Maki Zenin had the constitution of a Heavenly Tyrant.
She carried the Heavenly Restriction of a Heavenly Tyrant within her body — that is, the trade of zero Cursed Energy in exchange for a supremely powerful physical constitution. That was how it should have been.
But the problem was that she and Mai were twins. Because of this, the Cursed Energy that should have been Maki's was divided off — distributed to Mai instead.
This meant her Heavenly Restriction as a Heavenly Tyrant was impure. Because of that thin thread of Cursed Energy, she could never become a true Heavenly Tyrant.
But Mahiko didn't care whether there was Cursed Energy inside her body or not.
What Mahiko was after was the Heavenly Restriction within her body.
Truthfully, a Heavenly Tyrant's Heavenly Restriction wasn't of much practical use to Mahiko herself. The Heavenly Tyrant discipline was all about sacrificing Cursed Energy in exchange for a powerful physique — and for Mahiko, discarding her Cursed Energy would cost her far more than she could gain. Not to mention that her whole build was geared toward rapid regeneration and massive damage reduction… the two simply didn't mesh.
What Mahiko valued was something else entirely — the fact that a Heavenly Tyrant possessed not only "superhuman strength," but simultaneously "superhuman concealment."
From the moment she had crossed into this world, the question of "how to completely hide her own identity" had become a persistent problem that plagued her.
She could suppress her own Cursed Energy, alter her face and appearance, make it so ordinary students couldn't tell — but that kind of measure was useless against powerhouses of the caliber of Kenjaku, or Satoru Gojo.
Satoru Gojo especially. That man had the Six Eyes.
No matter how faint the Cursed Energy inside her body, he would see straight through it.
So if she were ever hunted down by people from Jujutsu High, she would have no way to live a peaceful, ordinary life.
And the Heavenly Restriction of a Heavenly Tyrant offered Mahiko one possible path forward.
No matter how much you suppressed Cursed Energy, if it existed, it still existed.
But a Heavenly Tyrant was different.
The Heavenly Tyrant's Heavenly Restriction could render a person completely devoid of Cursed Energy.
Which meant: if Mahiko wanted to conceal any portion of her Cursed Energy, she could attempt to use the pattern of the Heavenly Tyrant's Heavenly Restriction to mask the existence of that portion.
In other words — as long as she learned the pattern of the Heavenly Tyrant's Heavenly Restriction, she would have the means to hide her own identity right under Satoru Gojo's nose.
"Let's give it a try."
Mahiko gently laid Maki flat on the sofa, reached out, pressed both hands against her head and lower abdomen respectively, and began using Idle Transfiguration to observe Maki's soul.
She had already switched back to her "Cursed Spirit state" while Maki was changing clothes.
As a side note — at the time, Mahiko had first sent out a clone to sweep the surrounding area, confirming there were no other sorcerers nearby.
When Maki took off her glasses, she couldn't detect the change in Mahiko. When Maki came out of the fitting room, the Mahiko she saw was, in essence, that blue-haired Cursed Spirit.
What a pity she had no way of noticing.
She had been blissfully oblivious the entire time, thinking that the one sitting on the sofa was still that originally innocent, harmless little blue-haired girl — and had even gone and laid her head in her lap...
Walking right into the trap, really.
"Mm…" Mahiko's gaze turned serious.
Now was the time to get to work.
The girl carefully scanned Maki's soul.
Because the scan probed so deeply, Maki began making sounds of discomfort in her sleep — even muttering in her dreams.
"Get away from me…" The girl who had sunk into sleep displayed a vulnerability entirely at odds with her waking self. "Who says I have to obey you people…"
Maki's expression was anguished. She appeared to be having a nightmare.
Judging by what she was mumbling… it was probably something unpleasant from the Zen'in household.
With the exception of the old man who was its current head, every single person in the Zen'in family was a godlike sorcerer. The clan discriminated against those without Jujutsu talent, and so Maki and Mai had been branded as worthless by their family from the start — and on top of that, a traditional family like this would inevitably prize sons over daughters. So from childhood, Maki and Mai had already been living under the contempt and loathing of the entire clan, parents included.
At the same time, they were pawns the family could sacrifice at any moment.
Mai accepted that fate.
Maki did not.
So Maki had kept pushing, kept struggling, trying to resist the destiny laid out for her.
But the problem was that as long as the two sisters remained alive together, neither could ever grow stronger. The twins were each other's stumbling block — only when one of the two died could the seal on the other's fate be broken.
And in the original story, it was Mai's death that broke the seal on Maki.
Ah.
Mahiko's eyes flickered suddenly.
Because she truly did see it — she saw the Heavenly Restriction within Maki's body, and saw that excess thread of Cursed Energy that had been holding Maki back from her true potential.
Maki's Heavenly Restriction was just as easy to study as Mechamaru's had been.
But the limitation on Maki — the one brought about by the twin sisters' bond — was, unexpectedly, a bit more troublesome to deal with than Mahiko had anticipated.
As for the original fate of Maki and Mai, Mahiko felt genuine sorrow.
If she could help, she of course would.
But the positioning of "twins" in Jujutsu Kaisen was far too peculiar.
The souls of twins were intertwined with each other.
With only Maki here before her, Mahiko had no way to resolve the problem for either of them. If she was going to help, both of them would need to be lying in front of her at the same time.
"Maki-nee." Mahiko suddenly spoke up and asked, "Do you want to become the head of the Zen'in family?"
Maki was still making pained sounds in her sleep and couldn't answer.
But the girl's hand reached out and gripped Mahiko's wrist, grip tight.
"Alright then." Mahiko said softly, having already understood what Maki was trying to convey. "If the opportunity comes later, I'll help you."
Actually, the conditions weren't all that demanding. Even without having studied it thoroughly, as long as the two sisters could be persuaded to lie obediently side by side in front of her, a bit of time spent fixing what ailed them ought to be no great trouble.
Consider it… payment for letting me learn your Heavenly Restriction.
Mahiko settled her mind and began to study in earnest.
Time trickled by, little by little.
And then...
Noon arrived.
Somewhere in a certain park.
"Hss…" Yuji Itadori rubbed his shoulder. "Todo, I'm all good, right?"
"Relax, my best friend — you're perfectly fine."
Yuji, Nobara Kugisaki, Megumi Fushiguro, and Todo Aoi — the four of them were making their way into the park.
Yes — once Yuji and Todo came to blows, no matter what the reason was, the outcome was inevitably that the two of them ended up the best of friends.
The timing of the fight had caught Nobara and Yuji completely off guard.
The two of them had been going at it one moment, then abruptly had their arms slung around each other's shoulders the next — which had also left Megumi and Nobara completely at a loss.
"Whatever! I only went looking for the blue-haired Cursed Spirit because I wanted to spar with her and see if she was an interesting existence — that's all!" — After it was over, Todo cheerfully accepted their request for cooperation in exactly those terms.
And so they had formed an alliance.
Arms slung over each other's shoulders, they came looking for Maki Zenin.
What was happening on Panda and Inumaki's end, they didn't know — but Yuji and the others knew that Maki had taken Mahiko away ahead of them. They sent Maki a message asking where she was; Maki replied with the address of a park. They followed the address and came.
"Where's Maki-senpai…?" Nobara Kugisaki looked left and right.
"Ah, looks like over that way." Yuji pointed in a direction.
They walked over.
"Senpai…?"
Nobara Kugisaki had been about to call out loudly, but the words were barely half out of her mouth when she saw the scene before her and instinctively lowered her voice —
Because the blue-haired girl was raising her index finger toward her, pressed to her lips. Quiet.
And Maki was at this moment dressed in the outfit from earlier, lying serenely on a park bench, head resting on Mahiko's knees, fast asleep without a sound.
"Maki-nee is tired, so she's resting right now." The blue-haired girl smiled warmly, her voice low. "Let her sleep a little longer."
And as Yuji looked at Mahiko as she was now, he suddenly felt a moment of dislocation.
"Mahiko…" Yuji's tone was a little uncertain. "Are you… somehow… a bit different?"
Yuji couldn't put into words exactly what was different.
If the girl from before had carried, in Yuji's eyes, a faint trace of something otherworldly — then the girl before him now seemed to have layered over that faint trace a divine, godlike air of mystery.
He couldn't explain why.
Nothing had visibly changed.
And yet something, somewhere, had quietly, soundlessly shifted.
"Really?" Mahiko blinked, her smile growing wider. "Then… I must have grown taller again."
The research into using the Heavenly Restriction as a method of identity concealment had been a great success.
Mahiko, as she was now, no longer had anything to fear from even Satoru Gojo's Six Eyes.
____
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