Mahiko stumbled into an abandoned construction site, gasping for breath.
Around her: half-finished concrete frames and rust-streaked rebar, broken bricks and plastic sheeting scattered across the ground, the air thick with the smell of dust and corroded metal.
Not a soul in sight.
Safe.
She found a wall to lean against and slid down it, gulping air until her heartbeat finally, grudgingly, began to slow.
Oh my god.
Thank everything holy I can run fast.
After her little "assault" on Megumi Fushiguro, she'd bolted nonstop all the way here — and when she looked back in the direction she'd come from, Shibuya was very, very far away.
Erm… speaking of the assault…
About why, at the very end, she had turned Megumi Fushiguro into a girl…
Well…
How to put this.
Honestly? That particular move had not been in her plan from the start.
What she'd originally intended was simple: get a hand on Megumi, drop him with *Idle Transfiguration*, and run. That was it. Maybe carve something like "I AM AN IDIOT" somewhere on him in letters that could never be scrubbed off — a little memento for making her sprint halfway across the city. That was the full extent of her ambitions.
But the moment her palm actually made contact with Megumi Fushiguro's body, everything changed.
How to explain it…
Probably because she'd spent the past hour healing so many people, her soul-perception and fine motor control over her ability had climbed to a genuinely extraordinary level. The instant her hand touched Megumi's soul, she felt it — that sensation of absolute, effortless mastery.
Really effortless.
Like a painter who'd spent all afternoon drilling the fundamentals of figure drawing, only to suddenly pick up the brush and discover they could produce work that blew past everything they'd ever done before. The inspiration was there. The feel was there. She fell into a flow state without even trying — every detail of the soul rendered in crystalline clarity beneath her fingertips.
And so her hand… didn't stop.
She just got into it.
She'd only meant to engrave "Idiot" somewhere and be done with it — but before she could catch herself, her ability had followed its own momentum and simply kept going. Reshaping bone structure. Adjusting musculature. Redistributing fat. Rebalancing hormone levels. Rewriting gene sequences. Restructuring cellular architecture… A smooth, unbroken chain of operations, one flowing into the next — and by the time she snapped back to herself, Megumi Fushiguro had become a beautiful girl.
A beautiful girl who was, it had to be said, slightly her type.
"Pfft."
The blue-haired girl laughed out loud, completely without shame.
Hahahahaha…
What. How is this a thing that happened. How is this so incredibly funny.
Sorry, sorry, sorry — she should be feeling guilty about this, Fushiguro-kun, she really hadn't meant to confiscate your — well. Your ——.
Oops.
"...Hahahaha——"
Oh, she desperately wanted to see the looks on Satoru Gojo's and Inumaki's faces when they found out Megumi Fushiguro had been turned into a girl.
I want to see it so badly, so badly, so badly, SO BADLY, hahaha…
Although — aside from the gender swap — she genuinely hadn't altered anything else about Megumi Fushiguro. She hadn't weakened his Cursed Energy. Hadn't damaged his Technique. Hadn't touched his memories or his personality. It was purely, entirely, exclusively a change of sex.
And honestly? The operation itself had been genuinely impressive.
If there were some kind of "Cursed Spirit Annual Top Ten Plays" award, this would absolutely be on the list.
Because fully converting a person from male to female — the number of changes required was almost incomprehensible. Every single item on that list demanded soul-manipulation of extraordinary precision; the slightest error anywhere would have meant disaster.
And she'd done all of it in a single instant. Cleanly. Beautifully.
What did that say?
It said that her current proficiency and precision with *Idle Transfiguration* had already reached an extremely high level — comparable to the original Mahito at his peak in the source material, possibly even surpassing him. The potential ceiling of her Technique's precision might well be higher than the original's had ever been.
Still — high proficiency wasn't the same as high power.
You could have the nimblest fingers in the world and still lose an arm-wrestling match to a brown bear.
She could beat Megumi Fushiguro — but that was nothing to brag about. Early-arc Megumi was, to be blunt, pretty weak. The kind of Grade 2 sorcerer who could lose to a Grade 2 cursed spirit.
If she tried to fight Nanami Kento right now, she'd most likely get demolished.
And after the scene she'd just caused in Shibuya, Jujutsu High was absolutely going to escalate their search for her. A cursed spirit that could control human bodies, alter its own appearance, and change a sorcerer's sex — in their eyes, that was a top-priority threat by any measure.
Her current strength simply wasn't enough.
Ugh…
Mahiko hugged her knees to her chest, mood sinking. The way her emotions kept swinging from high to low was admittedly a little unhinged — but fine, unhinged it was.
She had genuine power anxiety, and she wasn't going to pretend otherwise.
Proficiency mattered, yes. But it was ultimately secondary.
What mattered most was raw strength. The total volume of her Cursed Energy. The sheer force of her Technique. And the breadth of her combat options.
And her biggest problem right now was this: she didn't want to kill people.
How had the original Mahito grown stronger? By devouring human souls. By reshaping living people into *Transfigured Humans* and stockpiling them as combat assets. That was Mahito's most fundamental growth method — and one of his most powerful weapons.
But she couldn't do that.
She was not going to twist living human beings into grotesque, broken things. She was not going to devour anyone's soul. She simply could not bring herself to do it.
But that was the equivalent of locking out half her own skill set. Like playing a game with your core ability permanently disabled — how were you supposed to fight like that? You couldn't fight anyone like that.
Mahiko buried her face in her knees.
So annoying.
Was the path to getting stronger completely blocked off?
Truly, completely blocked?
.........
"Hm?"
Mahiko's head snapped up.
Wait.
She didn't want to absorb human souls — but she could absorb cursed spirit souls, couldn't she?
Humans had souls. Animals had souls. So cursed spirits — cursed spirits themselves had souls too!
How had she forgotten about this?!
The original Mahito had never absorbed other cursed spirits — possibly because Mahito regarded them as kin and wouldn't prey on his own kind… the exact reasoning was beyond knowing now. But from a purely technical standpoint, *Idle Transfiguration* could absolutely act on a cursed spirit's soul. After all, Mahito himself was a cursed spirit — he could use the Technique to alter his own body, which meant applying it to other cursed spirits was equally possible.
If this route was viable…
Mahiko got to her feet and began searching the construction site, tentatively.
Cursed spirits weren't hard to find, really. In the world of Jujutsu Kaisen, any sufficiently concentrated negative emotion could eventually coalesce into a cursed spirit. The ones powerful enough to pose a genuine threat to humans were rare — but the tiny, low-grade ones, the kind as insignificant as flies and mosquitoes, were absolutely everywhere. Any shadowed corner, any abandoned building, any place where human feet had long since stopped treading could be home to one of these microscopic things.
Mahiko closed her eyes and extended her perception outward, feeling for the faintest traces of Cursed Energy in the area.
…There.
In the corner of the construction site, beneath a pile of broken bricks — a tiny flicker of Cursed Energy.
She walked over, pushed the bricks aside, and found it: a cursed spirit roughly the size of a large insect. Black and slimy, like some crossbreed between a centipede and a slug, huddled in a crack between the rubble, trembling.
Mahiko extended one finger and tapped it lightly.
*Idle Transfiguration*.
First: perceive its soul.
Mmm… small.
Very small.
Compared to a human soul, this thing's soul was barely a grain of sand. But what surprised Mahiko was that it was unexpectedly pure.
Human souls were the most complex — emotions, memories, and life experiences all tangled together in an inseparable knot, like a ball of knotted thread. Animal souls were simpler, but still had their own textures and structures. Cursed spirit souls, though — especially those of the weakest cursed spirits — these existences born from nothing but pure negative emotion had souls that were, paradoxically, the cleanest of all. No excess, no noise, no impurities. Like a piece of raw material in its most unprocessed state.
Sorry about this, little one.
Mahiko began.
Using *Idle Transfiguration*, she erased every last detail and contour from the small cursed spirit's soul — it had originally been shaped like an insect, but she flattened it, rounded it, kneaded and rolled it between her palms like clay, until it became a smooth, featureless little sphere.
Throughout the process, the tiny creature emitted a faint, buzzing sound — something like a very small scream.
What she held in her hand when it was done was a pure, raw soul — stripped of all form and detail, reduced to its most primal state.
And then — absorption.
The small sphere melted into her palm, drawn inward, assimilated by her own soul.
Mahiko closed her eyes and took stock.
Her soul's strength had grown — by a tiny sliver.
Almost negligible. It had, after all, been nothing more than an insect-sized low-grade cursed spirit.
But — it worked.
"Holy—it actually works!!"
Mahiko nearly leapt off the ground with excitement.
Sure, absorbing cursed spirits would never be as efficient as absorbing humans — humans were everywhere, while cursed spirits worth hunting weren't always easy to find. But at the very least, she now had a viable path forward!
She didn't have to kill people. Didn't have to create Transfigured Humans. She could get stronger by hunting cursed spirits!
This route worked!!
Mahiko was happily calculating where to go next to find more cursed spirits to hunt —
Footsteps sounded from behind her.
She turned on reflex, assuming it was a passing construction worker or some ordinary pedestrian.
It was not.
A figure with a rough line of stitches running across his forehead stood at the entrance to the abandoned construction site, both hands in his pockets, that perpetually unreadable smile curving his lips.
Kenjaku.
Mahiko's entire body jolted with fright.
What the — how are YOU here?!
Wait. Had he been following her this whole time?
Or had he always known exactly where she was?
Damn it… this thousand-year-old monster. She'd known, deep down, that she could never escape the reach of his hand.
She'd just been celebrating her discovery of the cursed-spirit absorption route a moment ago — and reality had turned around and slapped her across the face.
Right now, she couldn't even move freely. She was under Kenjaku's watch at every moment, in every place.
"My, my." Kenjaku smiled, voice light and easy, as if he were just stopping to say hello. "Looks like you had quite a bit of fun out there."
Mahiko forced a brilliant smile onto her face and kept playing her part. "I did, actually — a lot of fun. This world really is fascinating."
Kenjaku studied her for two seconds. Then he extended one hand, gentle smile firmly in place.
"Speaking of which — your kin have been asking to meet you. Shall we go pay them a visit?"
Kin.
Meaning Jogo, Hanami, and the other Special Grade cursed spirits. The crew that worked alongside Kenjaku in the original story.
Mahiko desperately wanted to say no.
Desperately.
But she knew she couldn't. Refusing right now would be tantamount to telling Kenjaku outright: I don't trust you — and she currently had no leverage to make an enemy of him.
"Then let's go," Mahiko said, smiling.
But inwardly, she was screaming.
____
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