A blue-haired girl walked down the street.
Miwa Kasumi — a student from the Kyoto sister school. Her long blue hair fell loose around her shoulders, and she had the kind of clean, unremarkable face you might call pretty in a quiet way.
She wore the standard black school uniform, a katana tucked at her hip — her weapon of choice. Everything about her read as completely ordinary. The kind of girl you'd walk past on the street without a second glance. The girl next door.
Miwa Kasumi was not a brilliant jujutsu sorcerer. She had no exceptional gift.
Her existence felt like what happened when the original author suddenly realized that among all the young students, there wasn't a single normal person — and thought, Oh crap, I need to add one — so they did.
She was ordinary. She worked hard. She had no grand ideals. She hadn't become a jujutsu sorcerer to save the world — she'd done it to earn money and put her two younger brothers through school.
Because her family was poor.
She didn't even have an innate Jujutsu Technique. She had Cursed Energy and nothing else to show for it, which was why she'd ended up learning New Shadow Style — a combat discipline designed specifically for sorcerers who had no Technique of their own.
"A manhunt for a blue-haired Cursed Spirit, huh..." Miwa thought about her mission in Tokyo and let out a small sigh. "If nothing comes up for a while, do you think I could just take a vacation until the exchange event?"
She wasn't supposed to be in Tokyo until a month from now — when the joint exchange event between the Tokyo and Kyoto jujutsu schools was scheduled to take place.
But then, out of nowhere, a blue-haired Cursed Spirit had appeared in Tokyo. A brutal, cunning, terrifying one that had left a trail of bodies behind it.
The factory massacre had been especially horrific — over twenty people dead in a single incident, the manner of their deaths grotesque beyond description. And the spirit had already crossed the line twice before, doing genuinely awful things to students from the jujutsu college.
The higher-ups had issued a maximum-priority wanted order in response. Not only had they mobilized the Tokyo Prefectural Jujutsu Technical College's own personnel — they'd also called in students from the Kyoto sister school.
Miwa Kasumi was one of the Kyoto students dispatched to Tokyo.
"Though I showed up a day late..."
Couldn't be helped. Some things just slip through the cracks.
And she was already the fastest of all the Kyoto students sent to Tokyo — she was currently the only one who had actually arrived. The others were still on their way.
No hunt yesterday. No orders today either.
She was alone in Tokyo, not knowing a single person, with nothing to do but wander aimlessly. Back in Kyoto she at least had classmates to talk to. Now she didn't have anyone.
Sigh.
She pulled out her phone and searched for anything nearby to kill time.
There seemed to be a library not far away. That looked decent enough.
She wasn't especially fond of reading, honestly. But when your friends weren't around and you had no work to do, killing time in a library was always a solid option for a lonely, idle afternoon.
Besides, she'd heard that a light novel she'd been really into lately — The Band Girl Has Nine Wings — had just updated. Apparently it was getting good.
God, days off felt amazing.
If the intel on the blue-haired Cursed Spirit never came in, maybe she really could spend the whole stretch until the exchange event just... wandering around like this. That was nearly a full month of vacation.
But no.
She had to keep training.
She couldn't let her guard slip.
And she had to stay alert.
Word was that the blue-haired Cursed Spirit had escaped easily even when pursued by a team led by a Grade 1 sorcerer. It was cunning, dangerous, and utterly merciless.
If she ran into it alone — what would she even do?
There was no way she could fight that kind of monster by herself.
She pushed the scary thoughts out of her head with a sigh, eyes dropped to the map on her phone, and followed the directions to her destination.
She pushed the door open and stepped inside.
But the atmosphere inside the library was... not quite what she'd imagined.
It was not quiet.
It was kind of loud.
Loud enough that it almost sounded like... a brawl?
Miwa walked a few confused steps further in, moving into the main area of the library.
Then she stopped dead — completely blindsided by the scene in front of her.
She felt like she'd stepped from the normal world directly into a psychiatric ward. Every single person in the library was doing something Miwa could make absolutely no sense of.
One person was face-down on the floor, rolling around in circles, making little meow meow meow sounds.
Another was crouched under a table, gnawing on the back of their own hand — and bared their teeth at Miwa when she looked.
Two people were climbing the bookshelves, and books were crashing down like a waterfall, piling up across the floor.
Two more were doing something unidentifiable — clutching each other and rubbing against each other, shrieking the whole time, in a spectacle that couldn't be determined to be either a fight or some bizarre two-person sport.
Miwa Kasumi's jaw hit the floor.
She pressed a hand to her own forehead to check her temperature. Confirmed: no fever.
This... this... is this some kind of weird group activity?
Or did she eat something bad for lunch... and now she was hallucinating?
Had the world... gone insane?
"Honk honk honk honk honk honk—" she startled, and someone sprinted past her.
"Woof woof woof woof woof—" she startled even harder, and someone rolled past her.
"I am Kou the penguin, I am Kou the penguin, I am Kou the penguin—" she couldn't believe it, and someone ran past her from behind.
"You're not Kou the penguin, you're Kaoru the penguin, you're not Kou the penguin, you're Kaoru the penguin—" she turned around, and someone was chasing after that person.
And at that moment, Miwa reached an enlightenment.
I must have a brain injury!
(Incoherent laughter)
I must have hit my head on the door when I came in just now! That has to be it!
Ha ha ha, in that case she should hurry and find a teacher at the jujutsu college to come fix her brain. Oh, and when the teacher asked her what happened, she'd say, Oh, sensei, I went to the library and I saw Kou the penguin... Ha ha ha, the teacher would definitely understand that she'd lost her mind.
Probably.
"Hm...?"
But in the next instant, Miwa felt it.
Felt Cursed Energy.
A faint but unmistakably real fluctuation of Cursed Energy hanging in the air.
Her pupils contracted. She understood in an instant.
Her brain was fine.
The chaos around her had been caused by a Cursed Spirit.
A Cursed Spirit had disrupted the minds of everyone here — driven them all mad.
Damn.
A Cursed Spirit capable of inflicting psychic interference at this scale — its power had to be at least Grade 1. She had no chance of handling it alone.
Miwa immediately reached for her phone to contact someone at the jujutsu college —
No signal.
Every bar at the top of her screen had vanished, replaced by a No Service indicator.
Her stomach dropped.
She turned to look back at the library entrance behind her.
Outside the doors, a thin, nearly translucent Curtain had already descended over the entire building.
A Curtain??
When had that appeared?
It definitely hadn't been there when she walked in.
Had someone deployed a Curtain the moment she stepped through the doors? Had she walked straight into a trap set by a sorcerer or Cursed Spirit?
Cold sweat beaded on Miwa's forehead.
She gripped her sword hilt with one hand and swept a wary gaze around the room, her mind working furiously, racing to figure out what to do.
If this was a trap, the best move was to turn around right now, slash through that Curtain with her blade, and get out. She wasn't the strongest, but cutting through a thin Curtain like that should still be within her ability.
Right!
Get out first!
She made her decision. Her body turned toward the entrance.
She had just started to move —
CRASH!
A tremendous bang erupted from right beside her.
Miwa's head snapped upward.
She watched, in disbelief, as a girl who had been climbing the bookshelves plummeted from the top of a shelf more than three meters up.
Crash, crash. The bookshelf tilted with her, and books cascaded down like a waterfall.
Miwa's eyes went wide.
A thousand thoughts flashed through her mind in that single instant.
She should have run — and the sooner the better. This was obviously a trap, and every second she spent here put her in greater danger.
She had no reason to stay. She shouldn't stay.
But — but — that girl — she was about to fall.
If that girl hit the ground like that, she was going to get hurt. She might bleed.
It would definitely hurt...
Could she really just stand there and let that happen?
"...Dammit."
Miwa abandoned every instinct telling her to save herself first, darted forward, and caught the girl just before she hit the floor.
Once caught, the girl curled up into a ball in Miwa's arms, hands clutched over her head, body trembling. It took a couple of seconds for her to register that she hadn't hit the ground. She made a small, baffled "?" sound, then slowly lifted her head and looked up at Miwa with tear-brimmed eyes.
"Are you okay?" Miwa asked, concern in her voice.
The girl looked absolutely pitiful — tears clinging to the corners of her eyes — and gave a tiny, trembling nod.
"I'm okay... thank you for catching me, big sis..." Her voice was still shaking. "Everyone suddenly got so weird..."
Something stirred in Miwa's chest.
This girl hadn't been affected by the Cursed Spirit?
The Cursed Spirit had driven everyone mad — but apparently hadn't actually harmed anyone here yet. Miwa hadn't seen anyone visibly injured, and she couldn't smell blood.
And right in front of her, she'd just caught a girl who hadn't been affected at all.
So the Cursed Spirit apparently couldn't influence everyone inside the Curtain. Which meant there might be other unaffected victims hiding in corners somewhere.
And there was a strong possibility that the Cursed Spirit would target the people who hadn't gone mad — rather than those who had...
Miwa's mind raced as she tried to work out the behavioral pattern of whatever Cursed Spirit was lurking here.
"Do you know what's happening to everyone?" Miwa lowered her voice. "Did you see anything — a monster, something strange?"
The girl gave a tearful nod. "I... I do..."
Miwa's pulse jumped. She pressed immediately: "Where is it? Where's the monster?"
The girl glanced around nervously, her body shrinking slightly with fear. Then she leaned in close to Miwa's ear, like she was about to whisper a secret.
Seeing how frightened she looked, Miwa's guard eased — almost without her noticing. She moved her hand away from her sword hilt and tilted her head to listen.
And then — she heard the girl's voice rise beside her ear.
No longer pitiful.
No longer trembling as if terrified of something.
Instead — laced with a wicked, amused lilt.
"Become my little kitty cat, Miwa Kasumi."
Cursed Speech — activated.
Miwa Kasumi's eyes flew wide open. The light vanished from her pupils.
____
👻🔥Walnut-chan🔥👻
🔥 New history: Group chat of the Dead
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