Chapter 4

  “I observed your cursed energy during your sparring match,” Iemon said as I sat down on a chair in the infirmary. Matsumoto was in one of the beds, while I was being tended to by a nurse who was slathering some type of cream on my face that chilled me. “You have better control than any of the children there. Control comparable to an experienced user, even. But you are facing a few problems here, my dear. Number one: the circumstances of your birth. Twins are rare in our world. Quintuplets, even more so. We had no choice but to cull that litter, leaving only one alive, chosen at random since they were all female anyhow.” Implying that if I’d had a brother, I would have been chosen to die. Of course.

  “Number two: your gender. You don’t stand to gain any position due to that. You are, at best, a bargaining chip. Your task is to support whoever you marry from the shadows, and you will not even benefit me unless I have you marry one of my children—your first cousins.”

  Right, of course.

  Every day was a fresh hell, a fresh indignity.

  “Number three: you are… too strong. And now that you’ve taken too many Juchū, it would be an incredible waste to kill you.”

  “What about torture?”

  Iemon looked at me intently. “Keep rattling the clansmen and the elders will begin to consider that alternative closely.”

  Huh? “Then… no more Juchū battles.”

  “No more. You will train your curse expertise in other ways: learning combat skills, espionage, breaking and entering, and you will hold your head low. No more contact with your generation, whatsoever.”

  I nodded. That was… acceptable.

  “And what if I learn the Reverse Cursed Technique?” I asked. “Will I still be shunned for being a woman?”

  He chuckled and shook his head. “That might introduce some real change in these here parts. Yes, Teira—if you somehow manage to unlock the Reverse Cursed Technique, you will be considered the hero of our clan. No position would be too high for you. Until that point, you will of course be obliged to behave in the ways prescribed by our clan’s edicts since ancient times.”

  “What is… the Reverse Cursed Technique?” I asked.

  “What is cursed energy?”

  “Energy borne from negativity.”

  “This is the reverse. Cursed energy that has somehow transmuted itself into becoming its opposite: positive energy. This is productive energy that can even heal wounds and regenerate entire limbs. It can also regenerate lost Juchū and square your total number.”

  I furrowed my eyebrows. “How does one get positive energy? Do I need to search for a different source of power inside of my spirit?”

  “Positive energy comes from negative energy—somehow. I don’t know. Nobody does. Don’t hurt yourself trying to figure it out. You won’t.”

  I had to make positive energy from negative energy.

  I closed my eyes and focused on my cursed energy.

  Before anything else, I had to understand one thing: what made this energy negative?

  000

  “Let’s get one thing clear: I don’t like you touching me,” I said to caretaker number three as she sat across from me in my room, in seiza. “You don’t need to touch me, so don’t. Try to tickle me again and I will hurt you. I’ve learned how to harness my cursed energy.”

  Taniko looked at me in shock. “But—but… you’re so cute, Teira! I just want to make you feel good!”

  “You creep me out.”

  She gasped in shock.

  “And frankly, your insistence on ignoring my boundaries just proves that you don’t have my best intentions. If I didn’t think I was placed in your care precisely to punish me, I would have complained by now. But I won’t waste my time on that. Instead, I’ll warn you not to try anything, or I will hurt you.”

  I summoned my Juchū to punctuate my statement.

  And in Taniko’s expression, I saw a flicker of rage. It disappeared and she lowered her gaze. “Fine then, Teira-sama. Would you like some tea?”

  “Yes.”

  I’d have a Juchū follow her conspicuously just to make sure she wouldn’t spike it.

  If she did, she would make my decision to cut her off much, much easier.

  While I did that, I closed my eyes and delved deeper into my cursed energy, trying to find the answer to what the core of cursed energy really was.

  000

  They had books on the subject. Books that I had read to me while I still learned how to read—and also expand my abysmal Japanese lexicon.

  Taniko proved useful for this purpose, though I was dubious about how helpful she would really be to me now that I had enforced our boundary.

  In the texts, cursed energy wasn’t described the same way that scientists described things like electrons or other subatomic particles, even though that was what I was looking for. I wasn’t exactly well-versed in physics either, but that was what I was expecting: something scientific, familiar.

  The texts described cursed energy in poetic prose instead, matching—almost perfectly—my own idle observations on that natural phenomenon. Cursed energy was malevolence, spite, the focused desire to do harm. It was in the name: cursed energy was cursed energy.

  The one treatise I could find in the clan archives had simply described cursed energy as ‘indescribable’.

  ‘Whatever insights you glean from your cursed energy is yours and yours alone. The last inheritor of the Reverse Cursed Technique was incapable of sharing his secrets—not for a lack of trying. His words simply failed to penetrate anyone listening. In his final days, he had concluded—perhaps correctly—that the only way to master the Reverse Cursed Technique is to understand your cursed energy. Not ‘cursed energy’ in general, but your cursed energy. It is unique, carries its own signature, and differs from the energy of others. It cannot be shared directly—unless via a cursed technique made for such a purpose—and the residuals left by a curse expert can be tracked to that very same expert due to this signature.’

  The author of this work died in 1935.

  As far as most of the manuscripts I had consulted went, his was remarkably current—and the only useful one I had found thus far.

  I vowed to forget every other insight into the nature of cursed energy that I had read from books and external sources.

  It wouldn’t help me. The only relevant source was myself. I would have to invent particle physics from scratch.

  Iemon kept me in tutors and private lessons on curse use. According to him, while my cursed energy control was good, my physical ability still lagged behind, on account of the fact that I was six and barely even four feet tall.

  He had me practice on how to move my cursed energy and how to infuse it through my body. Somewhere in that skill, I would learn more about the nature of cursed energy, and that was what I needed to do.

  In Iemon’s private training room, I punched a wooden pole hard. It finally began to splinter. Iemon, who stood next to me, nodded. “You’re no Gojo Satoru, but your progress is… passable.” It had been three months now, learning under him, still keeping away from my agemates.

  “Who is Gojo Satoru?” I asked. I had heard whispers about some golden child being born with that exact name.

  “The recent inheritor of the Six Eyes and the Limitless technique, from the Gojo clan. A member of the so-called Jujutsu Society. He is fated to be the strongest Jujutsu Sorcerer of this generation. Your generation. And any other contemporary besides him. I fear that his reign will not end until his dying days.”

  My generation? “How old is he?”

  “Six. You were born in the same year as him,” he said. “Though you should pray never to run into him. According to rumor, he has stark white hair and bright blue eyes. Like a foreigner, almost.”

  “He has two techniques?” I asked. Six Eyes and Limitless.

  “The Six Eyes is a cursed trait. A cursed trait is different from a cursed technique in that it is always active. Cursed traits are rare due to that. Our clan has none. Well, none as truly visible as the Six Eyes. Some have theorized that even the ability to master the Reverse Cursed Technique requires that one possesses a trait, though that has never been confirmed. It may as well be true—it is an impossible skill to master.”

  According to him, at least.

  “Do you have any more questions?”

  “How do I rate against a cursed spirit?”

  “You can match up against a Wolf-grade spirit,” he said. “Bear-grades are yet beyond you.”

  There were six grades: Dog, Wolf, Bear, Tiger, Demon, and Dragon.

  “And the Six Eyes? Gojo Satoru?”

  “He will become a Dragon in time,” Iemon sighed, shaking his head. “And nothing can be done about that. The Gojo clan are famously protective of their heir, and according to rumor, he has already fended off several credible assassination attempts from some of our colleagues. We even provided the intelligence to enable these hits—though we were adamant that it wasn’t possible. Gojo Satoru is not an opponent. He’s an obstacle that must simply be avoided. Like any natural disaster.”

  Huh. The way he was talking about this kid, one would think that he was describing an Endbringer. He was only six years old, and people were still trying to assassinate him. This world was truly cursed.

  “I should arrange for a duel between yourself and a Wolf-grade curse,” he furrowed his brows. “You seem ready by now.”

  “I am.”

  “Excellent. We will arrange for it tomorrow.”

  I knew that Iemon wasn’t doing this out of the kindness of his heart. He wanted to groom me for one of his sons. I saw absolutely no reason to try and fight him on this. Rather, I welcomed his overtures and overt hints, playing my part perfectly. It helped that it didn’t chafe to be under Iemon’s thumb. His guiding hand was strict, but soft. It was something I could endure for a few more years.

  But the moment I learned the Reverse Cursed Technique, I would no longer have a use for him.

  I just hoped it would arrive sooner rather than later.

  000

  The battlegrounds was in a basement, darkly lit, with talismans all over the walls.

  The place was lit only by floating Juchū that glowed in the dark—Iemon’s Juchū. Apparently, they were so laden with his cursed energy that they released the excess power as light, one of the niftier quality of life applications to our inherited technique.

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  Standing in the middle of the room, arms bound in manacles connected to the floor, was a cursed spirit.

  It had green skin, a massive mouth and an odd body-shape, like it belonged in a kid’s cartoon and not real life. Its teeth were wide rectangles that looked comically oversized, as did its mouth. Proportionally, it looked stubby and short, but it was in fact taller than even Iemon. Almost twice as tall as I was.

  I imbued my body with cursed energy and released my Juchū.

  “That… might be a mistake,” Iemon said. “Once you lose one, it’s gone for good. This is why we don’t use our techniques to fight.”

  “But we could control them,” I said.

  “It takes over a hundred Juchū to control even this paltry Wolf-grade,” Iemon shook his head. “Ten times more as you go up each grade.”

  A million for one Dragon-grade, then.

  “Usually, we join hands to take control over more stubborn monsters, but we have never been able to control a Tiger-grade directly.”

  “What about Hibana Renzo?” I asked. Also known as ‘the last guy’, in my head at least. The clan referred to him as a hero and a legend. He was the last person to have unlocked the Reverse Cursed Technique. “He must have had millions of insects. At least one million, right?”

  Iemon snorted. “That’s an impossible amount to have.”

  “If he had a thousand and squared the number using the Reverse Cursed Technique—“

  “Then his head would have exploded from that deluge of sensory information. Renzo stopped at fifteen thousand Juchū because that was the human limit.”

  I blinked in shock. “Then… does that mean that it’s… possible to reproduce even further than just one generation?”

  Iemon blinked. “I have no clue. All I know is that Renzo limited himself purposefully. Some accounts state that it was because he didn’t want to take too many Juchū from his clansmen, while others state that he was approaching his limits as a human. I’m partial to that interpretation.”

  Fifteen thousand bugs put his initial number at just north of a hundred—so he hadn’t exactly plundered the clan to get as many Juchū as possible for what I had initially assumed was one singular chance to increase the number of the swarm.

  Iemon clapped his hands. “Enough talk. I will free this cursed spirit now. You will fight now. I don’t recommend Juchū for this—even if they don’t end up dying, the sensory information would just distract you—, but perhaps some lessons are better learned the hard way.”

  I released all seventy-six of my Juchū at once, immediately gaining a barrage of information on the cursed spirit from every angle. With each additional Juchū, it seemed like my senses became sharper and sharper to boot.

  Would that prove overwhelming after even a few hundred more Juchū? Was this what Renzo had shied away from, two centuries ago?

  Iemon raised two fingers up and placed them vertically before his face. The manacles fell off from the cursed spirit’s muscled hands.

  Its eyes widened and it started screaming, running towards me.

  It ran at me with its mouth wide open, and a savage glint in its eyes. It wanted nothing more than to kill and eat me.

  And yet it moved…

  …so slow.

  000

  It couldn’t make even a single move without my constant awareness. It got to the point that I could almost plot its future course and how it would react to me.

  I ducked under its punch and sent one directly into its mid-section. It flew back a little, landed on its feet to arrest its momentum, and hurled itself at me again.

  The Juchū gave me eyes on the monster, and also on myself. And in my own movements, I could finally sense what I had chastised those children for, back when I had been training with the general population.

  Inefficiency. My cursed energy wasn’t quite telegraphing my movements, but it also wasn’t hitting just right.

  I landed another blow and jumped away from the cursed spirit’s counter attack, careful to reposition my Juchū away from it. Unless this monster had some form of technique, I couldn’t see it be able to land even a single hit on my bugs.

  I dove right in again, this time hunting towards that timing that I was missing by a hair every time.

  One punch.

  Two punches.

  Three.

  By using my cursed energy, especially against a curse, I was gaining more and more raw comprehension of the energy. Nothing I could put to words, of course. Just a feeling of gradually inching towards getting things just right.

  I started softening my blows, just to make things last longer. The cursed spirit had somehow begun to slow down even more. Its green skin was covered in purple welts, its body was covered in cuts from my fists, and it wasn’t using its right arm anymore.

  I had to slow down, or else the creature would die.

  And I was getting so close.

  As my punches turned into love taps, my cursed energy seemed to make up for the difference, and I forced myself to reduce the intensity even further.

  “Tiring out?!” Iemon called out to me from the sidelines. That was what it looked like to him?

  I took a boxing stance, and started focusing. The green monster waved its arm over my head gently. And I waited. For something. A sign maybe—I didn’t know. I couldn’t tell. Couldn’t think. My mind melted into all the information that the Juchū were shoving into my brain, and what my eyes were telling me.

  And what I could sense from my own cursed energy.

  I’m not meant for this place.

  I have to leave. I need to leave.

  I imbued that desire with a curse.

  And settled on a purpose.

  I would have to destroy the Hibana clan. That was what my cursed energy was telling me. And that was what I wanted to do. I had seen too much to let everything just slide. Too many monsters, too much suffering.

  And I would learn the Reverse Cursed Technique.

  I punched. This time, with all my power.

  The air cracked. Black lightning flashed from the point of contact.

  The cursed spirit flew back, and as it did, I saw a hole form from the point of contact, gradually causing the spirit to explode.

  A second passed and the monster hit the wall.

  Purple gore covered my pretty black kimono. Soon it began to dissolve, leaving me looking clean.

  Lightning…

  …what the hell was that?

  I looked to Iemon, whose eyes were wide in shock. “Black Flash,” he whispered.

  I closed my eyes and focused on my cursed energy. Everything was so clear now.

  The nature of cursed energy had become clearer to me than ever before.

  Clear enough that… I could almost swear that I was looking at a roadmap now. Or… an incomplete jigsaw puzzle, all the pieces spread out before me. It was all there for me. All of it.

  Above all else, it was a direction.

  I grinned widely.

  000

  Black flash.

  The metal pole dented under my fist.

  Black flash.

  It bent.

  Black flash.

  It broke.

  Timing was key. It had to be perfect. And with each hit, I learned more and more. Tiny crumbs, but enough to one day fill a plate.

  I was training privately inside Iemon’s place. He had been cagey about what the Black Flash meant, but I had a decent understanding of what it was from my own self-experimentation: it was the apotheosis of cursed energy control, clearly. A timing-based strike that leveraged cursed energy’s potential at an extremely narrow window of time, in which the cursed energy was at its most volatile.

  It was… an otherwise reasonable person murdering someone in a fit of passion.

  It was exactly that, yet somehow more. A negativity blown into extreme proportions only for a short time. The devil himself inhabiting your body just to commit one singular act.

  The reason a handcuffed man could sit in front of a jury of his peers and cry to them that ‘this wasn’t me’ that had murdered that person.

  Cursed energy operated under such rules, too. There was the regular amount of energy, largely stable. And then there was The Moment.

  The crime of passion. Over too quickly, leaving behind an aftermath of devastation.

  It was something that I was all too familiar with.

  Alexandria…

  Black Flash.

  I struck another metal pole.

  I got good results only when my Juchū were out. Clearly, they were enhancing my control. When they were inside of my spirit, they weren’t active. I suspected that with a few more Black Flashes, I could figure out even that.

  If I took enough Juchū from the others and activated them all while they were inside of my spirit, I could perhaps finally comprehend the nature of cursed energy, at least enough to activate the legendary technique.

  I was more excited than I had ever been in this life.

  Black Flash.

  000

  Iemon watched through his Juchū as Teira tore down pole after pole with consecutive Black Flashes.

  She was clearly hitting them at will, too.

  He was in his bedroom, hand wrapped around the rope of a large gourd of sake. He could barely believe his eyes, but she was doing it. Black Flashes without end.

  It wasn’t possible. It was literally not possible. In the history of curses, no one had ever been able to do what Teira was now doing. No one in documented history, at least.

  With a start, Iemon realized—she really was going to do it at this rate.

  She really might learn the Reverse Cursed Technique.

  What would that mean for him?

  He was proudly a Tiger-grade expert, among the strongest in the entire clan. While the second coming of Renzo—especially in a woman—would shake the clan up, he stood to profit massively as long as he didn’t act hastily.

  Where do I start? Gifts? Yes. I should lavish her in gifts. I should switch out her caretaker as well.

  That one had been Mitsuzuka’s idea of a funny joke, apparently. All Iemon could feel was a bone-deep dread that the harlot hadn’t already gotten a fill of her urges for children already. There was no telling what Teira might do in retaliation, though the answer was quite obvious.

  He couldn’t make any overt promises to her, but he would back off from foisting his sons on her—they would likely not be very safe in the proximity of such a prime target for assassins.

  Gifts…

  Another Black Flash.

  …and respect for the next head of the Hibana clan, whether she knew it or not.

  Iemon took a deep gulp of his sake and shook his head.

  Another Black Flash.

  Could… could even Gojo Satoru do this?

  Black Flash.

  Iemon drank again, and removed the Juchū from the heiress’ presence.

  000

  “Life could be a dream. Life could be a dreeeam. Durududu, shaboom.”

  The old song played from the same record player that Iemon had gotten me some months ago, after the ‘Turning Point’ as I had taken to calling it in my head.

  While the song played, I meditated on the nature of cursed energy, like I usually did. It wasn’t work, really. Rather, it was fun. Negativity was a wine, and I had pretty much fallen into the deep end and become an alcoholic. Spite animated me.

  The answer to positive energy would be to find a way to transmute this spite into the opposite. It was easy to conceptualize the matter mathematically: a negative number multiplied by itself, or any other negative number for that matter, always became a positive number. That was just how math worked.

  Like turning around twice and being in your original position.

  In practice, it was impossibly complicated.

  “Life could be a dream. If I could take you up in Paradise up above.”

  That record player had come at exactly the right time. The Turning Point had changed Iemon for the better. He had, due to self-interest no doubt, completely changed his tune about me. Exorcising that cursed spirit with the Black Flash had proved something to him, no doubt.

  And the music that now filled the room? Well, it was in English.

  I had asked for American songs. Any American songs, really. I wasn’t picky, I didn’t care. I just needed to hear the language again. I needed to remember a time when things were better.

  Earth Bet was far better than the Hibana clan.

  The first six years of my life had scarred me utterly, and I suspected that I would never heal from the experience.

  I doubted the next few years would be so much better, without infantile amnesia protecting me from the worst of it.

  But at least now, I finally had room to breathe, to decompress.

  And stew in a cauldron filled with negativity.

  It was important that I stay my course in destroying the clan. My cursed energy resonated with my emotions and my focused desire to destroy something. I suspected that in truth, what any curse expert worth their salt needed was a target, or a totem upon which they could heap their bottomless hatred.

  An enemy.

  Mine were the Hibanas. Every single one of them.

  I wouldn’t kill them. I wasn’t a killer.

  I would… bring them to justice. I would side with the Jujutsu Society and help them lock these degenerates up for good. These people were only slightly above the Endbringer cults in my estimation, and they made regular dealings with the yakuza.

  They had conspired to kill a six-year-old boy, for goodness’ sake!

  In this world, the hierarchy of strength could be measured by who was the most hateful.

  I wondered if Gojo Satoru would grow to become a monster on that account, or if he would be able to control the focus of his ire properly.

  I got up from my kneeling position as the song started getting good, once the singers reached a crescendo and stayed in that region of tones.

  “Life could be a dream, shaboom, if I can take you up to paradise up above,” I skipped on my feet, nodding as I sang. “Shaboom, You'd tell me, darlin', I'm the only one that you love. Life could be a dream, sweetheart, hello, hello again.” I hummed the rest of the song.

  It was good to get moving sometimes. Cursed energy infusion gave me strength, but without it, I was quite pathetic, physically. Something I’d have to rectify once I left the clan.

  The Turning Point had given me a lot of capital with Iemon, but he still insisted that I keep things inconspicuous. He had upgraded my digs, making it roomy enough to contain a record player and two bookshelves absolutely stacked with records. That and a separate little space for studying and taking notes, memorizing my daily sets of kanjis and going back to revise past ones.

  I was making good progress there as well. My Juchū gave me additional streams through which I could absorb information.

  That was one way in which my new power differed from my old one. It wasn’t just helping me control the bugs better. It was also helping me tolerate Sense Expansion.

  This shouldn’t be possible without a shard, and yet it had stopped influencing me entirely. It was no longer there, clearly. I had theorized that the bullet that had so obviously killed my old self—upon my request—had scrambled my corona pollentia and gemma on the way through.

  The closest frame of reference I had to what I could do, was that it was a cursed trait, like the Six Eyes that would apparently let Gojo Satoru control his Limitless technique perfectly.

  In that same vein, my cursed trait—the Queen Administrator—allowed me perfect control over the Cursed Insect Technique. The synergy I had with it was off the charts.

  Unfortunately, without the Reverse Cursed Technique, my Juchū would remain a rather pathetic defense against cursed spirits above Bear-grade. The clan, also, were quite useless to me when it came to answering my questions on how to emphasize the Control and Parasitization abilities better. Few ever risked their Juchū on those things. The clan had essentially frozen our collective advancement by being too cowardly to lose Juchū in the interest of getting stronger. It was pathetic, really.

  “Teira-sama.” I heard a voice from beyond the rice paper walls. My new servant woman/babysitter. Her name was Michiko, and given that she was not a pedophile, an abusive old bat, or an abusive younger bat, she was already the best caretaker I had ever had to deal with. “Sosuke-sama is returning from a mission. We should receive him in the courtyard.”

  The big baby apparently had to make a big deal out of returning from a job, having chipped in on the clan’s revenue by completing a ‘high-difficulty’ mission.

  He would do nothing but serve his clan duties for another year before going out once again. It was just a ceremony to ‘inspire’ the clan by making a show of how even the clan head was out working, and therefore no one else had an excuse.

  In my humble opinion, it served more to boost his own ego. I doubted anyone cared to such an extent.

  Still, I turned off the record player, put the record back inside its cover and proceeded out my room, Michiko three steps behind me.

  Evidently, I must have counted as an honorary man to her or something, because she truly did treat me with more respect than anyone else in this life had done before.

  In any case, irritating as it was for me to have to make an appearance in public just to appease the father of the first kid I ‘crippled’ in this clan, I was curious to see him up-close finally, and not just through the eyes of my Juchū.

  After all, he had a rather interesting set of Cursed Tools that I wanted to get a good look at.