In the original story, Satoru Gojo had once been sealed away. And in order to break open Prison Realm and rescue Satoru Gojo, the main group's plan was to seek out a sorcerer known as the "Angel."
This sorcerer was also one of the ancient jujutsu practitioners who had entered into a contract with Kenjaku. She possessed a technique capable of annihilating other jujutsu techniques. What was remarkable — almost uncanny, really — was that after the "Angel" was revived through a host body, her goal turned out to be the elimination of Sukuna.
Because of that, even though she had signed a contract with Kenjaku and been revived in the modern age through a vessel, she was in truth one of the main group's allies — and she played her part in the final battle.
"So you're planning to pull his host body out as well?" In the dim room, Rime stood behind Kenjaku, a faint frown creasing his brow. "He's hostile to Sukuna… honestly, I don't think this is a good idea."
Sukuna was, after all, a potential ally of theirs.
Anyone who stood against Sukuna was someone Rime could not regard with any warmth — and so, when he saw Kenjaku produce the cursed object containing the Angel's soul, he couldn't help but speak up.
"Relax. As long as my hypothesis is correct and the experiment succeeds… I'll have created something extraordinarily interesting." Kenjaku answered with a smile. "In that case, even if every plan we'd prepared before falls apart — we'll still have one final road left to walk. The most savage road of all."
The most savage road?
Honestly, Rime had no idea what Kenjaku was muttering on about. But since Kenjaku clearly had it figured out, Rime didn't press further.
"There's something else I came to tell you. Someone's shown up outside," Rime said.
The location they were in was the hidden chamber inside the dam where Mechamaru had originally been concealed — deep in the forested mountains where Mechamaru had been confined.
With Mechamaru missing, Jujutsu High was bound to send someone to investigate. And once they sent someone to investigate — the result of that investigation would inevitably be the discovery of an entire mountainous forest blanketed by a barrier.
And so Jujutsu High's staff had summoned a sorcerer they deemed capable of handling the situation.
However, because all the major incidents lately had been unfolding in Tokyo, while Mechamaru's location was over in Kyoto, Jujutsu High had failed to connect the dots between what was happening here and what was happening in the capital.
They had probably assumed this was simply a case of a moderately powerful Cursed Spirit showing up in the area...
And so, as a countermeasure, they had dispatched exactly one sorcerer.
— In fairness, if the enemy lurking here truly had been a run-of-the-mill Special Grade Cursed Spirit, that one sorcerer's strength would have been more than sufficient.
"Oh? They've arrived, have they?" Kenjaku raised his eyes.
There were screens on the walls of the hidden chamber. The screens were linked to surveillance Cursed Spirits, displaying the appearance of the new arrival.
White hair, white beard — a tall, powerfully built old man with a katana at his hip, clearly a cursed tool of exceptional grade. His robes billowed gently as he stood at the high ground, looking down over the forest veiled beneath a transparent barrier. There was not a trace of anxiety in his eyes at whatever unknown danger might lie ahead — only supreme confidence.
The smile resting on his face was the easy, unhurried smile of a man utterly in his element.
— Naobito Zenin.
The current head of the Zenin clan.
The fastest sorcerer alive save for Satoru Gojo himself — and simultaneously one of the absolute pinnacles of the modern era's Grade 1 sorcerers in Japan.
"The protagonist has arrived." Kenjaku looked at Naobito Zenin's figure and broke into a smile.
This was exactly the person Kenjaku had been hoping for. The person he had been waiting for.
If the one who had attacked Mechamaru here truly had been a conventional — or in other words, ordinary — cursed practitioner, then Naobito alone would have been enough to clean this whole situation up.
Because the old clan head was genuinely, frighteningly strong.
Unfortunately for him, that's not the situation here.
Jujutsu High's leadership had always been laughably poor at both judgment and initiative.
They had failed to notice the connection between what was happening here and what was unfolding in Tokyo — and in doing so, had with their own hands delivered the Zenin clan's venerable patriarch straight into a place of extreme danger.
"Kill him?" Rime asked.
"Just make the outside world think he's dead. As for the specifics… leaving him alive isn't a bad option either. His position is a special one — he might prove useful down the line." Kenjaku answered with a smile. "Is Urogi ready? If she is, have her come out and join the fun — think of it as a warm-up..."
If word got out that the head of the Zenin clan was dead, the jujutsu world would erupt into chaos, wouldn't it?
In that case… while everyone was in disarray, his plan could advance smoothly and without obstruction.
How wonderful.
The reason Mahiko and Maki Zenin had ended up in the park together was, naturally, because Mahiko had moved Maki Zenin there herself.
The maid outfit Maki had been wearing had long since been changed out of, and her hair and clothes had been neatly tidied by Mahiko with careful attention.
But none of that was the important part.
The important part was this — Mahiko's research had succeeded.
Learning the Heavenly Restriction was no great challenge for Mahiko at this stage. The real challenge was figuring out how to flexibly convert this particular Heavenly Restriction into a method she could "switch on and off at will."
Mahiko couldn't completely cancel out her own Cursed Energy.
Without Cursed Energy, she would have no way to use Idle Transfiguration to revert herself back to her original state. In that scenario, she would effectively become an ordinary human being forever.
That simply would not do.
And so Mahiko had developed a different application entirely.
This method didn't involve carving the Heavenly Restriction directly onto her own soul. Instead, she treated the pattern of the Heavenly Restriction like a cloth — and wherever she wanted to conceal a portion of her Cursed Energy, she simply draped that cloth over it.
In this way, she could achieve change at the very root of her Cursed Energy.
The principle behind this was entirely different from the approach Mahiko had used before — that of "suppressing the aura of her own Cursed Energy."
For the time being, she had used it to completely conceal that portion of her Cursed Energy that belonged to her original self as a blue-haired Cursed Spirit.
What remained was a portion of Cursed Energy that Mahiko had deliberately crafted — belonging to a "blue-haired little girl," possessing water manipulation, calibrated to the level of a Grade 4 sorcerer.
So even if Satoru Gojo himself showed up right now, he would not be able to see through Mahiko at a glance.
The birth of this method would grant Mahiko enormous convenience in all her future actions.
As for why Yuji had felt that faint, strange sensation around Mahiko — it wasn't because he had seen through the Heavenly Restriction she was using on herself.
It was simply that Yuji Itadori, to some degree, had the ability to sense the aura of souls.
And so he had caught the faintest, wordless hint of that slight change in Mahiko's soul — a vague, half-formed perception that he couldn't quite put into words.
But that didn't really matter.
Still...
Mahiko glanced at Yuji, her eyes flickering faintly.
Yuji didn't know who Mahiko was.
But Sukuna, living inside Yuji, certainly knew exactly who she was.
Yet Sukuna had made no move to expose her up to this point — which meant Sukuna was actively helping conceal Mahiko's identity.
Mahiko didn't know why Sukuna would do that.
Some time ago, when Mahiko had been locked in a Domain battle with Kenjaku, Sukuna had stepped in and exchanged a few words with her — saying some cryptic things along the lines of "you're quite interesting." In the original story, Sukuna had been obsessed with Megumi Fushiguro. But in this version of events, it seemed like this fellow had gotten interested in Mahiko instead.
Ugh.
In the original, Sukuna's obsession with Megumi Fushiguro was because he wanted to take over Megumi's body.
So this time around — he isn't planning to take over mine, is he?
Mahiko had no idea what schemes Sukuna was cooking up inside that head of his. But one thing was certain: she needed to stay far more vigilant.
"So the big brothers made up, did they?" Mahiko looked at Yuji and Todo Aoi, tilting her head. "If you can make up in the end, why did you fight in the first place?"
"Hmph." Todo Aoi crossed his arms and grinned. "Because the person standing across from you is your best friend."
A statement of thoroughly mysterious import.
"Anyway — Todo's cooperating with us now," Nobara said, one hand on her hip. "We're all going together to find the blue-haired Cursed Spirit."
And then, at precisely that moment, Maki Zenin felt her phone vibrate in her pocket.
She pulled it out and glanced at the screen.
It was a message from Inumaki's side.
Maki Zenin frowned slightly. "There's a message from Inumaki."
"What does it say?" Yuji asked.
"The fight on their end is over," Maki Zenin answered.
"Who won?" Yuji asked.
"It sounds like they conceded," Maki Zenin replied. "They're asking to cooperate."
No matter how many agreements had been made during the battle itself, without Mahiko on their side there was nothing they could do. And so, in order to get their hands on information about the blue-haired Cursed Spirit too, the Kyoto side had conceded and was willing to make concessions.
"What does Mahiko think?" Nobara Kugisaki looked at Mahiko, asking for her opinion.
Ultimately, what mattered most was Mahiko's view.
Kyoto had agreed to follow Tokyo's instructions for as long as the search for the blue-haired Cursed Spirit continued — they were even willing to formalize it with a Binding Vow. The Tokyo side all felt the terms were reasonable enough and the cooperation was acceptable.
It all came down to whether Mahiko had any problem with the Kyoto students.
"I don't mind," Mahiko answered. "Whatever works."
Might as well team up.
Although the Kyoto students had all been playing the villain side during the exchange event, in reality these kids — with the exception of Mechamaru the traitor — were all decent enough people who had fought bravely to protect civilians.
Mahiko held no ill feelings toward them.
And so, that afternoon, a meeting was convened inside one of Jujutsu High's safe houses.
"What we need now is a formal investigation into Mahiko and Nobara Kugisaki's pasts." Megumi Fushiguro spread a great many documents across the table. "If we operate on the assumption that Mahiko and Nobara had some prior connection to the blue-haired Cursed Spirit, I believe we can find some trace of it through the network of past interpersonal relationships."
This was, in fact, perfectly sound reasoning.
And the truth was, short of taking some fairly extreme measures — the only avenue they had for tracking down that blue-haired Cursed Spirit was to excavate information from these two people's histories.
And so Nobara Kugisaki's past was dug up.
Every single one of her elementary school classmates was turned over one by one.
And of course, Mahiko's past was excavated as well.
Except Mahiko didn't really have a past to speak of.
Her identity as a "blue-haired little girl" was that of an orphan from a fairly remote orphanage. The sum total of everyone she had ever interacted with amounted to a handful of small girls — including Jogo and the others — plus one teacher at the orphanage who had since passed away.
It had to be said: Mechamaru had done his job thoroughly. Everything the students dug up in their investigation — turned up nothing.
And so the focus of the inquiry remained concentrated squarely on Nobara Kugisaki's past.
At the same time, they also conducted a fairly detailed round of questioning directed at Mahiko.
They knew that before Mahiko had been caught up in the incident with the blue-haired Cursed Spirit and gained her jujutsu techniques, she had already possessed the ability to see Cursed Spirits. So they asked her whether, back during her time at the orphanage, she had ever seen any entity resembling the "blue-haired Cursed Spirit" — a blue-haired little girl in form.
"I've seen one in the mirror," Mahiko answered obediently.
"Er, besides the mirror?"
"Kin-chan?" Mahiko tilted her head.
Kin-chan was indeed a blue-haired little girl.
But during the fight between Mahiko and the blue-haired Cursed Spirit, Kin-chan and Hanami had an airtight alibi at some shopping centre elsewhere. And so Kin-chan was once again ruled out.
Mahiko knew this perfectly well, so she didn't dodge the question.
"I've got it! Has anyone considered this possibility?" Yuji suddenly smacked his fist into his palm. "What if the blue-haired Cursed Spirit is actually here to repay a debt of gratitude!"
"Huh?" Nobara Kugisaki shot him a sideways look, an eyebrow twitching. "What on earth are you on about?"
"You know how those stories go, right? A rabbit or a fox you rescue out in the snow — when you grow up, it comes back to repay you." Yuji gesticulated as he spoke. "What if Mahiko rescued some little animal when she was small, it turned into a Cursed Spirit, and came back?"
Ugh.
"That's a stretch," Megumi Fushiguro said flatly.
"So in the end we can't find anything at all." Zen'in Mai crossed her arms. "The most suspicious people are still those two, aren't they?"
The moment those words left her mouth, a brief silence fell over the room.
Without a word of coordination, everyone's eyes drifted toward Mahiko and Nobara Kugisaki.
"But Nobara and Mahiko both have birth certificates, don't they? And if either of them were the blue-haired Cursed Spirit, the timing of when the fights broke out would be all off, right?" Yuji said, rubbing his chin.
"But birth certificates don't actually prove anything, do they?" Zen'in Mai frowned. "Didn't you say that blue-haired Cursed Spirit can change her own appearance? So what if she killed someone and took their place — would any of you have caught it?"
The room fell silent.
A collective shock spread through the group.
"Like a body-snatcher?!" Yuji blurted out.
"That's genuinely terrifying," Nobara said, getting goosebumps.
"I haven't been swapped out," Inumaki remarked from where he was sitting to the side, his tone perfectly flat.
Having stepped back from combat mode, Inumaki had reverted to his usual quiet, reticent, few-words self.
"But if we think about it that way, then actually anyone sitting here could have been swapped out a long time ago," Todo Aoi narrowed his eyes.
True. That was a very real possibility.
After all, they had no way of understanding how the blue-haired Cursed Spirit had gotten hold of inside information on sorcerers.
[The blue-haired Cursed Spirit is among us] — the more they turned this theory over, the more plausible it seemed.
No one could immediately prove that they themselves had never been replaced at some point along the way.
And on top of that, this theory could also explain why the blue-haired Cursed Spirit had saved Nobara or Mahiko — either because in the process of impersonating someone, the Cursed Spirit had grown fond of her companions, or because Mahiko and Nobara had already been replaced.
All at once, everyone in the room was staring at one another, expressions of suspicion and wariness creeping onto every face.
Mahiko sat right at the center of it all, watching this scene unfold, the corner of her mouth twitching slightly.
"Er..."
The girl was a little dumbfounded, with no idea how things had managed to develop to this point.
But...
Mahiko touched her chin thoughtfully.
Not to mention actually taking someone out and replacing them — Mahiko was pretty sure she could actually do that.
"So..." Todo Aoi sensed the tension rising sharply through the air and narrowed his eyes. "What do we do now?"
Now that this theory was out there, the situation was going to be very hard to walk back from.
Werewolf had officially begun.
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