojo! Toji! Look at what you've done!"
"Fix the back mountain. Right now. Or I will expel both of you from Jujutsu High!"
➤ Next: The Hound Pup's First Bite