"Trains were slow," Ren lied smoothly. He walked across the room, pulling one of the paper cups from the carrier and setting it down right next to her boots on the desk. "Dark roast. Black. As requested."
Shoko finally shifted her gaze. Her brown eyes, framed by deep, chronic dark circles, flicked from the coffee cup up to Ren's face. She stared at him for a long second.
She reached out, picking up the cup. She took a sip, letting out a quiet hum of approval.
"Not bad," Shoko murmured. She lowered her feet from the desk and leaned forward, resting her elbows on the metal surface. "Now. Sit down, Ren. You and I are going to have a little chat"
Ren cautiously pulled out the rickety metal folding chair opposite her desk and sat down. He kept his posture relaxed, though internally, he was bracing himself. Shoko Ieiri was sharp.
If Satoru Gojo was a chaotic hurricane of overwhelming power, Shoko was a scalpel—precise, clinical, and completely unimpressed by bullshit.
"So," Shoko began, leaning back in her chair and crossing her arms. "Your cursed energy. It's essentially the exact same as Maki's, correct? Extremely low. Basically non-sorcerer, civilian levels."
Ren frowned, narrowing his eyes slightly. He leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees.
"You're the primary medical examiner for the entire Tokyo branch, Dr. Ieiri," Ren interrupted smoothly, his tone leveling out. "You already know exactly what my energy levels are. So why are you asking me a question you already have the answer to?"
Shoko paused. The corner of her mouth twitched upward in a dry, genuinely amused smirk. She took a slow drag of her cigarette, the cherry burning bright orange for a second before she exhaled a thick cloud of smoke.
Tapping her ashes into a glass tray on her desk. "I'm asking, Ren, because Satoru—in his infinite, relentlessly annoying wisdom—requested me to teach you something."
Ren blinked. "Something?"
"Yes," Shoko deadpanned. "He requested me to teach you Reverse Cursed Technique."
Ren stared at her. The morgue was completely silent for three full seconds, save for the faint hum of the fluorescent lights overhead. His brain completely stalled out.
"He... what?"
"You heard me," Shoko sighed, picking up her coffee cup and taking a long, highly caffeinated sip. "He told me to teach you how to heal yourself with RCT. Like it's some sort of casual parlor trick that anyone can pick up on a Thursday afternoon."
"RCT?" Ren asked, tilting his head and forcing a look of complete, blank confusion.
Internally, he knew exactly what it was, but satoru had only vaguely talked about his 'new strength,' and Maki certainly hadn't given him a lecture on techniques.
Technically, he wasn't supposed to know anything beyond the absolute basics. "I'm guessing that doesn't stand for root canal treatment. Neither Satoru nor Maki have actually explained what that is yet."
Shoko closed her eyes and let out a long, slow exhale that fluttered the collar of her lab coat.
"Of course they haven't. Leaving all the work to me" Shoko muttered, looking like she severely needed a stronger drink than coffee.
She leaned back, resting her elbow on the arm of her chair, and pointed her cigarette at him.
"Listen closely, I'll give you the idiot's version. Normal cursed energy is fundamentally negative. It's born from stress, fear, anger, and disgust. It is inherently destructive." She gestured vaguely to the empty metal autopsy tables in the room.
"If you get a hole punched through your stomach and you try to jam regular cursed energy into the wound, you aren't going to fix it. You're just going to make a worse, messier hole."
Ren nodded slowly, playing the attentive student perfectly.
"Reverse Cursed Technique," Shoko continued, her tone slipping into the crisp, no-nonsense cadence of a medical professional, "is the process of taking two sources of that negative energy and multiplying them against each other inside your own body. Negative times negative equals positive. It creates positive energy, which regenerates human tissue."
Ren let out a low whistle, rubbing the back of his neck. "Multiply negative by negative. Sounds like basic math."
"It is basic math. But doing it while you are actively bleeding to death is like trying to solve calculus in your head while getting hit by a train," Shoko deadpanned.
She took another drag of her cigarette, the cherry burning bright orange, before exhaling the smoke toward the ceiling. Her brown eyes shifted back down, locking onto his with a sharp, piercing intensity.
"I am one of the only people in this entire country who can output it to heal others. Even Satoru can only use it to heal himself, and it took him literally getting his throat slashed open to finally figure it out," she said.
She leaned forward, resting her chin on her hand, looking at him with a mix of curiosity and deep, profound exhaustion.
"So, considering you have the cursed energy capacity of a damp AA battery, and the mental gymnastics required to pull this off is basically magical quantum physics... tell me, Ren," Shoko asked, her voice perfectly flat. "Does that sound like something that can just be taught?"
Ren slowly leaned back against the rickety metal folding chair, letting the silence stretch as he stared up at the fluorescent lights. He crossed his arms, dropping the facade of total confusion and letting a genuinely analytical frown take over his features.
"Okay. Let me make sure I'm getting the logic here," Ren murmured, piecing it together aloud.
"Humans are able to heal with this complex, positive energy. But cursed spirits are literally made out of negative energy, right? So... it's infinitely easier for them to heal, because they don't have to do any math at all. They can just heal directly from... negative cursed energy?"