Chapter 134 - The Plot Emerges, Society Panics!
Suguru Geto stuffed the last Cursed Spirit into his mouth and chewed with the unhurried grace of someone savoring a fine dessert. He closed his eyes. A look of quiet pleasure settled across his face. Beside him, Yuji Itadori, on his very first mission with Geto, couldn't help scratching his head.
Is that stuff... actually good?
He glanced at the residue pooled on the ground, that revolting slick of something like asphalt mixed with rotten flesh, and his stomach lurched hard. Nobara Kugisaki shuddered and quietly took two steps back from Suguru Geto. Their normally handsome, mild-mannered Teacher Geto, it turned out, had one absolutely incredible eating disorder.
Megumi Fushiguro rolled his eyes and sighed at his two sheltered companions. "Idiots. It doesn't taste like what you're picturing."
"Huh?" Yuji and Nobara both looked over.
Suguru Geto swallowed the last mouthful, opened his eyes, and smiled. "To be honest, a Cursed Spirit Orb tastes like a rag someone wiped vomit with. Genuinely disgusting."
That description drained the color from Yuji's and Nobara's faces instantly.
"However," Suguru Geto continued, his expression easing back into something almost contented, "ever since that idiot gave me a suggestion, things changed."
Yuji blinked.
"I placed a Binding Vow on myself." Suguru Geto raised one finger. "Every Cursed Spirit I consume now tastes like the finest cake I've ever imagined. The price: I can only absorb Special Grade Cursed Spirits."
Yuji Itadori and Nobara Kugisaki stared at him with identical expressions of absolute disbelief.
"You can use a Binding Vow like that?!"
The rules of the Jujutsu World could actually be bargained with like this? At that exact moment, the smile on Suguru Geto's face disappeared. His head snapped up. His gaze cut toward the far horizon. Almost simultaneously. In another district entirely, mid-fight with a Cursed Spirit, Satoru Gojo stopped moving. The lollipop in his mouth cracked between his teeth.
On the Tokyo Jujutsu High training ground, where Toji Fushiguro had been leading Aoi Todo and Naoya Zenin through a "Youthful Handstand Mountain Circuit," Toji stopped too.
Three people standing at the absolute peak of the Jujutsu World, in three different locations, all sensed at the same moment two enormous columns of malevolent Cursed Energy tearing into the sky from somewhere far away.
"Looks like," Satoru Gojo spat the plastic stick out of his mouth, the eyes behind his sunglasses going very cold, "something really big is actually happening."
Cut to: a derelict dojo buried deep in the mountains. The same resurrection ritual. Again. The cross shattered, and a blinding torrent of black-red light erupted with a concussive boom, painting the entire dojo crimson. The light died. On the altar stood a figure that hadn't been there before.
A tall man. Powerfully built. Dressed in a tattered samurai uniform, a broken katana hanging at his waist. His eyes were shut, and radiating off him in thick, suffocating waves was the smell of rust and blood, so heavy it seemed to stain the air. Kenjaku opened his mouth to speak.
Clang!
The samurai's eyes snapped open. He hadn't taken in a single detail of his surroundings. It didn't matter. The broken blade was already out. A blade aura, absurdly dense, solid as cast iron, carrying the weight of something that could split mountains, swept horizontally straight for Kenjaku's throat. Kenjaku's smile didn't move. He tapped one foot lightly against the ground and stepped aside.
BOOM.
The blade aura tore through the space where he'd been standing a half-second before, ripping through hundreds of meters of trees and the cliff face behind them. Every surface left behind was smooth as a mirror.
"My, my. Quite the temper," Kenjaku said pleasantly.
"There's no need to rush, old friend. I brought you back to give you worthy opponents. Real ones."
The samurai gripped his broken blade. His eyes were ice. They didn't leave Kenjaku. Kenjaku spread both hands wide, his smile warm with invitation.
"This era has produced two of the greatest monsters in recorded history."
"One was born with the Six Eyes. He stands at the apex of the Jujutsu World. A Divine Child."
"The other has no Cursed Energy whatsoever. He shatters Domains with his bare body. They call him the Taijutsu Tyrant."
At those two words, "greatest" and "Taijutsu Tyrant," something shifted in the samurai's dead eyes. A single spark, catching in the dark.
The killing intent rolling off him pulled back, replaced by hunger, pure and focused: the desire for a real fight.
"Greatest." The samurai's voice came out like gravel. "Where."
"Soon." Kenjaku's smile held. "They'll come to you. Personally."
The words were barely out of his mouth when a second figure appeared at the dojo's entrance without a sound. The bewitching woman from the earlier resurrection. Her eyes found the sword-wielding samurai across the room.
BOOM. BOOM.
Two surges of Cursed Energy, both ancient, both soaked through with centuries of slaughter and death, detonated simultaneously without the slightest restraint and crashed into each other. The space inside the dojo buckled. The ground split in long, jagged lines. Standing off to the side, Jogo's volcano head let out an involuntary plume of black smoke.
So strong. God, I want to fight them.
Kenjaku surveyed the scene with quiet satisfaction. The Four Great Disaster Cursed Spirits. The Cursed Womb: Death Paintings Eldest Son. The deep-sea monster. And now these two, ancient things that had clawed their way back from mountains of corpses and oceans of blood. Every piece was in position.
He turned the shape of it over in his mind, the Shibuya Incident already taking form, already glittering: a carnival, an absolute spectacle, something that would tear the Jujutsu World apart at its foundations and set what remained on fire.
While the Jujutsu World moved in tense, urgent preparation for the storm bearing down on it, something else was already happening in the world of ordinary people. Quietly. Then all at once. Twitter, YouTube, TikTok. Every major platform on earth. A handful of short videos,shaky footage, washed-out resolution—spread from account to account with the speed and reach of a virus.
The locations were all different. A parking lot at two in the morning. An abandoned factory. A deserted back alley. The content was identical. Creatures that had no business existing,bodies warped into wrong shapes, faces that didn't belong to any living thing science had ever catalogued—tore into human beings and ate them.
Most people, at first, assumed it was CGI, good CGI, maybe even impressive CGI, or some studio's guerrilla marketing for a horror release.
"The effects look so real. Anyone know the movie?"
"Fake. Obviously fake. Come on."
"Just a promo stunt. Nothing to see."
But the uploads kept coming. Different countries. Different angles. The same thing on every screen. Then came the clearest video of all.
A creature layered with eyes, dozens of them, all open, dragging a man in a dress shirt across the ground while he was still screaming. Still alive. It pulled him into the dark of an alley, and the feed held on just long enough to capture the sound: the man's screaming, raw and tearing, and underneath it, the wet crack of bones breaking between teeth.
That sound was real. Anyone who heard it knew immediately that it was real. Panic ignited. And then it moved the way wildfire moves through dry grass,no pause, no hesitation—consuming everything.
"What the hell IS that thing?!"
"Is this the end of the world?!"
"Why won't the government say anything?!"
Conspiracy theories and apocalypse prophecies tangled together and fed each other. The world, already shaking from one disaster after another, tipped the rest of the way into something that looked a lot like madness.
That thin, fragile veil called "ordinary life," the one that kept human society feeling safe and predictable and sane.
An invisible hand found a corner of it, somewhere small and easy to overlook. And quietly pulled it back.
➤ Next: Society Out of Control, a Mole?