Chapter 7

  The Association of Curse Experts had a long and storied history of being generally quite pathetic. After the usurpation of the Jujutsu Society, they had even stopped referring to their art as Jujutsu Sorcery, even though that was ostensibly what it was called all the way back in the Asuka era.

  And the Association had been ground down to five disparate clans. In the Heian era, there had been twenty-four. All of them were lost now. Their blood had intermarried with the bigger clans—such was the fate of a clan that didn’t consider women to be a part of their family, who also regularly put their men in harm’s way. Logically, it followed that the weaker clans would die out as no one was left to inherit the clan name.

  Now, those nineteen lost clans were partially responsible for the occasional random occurrence of sorcerers in the non-sorcerer population, and sometimes their inherited techniques would pop up in the big clans, whether Association or Society. Indeed, the Society was not above taking the women of the Association, sometimes forcefully.

  The Association did largely the same. It was all one big game of rape and eugenics, whether you were the ‘good guys’ or not.

  The biggest crowd in the hall were no-doubt us Hibana. Since we were hosting, we were also obliged to show off every one of our curse experts, even the children. That was why I was here in the first place. My absence would prove glaring to the clan, and it would reflect poorly on the higher-ups.

  They could despise me all they wanted behind closed doors, but the moment they made their distaste known publicly…

  Needless to say, the optics of having a beef with a seven-year-old whose only sin was just being really good at curses, wasn’t the best. It would have been one thing if I had been born as some kind of aberration with extremely low cursed energy or a congenitally disabled body. Or worse yet, a corruption of the standard Juchū technique.

  Aside from my quintuplet situation, I was the ideal young expert.

  I wondered if them treating me as such would have distracted me from my mission to end them.

  No. If anything, it would have sped their demise up. With focused training and unlimited resources at my side, that might almost make up for the fact that I’d lose out on some of that focused hatred I had managed to cultivate.

  In the procession of Hibana experts, I walked next to Iemon, who was not followed by his family as none of them were curse experts. His oldest was seven and had yet to awaken the inherited technique, which boded quite poorly for his future prospects. The other elders were followed by their own curse experts from their branch families. All in all, we made up around one hundred. We had a hundred and fifty curse experts, though fifty of them were perennially stationed in the outside world on a rotational basis, acting as our windows into the world.

  According to Iemon, this was a truly heavens-blessed number of curse experts to have. To put things into perspective, roughly half of the delegates sent by the Association clans were active curse experts.

  And the few of them that were curse experts didn’t all seem to have their inherited technique, which didn’t come as a surprise to me. The Hibana clan was an aberration in the world of curses in how often our inherited technique popped up. It made sense when one considered what the rules of cursed energy seemed to be governed by. Trade-off was a big part of the game.

  The Juchū technique was, by itself, pathetically weak. Without the Reverse Cursed Technique, you needed to absorb Juchū from your rivals to gain more. And no one seemed to be able to multitask as well as I could, which meant that the technique was gimped from the start without a special Cursed Trait.

  In exchange for these drawbacks, our experts were more numerous.

  I wondered if, instead of Juchū battles, we forced our curse experts to focus solely on physical combat instead? If we did that, we would have been at the top of this world of curses owing to how numerous we were.

  Unfortunately, the technique was more important, culturally. Almost like it was a religion.

  I paid half a mind to Sosuke-sama droning on about unity among our clans in the wake of Gojo Satoru’s birth as I focused most of my attention on colliding cursed energy together. Every moment that I spent awake was in service of this infuriatingly slow-going task.

  At times, I made lurches in progress, only to find that I was walking down dead-end paths. This forced me to start over, which was the infuriating part.

  “Hello there!”

  One of the Mori were talking to my Juchū, which was on the wall, having blended in with the shadow of a wooden frame. Black was a good color for Juchū to have, for that reason. I didn’t know why anyone deemed it a bad omen at all.

  The Mori in question was a middle-aged man with a wide grin and kindly eyes, though I was filling in a lot of blanks due to the low fidelity. It felt like looking at a person without my glasses, in my past life. The only reason I could make out any detail at all was because he was so close.

  “I almost didn’t notice you!” He whispered. “That’s impressive! Especially for a girl so young.”

  Fuck. He had tracked me down from the ‘radio signal’ tether. I hadn’t veiled it properly. I hadn’t been focused on developing that skill very much, which was a mistake. The more mastery I gained over my innate technique, the better I would become at sensing cursed energy.

  “You can signal to me if you want. I understand your clan’s morse code.” I did not take him up on that. “Not going to say anything?” He leaned closer to my bug, letting me get a better look at his features. There was something on his forehead. “That’s fine. I’ve heard rumors about you. Your clansmen seem to be thoroughly dissatisfied with you for bucking tradition and simply being better. That is such a shame. You don’t deserve any of that.”

  There was something seriously disconcerting with being comforted by a stranger, especially one from a clan of ‘villains’. He couldn’t have been much better than the Hibana clan—except that maybe his family’s policy was ‘equal-opportunity evil-doing’.

  In the end, the man wasn’t speaking to a seven-year-old like he so clearly thought he was. I was too old to fall for someone’s honeyed words, especially a wild stranger.

  “The Association respects strength above all else. In time, you will be able to change hearts and minds by that virtue, should you be able to stay alive for long enough. Luckily for you, my clan has resources that might be able to help you do exactly that. Over the course of so many years, much of what once made the Hibana strong has been corrupted, watered down, or deleted from the annals of history. I can offer you some insights, free of charge! On my cursed energy, you would owe me nothing.”

  Ah. There was the hook.

  “After the summit ends, meet me outside. I will present you with a small gift, an investment into your illustrious future.”

  I signaled to him: ‘Why do you care?’

  He grinned widely. “I heard the rumors, and made my own investigations into you. Now, having seen you with my own eyes, and sensed your grasp on cursed energy, I’m fully convinced that you are truly singular. And I’m an avid purveyor of young talent. I water growing seeds wherever I go, just in case. Always helps to have an early contact with the leaders of tomorrow.” He leaned closer. I could see that the thing on his forehead were lines like… stitches on a horizontal scar. “What do you say, Teira-chan?”

  I signaled a brief ‘yes’. Then I had my Juchū fly away.

  000

  I had Mori Tachi dead-drop my ‘gift’ somewhere inconspicuous as I had no desire to be seen next to another clan big-wig. I had him do it on the foot of a tree near the mountain staircase.

  Once the summit ended, we descended down the mountain, Iemon and I—with Michiko in tow, of course. We were at the very back of the pack, and using our Juchū, we had confirmed no eyes on us.

  Once we reached a specific point down the mountain, I split off from Iemon for a second, into the trees, to get my item.

  According to my research, Tachi was the younger brother of the current clan heir of the Mori. The present was a book, wrapped in linen. There was a note attached to a string on the linen as well. Contact information, should I desire more.

  I didn’t waste any time crumpling the tag up and swallowing it, having deliberately not looked at any of the details. There. Now, he can’t tempt me.

  I returned to Iemon’s side. I had told him of my contact with the Mori man, and he had insisted on checking out the package. He took it from my hand and turned it around, feeling it. The book was larger than Iemon’s hand span by a few inches, and it also looked to be at least a thousand pages, from the thickness of it. “It’s a book, like he said. And it isn’t cursed.”

  I could also tell that it wasn’t cursed, but I had been worried that my senses weren’t advanced enough to tell if it was.

  I couldn’t feel anything, however, and I considered my sensory perception to be my strongest suite.

  I unwrapped the linen and saw a plain cover with a title written by hand, with a brush, clearly.

  Assorted accounts of past encounters with the Hibana clan’s greatest experts.

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  These were second-hand accounts of Hibana arts?

  “I scarcely need to inform you of this,” Iemon said, looking at the cover. “But you should take the contents of this book with a grain of salt to say the least. Our archives may be incomplete, but I can hardly imagine that we would forget the details of our greatest figures.”

  Me neither.

  Nevertheless, I had already exhausted the clan archives, and this was a valid next step as any.

  000

  Michiko arrived in my room with a tray of hot chocolate and marshmallows next to my floor bed, what I liked to drink in the evening while I was getting my reading on.

  I didn’t look at her face, but I gave her a nod of appreciation and a word of thanks as I read the book.

  These were stories of Association and Society sorcerers and their impressions of the Hibana experts that they had encountered. That was consistent with the title. Thirty-two different accounts from thirty-two different authors, all transcribed into this one book.

  It took me an hour to read and then reread it with my Juchū. Once I was done, I set the book aside. Michiko came to take the book and put it on my desk.

  And I considered what I had learned.

  There was far more to curse use than what the Hibana was currently aware of.

  Apparently, that had almost everything to do with the several instances in which our libraries had been burned down. Jujutsu Society had once truly targeted us with extreme prejudice. It was no wonder that our clan guarded certain secrets via oral tradition instead of just writing it down. Human memory was an extremely potent tool in the face of such naked oppression.

  The most recent raid had been in the 1870s, right as the Meiji era had started.

  And there were references to some kind of off-shoot of the Hibana clan. Black operatives?

  Truthfully, this whole thing read as fiction. Juchū merging to create bigger ones, affixing insectile traits to one’s body, several Juchū users with massive swarms cooperating to create some type of barrier technique—

  This was all Hibana clan fanfiction. Interesting as it was to read, I had no idea what I was supposed to do with any of it.

  There were some interesting nuggets of information. I knew that there were some aspects of cursed techniques that required finger gestures. The Juchū technique was straightforward enough that all it required was willpower to steer the bugs around, which was why I hadn’t learned of any gestures. Or incantations, for that matter, and these were apparently quite common for many cursed techniques.

  According to the text, these fictional Hibana clansmen favored the Flying Lotus and the Prana Mudra—sacred gestures from Buddhist tradition.

  Another thing of note: Domain Expansions.

  These didn’t strictly pertain to the Hibana clansmen. The texts described them as a general form of cursed technique that anyone could learn. It essentially involved expanding one’s innate domain—some kind of mind palace that all curse experts and jujutsu sorcerers were born with, even curses—into the real world, and enclosing it using a barrier technique. The barrier would then have to be imbued with one’s innate technique, warping reality locally.

  The fictional Hibana clansmen had Domain Expansions that turned battle into games. One enforced a rule that if you lost in some insect-themed card game, you died, and the only reason why the writer of that particular account had escaped with his life was because he had reached a draw with the Hibana assassin that was after him—despite having to learn the rules entirely on the fly.

  I almost didn’t believe that such a thing could be possible. What a transcendent power, and it was being used to play games? What about a Domain Expansion that just instantly killed you instead? Wouldn’t that be the most logical thing to do if you had the power to bend reality locally?

  Curse expertise was all about trade-offs, however. Maybe the trade-off to making your Domain lethal was too much to bear?

  “Michiko,” I said. “I’m going to bed now. Good night.”

  “Good night, Teira-sama.”

  I crawled under the cover of my bed, closed my eyes, and pictured my innate domain.

  It was in there somewhere, in my spirit. Somewhere.

  000

  My Innate Domain was… difficult to accept.

  Conceptualizing it hadn’t been hard. I just had to… look for where my cursed energy… met my mind.

  I didn’t know how I did it. I had just done it, and it had worked out for me.

  This place wasn’t a dream or my imagination. This really seemed like a place unto itself, static and unchanging despite my wishes.

  There was a golden sun in the sky, bathing the ruins of a city in golden light.

  Corpses littered the ground, but they were so covered by flies that it was difficult to say if there really were corpses underneath them, or if the flies had just bunched up into the shape of humans.

  And it stunk of rot and decay.

  Well. I had the concept of my Innate Domain down pat already. Now, all I needed to do was figure out how to push it into reality, and how to enclose it with a barrier.

  Why am I leaving so soon?

  Because…

  I looked up at the golden sun. It was in the shape of a person.

  …it really was too soon.

  000

  The Reverse Cursed Technique continued to elude me. And the more I stewed on the contents of that silly book, the more I felt like I would never be able to achieve that technique if this was the level of our development into curse use.

  The Jujutsu Society had us by the balls, clearly. Even if we weren’t so shit-scared of Gojo Satoru, chances were that they were just qualitatively better than us. Here in the Association clans, we had to contend with having to sort reality from fiction. Lapse techniques, Totality, and Maximum Outputs.

  I had, perhaps naively, assumed for the longest time that the only thing I needed in order to master cursed energy was the ability to simply focus on it for long enough that the answers became apparent. Now I wasn’t so sure.

  And it was all that occupied my thoughts.

  When I took baths, when trained my body, when I wandered through the forest, and even when I ate.

  Back in my room, I was enjoying lunch, a bowl of hot rice and chicken curry, a side bowl of miso soup next to it, with floating chunks of tofu and sliced spring onions.

  Michiko was kneeling ten feet away from me, watching the ground as always. With that sad expression of hers.

  Why was it that I couldn’t bring myself to look at her? I still didn’t understand it. Maybe it was the guilt that I harbored that, for all intents and purposes, she was a slave to me?

  Low status women of the clan didn’t have many other prospects than to be breeding stock or ladies in waiting. I couldn’t imagine what Michiko had gone through, that this was now her constant demeanor. Even more difficult to wrap my head around was how apathetic everyone was to it.

  “Michiko,” I said. She lifted her head up fractionally, though she didn’t meet my eyes. She never did. Something about her face didn’t look real. Like it was a painting of the saddest woman in existence. Or a mask. It was in how little her expressions moved. She seemed frozen in a moment of pure agony.

  I didn’t know what to say to her.

  I felt a swell of shame at that. Wasn’t this why I wanted to destroy the Hibana clan, to free people like her, people like me? And yet I couldn’t even bear to shoulder even a fraction of her pain. What kind of a pathetic excuse for a ‘savior’ was I?

  That was the thing, though. I couldn’t save Michiko. I could end her suffering by getting rid of the Hibanas, but she would have to live with her past, and I didn’t know how to help with that. Even though I wanted to.

  And yet, something about ‘crossing the line’ and reaching out to her on a personal basis rattled me. I wasn’t supposed to do that. It wasn’t allowed. I didn’t fear punishment so much as I feared judgment for being wrong at being Japanese or a Hibana.

  And I feared it coming from her.

  All my life, I had been at the mercy of my caretakers, and I’d had rotten luck with them for the most part. Michiko was… not mean. I didn’t want to lose that.

  It scared me.

  I looked back down at the food. “I’m sorry. It’s nothing.”

  She said nothing to that.

  I should ask her about herself.

  But what if it hurt her to recount her past?

  Fine then. No past. Just future.

  “When I take over this clan, I promise I’ll make sure your life is comfortable,” I said. “And… thank you. For all your hard work. I appreciate it very much.”

  I snuck a glance at Michiko. Her eyes widened ever so slightly at me. Then she nodded, and looked down again.

  000

  “Iemon-sama, I need to know: how much of the clan’s true knowledge is locked behind oral tradition?”

  Iemon was sitting on his veranda overlooking his sand garden, and he was smoking away on a pipe when I asked the question.

  “…A lot of it.”

  I furrowed my eyebrows.

  “By now, you may have already gotten an inkling about the gaps in our histories,” Iemon said. He took a deep drag and blew out languidly. “They’re not so substantial as to suggest a conspiracy—at least, not one that we’d not be complicit in.”

  “Explain.”

  “Libraries burn. Memories don’t. Oral traditions are the safest way to store knowledge if done right. If every generation has historians that actively try to preserve knowledge rather than letting it rot in a library, the chances that it disappears reduces drastically.”

  “What are you keeping from me?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing. You must know more than I do at this point.”

  “You’re an elder.”

  He cracked a grin. “It doesn’t matter. Without a user of the Reverse Cursed Technique in our generation, I suspect that our clan has entered into a sort of… standby mode. Perhaps it is to protect and preserve our Juchū now that they have become a scarce resource?”

  I furrowed my brows. “That’s the conspiracy? We’re not being taught the full potential of our technique? Who knows? The clan head, certainly. Who else?”

  “The secret historians.”

  “And who are they?”

  Iemon cracked a grin. “Could be anyone.” He looked over my shoulder, to where Michiko was standing three steps behind me. “Even your caretaker. That’s why it’s a secret. So that they can’t be targeted. And they are all sworn to secrecy via binding vow, which makes it impractical to shake them down for the information.” I had never actually gotten an answer to what would happen if a binding vow was broken. My tutors had told me ‘bad things’, and had hinted that the universe would turn against me or something.

  “Do you know anything about Domain Expansions?”

  Iemon nodded. “Got that from the book that Mori gave you?”

  “It said that our clan had all sorts of eclectic Domain Expansions. They didn’t make sense to me. They also described things like merging the Juchū to make them bigger, or…”

  “Stop,” Iemon raised a hand to forestall me. “The answers will become clear once you unlock the Reverse Cursed Technique. Then the secret historians, or the clan head, will fill you in. Until then, stop… looking for answers. You’ll likely hurt yourself. There’s a reason why things are kept a secret, always a reason.”

  And that was the difference between him and me.

  I wasn’t afraid to take risks for the greater good.

  000

  A scroll of curse mudras and incantations sat before me. I had read through this before, but I hadn’t memorized it. Saw no need to. My technique didn’t need them after all.

  I recalled Mori Tachi’s book, and cycled through some gestures, my Juchū before me. “Totality.”

  My cursed energy flickered.

  Okay!

  I sequentially ran down all the hand signs until I hit the one with the most amount of resonance with my energy.

  Then I felt my way to something that worked.

  It took me five minutes until two Juchū melted into one, becoming twice as large.

  Motherfucker!

  I laughed in delight.

  000

  It took me a couple of weeks until I managed to grow temporary fly wings out from the tip of my index finger.

  In doing so, I discovered that the technique had permanently destroyed the one Juchū I had spent on the task.

  If joining Juchū to make bigger ones was referred to as Totality in the texts, then this yet-unnamed technique, I would call…

  Arthropodal Aspect.

  An extension technique… just like Totality.

  And while one stream of focus was busy unearthing the secrets of Totality, I focused another on Arthropodal Aspect, feeling my familiarity with cursed energy lurch dramatically as I did.

  000

  My innate technique was like a formula, or an engine, that required fuel to function. No, a waterwheel. It was a waterwheel, and cursed energy was the water. Intensity was the velocity of the current.

  Maximum Output?

  I poured all the energy into a single Juchū that it could possibly hold, and then some more, forcing the shikigami to remain alive by sheer force of will until something snapped.

  The shikigami felt bloated to my senses. Not bigger, not deadlier, or faster. Just… bloated in a way that gave me the shivers.

  I didn’t know what to do with it, so I just re-interred it into my spirit.

  000

  And on the eve of my eighth birthday, on a day like any other, I collided my energy against itself.

  And something finally happened.

  Total collapse.

  Inversion.

  Opposite spin. Opposite vibration.

  I jolted myself out of my meditation in my room, infused my fingernails with energy, and scratched my forearm, ripping a horrific wound open on my arm.

  I sent the positive energy into the arm.

  The wound closed up before my very eyes.

  If a Black Flash had felt like being thrust into a zone of Godliness, then that was only because…

  …I had never known what it felt like to be truly divine.