A/N:
Posting this on an auspicious day: 大安, meaning taian or "great peace!" Similar to how Friday the 13th is generally considered ill-fated but not taken seriously, there are a series of six days calculated from dates in the Chinese calendar that supposedly predict if a day will bear good or bad luck. These days are called the rokuyou or rokki (六輝). If you're planning a wedding, it's auspicious to set it on taian and definitely not on butsumetsu (which was yesterday （；￣ェ￣）). Some shinto shrines even close their offices on butsumetsu. Humans are weird, haha
Since notes have character limits, I couldn't insert this fun bit in the end notes of the last chapter:
The chapter titles are based on the Four Stages of Awakening in Buddhism. Since Nasu and Gege's works choose to understand Buddhist terms (like Alaya) in their "basic" meaning instead of their derivatives (e.g. religion, psychology, meditation), I similarly use the Four Stages to refer to certain characters in each chapter:
The stream-enterer (預流, yoru) - Emiya
The once-returner (斯陀含, shidagon) - Touji
The non-returner (阿那含, anagon) - Fujino
The arahant (阿羅漢, arakan) - Tengen
Yoru is one who has seen the cosmic law and order (dharma) and has entered a stream that leads to an ocean (nirvana: the blowing out of one's suffering like a candle's flame). As a counter guardian, Emiya exists to extinguish threats against mankind. He has also gained a perspective on the universe that most humans never do, and has thrown away his self-identity.
Shidagon is one who is reborn into the realm of the senses for likely the last time. Touji was reincarnated into Shibuya, but after dying is "highly unlikely" to return the same way. At this point, Touji has given up on his past life of vices and feels regret over not caring for his children more.
Anagon is one who is reborn into the Pure Abodes, meaning they're a deva on the path to becoming an arahant and can't reincarnate as a human anymore. As a temporary counter guardian, Fujino is artificially recorded into the Throne of Heroes and is serving Alaya as a last resort for eliminating threats. She has no attachments to her past life and no driving motivations. She considers her continued existence a "dream."
Arahant is one who is "awakened, deserving, entitled," i.e. one has been freed from all attachment. After Riko's death, Tengen chose to surrender themselves to the flow of nature and has given up on merging with Star Plasma Vessels to maintain their humanity. They are neither "here" nor "there," are currently closer to a spirit than a human, and are yet neither of these things. They have only maintained an ego – a consciousness – through jujutsu and force of will.
;
After Goetia's defeat to the master of Chaldea, Belial and four other Demon Gods fled Goetia's time temple: some to survive, others to seek revenge against the master who had thwarted the incineration of the anthropic principle. Driven by both desires, Belial eventually found itself in an unhinged timeline, a world whose potential for stability constantly fluctuated. One day, Alaya could deem the world a danger to the Universe and prune it from existence.
Yet this cursed world teemed with phantom spirits and near-legendary humans.
Be it the humans' insufficient saint graphs or the spirits' nebulous impression on history, these residents of the world were at most urban legends, fairy tales, or nearly-extinct beasts whose saint graphs all lacked the levels necessary to ascend into heroic spirits upon death. In them, Belial saw potential assets for its continued survival and revenge – resources it could manipulate into killing the master of Chaldea once the magus inevitably detected an anomaly in this point of time and came to investigate.
Thus, Belial possessed a phantom spirit known as Tengen to conceal itself from Alaya, then struck a deal with a certain local. After all, Belial was the demon of "worthlessness," of an independence and personal accomplishment that others condemned, and who other than Kenjaku could comprehend Belial's nature? What Belial didn't divulge with its – inferior, disgusting, human – ally was that Belial was also the Demon God of the Trash Heap, an apocalyptic island of death and exile, oblivion and nothingness, a realm that like Belial had no future, faith, or hope.
And Belial would realise its realm once again.
Thus a curtain darker than black fell over the entire city of Tokyo, cutting it off from the outside world and the SHEBA lens of Chaldea.
Terror unlike any Culling Game came into form….
Pseudo-Singularity V
Path of Octuple Bends: Tokyo
2018 AD
Humanity Foundation Value - ?
…
..
.
Humans and curses, those with juryoku and those without, those allied with Kenjaku and those who hadn't even heard of his name — all couldn't describe what had happened until it was too late. With inexplicable power, Kenjaku had betrayed his allied curses in Shibuya on a Halloween night and consumed them all before shortly facing Gojou. While Getou's face had paralysed Gojou with shock for an instant, Kenjaku had killed the Six Eyes user. There was no reason for cautious tactics when one was empowered by a demon god. The future was in his clutches. Yet what Belial sought wasn't only humanity's evolution through juryoku — as useful as an evolved species would be — so once Kenjaku disposed of Gojou and initiated a bloody battle for survival across all of Tokyo, Belial began forming its own personal elite guard and assassination squad.
A squad of heroic spirits that couldn't normally be summoned, yet were forcibly manifested into Belial's realm by merging with local phantom spirits or humans. A squad of Pseudo-Servants with abilities the likes that the world had never seen. A squad that through Belial's summoning was under its thrall and control.
Mostly.
Touji cracked his neck, heavily sighing. Whether one possessed juryoku or not, certain death awaited anyone who didn't kill a different number of people a day. Ever since Kenjaku had reduced Tokyo into a boiling pot of crabs with this announcement, there hadn't been a single bit of sane company to be found around Touji. Sure, there were the other members of Belial's elite guard, but Touji doubted they would enjoy conversation on how one might go about apologising to one's estranged children.
Belial had summoned them for three purposes: to guard its vessel's body until it was ready to abandon the body for Kenjaku to absorb, to ensure that Kenjaku's blood bath was stirring up despair between juryoku- and non-juryoku-sensitive people equally, and to keep an eye out for a teenage magus bearing shield-shaped command spells on their right hand. A personality wasn't required to fulfil such duties. Still, it was strange that Touji alone remembered another instance where he had been summoned to the modern world as a zombie; his memories could have been a result of having an odd saint graph to begin with, but shouldn't Touji be the last person to rely on for sanity?
A nearby clash of humans and jujutsu-wielding humans caught Touji's attention, before his interest dimmed with the absence of Megumi or Tsumiki. Touji was sure they were alright, based on his past memories. He only wished he could see them. Suddenly, the feral humans noticed his presence and redirected their homicidal energies at him—
Earning them death in a single strike.
The encounter couldn't even be called a battle.
Touji dusted himself as he strolled past bodies dropping like flies. Tokyo's despairing populace had taken to naming their bloody prison as if naming a fear would convince it to vanish, but the masses' contagious label only served to empower Touji.
Tokyo: the Path of Octuple Bends — the Unseen World of Spirits.
After a curse user had facilitated Touji's reincarnation, Belial had used Touji's living dead body to summon a divine spirit otherwise inaccessible as a Servant and had planned on manipulating the reincarnation jujutsu to physically puppeteer the divine spirit. Unfortunately for Belial, the divine spirit preferred granting Touji full control in favour of avoiding direct contact with mortals, leaving Touji's mind in the forefront of their Pseudo-Servant manifestation while immunising him from Belial's control in the background. Belial's commands nudged Touji with strong urges, but couldn't dictate his movements. Touji possessed all the upsides of a demigod — with none of the means to track down and communicate with his children, darn it! Regardless, he acknowledged his luck in sharing a body with Ashihara-Shikoo.
The Shinto god was more commonly known as Oukuninushi. His name meant "Young Warrior of the Reed Plains," where the Reed Plains referred to the "world between heaven and hell" and to the country of Japan. Ashihara-Shikoo's life had started with abuse and attempted murder from his brothers, until he had finally escaped them through a series of trials and eventually established the Reed Plains as his realm. When Amaterasu and his heavenly court had later demanded that Ashihara-Shikoo relinquish his reign over Japan, Ashihara-Shikoo had agreed to their terms and withdrawn into the Unseen World of Spirits. Aside from surviving his trials, Ashihara-Shikoo was also known for his romantic escapades with a number of women and goddesses, one of whom he had wooed with a poem that cursed the nue bird.
Touji and Ashihara-Shikoo's lives paralleled each other enough to allow them the compatibility to merge, and for Touji to manifest as an Assassin-class Servant based on Ashihara-Shikoo's legendary disappearance into the netherworld. Touji wasn't arrogant to believe he now qualified as a semi-special grade threat, and the ancient curse users Kenjaku had awakened and who had crossed Touji's path could testify to it. Unfortunately, Touji hadn't encountered any shamans to test himself against just yet….
Oh?
The glimpse of a familiar cleaver snapped Touji's head in its direction, and in a blink of an eye he had already closed the distance between them. He deflected a reflexive swing from it with a snicker.
"Hey there, Nanami~n!" The pink-haired kid's nickname had been too hilarious to forget.
Sure enough, Nanami's brow twitched as he disposed of curses surrounding him. "Do I know you?"
Touji halted, startled. He could sense prana from the blonde whose body language betrayed an ease born from days of living in each other's pockets, but it seemed the method behind Nanami's summoning had sabotaged his conscious memories. Bummer. Touji could do with the shaman skipping past his obligatory "kill the mercenary" phase of their introduction.
Oh well, Touji could graciously catch Nanami up on how they were the best of friends.
"Fushiguro Touji," he introduced, "fellow elite guard of Belial. When did you die, and what poor sod did our nefarious master stuff you with?"
"Belial?" Nanami echoed, startled.
A curse seized its chance at killing Nanami, only for Touji to destroy it with a kick.
Nanami eyed Touji warily, unsure how to categorise the dark-haired man in the conflict that had swallowed Tokyo. During Kenjaku's unreserved attack on Shibuya, Nanami had gained lethal wounds. However, Alaya hadn't overlooked his peculiarity as a shaman with a compatibility for serving the Counter Force, and had thus adopted Nanami as a transient military asset, freezing him in a state between life and death. In this respect, Nanami was a temporary counter guardian who, once order was restored to Tokyo, would return to being a normal human with no memory of his stint as an agent of Alaya.
For now, Nanami had to investigate the source of Kenjaku's unusual power and eliminate it. Alaya had informed him that the barrier over Tokyo was blurring the current point of time in the fabric of reality, effectively corrupting it into a pseudo-singularity. Once Nanami erased the source of Kenjaku's power, the fabric of reality would mend and return Tokyo to its initial state before the anomaly behind Kenjaku's actions had materialised.
Nanami tossed the name Belial around in his head, acknowledging it as a western occult demon with origins in the Tanakh. As a shaman, he acquainted himself with common mortal fears, though he admittedly practised limited familiarity with concepts from outside of Japan.
However, its foreign nature alone raised a flag.
After all, what place did foreign fears have in the home of juryoku?
"Fushigurou," Nanami enunciated, recalling Itadori's classmate – the son of a Zenin whom Gojou had once killed. "You serve Belial?"
The hair on the back of Touji's neck stood on end. Both sides of the conversation had somehow missed a point of understanding.
"Yeah…? Wait, bastard––!"
"My innate technique can further divide a target with ten lines and forcibly create a weak spot at the 7:3 ratio point––"
"I know, I know!"
BANG.
BANG.
SHING––
Touji and Nanami tore up a block with a flurry of feints and exchanges that carried them to the open space of a park. Curses, curse users, and normal humans who had been waiting around the park attempted to ambush fresh prey, only for Touji and Nanami to cripple them between strikes directed at each other. Touji would have preferred punting the normal humans to an isolated corner of Tokyo, but the hostile curses and curse users attacking Touji forced his rough hand.
Touji and Nanami parted in the middle of the park to catch their breath and analyse each other. The ancient curse users in their vicinity immediately moved to strike, having used the other hostiles' ambush to first wear their prey down.
"You're still a pain in the neck, Blondie, but I'm gonna show you how much I've matured as a 'functional adult.'" Touji's Presence Concealment diminished with a deployment of Ashihara-Shikoo's noble phantasm. "Ajimasa no Nagaho no Miya: the Hallowed Palace Hidden in the Bullrush!"
Prana lit up in a circle around Touji, consuming the entire park before an emerald and sepia grand hall with bowed roofs rose from the ground with divine brilliance, a golden sacred straw rope hanging across the hall's entrance. The sacred hall towered over Touji, Nanami, and their enemies – and was still rising from Touji's realm, but he cut the palace's manifestation off at five stories else more than the park would turn into Ashihara-Shikoo's palm of influence. The noble phantasm at full power was as large as a literal mountain.
The ancient curse users attacking Touji and Nanami suddenly felt any tactical jujutsu they possessed evaporate as if it had never existed, and before they could react, Touji was already up in their faces with a bloodthirsty grin.
"Yo."
Bang bang bangb angbangba ngbangbangban gbangbangbang…!
Touji's noble phantasm was derived from the legend where Ashihara-Shikoo had cursed Prince Homuchiwake with muteness until the prince had embarked on a journey to Izumo-taisha, Ashihara-Shikoo's shrine that Amaterasu had built after Ashihara-Shikoo had handed over Japan and vanished to the Unseen Land. Izumo-taisha was the oldest shrine in Japan, and Prince Homuchiwake had been cured of his curse merely on the way to it, with his first words being a description of a mysterious site hidden in leaves nearby:
"That down-river which is like a mountain of green leaves, and looks like a mountain but is not a mountain — could it be the ceremonial place of the priests who worship Ashihara-Shikoo-no-Okami in the shrine of So at Iwakuma in Izumo?"
It had been through this site of worship that Ashihara-Shikoo had cured Prince Homuchiwake of his curse, therefore the noble phantasm "Ajimasa no Nagaho no Miya" granted Touji the ability to nullify any non-lethal jujutsu within vicinity of the palace. Ironically, Touji's noble phantasm resembled an open domain expansion. He would have liked to see his old man's face upon witnessing his "useless" son stand above even semi-special grade members of the clan.
BANG!
Nanami and Touji's enemies weren't granted time to comprehend the noble phantasm. In anyone else's hands, Ashihara-Shikoo's legend wouldn't have even been worthy of the label, "an ultimate finisher" – however, Touji was a martial genius who through a series of circumstances had failed to leave an impact on human history. With the noble phantasm, Touji could disable his enemies' defences and any other tactical jujutsu, turning Touji's enemies invulnerable to his physical prowess.
Touji clapped his hands of dust as his enemies fell to their knees around him, before he dismissed the hallowed palace.
"So, Nanami," Touji's scarred lip twitched, "trust me now?"
"You've valiantly protected me," Nanami deadpanned. "The act is appreciated."
Touji rolled his eyes, yet Nanami still reluctantly lowered his cleaver. Exposing one's noble phantasm revealed a heroic spirit's legendary weaknesses, and Touji-Ashihara-Shikoo's was straight-forward: they possessed no divine means of offence or defence, only a means to seal skills. Their survival in a fight relied entirely on their physical ability.
"Wow, you two made short work of those guys!"
Touji and Nanami blinked, turning to spot a teenager in a white uniform peeking out at them from behind a tree in the park. The teenager sheepishly approached them with a wave of a hand bearing command spells.
"I wasn't sure how I was going to defend myself after arriving at this singularity with only one Servant," the teenager admitted.
Touji grit his teeth in rebellion. "Nanami, hurry up and cleave my Achilles tendons."
The blonde frowned. "You've been making little sense."
"Now, before I kill the kid."
A hand suddenly settled on Touji's shoulder, the reality of infinity preventing direct contact. "It's because this guy is contracted to Tengen. That old fart suddenly went and allied himself with pseudo-Getou, can you believe it Nanami?"
Touji snarled at the sight of Gojou Satoru pinning him in place. "You?"
A mischievous grin crinkled the shaman's black blindfold. "'Tis I, the strongest existence in the world now with the added bonus of having received enlightenment from death!"
Nanami exhaled sharply. "Speak sense, Gojou-san."
"You're both Pseudo-Servants," the teenager recognised, gesturing to Gojou and Touji.
"Ding ding ding!" Gojou sang at the correct deduction. "I couldn't leave this world alone after peacing out in such a lame way. So, as a feared god-like existence whom the non-jujutsu masses have sadly never heard of, I possessed my own corpse. You can prostrate yourselves before me now!"
"What? That's amazing!" the teenager praised, sparkling.
Touji and Nanami flatly watched Gojou curry more praise that the teenager happily heaped on him.
"Wait," Nanami addressed the teenager, "you mentioned you arrived here with one Servant already?"
Short bangs flew with an enthusiastic nod. "Yup! He went ahead to scout the area for ley lines I can utilise for contracting with Servants."
"Like us!" Gojou recognised.
"That's right— oh, he's back! Emiya-san!"
Thump.
No.
IT COULDN'T BE.
Emiya gaped as his young master jovially skipped over to Touji, Gojou, and Nanami with obvious intentions of recruiting the three to help resolve the singularity. Why. Why couldn't Emiya escape this world, or even its people!?
A genuine, deeply amused grin split Touji's face.
"Well well well, long time no see — Emiya."
X
X
Codex entry: Pseudo-Servant
When a "spirit" manifests as a Servant through a human vessel functioning as a catalyst, the end result is a Pseudo-Servant. Spirits that qualify for this manifestation include Divine Spirits who otherwise wouldn't manifest in the modern age, and souls whose saint graphs lack the attribute levels to ascend into a Heroic Spirit. There are also Heroic Spirits like Rasputin or Gojou Satoru who are only summonable by taking over a deceased body.
To serve as a catalyst, a human must meet one of the following criteria:
They must possess similar personality traits and a similar mentality to the spirit being summoned.
They must possess qualities – like innate talents or excellent magic circuits – that are compatible with the spirit being summoned.
The "shape" of their soul must share similarities with the spirit's being summoned.
Most spirits and their human vessels merge into a single entity where their personalities combine into a third, new personality and where powers fuse to match this new personality's self-expression. Muramasa Sengo's legacy of swordsmithing, for example, manifests through his host's Projection magecraft, and Ishtar's divine energy only accumulates through jewel magecraft as a Servant. Since humans are unable to handle the full weight of a Divine Spirit's memories and mind, the Divine Spirit's memories usually take the forefront of the personality merge and the human vessel's memories are usually sealed.
However, there are special cases where the host and the possessing spirit remain completely separate due to the latter's preferences. This is the rarest pattern of a Pseudo-Servant, and examples of this include Ganesha, Zhuge Liang, and Fushiguro Touji.
Pseudo-Servants usually possess two saint graphs: that of the spirit and that of the human vessel. In the case where both remain completely separate as a Servant, it is possible for the human saint graph to sleep while the spirit saint graph remains awake, and for the spirit to even temporarily leave the human. When a spirit cuts themselves off from their human, they consequently leave the Pseudo-Servant powers with the human and cause the human to be difficult to identify as a Servant. A sufficiently powerful spiritual attack can forcibly separate the two entities of a recently manifested Pseudo-Servant.
Due to their unique manifestation, Pseudo-Servants need more rest than normal Servants and benefit from sleeping.
;
A/N:
Gudako/Gudao, arriving in the singularity: *immediately pulls a 3-, 4-, and 5-star*
That's right – Nanami, Touji, and Gojou are summonable servants in this AU! Based on their noble phantasms, I've rated them a 3-star Saber, 4-star Assassin, and 5-star Caster respectively.
Nanami's excellent instincts that protected him from Mahito's Idle Transfiguration grant him Magic Resistance, and his Ratio Technique allows him to reliably crit with every hit. Collapse is also great at triggering internal damage in enemies that continues to lower their HP for the next few turns. However, Nanami's noble phantasm (NP) doesn't have the support of skills to make it effective against enemies with more mystery than him. Meanwhile, Touji can evade most any attack and can sneak up on enemies to seal their skills with his NP, allowing him to deal out uninterrupted damage. Gojou's Hollow Technique: Purple is a plain AOE damage dealer that essentially ignores invincibility. Limitless simultaneously shields Gojou with invincibility that can't be ignored.
I was planning to have Gudako/Gudao (supported by a ley line) and Gojou forcibly separate Ashihara-Shikoo from Touji with a powerful spiritual attack and revise Touji's contract to set Gudako/Gudao as his Master. Ashihara-Shikoo then might or might not rebound back into Touji; if he didn't, then Touji would have the unique circumstance of not only being hard to detect in general, but also being hard to identify as a Servant. I also like the imagery of Pseudo-Servant Gojou always being sleepy like Okita Alter. Even in the midst of reality collapsing, Gojou is still reliably quirky.
All this talk of Pseudo-Servants makes me curious what it would be like if there was a Pseudo-Servant Sukuna via Itadori Yuuji. Anyway….
The name of JJK's singularity is based on Oukuninushi's realm as described in the Kojiki — a collection of Japan's first historical records that were widely accepted as official — and the Nihon Shoki — a second collection of historical records that were written after the Kojiki to address gaps or missing pieces in it. The Nihon Shoki still covers myths and events mentioned in the Kojiki, but from a different perspective, and is also the oldest record to mention a double-faced demon named Sukuna. The realm that Oukuninushi moves to after transferring ownership of Japan is called 「百不足八十坰手」 or "momotarazu yasokumade," translating to "not a hundred, but eighty winding paths." This is a euphemism for the land of the dead. There's an old poem that says if you walk a path with eighty bends and say a prayer, you'll meet a deceased loved one.
Touji's noble phantasm "Ajimasa no Nagaho no Miya" was a tough one to translate, especially as I'm not fluent in Japanese. Nagaho is a real place in Japan, but isn't on the way between the Koshi province (Prince Homuchiwake's home) and Izumo-taisha. Nagaho translates to "long ears" which turns my mind to the auspicious long ears of Buddha, but doesn't have a place in a shinto literary work. I also can't find other mentions of Ajimasa or Nagaho in the Kojiki or the Nihon Shoki. Anyway, I did my best!
The first time Emiya was summoned to JJK, it was the moment Kenjaku had imprisoned Gojou. The whole world is essentially doomed the moment Gojou is either sealed or killed. Emiya's going to soon learn that as insufferable Gojou is, the Six Eyes user is a necessary nuisance.
Rip Emiya.