The city had already fallen.
The concrete jungle spewed black smoke, half-severed. Above the heaps of shattered glass and steel, the lingering scent of curses drifted down like rain.
The sky was red. It wasn't the glow of sunset. It was the color of the atmosphere stained by the traces of Cursed Energy, endlessly torn and burned.
In the center of those ruins, Itadori Yuji stood alone.
Not a single remnant of a Cursed Spirit remained at his feet.
Those he exorcised were annihilated; those he cut down weren't even granted the mercy of regeneration. For a being whose very soul boundary had been severed, nothing remained but ash.
Yuji slowly steadied his breathing.
His breath was calm.
Body, Cursed Energy, consciousness—not a single tremor disturbed them. If anything, he was eerily still.
His concentration didn't fray as the battle dragged on; instead, it grew sharper. The senses he had honed by crossing the line between life and death tens of thousands of times were no longer mere instincts—they were a physiological structure.
A flicker of black lightning danced across the back of his hand before vanishing.
Black Flash.
Once a phenomenon that visited like a miracle, it was no longer a miracle to the current Yuji. It activated when he willed it and ceased when he desired. He could even regulate its output.
He could land it as lightly as a jab, or compress it enough to shatter the very soul of a Special Grade Cursed Spirit.
His gaze shifted toward the collapsed outskirts of the city.
Two swarms of Cursed Spirits were surging out from the edge of Tokyo. One was a hive-mind type, and the other was a mixed group centered around a massive specialized entity.
An ordinary sorcerer would have partitioned the battlefield, calculated a route to minimize damage, and requested backup.
But Itadori Yuji did not stop.
He slowly raised his right hand.
Gathered at his fingertips was a single, literal strand of Cursed Energy. It was so condensed that its density reached a level of precision where it felt like nothing at all.
A low, cold voice echoed over the ruins.
"Dismantle."
A single word.
It was enough.
In the next instant, the world split. A massive, invisible slash swept across the city.
It wasn't a straight line or a curve. It was a wide-area severance, as if the very boundary between the sky and the ground had been pushed and sliced all at once.
The swarm of Cursed Spirits vanished instantly, unable to even squeeze out a scream. Even the Special Grade entities leading the two groups collapsed as the connection between their bodies, Cursed Energy, and souls was severed simultaneously.
The cutting didn't end there.
The sorcerers in the distance, who had been trying to contain the battle's aftermath, realized it too late. The slash had never reached them.
The ground was sliced, but not a single civilian was harmed. Falling buildings were left with only their pillars intact, expertly avoided.
It was too vast, yet too precise.
Watching that sight, an old sorcerer muttered, lost in awe.
"Sukuna's Dismantle... he has already surpassed it..."
Yuji didn't answer.
The battlefield was already gone from his eyes.
A finished fight held no meaning. The only things with meaning were those that hadn't ended yet.
It was then.
The air distorted.
To be precise, reality let out a brief shriek.
Yuji turned his head immediately. In the center of the ruins, the space where the remnants of souls and curses were most densely entangled—an invisible crack was forming there.
Like an old wound reopening, a black rift darker than shadows tore through the world and gaped open.
The boundary of the soul.
He took a step forward.
He had no reason to run. He had no fear. He simply knew instinctively.
That rift was no mere dimensional crack.
Something was calling him.
Familiar voices brushed past his ears.
"Itadori-kun."
The low, heavy voice of Nanami Kento.
Junpei's trembling breath.
Nobara's irritated laughter.
Megumi's swallowed cry.
And the countless 'ends.'
Yuji's expression hardened slightly.
The people he couldn't save. The backs he reached for but never touched.
The conclusions that would have changed if only he'd been a bit faster, a bit stronger, or if he'd known just a bit more.
He was now stronger than anyone.
The strongest Jujutsu Sorcerer, having surpassed even Gojo Satoru and Ryomen Sukuna.
A body of immortal endurance, perfected martial arts, Cursed Energy control honed to the absolute limit, Blood Manipulation, Dismantle, the sense to perceive and cut souls directly, and—Yuji closed and opened his eyes.
Inside him, a Domain dormant in his deepest depths breathed quietly.
The massive black crack widened, and someone seemed to whisper from within.
Can you make it in time this time?
Yuji's eyes sank.
He already knew the answer.
"I won't be late."
The moment he spoke, the rift exploded.
Cr-crack.
The world flipped upside down.
The first thing that returned was the hot air.
The atmosphere of a midsummer night, where the moisture soaked into the lungs from the very first breath.
The smell of heated asphalt and damp cement mixed together.
The distant sound of cars and the mundane noise of people living their lives.
There was no scent of blood, no explosions, no vibration of collapsing buildings.
Yuji pushed off the ground with his hand and slowly stood up.
He was in an alleyway.
Worn-out telephone poles, the faint glow of a vending machine, old signs.
It was a Tokyo he had seen many times, yet the scenery before him was different. It was older, less worn by the passage of time he remembered.
The glass wasn't broken, the sky wasn't red. He couldn't smell a city in decay.
He looked around silently. Then, he slowly turned his awareness inward.
Total Cursed Energy—Normal.
Physical Body—Normal.
Reverse Cursed Technique—Operational.
Blood Manipulation—No abnormalities.
Soul Perception—Active.
Dismantle structure—Fully maintained.
It was too perfect.
To the point where it was almost laughable.
Yuji saw his own reflection in a roadside window.
Itadori Yuji. It was definitely him.
But his eyes weren't those of his younger self. They were the eyes of a man who had seen too much and experienced too many ends.
He walked over to a newspaper stand.
The moment he saw the date printed in old typeface, his pupils trembled ever so slightly.
July 2006.
It was more accurate than he'd thought.
The season just before everything fractured.
Before Gojo Satoru and Geto Suguru drifted so far apart they could never return.
When Amanai Riko was still alive.
Before Fushiguro Toji had died, and before the tragedy surrounding Tengen and the Star Plasma Vessel had unfolded.
And just before that summer became the beginning of so many tragedies to come.
Yuji slowly closed his eyes.
An inexplicable emotion welled up from the center of his chest. It was too heavy to be called joy, and too quiet to be called rage.
It felt as though he had regained something lost long ago, but simultaneously realized that if he let it go again, it would be the absolute end.
Not this time.
In this life, he could never say he didn't know, that he was too late, or that he couldn't help it.
Because he knew everything, and he was strong enough to change it all.
Yuji exhaled slowly. Then he looked up.
In that instant, his senses spread across the entire city.
The flows that ordinary sorcerers could only guess at through barriers were as clear as day to him.
The barrier nodes embedded throughout downtown Tokyo.
The surveillance network established by the Jujutsu world.
The small seeds of curses born from human anxiety and regret.
And layered over all of it was the outdated, closed-off structure of the Jujutsu world—better at controlling people than saving them.
The Higher-Ups.
Yuji clicked his tongue. Normally, he could have slipped into the shadows.
He could move like a phantom, intervening only in necessary incidents, using his knowledge of the future to change things one by one. But he immediately discarded that thought.
There was no need.
Hiding is the method of the weak.
The current him was a being the Jujutsu world of this era could not handle. If that was the case, he simply had to make them realize it clearly from the start.
He stepped out of the alley.
A passerby flinched for a moment.
Though they saw nothing, they instinctively felt an inexplicable pressure. Yuji didn't care. Just by walking, the air in his wake grew marginally heavier.
At the end of the alley, a weak Grade 4 Cursed Spirit appeared.
A trivial, commonplace curse born from student anxiety and inferiority complexes.
It crawled toward Yuji on its damp limbs and lunged.
Yuji didn't even turn around.
"Black Flash."
A single phrase, more of a confirmation than an incantation.
Tap.
It wasn't a punch; it was just a graze from the back of his hand.
And yet, a pitch-black spark flashed for a split second, piercing through the curse's entire body.
Not even the sound of a rupture remained. He had lowered his output to the point where it wouldn't kill—no, it was an excessively precise waste of power against an opponent that didn't even deserve such words.
The Cursed Spirit quietly dispersed.
Without lowering his hand, he gazed past the city.
Tokyo Metropolitan Jujutsu Technical High School.
And the Higher-Ups who reigned over it.
They likely knew nothing yet.
They didn't even know that tonight, their entire world would be turned upside down.
Yuji's gaze went cold.
Gojo Satoru.
Geto Suguru.
Amanai Riko.
And Kenjaku, Mahito, and even Sukuna, whom he would eventually face again.
Before heading to the source of all those tragedies, there was a door he had to kick open first.
The Higher-Ups.
The first place he needed to handle. The first people he needed to strike fear into.
Only then would his subsequent interventions remain unshakable.
Yuji shoved his hands into his pockets and walked through the night streets.
His pace was neither slow nor fast.
Nevertheless, his presence spread out like an invisible ripple, beginning to alert several sorcerers within the barrier simultaneously.
An assistant director somewhere suddenly looked up, and a sorcerer tasked with monitoring the barrier felt cold sweat trickling down their spine.
Despite the summer night, a chill seeped in.
Without knowing why, everyone looked in the same direction.
The center of Tokyo.
An unidentified pressure walking through the heat of the night.
Yuji whispered quietly.
"Wait for me."
He knew who he was talking to.
The people who should have lived. The people he couldn't save. Every moment he failed to reach in the end.
This time is different.
He did not stop.
"This time—"
In the stifling air of the summer night, his voice was all the clearer.
"I'm truly changing everything."
And so, Itadori Yuji walked toward the Jujutsu world of the past.
To suppress the Higher-Ups, to meet Gojo and Geto, and to seize the summer that had not yet died.
No one knew yet. Tonight, the Jujutsu world would learn for the first time what the truly 'Strongest' was.