Chapter 62

Jujutsu High, Tokyo
3rd September, 15:09 JST

Mistakes had been made.

‘Ego death’ as it was known in the circles of people that liked to fuck with their brains for fun, was not an especially destructive or traumatic process, at least not in my experience. It sounded scary because it contained ‘death’ in its name, and indeed, it was a lot like death, in that there was nothing to really experience.

The experience was nothingness. That included the absence of uncomfortable experiences such as fear, and every comfortable experience for that matter.

All in all, pointless to the extreme. And disruptive to my purposes. I had been ‘offline’ for three hours, in which any given thing could have happened in all the clans that I administrated. Nothing did happen, because nothing usually happened nowadays. Between my panopticon, my lack of tolerance for rule-breaking, and the comfortable living standards I afforded to those that followed the rules, I had created a perfect formula for a peaceful microsociety that required very little constant attention.

I still gave it constant attention out of habit and a desire to be thorough, which was why the missing three hours disturbed me.

Normally, I’d have entered Michiko’s Timeless Sanctuary to wait out the downtime, but I had given her explicit orders not to interact with me while I was high for reasons that didn’t need to be explained. I gave her an order to swallow me into her innate domain afterwards, should I ever be taken out of commission.

Four grams of psilocybin were too much, clearly.

It was a shame that I had so little to go on when it came to dosages. Alcohol was ingrained in the Japanese culture. The technique behind drinking was universally accessible both orally and in literature. LSD and psilocybin on the other hand were poorly researched and the accounts were heavily biased. Those that liked it, loved it. Those that hated it ascribed all manner of implausible side effects and dangers to it.

Drug culture was different from drinking culture in that roughly none of it was really written down.

I expected that this would begin to change heavily as the internet became more and more popular over the years, but for now, I was mostly flying blind.

My drug dealer had explained to me the culture of drugs when I had made my deal with him. We had met in a coffee shop, in a private booth in the middle of town, somewhere public and with many people. For a yakuza goon, he was conscientious enough to cover up all his tattoos where they peeked out from his clothes with a healthy layer of make-up, which made our meeting far less conspicuous.

Before going into the brass tacks of what he would get me, he explained that drug enthusiast often used in numbers and discussed dosages amongst one another. The dangerous drugs with a higher acute mortality like opiates were an especially hot and important topic of conversation. It was difficult to rely on dealers because the purity was highly variable, the supply chains always in flux, and the criminals involved not really being particularly… motivated in keeping people safe.

The Japanese criminals were far more invested in that subject, as dead bodies were bad for business, and this really was an era of criminal organization’s downfall. They would rather not rock the boat too hard, else risk a too-too severe blowback to their operations by law enforcement.

Therefore, my dealer had been all too eager to fill me in on anything that I needed in terms of information, dosages, and acute toxicity, most of which I tried to double check in what little medical literature existed on the subjects.

From all this, I learned that doing illicit drugs was an almost hilariously dumb thing to do, taking me back to my initial position from when I was a child, the first time around at least.

Still, I had purchased all that I felt I needed. One hundred milligrams of LSD, spread across one thousand paper tabs, each containing one hundred micrograms, which was the standard dosage. Two hundred grams of psilocybin cubensis, or Magic Mushrooms. Fifty grams of ketamine. Ninety grams of MDMA. A kilogram brick of static hash from a farm in India—real artisanal shit according to my guy—, a hundred grams of this brand new drug called changa imported from Australia, and finally, two hundred grams of pure DMT crystals, and the assorted paraphernalia to properly vaporize and inhale the substance.

DMT was also the active ingredient in changa, which was plant matter containing Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors or MAOIs as well as the DMT. The former would increase the duration and intensity of the DMT, which was where the ‘trip’ originated from. MAOIs alone were apparently just a class of drugs that could be naturally found in certain plants, and had been used as antidepressants and treatments in mental disorders.

And hey, if it worked…

All of this, I rigorously tested, even though I had paid my dealer to test it for me. Everything, except for the ketamine, came back with good results, for both our tests. The ketamine seemed to be cut with something called ‘4-methylmethcathinone’, or mephedrone. Whatever it was, it had meth in its name twice, thrice if you counted ‘meph’, which made me not very super excited to try it, even if the available literature made it seem innocuous. The analogue of this substance, cathinone, occurred naturally in many plants that people chewed in places all over Africa, and its acute toxicity was very low, compared to other controlled substances of course.

The frequent occurrences of ‘meth’ in the name still gave me some pause, but that reaction of mine didn’t really hold any water when considering my other purchase. After all, the MA in MDMA did outright stand for methamphetamine, which also awakened my long-atrophied moral panic surrounding substances.

Ultimately, my entire line-up was carefully selected to limit physical dependency and acute toxicity. None of these substances were liable to kill anyone when taken responsibly, and certainly not me even while taken irresponsibly. Neither would they create physical dependency, though nothing could be said about psychological addiction, or the long-term effects while taken during adolescence.

Names aside, 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, or MDMA, was far from actually being methamphetamine. The difference was really not just academic. The two substances did entirely different things to entirely different parts of the body.

I wasn’t the fifteen-year-old Taylor Hebert anymore, whose world was shaken by the sight of some poor shmuck in a K-hole.

I was far worse. Life had a way of taking you every which place than where you expected to go.

Ultimately, my dealer was a lowlife of his word. He had apologized profusely for the mix-up with the ketamine and had made things right by giving me a pure sample. I rewarded his honesty by buying myself fifty grams of the mephedrone as well, as I was already very curious about it.

After paying—using money that I had stolen from a couple of rival gangs—he had been prompt in his deliveries. He was good at business, if not being a good human being.

That was the last I’d ever see of him, I imagined. I had bought myself a ‘lifetime supply’ of everything that I needed, knowing that I’d likely never reach the end of my supply. I was burnt out on alcohol, and I suspected that I’d similarly be burned out on all my different flavors of psychedelics and empathogens.

All that awaited me from then on was reality, in all its cold, cruel and sharp harshness. No longer did the experience seem like a non-starter to me, but rather something similar to a cold plunge. Harsh and acutely uncomfortable, but ultimately refreshing and therapeutic.

This was all a rather bizarre and impossible-to-describe set of circumstances that I had fallen into, even if I mostly believed this development to be a positive one, which was why I didn’t share any of it to Shoko. I still needed to phase her out of her smoking addiction.

Of course, that would entail a lot of work, gently coaxing her into the right path. The path to moderation was long, but it didn’t pay to rush towards it. Even the process of attaining moderation had to be moderate.

Rather than worry too much, I just let the days go by, smoking my static and hanging out. The smoking had the added effect of making time go by at an almost breakneck speed.

I was still at least 70% functional during my highs as well, which was an acceptable degree of breakage in my opinion. The downsides didn’t eclipse the upsides of being able to coast through unstimulating classes and degrading my cognition until I was not really all that different from a genuine fifteen-year-old.

And, of course, I would eternally contemplate whether or not I should reveal any of what I truly was to the people closest to me. A birdie had told me that the truth would set me free. Perhaps this truth genuinely would?

At least today, I wouldn’t know.

My three friends and I hung out on the balcony of one of the many buildings on campus designed to store cursed artifacts. It was a part of Tengen’s network of revolving storage rooms containing everything from cursed tools to even some of Sukuna’s fingers, though the placement was randomized and subject to change due to Tengen’s dimensional barrier Jujutsu.

It was one of the taller pagodas on campus, and it was discrete enough to allow me a place to smoke while we leaned over the railing, watching people from our sister school arrive to Tokyo and being welcomed by the principal.

They, too, had fifteen candidates to front, but almost everyone besides had arrived to see their school compete against ours. Haruta was among their selected as well.

I took a deep drag of my pipe, calculating that my high would go from a three to a four and a half out of ten on my own personal scale. Not nearly enough to induce paranoia or a general inability to operate around other people, but more than enough to make an hour feel like ten minutes.

Behind the general crowd of the Kyoto students arrived a procession of robe-wearing monks of the religious faction. At the head of their parade, Daimonji Matsuda, Special Grade sorcerer. The clean-shaven monk from Kyoto High’s fourth year. His uniform was still cut in the style of a monk’s robes, and he had an all-too-innocent smile on him that likely concealed a fanatical devotion to his ideals.

He was not just a Special Grade. He was also a Sorcerer worthy of the name. Even Gojo did not meet my estimation of that name, Sorcerer. Not because he was lacking in strength, but because he simply did not embody that title the way some people did.

People like me. And Ito. And Haruta.

“He looks strong,” Gojo said.

“He is,” I said.

“Stronger than you?” Shoko asked me.

The question had a simple answer, but that didn’t compel my mind into action the way all the complex answers did. I instantly lost myself in them.

“I can imagine so many different ways of losing to him right now,” I said wistfully. My brain was going turbo-mode picturing every worst case scenario at the same time in flashes of catastrophe. I could almost feel my skull heating up from the activity.

Evidently, I had underestimated my last hit from my trusty kiseru. I had to work to calm down now.

“I fear he might even defeat me,” Gojo whimpered, his expression hangdog.

“No way,” Shoko said flatly.

“He’s the real deal. The dreaded Class Four!”

Suguru’s jaw clenched, his eyes tracking Daimonji. “Class Two, actually. Definitely not a slouch.”

He most certainly was not. I had found him when he was fourteen, rescuing him from a Grade One cursed spirit that had been determined to eat him. Sometime after I passed him over to the Jujutsu authorities, he had apparently embraced religion and had become something of a poster boy for the religious faction in the modern era. Their little Gojo Satoru.

And due to his devotion to his faith, he would never be my enemy in any way except politically. That still made him a threat, but one I would much rather have than a Special Grade out for my blood. It was far less of a headache to say the least.

“Who are all those monks?” Shoko asked.

As each sub-faction within the wider Kyoto faction met and were directed by Tokyo’s administration to their next location, it was soon the turn of the monks to be received.

“The conservative faction of Jujutsu Society is a wide net,” I said. “It used to be the only faction, really. The status quo. That’s still what they fight for. But they have different ways of going about this, of course. The religious faction favors faith.”

“Ah,” Shoko said. “Do they also include Christians and Shintoists?”

Among the monks were people dressed subtly different. They still wore robes, but in a different style. One style was black and white, with a white collar, and the other was white, red and voluminous.

“Indeed,” I said. “The power of faith is nothing to sneeze at. In the ancient era, faithful non-sorcerers could collectively repel cursed spirits from sanctified lands.”

“But not exorcising them,” Shoko said. “Which was why in every era, we were always needed. Come to think of it, this method is how the Ainu deal with their cursed spirits even today, but every year, they still have to manually clear away cursed spirits from the exclusion zones, or risk an outbreak.”

She had paid attention in class. That was good. Full marks, Shoko.

“Nowadays, all they’re good for is lending extra legitimacy to the conservatives,” I rolled my eyes. “When God’s on your side, how can you be wrong? And this group of old men all get to decide who God favors. Convenient, isn’t it?”

Though it went both ways, obviously. The old factions needed to appease the religious groups as those held a lot of sway over the Sorcerer rank and file. The Christians, especially, were a growing population in the world of Jujutsu, especially from the new population unattached to the old powers.

I couldn’t wait to sit in for the discussion about whether or not to let the Vatican in on our demonic infestation. That would be a riot to just watch, and not weigh in on at all. I had no horse in that race.

Appeasement to the religious groups often meant charitable donations to keep their lights on, and letting them act as a de facto Judiciary alongside Jujutsu HQ.

When I imagined this tangle of loyalties, the word that popped into my mind’s eye was ‘incestuous’. It likely didn’t make sense when viewed under a microscope, but I appreciated the venom and accusation of the word.

“You’re totally going to hell, so I get why you don’t care what they have to say,” Gojo said, turning around from the railing and leaning over it instead, looking up at the sky. His sunglasses hung precariously, but I knew better than to underestimate his perfect command over his body and space. “But some of us are trying to have a good relation with our lord.”

“I have it on good authority that I can’t go to hell,” I snorted. “So it really doesn’t matter to me.”

“Oh? Did a scammy cult leader get you to pay him the big yen for absolution?”

Shoko just groaned. “Worse.”

Not ‘worse’, per se. Just absurd. I wouldn’t blame them if they only said that to get me to feel good, but I was pretty sure that they believed it. This, in turn, suggested that heaven was real.

And that I would go there after I died, no matter what.

Even if it all turned out to be a lie, this was nevertheless something I quite liked to hear.

“What?!” Gojo shouted.

“It’s a secret,” I said. My attention moved from Daimonji, and to Kamo Joichi, dressed in a punky Jujutsu High uniform with a long coat and ripped sleeves. He even wore short-brimmed cap. He walked with his fellows from the Kamo clan, and was being received by the one Kamo who went to Tokyo Jujutsu High, Kamo Sachi. My reluctant double agent.

I was no longer afraid of her betraying me. Over the months that I had known her, I had counselled her using my Juchū, talking to her about her love and encouraging her to get to know him better.

I did this for purely selfish reasons, because a crush was simply a lack of information, and I knew where this would end. The hormones of teen love were strong, but they truly couldn’t defeat the many tiny ways in which her love, Kamo Tabito, was not nearly as into her as she was into him.

I was prepared to be pleasantly surprised. As much as I was wary of romantic love, especially when it was young love, I had nothing against a successful love story.

When the rose-tinted glasses finally came off, Sachi-chan had to reckon with the fact that Tabito was not ready to provide Sachi with what she needed. From this point on, all she had to do was make a decision that favored herself.

She still worked for the Kamo clan, ostensibly so that they would one day grant her the right to maybe marry Tabito (it had never been a sure thing in the first place). Nothing had changed in this regard. She worked for them and fed them the information that I wanted them to have.

And it was for that purpose that she worked for them. To work for me. Tabito was no longer in her heart. She would reject him if they ever deigned to allow the marriage because she was just that done with the situation.

I was quite proud of what I had accomplished with Sachi. She was down one potential leech for life, and was working to further an agenda that was finally centering her and her struggles. Manipulation aside, she was a winner no matter how you sliced it.

“That’s the other Special Grade,” Suguru said, looking at Joichi. “The trouble-maker.”

“His blood manipulation is good,” I said. “What makes him Special Grade is his ability to manipulate the blood of Cursed Spirits, almost free of cost to himself. He gets stronger the more Cursed Spirits he kills in quick succession.”

Shoko raised an eyebrow at that. “But what about the vanishing effect?”

“That’s the reason he can’t fight at full power for too long,” I said. “The vanishing effect makes it impossible for him to ramp up to his maximum potential instantly. But granted a big enough supply of Cursed Spirits, he will become unreasonably difficult to deal with, on the scale of even a natural disaster.”

Liquid was… dangerous.

I knew that all too well.

Joichi being able to pull off a pale imitation of Leviathan, using blood of all things, made him an everpresent threat in my awareness.

Thankfully, there weren’t all that many cases in which Joichi would have so much access to cursed spirit blood to play with.

Unless he was up against Suguru.

“I’m in trouble,” Suguru sighed.

Gojo clapped him on his shoulder. “Just take your ass beating like a champion, Suguru. You’ll come out stronger for it.”

The obvious solution was for Suguru to not use disposable spirits. Between his three Special Grades, he could make a convincing run for the top in their match-up.

“Self-deprecation is a bad look,” Shoko said to him.

“If I speak too arrogantly, I’m the bad guy. If I’m being humble, I’m still the bad guy,” Suguru muttered. “I can never win.”

“I’m sure that upstanding citizen won’t beat you,” Gojo said as Kamo Joichi shoved Sachi out of the way violently, stomping along the path to his lodging, ahead of the pack. He sure hated the concept of existing in a society. I supposed that was a part of what made him antisocial in the first place.

And how could something like that occur within a human, which was a social animal that relied on intraspecies bonds to survive?

Because humans were social enough to even pack-bond with the antisocial among us? What a noble species we were. I liked that interpretation.

It was naïve and ridiculous and yet I liked it. I had a newfound patience for overwhelming, bland positivity these days.

But I would kill that piece of shit given half an excuse. I didn’t care that he was a child. I cared that he was in control. He had nearly mortally wounded a teacher before trying to kill my Haruta. Where I came from, we put his type under the jail. The fact that he still walked free was a travesty and an affront to justice.

So he was on my docket now. My brand of justice. As soon as he acted out, I’d eliminate this threat to my people once and for all.

“If any of you kill him, I’ll make sure you get off scot free,” I said quietly.

“Ah, good to know,” Shoko nodded, pinching her chin and nodding repeatedly as though she was genuinely considering it.

“That’s excessive,” Suguru said.

I just shrugged. “I said what I said.”

“I’ll do it for money,” Gojo grinned. “Ten million yen. I wanna be the hitman for a change! Getting hunted is such a bore.”

“You get hunted a lot?” Shoko asked.

“When I was a kid, curse users really wanted to kill me,” he laughed. “They couldn’t, obviously. But for a time, I wasn’t able to really step outside unless I was fully fresh and ready to keep Infinity on at all times. It was such a drag. But I wanna see what all the bounty-hunting fuss is about!”

“I can do ten million,” I said.

The others were quiet.

Then, finally, Gojo broke the silence. “A hundred million.”

So he was never serious. A shame. “Coward.”

He grinned. “Broke.”

Ultimately, I didn’t need him dead that badly. For now, I could continue suffering his existence. I was a human, after all; a noble species of compassionate creatures that could bond even with those who did not reciprocate their feelings.

…I had already lost all interest in that banal sentimentality.