The classroom door slid open just as the bell finished its last chime, and Ieiri Shoko slipped in, blinking in genuine surprise to find all three boys already seated and waiting.
Gojo Satoru waved with exaggerated enthusiasm. "Shoko! Last one in. So lame!"
[Jujutsu High Melon-Eating Duo]
[Ieiri Shoko: Akiya, remind me next time before you leave.]
[Asou Akiya: Don't take him seriously. On the bright side, he believes in perfect gender equality when it comes to insults.]
After all, both Asou and Geto had already been roasted by that same mouth this morning.
"May you never be late a single day in your life, Gojo," Ieiri answered with serene sarcasm. Having convinced herself she had grasped the truth, she forgave the white-haired classmate who had never been taught the art of conversation, dropped into the window seat, and calmly pulled an unfinished novel from her bag.
Asou Akiya's gaze caught on the cover (his own book, the very copy he had given her as an entrance gift). He pressed his lips together in a small, nervous smile.
What was he supposed to do if a girl was reading a published novel he had secretly written?
Simple: pray she never discovered the author's true identity.
During theory lessons, Yaga Masamichi was remarkably lenient with his four students. As long as they sat properly and did not disturb those who actually wanted to listen, he left them in peace. Today, his priority was clearly protecting the attention of Ieiri Shoko and Asou Akiya.
He strode to the lectern with his usual imposing presence and announced one thing right away.
"Let me be perfectly clear: there will be no day off tomorrow."
"Sorcerers' holidays do not align with the national calendar. Get used to it sooner rather than later. The only silver lining is that May is a low-activity season for curses; people are generally in good spirits. Come June, when summer truly arrives, everything changes."
"If any of you need to go out, schedule it for the weekend. Sudden incidents are rare on weekends."
Japan's May was Golden Week: a glorious string of national holidays, sales everywhere, and office workers with decent jobs could string together as many as ten consecutive days off. That brief national exhale quietly eased the pressure on the jujutsu world as well.
Geto Suguru sighed. "Being a sorcerer is no easy life."
Gojo's mouth opened at once, delivering a razor-sharp verdict. "Ugh. Worse than corporate livestock."
Yaga Masamichi froze mid-sentence, embarrassment flashing across his face. He glanced at the pampered heir of the Gojo clan and forced himself to set a proper example. "Gojo, respect the profession. Plenty of people in this society work harder on holidays than any other day."
Asou Akiya lowered his head and spun his pen between his fingers. Even a cloistered Six Eyes knew that early May was marked in red on every calendar.
Ieiri Shoko glanced over in faint surprise. Why wasn't Asou jumping in to smooth things over for Yaga-sensei like usual?
Asou Akiya felt the girl's gaze settle on his cheek. He looked up, met her eyes, and suddenly understood. Ah. He had apparently left her with the impression that he was Yaga's unofficial teaching assistant.
He needed to adjust more than just his mindset; he had to change his behavior too. The crushing weight of his previous death had made him act far older than any student should.
If Yaga-sensei ever mistook him for someone angling to become staff after graduation, that would be disastrous.
"Yaga-sensei," Asou Akiya spoke up once Gojo had settled down again, "things should stay relatively calm outside for a while, right?" His tone was earnest, almost eager. "As for holidays, we're not just little kids begging for days off. We're more excited about getting stronger. On the twentieth of last month, that strong aftershock in Miyagi Prefecture killed one person and injured over twelve hundred. Did it give birth to any curse at semi-grade-one or higher?"
Japan was, after all, a land that lived on the trembling back of the earth, and Miyagi had been shaken more than once.
Yaga Masamichi answered as though such questions were routine. "Window is definitely keeping an eye on Miyagi. No reports have come in yet. Curses of semi-grade-one or above don't appear that easily."
Sorcerers witness unnatural death so often that they have learned to shrug at natural disasters? Asou Akiya quietly studied Yaga Masamichi's tone while the corner of his eye tracked his three classmates. Even Geto Suguru, whose heart was usually the softest among them, seemed far more concerned with whether a curse had been born than with the human toll.
No wonder this was the land of earthquakes. The ground shook and shook again, and somehow people simply grew accustomed to it.
Asou Akiya decided to be kinder to himself and let the thought drift away. He raised his hand. "Yaga-sensei, shall we begin the lesson?"
Yaga Masamichi nearly forgot what today's topic was supposed to be. With perfect composure he flipped open his teaching plan.
The middle-aged man wore the deep-colored instructor's uniform that set him apart from the students. He wheeled in the projector and, without ceremony, began playing footage that radiated pure negative emotion.
"Today we study emotional control. Sorcerers must never allow negative feelings to flood unchecked. We learn to wring cursed energy from the faintest threads of sorrow or anger. Extreme emotion disturbs combat clarity…"
Gojo Satoru responded with a yawn so long it could have rattled the windows.
Ieiri Shoko glanced up for half a heartbeat, then sank back into her onmyoji novel and declared the entire period irrelevant.
Only Geto Suguru and Asou Akiya paled. The screen now displayed death videos of the sort strictly banned from the internet: "supernatural incident" files.
Since cursed spirits could not be captured by cameras, what the lens recorded were ordinary humans dying in ways that made no sense—bodies twisted, crushed, torn by invisible hands. The corpses were so grotesque that no horror film could rival them.
For sorcerer students raised as civilians, this lesson was wildly, cruelly beyond the syllabus.
Then Asou Akiya remembered: in the original story, even Fushiguro Megumi—who had not yet enrolled—had already watched comrades die. Adapting to death was part of the curriculum. Those who could not adapt had long since been gently, firmly removed from the front lines.
Geto Suguru's fists clenched until the knuckles blanched. He forced his eyes to stay open, to memorize every detail of those ordinary people's final despair.
Asou Akiya's mental age towered above the rest of the class; even the dullest blade could have felt the violent surge of Geto's cursed energy.
Students raised in normal families usually carried thick, helpless empathy. Those dead could have been their parents, their childhood friends. No one could promise that the non-sorcerers around them would not someday end up exactly like that.
Except Gojo Satoru.
And, he realized with a chill, except Ieiri Shoko as well.
Asou Akiya stared at the screen for a few moments longer, then felt the sense of identification slip away like water through his fingers. It was inevitable. In his previous life the world had held no cursed spirits. In this one he had awakened in Yokohama, recognized the danger early, and deliberately kept the children at the orphanage—and later every ordinary civilian—at arm's length. He had never intended to forge any real resonance with the common people of Japanese society.
So the screams on the projector no longer sounded like his own.
And the moment he pictured the countries on the far side of the Pacific (lands untouched by the plague of cursed spirits, where sorcerers were rarer than giant pandas and probably pampered like national treasures), the corners of Asou Akiya's mouth threatened to curl upward and release three triumphant, villainous laughs.
He tried to school his expression, but the Six Eyes existed for a reason. Concealment failed in less than a heartbeat. He surrendered instantly and joined the official ranks of those who had given up on the lesson.
Gojo Satoru's Six Eyes saw the flow of cursed energy in every soul in the room with merciless clarity.
He nearly laughed aloud.
The short classmate who had just flared with negative emotion a moment ago had adjusted in the blink of an eye. As expected of someone whose surface and core never matched.
A person who could turn cursed energy into literal fire and grope his way to that technique—how could he be anything less than a complete lunatic?
"Weird bangs," Gojo drawled, voice dripping with mockery, "looks like you're the only one pitying those people."
"Honestly, I'm starting to feel sorry for you."
In a classroom filled with footage of violent death, Gojo Satoru—bored beyond endurance—waited and waited. The instant he saw those weird bangs being so disappointingly soft-hearted, he struck with two perfectly aimed sentences, shattering Geto Suguru's composure and jolting him awake. In his confusion, Geto somehow managed to steady his cursed energy anyway.
Geto turned left: the white-haired boy with sky-blue eyes stared back, cold as winter steel.
Geto turned right: the black-haired boy had tilted his head to shield his face; the brown-haired girl was buried in her novel, breathing slow and even, silent as stone.
Something was wrong.
Why was he the only one in this room drowning in negative emotion?
The sorrow vanished as suddenly as morning mist under a blowtorch. Blood rushed to Geto's face; his teeth ground together. "Yaga-sensei," he forced out, "are all sorcerers… like them?"
Yaga Masamichi suddenly wished he owned a pair of sunglasses dark enough to hide behind. His gaze drifted, then snapped back to Geto with as much severity as he could muster.
"Sorcerers must learn detachment!"
But Sensei, I don't think they learned it—they just grew crooked!
In that instant Geto Suguru felt like an alien species. Gojo had been born abnormal, Ieiri was half doctor already, but Asou—who came from an ordinary background just like him—how could he watch those videos without a flicker of feeling?
Asou Akiya felt a quiet pang of guilt.
Perhaps, when all was said and done, he pitied people who died in natural disasters far more than those killed by cursed spirits.
After all, cursed spirits were pretty much a local Japanese specialty.