Chapter 145 - Prison Realm — Tears Unshed

Subway station. Five minutes of slaughter. Satoru Gojo's eyes went still. At his feet sat a black rectangular prism. Its surface bristled with dense, fleshy spines. Dozens of bloodshot eyeballs rotated in unison, fixing hard on the hem of his trousers. Do not touch. The Six Eyes fired a piercing red alarm straight into his brain. Satoru Gojo compressed Cursed Energy, ready to teleport out.

BOOM!

A massive impact detonated inside his skull. Pain. He let out a muffled grunt. The spatial curvature he'd just gathered scattered apart with a soft pop. The world lurched. The narrow, blood-soaked subway station vanished. Blinding summer light crashed into his eyes. In his ears: the maddening drone of cicadas from an old Tokyo shrine. The shaded slope behind Jujutsu High baked under a scorching sun.

The person standing there was not the idiot gym teacher in green spandex, yelling about the bonds of youth through a megaphone every single day. It was a man in a washed-out black T-shirt. The aura coming off him was extreme, icy, and dead. That scar at the corner of his mouth. Not a trace of heat in his eyes.

Only the flat numbness of someone who regards the dying as weeds. The rust-caked Inverted Spear of Heaven drove straight down the centerline of his throat, punching through his windpipe at pure physical speed. Blood sprayed. Not far away, Riko Amanai's eyes were wide open. A bloody hole sat in the center of her forehead. She crumpled into the deep shadow and went silent.

The Star Plasma Vessel mission had failed. The cold-blooded monster they called the Sorcerer Killer had killed him. The images slammed into fast-forward inside his mind. In the dead silence of despair, he'd seized the secret of Reverse Cursed Technique and clawed his way upright from the ruins of the flowerbed. He'd blasted half the man's body away with Hollow Purple.

Before that monster died, he'd left behind one piece of information: Megumi had been sold to the Zenin Clan. Suguru Geto stood on the steps at the edge of the blood pool. His best friend, who should have been doing weighted frog-jumps on the back-mountain training ground, cursing up a storm, had become someone else entirely. Geto's eyes were hollow.

Withered dead in the mud. Not a trace of warmth left. The rain came down in sheets. In a remote mountain village, Suguru Geto summoned over a thousand malformed Cursed Spirits. He slaughtered every ordinary person in the village. Not one left alive. Blood mixed with mud and flowed toward the village gate. The scene cut again.

Suguru Geto stood in the entryway of his childhood home, setting two dripping human heads onto the family altar. To sever his bonds, he had murdered his own parents. That young man laughed in despair from inside the blood, carrying the curse of having cut everything away, walking to the end of a road that led nowhere.

"Get out!"

Satoru Gojo bit down hard, veins standing out sharp on his forehead, and drove his right fist into the load-bearing wall beside him. Brick and stone exploded. What the hell was this? Garbage nightmares, utterly nauseating, gut-wrenching filth, forcibly crammed straight into his skull. That muscle-headed idiot who was always shameless, always so over-the-top hot-blooded it made you want to throw up.

That Geto who, just two days ago at the bonfire party, had snatched wagyu right out of Yuji Itadori's hands. If that hot-blooded moron's nature hadn't changed... Was this really the despairing endpoint that Geto and I were originally doomed to reach?

His brain hit extreme overload. These false years, forcibly poured in, fabricated experience carved from nothing, moved through his ultra-high-speed cognition in real time. Three full years, lived as genuine reality. A suffocating weight settled over his heart. From the shadows at the back of the platform came slow, unhurried applause. Kenjaku walked out of the dark.

He glanced at the black cube spinning frantically on the ground, then tilted his head toward the woman beside him. She wore an ancient dark-purple haori. The newly awakened partner, pulled fresh from a dead man's grave. Chikage.

"The effect is truly astonishing." Kenjaku's mouth split wide. "Even this little brat who stands above all creation, reduced to this state. What exactly did you show him?"

Chikage kept both hands tucked inside her haori sleeves. Her voice didn't move.

"How would I know."

"Nightmare Samsara has no ability to directly harm the soul."

"Its only rule: forcibly seize the alternate parallel trajectory the target fears most from the depths of their soul, and drive it straight into their cognition."

She paused. A trace of mockery settled in.

"Unlike everyone else, his mind runs far too fast. One minute of real time — his cognitive system has probably already lived through several years."

Kenjaku let out a laugh of pure, unrestrained delight. This was the trump card he'd spent over a decade building. Prison Realm's activation and sealing operated on two conditions only. First: the target must be within range. Second: the subjective cognitive time flowing inside the target's brain must reach sixty seconds. As long as Satoru Gojo was immersed in that false dead end for even a single instant...

A span of several false years was more than enough to bring this dead man's cube fully to life.

"Seal."

Kenjaku issued the command to the eye-covered cube on the ground.

BOOM!

The cube burst open in mid-air. A series of sharp, wet cracks. The soft-bodied frame unrolled fast, wrapping gray runic matter tight around Satoru Gojo, thighs, waist and abdomen, both arms, up to the back of his neck. Limitless collapsed the instant the fleshy bands touched his skin. His technique circuits were forcibly severed, plunged into dead silence. The illusion fell away.

Cold sweat filmed across Satoru Gojo's forehead. His eyes refocused in the dim light of the platform. He looked down at the cube shell binding him, trussed up like a stuffed rice dumpling.

"What a filthy trap."

Kenjaku stepped over the severed limbs of the Transfigured Humans and stopped three meters away.

"You've lost, Satoru Gojo."

Kenjaku raised his scepter.

"On this night, the night before a new era dawns, inside this narrow black box, sleep quietly until the world has no more walls."

Jogo reattached his severed arm and hauled himself out of the rubble.

"Finally got that freak sealed! Now I'm heading up to scald every last worthless piece of Jujutsu High trash outside into sludge!"

"Ha..."

A low sound. Barely a breath. From somewhere deep in the throat. Kenjaku and Jogo both went quiet. They stared at the man wrapped in layer after layer of binding, only his head free to move even slightly. No despair. No loser's hysteria. No collapse from old wounds being torn back open. In those pale blue eyes, there was only mockery.

"Hey." Satoru Gojo's voice was unhurried. Insufferably easy. "Let me say something."

His limbs were locked dead. His tone didn't care.

"You pieces of trash who spend your days crawling through the sewers, aren't you thinking a little too highly of yourselves?"

Kenjaku's brow twitched. "Still running your mouth, even now?"

The amusement in Satoru Gojo's eyes deepened. He tilted his head.

"Seems like you've completely forgotten one thing."

Jogo's expression hardened. "Quit bluffing! Even you — the strongest — are sealed. What could those monkeys possibly do?!"

"Toji Fushiguro... might actually be stronger than me."

Jogo's orange-red stone face locked up. Kenjaku's grip on the scepter went tight. They had known from the start. Toji Fushiguro was a variable that defied every rule in the jujutsu world, not the kind of problem you solved with conventional methods.

"Good luck doesn't hang around a shitheap forever."

Satoru Gojo watched the flesh-colored mass closing in from above, slowly sealing over his head. He let gravity have him and relaxed. That reel of nightmares had been utterly wretched. But the more he recalled that world of despair, the hotter the fire for that hot-blooded idiot burned in his chest. Thank goodness. It wasn't real. Thank goodness. Geto didn't betray us.

Thank goodness. Toji is an idiot.

"Muscle moron. This deadly mess from here on out..."

"Smash it all to pieces with your fists."

Click. The black frame snapped shut and sealed. The iron box dropped hard among the scattered severed limbs and blood-foam of the Transfigured Humans.

➤ Next: The Natural Disaster Enters the Field