Like someone recommended, I tried to make a discord server.
https://discord. ## /N8eAZH8p
Important: Remove the ## and add gg in it's place, then search it.
--<<>>--
Yet again. I slowly came back from dreamland.
You know, for a second life that was supposed to be full of new experiences and finding the grand answer, I was spending an awful lot of it unconscious. At this rate, I'd find the meaning of life through the sheer variety of ceilings I woke up staring at.
This one however, was familiar.
Ugh… what was tha-
Pain.
"Shit, shit, shit!"
I clutched my head with both hands, curling into a ball on the futon. My skull felt like it was trying to split open from the inside. Every heartbeat sent another wave of fire through my head.
But it didn't knock me out this time.
That was progress. Painfully agonizing progress, but progress.
I squeezed my eyes shut and forced myself to breathe. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The way they taught me during chemo when the pain got bad.
Breathe. Just breathe. It's just pain. You've done pain before. You literally died of brain cancer. This is nothing.
Five seconds.
Seven seconds. The burn dulled to an ache.
Ten seconds. The ache became manageable.
And then something insane happened.
I could see.
Not through my eyes. My eyes were still closed. I was sure of that because I could feel my eyelids pressed together.
But I could see. Everything.
I could weirdly see the room around me. I could feel the wooden walls along the folded screen in the corner.
And it wasn't just in front of me.
It was everywhere. Three hundred and sixty degrees. Above. Behind. Below. Like someone had taken my field of vision, stretched it into a full sphere, and said, "Here you go, kid. Have fun processing all of this at once."
My brain screamed due to the massive intake of information.
It was like trying to listen to ten conversations at the same time and somehow understanding all of them.
And that's when I noticed him.
My father. Sitting directly behind me. Cross-legged, hands resting on his knees like he'd been meditating there for hours.
"You can see me, right?"
His voice was calm. Not surprised atall. Not even curious, really. More like a man confirming something he already knew.
I nodded. "Crystal clear."
He smiled. "That's quite a useful ability you have."
"It would be nice," I said, still pressing my palms against my temples, "if it didn't feel like my brain was being burnt."
He laughed at that as he walked over to me.
"Stay still."
He reached into his sleeve and pulled out a strip of cloth.
"I'll tie this around your eyes," he said, kneeling beside me. "It won't stop your sight, but it will reduce the raw information you take in. Think of it as… limiting the flow of water."
I nodded and held still as he wrapped the cloth around my head, covering my eyes completely.
The world dimmed.
Not gone. Not even close. I could still see everything around me in that strange, spherical way. But the intensity dropped. The information went from a raging river to a steady stream.
Oh, thank god.
The headache eased. Not gone, but manageable.
"Better?" my father asked.
"Much."
"Good." He studied me for a moment. "Now, I'm sure you have many questions about what you saw your sister do."
Many was an understatement. I had about four hundred questions, ranked by urgency.
I nodded.
"Perfect."
Then he picked me up.
Just like that. Scooped me off the futon like I weighed nothing, which, to be fair, I probably didn't. I was four.
And we walked out.
***
The moment we stepped outside, the world exploded.
Not literally. But my new sight, this strange three-hundred-and-sixty-degree awareness, reached out like a sonar, and suddenly I could feel everything within several meters of me.
People. Dozens of them.
Clan members training in the courtyard, their bodies lit up with that swirling energy I'd seen Yuka use. Some had a lot. Some had a little. It flowed through them in different patterns, different rhythms, like each person had their own internal circuit system.
And then there were the ones I wasn't supposed to see.
In the shadows between buildings. Behind walls. In the trees. Moving carefully, like they were part of the architecture.
Guards, I assumed.
They were good. A normal person, even a normal whatever-these-energy-people-were, probably wouldn't notice them.
But I could see them lit up like lanterns on a dark night.
I looked up from my father's shoulder. On the edge of my room's rooftop, crouched like a ninja, was a man.
Dressed in dark clothes that blended with the tiles.
And he was staring at me with shocked eyes. Clearly not expecting a blindfolded four-year-old to look directly at him.
"Why is there a man on top of my room's roof?"
My father glanced at me. Not at the roof. Like he was more interested in the fact that I'd spotted the man than the man himself.
"Oh," he said, a note of approval in his voice. "You can already sense at that range. That's good progress."
"You didn't answer my question."
He looked at me with that almost-a-smile again. "Your mother is right. You really are a genius."
I just stared at him.
Just answer the question, father.
He smiled and kept walking. "His name is Obito. He's your personal guard. Quite the personality he is. You will meet him later."
I glanced back at the roof.
Obito was still crouched there, staring at me with the most confused expression I'd ever seen on a grown man.
I gave him a thumbs up.
His confusion intensified even more.
"He's weird," I said.
My father laughed. "He gets that a lot."
***
As we walked through the estate, I decided to stop panicking about my new abilities and start actually figuring them out.
Charles told me life was about experience. Well, here was an experience. Might as well figure it out.
So. I'm in a world with magic. Or energy. Or whatever this is. Cool. At least I won't be bored while searching for the answer to "What is life?"
I focused on my sight and tried to understand the way it worked.
The first thing I noticed was that it wasn't exactly 'seeing'. Not in the way eyes work. It was more like… sensing. But with the resolution of sight. If that makes any sense.
It probably doesn't. Let me try again.
People were easy to see. They were crystal clear. I could see the energy inside them, flowing through pathways in their bodies, concentrated in their cores, and branching outward. Every person was like a walking constellation.
But non-living things? Rocks. Trees. The stone pathway under my father's feet. The wooden beams of the buildings.
Those were… different.
I couldn't see them the way I saw humans. They didn't glow. Didn't pulse with that energy. They were dark.
But I could still sense them.
Because the energy filled the air too. And it flowed around their shapes the way water bends around rocks in a stream.
So I couldn't see the tree directly. But I could see the tree-shaped gap in the energy field.
Think of it like a radar. Or like echolocation, but with energy instead of sound.
It was, objectively, the coolest thing that had ever happened to me in either of my lives.
It also gave me a headache that would make my old brain tumor jealous.
But in my view, that's a small price to pay.
***
Soon enough, we reached the training ground.
The same one from before, where Yuka had shown me her technique, and I fainted. Not my proudest moment.
My mother was there, sitting on a stone at the edge of the grounds. She had a cup of tea in her hand and was gazing up at the sky peacefully.
I looked at her with my new sight.
And noticed something immediately.
Her energy was… small. Compared to my father, who burned like a bonfire, she was a candle flame.
Huh. That's interesting.
When she noticed us approaching, her expression shifted from peaceful to joyful.
"Hello there, my genius snowflake," she said, setting down her tea. "Did you sleep well?"
I nodded. "Did you?"
A simple question. Six letters. But it made her smile like I'd given her the world.
"I did too. Thank you for asking, Rei."
She took me from my father's arms and set me down on the training ground.
My father stepped forward, folding his arms.
"You should be able to see everything around you now, correct?"
I nodded. "Mostly. People and anything with that energy, yes. Rocks and trees and things without it, not directly."
"Very good," Father said. "That energy you're sensing has a name. It's called cursed energy."
"Cursed energy," I repeated.
The name felt heavy. You don't call something "cursed" unless there's a very good reason for it.
"Why cursed?"
My father looked at my mother. She gave him a small nod.
He turned back to me.
"Because of where it comes from."
He knelt down so he was at my eye level.
"Every human being produces cursed energy. From the moment they're born until the moment they die. It's as natural as breathing."
"Okay…"
"But it doesn't come from nowhere. Cursed energy is born from negative emotions. Fear. Anger. Grief. Stress. Hatred. Every dark feeling a person experiences generates it. The worse the emotion, the more energy it produces."
I let that sink in.
Energy made from suffering.
That was kind of dark.
"Most people," my father continued, "cannot see or control their cursed energy. It leaks out of them without their knowledge. Every person you pass on the road, every child, every elder, they're all bleeding this energy into the world around them without realizing it."
"What happens to it?" I asked. "The energy that leaks out?"
"It accumulates." He stood back up. "It gathers in places where negative emotions are strongest. Battlefields. Graveyards. Places of sickness." His eyes met mine through the blindfold.
Something cold slithered down my spine.
Hospitals.
I thought about my old hospital room. The oncology ward, filled with dying people and grieving families. All that fear. All that despair. All that cursed energy, leaking out of everyone, pooling in the hallways, soaking into the walls.
If cursed energy existed during my last life, then I was sitting in the middle of it for over a year.
"When enough cursed energy gathers in one place," he said, his tone growing heavier, "it manifests."
"Manifests?"
"It takes form. Gains awareness. Becomes something alive." He paused, choosing his next words carefully. "They're called cursed spirits."
Of course they are.
"So," I said slowly, "everyone leaks this energy. It piles up. And if it piles up enough, it becomes a monster."
"Simplified, but yes."
"And what do humans do? I mean, there has to be a way to control this energy, right?"
"We do," he said. "We can perceive cursed energy. Control it. Direct it. Where normal people leak their energy uselessly, sorcerers learn to harness it. To use it as a weapon."
He looked down at me.
"We fight what the world creates, and protect the people. That is the duty of a jujutsu sorcerer."
I stood there, a four-year-old with a blindfold and a headache, on a dirt training ground, being told that the world ran on suffering and that monsters were real.
In my first life, I'd spent years looking for the meaning of life in books, shows, and philosophical arguments.
Now I was standing in a world where human pain literally came alive and tried to kill people.
Well,this is certainly one interesting world, isn't it?
I didn't have an answer yet. Not even close.
But for the first time in either of my lives, I had a feeling I was looking in the right direction.
--<<>>--
Hopefully I explain how 6 eyes work without any error. And if I did, please let me know, it's been while since I read JJK, so I may make some mistakes.
Powerstones and comments are greatly appreciated.
And if you enjoyed it, add it to your library.