Sukuna has come up empty, his search proving unsuccessful.
His host body, Naoya Zenin, is like a doll that's been stitched back together too many times. While it was super cool to be mobile and active in the world again, the body he is in tolerates him very poorly, and the owner is one of the most unpleasant people that Sukuna has ever had personal contact with, which makes having his voice in his head annoying as hell.
Of course Sukuna likes to kill people. It's kind of his thing.
But they are different flavors of killer and Naoya's flavor is just 'loser.'
Naoya simultaneously obsesses over women, wants them to fuck him, and wants to hurt them.
Sukuna's not really very sexual, but if he gets an itch, he'll scratch it. He just doesn't understand how if he could get laid as a four-armed mutant, some kid born rich and good looking can't manage.
Controlling Naoya has been a pain; there isn't anyone who cares about him or anyone he cares about. So there isn't anyone Sukuna can threaten when Naoya briefly gains control of the body. And he can't do anything dangerous to the body itself because it is not holding up well. Decay between body and soul or whatever it is that is happening inside of this vessel, aren't fixable with RCT.
Sometimes Sukuna thinks the worst thing he could possibly do to torment Naoya into being less of a shit would be to let a woman sit on his face for a few hours straight and leave him covered in girl juices. The idea of being 'emasculated' by a woman's body is far more intimidating to Naoya than anything else Sukuna has found because Naoya is demented.
What Sukuna really needs is to find a new vessel. There is one that was literally made for him. Yuji Itadori can definitely serve as his host, but before entering his body, he needs to force Yuji into a vow that gives him control of the body. Presumably, he's already been told not do that, so it will probably take significant coercion.
In theory, there probably are people who could tolerate being his vessel, but Sukuna has looked through all the possible candidates in Naoya's vast knowledge. Without assessing their abilities personally, it's impossible to guess if they'd be suitable vessels. If he jumps into a new body and it dies, he'll lose a finger and leave one single finger at large.
While the sorcerers failed in their goal of preventing him from incarnating, the conditions he awoke to were incredibly rough. Naoya's body wasn't suitable for him, and his technique wasn't interesting. To make matters worse, everyone in the Jujutsu Society knew his face, and likely all the Windows had been sent his picture as well.
There were probably thousands of eyes in Japan that might recognize him and the instant it happens, they'll text Satoru Gojo, who can warp across the entirety of Japan.
Satoru Gojo is bad news, worse news than other people who have been born like him, and if Sukuna needs any proof of that, he only needs to consider that Satoru packed Kenjaku without even really knowing who he was or what he was doing while Kenjaku had planned for centuries how he would avoid getting murdered by Six Eyes.
Gojo is the one that destroyed all his other fingers, built walls around Naoya, and had hidden his true vessel.
It is now September, and Sukuna still can't find Yuji.
Sukuna has managed to find out that Yuji is missing as part of a group that includes one of the teachers, an Inumaki clan member who was fortunate enough to not be at home when Sukuna dropped by to test out his new body, and Megumi Fushiguro, a Zenin clan member who was carrying some one of the most famed techniques of this era.
Since Naoya was a Zenin clan member, Sukuna has accessed top secret information about Ten Shadows and also knows that if he finds that group and puts them in a life-or-death situation, Megumi will summon Mahoraga, a monster who has killed someone like Gojo in the past. In his current state, he doesn't think the math is in his favor.
On one hand, if he found the group and immediately killed the summoner, it would increase the chances he could have Yuji's body.
On the other, the fact Megumi Fushiguro has a Gojo-level shikigami at his disposal and can natively pass it into the world through his body means his body can hold a Gojo-level amount of cursed energy without breaking. That probably means his body would be a workable vessel.
This eliminates the complication of forcing Yuji to hand over the body. Megumi would likely probably have no capability to control him.
But Naoya didn't have information about how strong Megumi was for the same reason everything else had gone wrong: Satoru Gojo, who evidently stole Megumi after killing his father.
And Yuji might never willingly hand over his body even if it meant death or the deaths of others.
None of this matters because Sukuna has no goddamned idea where Satoru hid the kids. He incarnated in this body on July 3rd, and on September 3rd, all he's done is trash Naoya's body having fun for approximately ninety minutes one time.
Sukuna returned today to Hokkaido in case they were at Fujishiro, the Gojo clan estate, but he can't sense Yuji presence. He's travelled all over the main islands and has never once sensed Yuji's presence again, leading to the fact that Gojo is maybe moving the kids around, or they're not on one of the main islands. There was no promise they were actually even in Japan, because modern society was international. If they were hanging out on the beach in Mexico, it wasn't like he'd ever be able to find them.
That being said, even at a distance, coming close to Fujishiro is a risk.
He probably wouldn't even make it over the walls; even in his time, Fujishiro was almost impossible to assail. Around the area, there are signs that look blank, but are painted in the blood of cursed spirits, so the writing isn't visible to those without sight, warning anyone approaching the mountain that there are landmines that will explode if someone with cursed energy enters the space around the estate.
Stepping on a landmine seems like it would be very unhealthy for Naoya's body, but it would also make a lot of noise and there's no way the Gojo clan wouldn't immediately call Satoru. Sukuna wonders if he could make it up the side of the mountain and over the walls before Gojo arrived.
There are also problematic people within those walls who aren't Satoru Gojo.
Sukuna wants to power up so he can fight Gojo. He can't do anything else unless two things happen: he finds a host that can hold him, and Satoru Gojo dies.
Sukuna is annoyed in ways he cannot express, trapped in a weak body with an imbecile and unable to make even a single move because on every side, Satoru Gojo either fucked something up before he incarnated, or he made things difficult afterward.
Not far from him, there's a huge discharge of cursed energy; high output, fast, and loud. A thunderous sound shakes the forest around him, and Sukuna is kind of curious, especially when he hears the noise again.
A white-haired man is hovering over a lake; Naoya doesn't know who he is, but he looks just like Satoru Gojo.
He is floating by pushing raw cursed energy toward the water, creating resistance. This is a fairly difficult trick because one's cursed energy has to spread out in a cone shape in order to create adequate resistance in the air. It was usually only possible to hover just above the water, as the higher one went, the more cursed energy was required and the wider the cone had to be.
This was obviously easier to do over land, but if one messes up, it's easier to plummet into water than it is onto the ground.
Suddenly, the man turns completely into a bolt of lightning and zips around above the lake at unbelievable speed and tries to return to a resting position without falling in. His feet kick over the water cartoonishly, but he doesn't get wet.
He reaches into his pocket and throws a rock into the air, and Sukuna sees what caused that thunderous noise.
He can breathe lightning out of his mouth like a dragon, and he repeats this action, this time using a lightning-imbued kick to shatter a little stone over the water.
Sukuna believes the cursed technique basically turns this guy into a gigantic energy conduit. The probability that he won't die from being possessed by him is encouraging because souls were in their most basic form sort of a form of energy.
Plus, it's lightning. Lightning is his favorite elemental ability; he even used to carry a lightning cursed tool with him everywhere. Gaining native access to breathe lightning like a dragon seems like so much fun!
He is encouraged, invigorated, and this guy is far enough away from the clan, he is sure he won't be able to signal to them…especially since he has an electrical ability and had to leave his phone safe on a big rock far from where he was practicing.
The phone rings, and the man zips toward it, stopping a couple of meters away and running up to it.
When he answers the phone, he yells loudly, "What's up, Chickenbutt?!"
Sukuna's expression drops and he comes closer.
This isn't a man.
This is an idiot fucking child that doesn't even have his big boy voice yet.
He's a huge kid, and Sukuna didn't really consider the possibility he wasn't older because this is relatively advanced training one would expect someone to not be capable of for some time.
With his own cursed energy turned down, Katsu Gojo suddenly looks up and his eyes meet the ones that have been watching him.
Sukuna puts a finger up to his lips.
He doesn't want to fight the Gojos right at this moment and the kid doesn't want to die, and by some miracle, he understands the deal that is being offered.
Katsu says he has to go, and hangs up the phone, eyes wide.
He's already been seen, so Sukuna comes out. "What's your name?"
"Katsu Gojo. You're like, Sukuna or whatever, right?"
"Something like that."
"How old are you?"
"Fourteen."
Katsu has clearly been told enough about Sukuna that he identified his vessel right away and is being compliant in order to avoid death.
At fourteen, puberty hasn't changed his body enough that Sukuna would be able to fully utilize large amounts of cursed energy. There are limits to what little bodies can do, which is why sorcerers don't really start showing their true output potential for two or three more years.
If he did take this body, he'd be kneecapped and the limits on cursed energy an immature body can use might cause Katsu's body to reject him.
For a minute, they just stare at each other, and Katsu asked, "Are you here to attack?"
"No. I was just leaving. Do you know where Yuji Itadori is?"
Katsu answers, "No. If you want to keep a secret, you don't tell other people, right?"
"I figured. That's some technique you have, and you're advanced for being a little brat."
"I work really hard."
"Why?"
"Because I want to take over the clan someday. No real man can tolerate another man ruling over him. I don't want anyone telling me what to do, so that means I have to become the strongest."
Sukuna couldn't argue with this.
Katsu asked, "Can I ask you a question?"
"Whatever, I guess?"
"What would you do if your girlfriend wanted you to become a vegetarian?"
"Eat her. Immediately. Straight into the pot."
Katsu suddenly bursts out laughing.
It's a funny and stupid question with an equally stupid answer that only reminds Sukuna that he is trapped inside of the body of a weird fool who has no sense of humor.
Sukuna asked, "Who did you call Chickenbutt on the phone?"
"My great grandma."
"The old lady of the Gojo clan?"
"Mhmm."
The old woman, who figured out how to reverse engineer Kenjaku's cursed soul binding technique, who floated everywhere and intimidated basically everyone in the sorcery community? The one who was head of the Gojo clan for over forty years? He answered her call with 'What's up, Chickenbutt?'
Katsu adds, "She said she's going to make me regret it when I get home so I guess I just live outside now."
Sukuna laughs.
He says, "I'm leaving now. You'll sit still and wait for an hour before you tell anyone I was here, or I'll come back here and start killing people."
"Fine, fine."
"I'll come back for you in a few years. You better drink your milk and train hard."
He mentally marks down stealing this kid's body as a long-term goal. Breathing lightning just sounds like the most fun a man can possibly have and an extremely effective tool for killing.
Katsu will probably not ever be as powerful as his uncle; after all, Satoru Gojo is a once-in-a-millennium type of calamity, and he will cast a shadow over all the sorcerers born in this age even if he dies. His greatness will haunt people that haven't even been born yet.
Just judging from the way Katsu talked about Gojo, it was obvious he has no serious ill-intentions against him and he's just a kid talking shit about his uncle who he adores.
This leave Sukuna back at square one.
The Jujutsu Society is searching for him, in an era where there are thousands of Windows, and facial recognition in tens of thousands of cameras. This is a game that is engineered specifically to work against him, one where he has to power up before he meets Satoru Gojo or he'll just die.
Sukuna notes something that is just strange to the point that he's not sure what to make of it. He first came by here right after he washed the Zenin clan in search of Yuji, and since then, a huge, forested hill has disappeared, like someone scraped it off the earth and made it vanish into thin air. He sees another similar spot, further along, it's quite odd and he wonders what the Gojo clan has been doing.
Meanwhile, far away in Tokyo, the atmosphere is kind of intense.
Sukuna being at large is a huge source of stress, but enough time has passed that many people wonder if it's possible that Sukuna's little rampage that one night destroyed Naoya's body and they just don't know where it is.
A number of Japanese sorcerers have been publicly identified in international news media. The identities of all the special grades have been out for a while, but Nanami has been outed as well, and the knowledge of clans is making its way around.
In every generation up to theirs, there were people in the media and in the government who knew to control information about sorcery, but in the world of Tiktok and social media where those moderating powers didn't have a role, there was just chaos.
Sorcerers lived quite separate from everyone else for most of history, and maybe during the last century, really integrated with society, and now they were tearing away again. The identities of some of the clans were circulating, and that made it dangerous for kids to be away from their estates—if their family even still lived on a traditional multi-generational estate, which wasn't always the case.
There had already been a sorcerer kid swiped in India.
A really difficult moment had come for them a couple of days ago.
Since Kusakabe still had Megumi, Yuji, and Toge, Nanami was looking after the second years along with Arata Nitta and Nobara Kugisaki. That was already a very stressful situation for Kento since he really hadn't been incredibly enthusiastic about transitioning into teaching in the first place. It wasn't an easy job, but he was doing his best because he knew it was needed.
A couple of days ago, they went to Sendai to investigate a situation with a cursed spirit that involved a young boy who had gone missing. They spent over twenty-four hours desperately searching for the kid, and ended up finding him half-eaten behind a department store. He'd been dead the entire time they'd been looking for him. It was a terrible and sad end to a very tiring job.
On the train back, Nanami was identified by someone on the train, and they were snapping pictures of him and the students.
They were miserable when they made it home.
Satoru has agreed to take all the students for the day, and he waits for them in the courtyard.
It was strange how quickly things had gone from a-okay to grim and stressful.
Sorcery is public information and Sukuna is out there somewhere, so Tengen was right about some aspects of that future being unavoidable.
They had made it to September, which meant that Kenjaku's Hell Season would have been about to start if Gojo hadn't caught him. The first event was the attack on the school using the special grade curses, which, in theory, might have resulted in some of the students being killed.
Once they've all gathered, he counts them off one-by-one, and says, "Are you all ready for an adventure? Our adventure starts with Shoko."
Having an adventure that starts with a trip to the infirmary is probably better than one that ends in a trip to the infirmary, but the students are cautious nonetheless.
They think it is a weird practical joke that she has a tray full of huge needles with little stickers with their names, but it's not.
"It's a microchip, like the kind they put in cats. It's so if you run away from home and someone finds you, they can take you to the veterinarian and get you scanned and call Nanami to come get you," Gojo teases.
Shoko twirls her hair and says, "I'm sorry. There's nothing modern medicine can do to cure whatever is wrong with him. You guys are visiting new HQ today, and you need these microchips to navigate through the security system. They go right above your hip…you'll feel a pinch, but you're all tough kids."
This was actually really exciting for them because Gojo had kept information about the move a secret from the students. The only people who seemed to know anything about it were the people on the Advisory Board, and no one said anything.
One by one, they went behind a curtain and got poked.
From there, they asked tons of questions while they followed him through campus to a storage shed.
"Is our new campus in a storage shed?" Kirara asked.
"This is Tokyo, we're all about compact living," he answers as he opens the door.
Inside, there's a glowing seal on the floor, a circle approximately two meters across. "This is a stationary warp seal. You step on it, release some cursed energy, and it will warp you somewhere else."
"…what?" Nobara asked.
Satoru said, "I have warped you before. It's like that, only much gentler."
Aoi Todo doesn't care if it seems dangerous and goes first, and the others follow, one by one. Maki uses her cursed weapon to make it work, and then once they've all gone through, he follows them.
The floor is concrete, and there are a dozen slightly different seals on the other side, four rows of three. The walls and ceiling have dark wood panels, and overhead recessed lighting leaves the room slightly dim.
Gojo said, "This is the Entry Hall, there's no cell service down here. There's no restriction on who can use a warp seal, but these are entry points only and there are sensors in the floor. If you warp in and don't have a microchip, it sets off an alert. There might be an occasion where you need to bring someone here, or someone might come on their own, and there's nothing wrong with it, but we security would know right away. And obviously, there are cameras and stuff.
"I gave my warp ability to a cursed object. His name is Warpy. It's hidden so I can't show you, but it's basically just an object that can do what I can, and the seals tell it to do it. Since I gave that ability to the object, I'm restricted to using it like you. I'm saying that because we sometimes rely on that ability in emergencies and I can't do it anymore."
There's a big metal, vault-like door in front of them that slides open, to a small space between blocked by another similar huge door.
The first one closes so they are trapped between them briefly, and then there's a chime and the second door opens to a hallway with a single warp seal.
"If the doors open or are damaged or if anyone appears in this hallway without the security system approving it, a manual mechanism will destroy the warp seal and the person will become trapped since the entry room is inbound only."
The next room has a row of warp seals in an arc, each one with a rectangular plate on the floor explaining where it goes. This arc has 'Main Entrance,' 'Base,' 'Infirmary,' 'Service Dept.'
There are other rooms branching off this one that labelled with which island they go to, each filled with these warps and endpoints scattered across Japan.
"Most of seals will just put you close to a cursed energy hotspot. The ones with red painted on the floor around them are inside of a Minibase, a tiny location we can use to launch missions. There will be a couple of cars there, so you'd warp into a base and have an assistant drive you from there in a lot of cases. Warpy doesn't cover all of Japan, it doesn't reach Okinawa, for instance.
"You can warp anything you can fit on the seal, with you, including other people, furniture, boxes, whatever. We warp our garbage to Osaka so that it doesn't feel lonely."
"You're a bad person," Maki comments.
He warps to the base and waits for them, carefully counting them once they've arrived.
The entry room has seals they arrive on, and ahead of them, there's a desk where several assistants are working. To the left and right, there are locker rooms and straight ahead, a long room with the main entrance, and dozens of shoe lockers where they change out of outside shoes into inside shoes that are waiting.
This creates a path to shower before entering the rest of the base, convenient since it is not uncommon to come in from missions filthy.
The room beyond that is a lounge for sorcerers on duty for emergencies, with comfy leather furniture, a few places to sit and eat or drink a cup of coffee. To the right, windows, and straight ahead a, big television. On the wall adjacent to them, there are high tech coffee machines, refrigerators full of drinks and snacks, and an instant ramen station. On the right, downstairs, there's a briefing room, restrooms, and upstairs open to the lounge there's an office with workstations and printers for office work and a quiet room.
"This is the base we'll be staging missions from. If you're on duty, you'll be hanging out here."
From the windows, they could distantly see the ocean, leading them to believe they were on the coast, but after they finished looking around the base and went outside, they discovered they were on an island in the middle of the ocean and couldn't see anything but sea in the distance.
The base was central in an area of buildings for daily sorcery business, which included administrative buildings, security headquarters, and so forth.
The peculiar nature of HQ becomes evident as they walk around, notably the fact that it's very unnaturally shaped.
Yuta asks and Satoru shows them a picture of how it looks from a distance, and it is a gigantic, perfect rectangle, square on top and jutting straight out of the ocean to the top, which is roughly the height of a twenty story building from the water. The top surface is higher in the middle, gradually descending as one walks from the center to the edge, where a clear guardrail and a sorcery barrier keep people from falling off the edge.
"It's a very long way down and there are sharp rocks down there," Satoru warns.
They go into the administration building, where there are orientation packets that include a map.
Satoru said, "I saw this giant rock out in the middle of nothing and asked if I could have it, and the government was like 'okay, good luck with your rock.' Then I made it into this shape and then realized this place was a logistical nightmare, but it's fine now. You can accomplish anything if you have enough money and cheat using sorcery.
"We had like two thousand people working here covering two shifts, and sorcerers from the Northern Territory would show up at night and cut tons of corners using sorcery and then the regular workers would show up the next day and be confused because they never saw them and crazy stuff would happen overnight."
HQ has broad stone walkways that stretch across the surface of the island, that are uniformly wide. The campus is divided into areas, and everything has just been carved out neatly and orderly, little rectangular areas for this or that, a building in this big rectangle and a tree with a bench in this much smaller one.
The buildings are made from reinforced concrete and shatter-resistant glass, but have more classic elements, wood trip and porches, curved roofs with various colored tiles, which made them seem sort of ancient. There are plenty of trees, plants, and grassy areas mixed in, splashes of color from flowering trees and maples.
It starts raining while they're walking around that area, and they take umbrellas from a stand inside one of the buildings.
They continue to the center of the island, which has a big park where the sod lines are still visible in the grass. There are benches, plenty of greenery, a little pond with koi, and in the middle, a covered pavilion where people arrive if they use the main entrance instead of the base entrance.
From the park going, there are four v-shaped sections that branch off from the park and extend going outward: early education area, sorcery training areas, common areas, and the administrative area where they just came from. Beyond that area, there's a band made up of scattered housing areas, and continuing outward, a band of forested space that extends nearly to the edge.
The education area has daycare, preschool, kindergarten, junior high, and high school, and the high school is on the border between the sorcery training area and the education area, with the dorms behind them in the outer band. There's also common housing for younger kids and different play areas for the different age groups.
Satoru's original goal was to socialize all the kids in the sorcery community together much earlier, and had no idea if the clans would play along, but now everyone was scared to have their kids out and about in the world so this turned out to be a good choice.
The high school is adjacent to the sorcery training area, and the dorms are behind, so the places they come and go from are relatively close despite the vastness of the campus. Open training zones are fenced and not accessible to everyone due to safety reasons.
There are safe rooms and escape routes, even warps to evacuate from HQ hidden underground in secret tunnels, and the most sensitive stuff—dangerous texts, objects, and weapons, are hidden within the rock.
It stops raining after a while, and he walks them over to the area with common buildings, where they have a hospital, a library and study center with all the books from the Kyoto student library, a little bowling alley with an arcade on top, a café, a shrine, a huge dining hall with an arsenal of vending machines, a little grocery store with the basics where they can order anything not offered there and pick it up the next day, a place to receive and send packages and mail, a small theater for watching movies, basketball and tennis courts, an indoor pool, a huge gym with an air conditioned running track, and a bar.
Continuing back, there are groups of row houses and apartment buildings, and then the forested area behind that.
The island was functionally dead, eerily silent, and devoid of birds, insects, and all other life, so they stole a chunk of the forest near the Gojo clan estate and spread it out around the outside of the island. This is how the island got birds, bees, butterflies, but also snakes, ants, and spiders.
Gojo says, "Most sorcerers are grade twos and threes, so you've never met them. We're going to pull everyone into this location, along with non-combatants. Our whole community will hang out here, and probably we'll get along better. Either that, or we'll be beating the shit out of each other here instead of the usual places," he said.
When this place was half built, he wasn't sure how enthusiastically people would participate, but the community was going through a lot and having a fortress to retreat to seemed like it would be welcome.
During construction, he cleared a spot around the island and there was a pier with an elevator shaft from the sea to the top, but as soon as it was completed, the pier was destroyed, and Satoru filled the shaft with rocks and activated the barrier. The only way into HQ now was by warp.
The location nearly unassailable; being out in the middle of the ocean and at high altitude, visibly was maximal, and unlike the city where they were constantly surrounded by things that might be threats but probably weren't and it was impossible to know the difference until the threat manifested, there was nothing and no one anywhere near them.
The huge rocks arranged around the island after it was complete make it impossible to approach with any sort of vessel, and there are cursed energy mines all over the place around the island that will explode if a human or cursed spirit comes anywhere near them.
If one made it past that point, it's a straight twenty-story slippery wall to the top, and even if a person cleared that, they would still have to break the barrier at the top, and if they started that, they would learn that the military let the Jujutsu Society have heavy artillery which are cleverly concealed at the moment. Artillery shells couldn't be used to exorcise curses, but they could certainly hurt them, and could splatter most curse users. Even a curse user who could avoid or defend against this onslaught would have to do it while fighting Jujutsu Society sorcerers.
Flying in and breaking the barrier from above was an option, but artillery was an even bigger problem with an airborne attack, and between having the property stacked with sorcerers and a plethora of modern technology to observe the vast area around the base, there was no way to sneak.
Where it was possible to just walk onto the Tokyo campus, the price of stepping foot at HQ without permission is so high, and it doesn't make sense to do it. By the time an invader makes it in, there's ample time for non-combatants to move and sorcerers to prepare for an attack. Even for someone like Sukuna, it's a bad idea. There are all kinds of things they can do if there's no risk at all of hitting Tokyo when they do it.
He walks around with them talking about everything. They're surprised at how quickly the place came together, but this was due to cheating with sorcery and astronomical costs only payable due to the fact that the Jujutsu Society owned a tract of land large enough for a big theme park in the middle of a trendy Tokyo suburb.
When he turns them loose, they're to return to Tokyo, pack their stuff, and move into their new dorm. The new dorms are very big and comfy, and the students are hyped about everything, especially when they go to the dorms and find Megumi, Yuji, and Toge hanging out, having been stashed there for two months.
Sukuna has failed to guess what random rock in the middle of the ocean Satoru chose to hide his vessel and has therefore failed to locate him before all the defenses and barriers were up at HQ, and it's no longer feasible for him to strike there.
Satoru believes this is a significant victory that might save Yuji completely.
While he is checking the progress of the transition plan, he feels relieved.
Maybe the Jujutsu Society will still fight for its life, maybe it won't.
But it's in a much better position to do so, and at the very least, they've bought enough time that even if Sukuna shows up at clan estates, there won't be anyone there for him. He's sure clans will still exist in their current homes, but in an emergency, with Sukuna on the loose, having a secure place to fold into will help them weather whatever is going to happen next.
Then his phone rings and his nephew tells him that he ran into Sukuna about three hundred meters from the walls of his clan's estate.
Katsu recounts the conversation, noting that Sukuna basically admitted he was the one in charge of the body. Weirdly, one of the most compelling pieces of proof that the person he met was Sukuna and not Naoya was the fact that whoever he spoke to had a sense of humor and Naoya did not.
He was evidently still looking for Yuji but wasn't willing to move closer to the estate, and didn't want to start a fight.
Many of the Gojos have some sort of eye-related extra ability, usually something minor related to their technique. Katsu is able to see electrical energy with his eyes, which gives him the questionably useful ability to see a person's nervous system.
Katsu says, "There's something wrong with him. The nervous system in that body is cooked. You know what the biggest part of the nervous system is, right?"
"I am a high school teacher, you know. Did Sukuna fry Naoya's brain?"
"Yeah, basically. They guy is probably held together by RCT and tape."
Katsu's report confirms that Sukuna isn't causing trouble because his vessel is in poor condition.
"I don't think he could have a real serious fight like that," Katsu adds.
"Why didn't you fight him?"
"It didn't seem like a smart thing to do. Getting rolled by someone who is already half-dead would be kind of humiliating," he answers.
Satoru answers, "It's somehow very surprising to me that you made the right choice?"
"Someday when I am much older, I will tell a mental health professional about how my uncle travelled all over Japan collecting kids he adored but he treated me like trash even though we are related."
"I know what you entered as my name in your phone. Megumi would never. If you ever call me that to my face, we're gonna fight."
Katsu quickly says, "I have to go. I'm traumatized by my experience today."
The next week is a dizzying blur of orientation meetings, informational packets, standard operating procedure changes, boxes, transferring hard drives, moving graves, sealing and relocating cursed objects still at Tokyo, combing the campus for every hint of their existence and the nature of what they were doing there, and preparing to leave the place behind.
This change marks a departure from how things have always been, especially the role the big clans played in the day-to-day duties of the sorcery community.
Assigning vast responsibilities to three people who gained their positions usually by inheritance or killing their own family members or being strong enough to kill their own family members was obviously not something that worked well or had good outcomes, or had a place in the 21st century.
Lower grade sorcerers had never really been included in anything before, so they were actually really excited to be included in this mass centralization of power. Some of them had really niche abilities that weren't good enough to have first grade potential, but one of the advantages of this new format was that if someone was reporting a cursed spirit that did something weird with water, that random second grade who could control water could be called up.
It also meant delivering reinforcements and help faster in emergencies, and not having to send unqualified teams to deal with serious emergencies because the heavy hitters were too far away.
Satoru believes that putting everyone together, especially the younger generation, will lead to better behavior between sorcerers and families, but his uncle said it might just mean they start trying to kill each other at sandbox age because most sorcerers are the result of centuries if not longer of selective breeding among people who delight in violence and are very good at it. They are the human equivalent of dogs bred for fighting.
His uncle believes that sorcerers are humans in the same way that a fluffy dog a woman keeps in her purse and a pit bull who mauls his abusive owner to death are both still dogs. Only one of them has been blessed by fate with incredible power and athleticism, jaws that can shatter bones, and an instinct to go for the throat. Maybe they are the same general thing, but they are different in ways that matter.
It was going to be interesting, one way or another.
In an atmosphere where the sorcery community is riddled with fears of Sukuna, public exposure, and what the future looks like for them, HQ is a silver bullet that makes even his skeptics relieved that he has made the use of his king-for-a-year status. As days go by, and everyone flocks to HQ, there is a collective sigh of relief, and they focus back on the work of the Jujutsu Society, which must continue no matter what happens, who gets publicly outed, or what Sukuna does in the future.
In nine days, the Tokyo campus is left an empty place filled with aged buildings and old furniture that has been left behind for demolition crews.
Satoru has one last task to take care of, so he visits alone, at night, and walks around for a while.
It's quiet except for the sound of a cool breeze, a reminder that the season is changing.
He visits places certain places.
There's the room where the old men used to be, ominous shadows behind rice paper that never cared about doing what was best for anyone except themselves. It's completely empty and quiet.
He wanders over to the gym where the basketball court is, and there's still a basketball left behind, having rolled to one corner. Satoru turns on the lights and shoots a few hoops in the totally silent gym. The sound of the ball bouncing on the floor seems impossibly loud, and the smell reminds him of afternoons spent in 1-on-1 matches with Suguru while Shoko sat around on the sidelines, flipping through magazines. Instead of cheering for one of them, she jeered both of them equally and said this was fair.
"Six Eyes and not one of them can see the damn hoop?!" he mumbles with a little grin.
Suguru was always very physical in everything that he did, and it was here between being bumped and shoved on the court, and maybe after, with eyes that lingered a little more every day in on his body in the locker room, that he evolved into something new.
When he was fifteen, he wanted to be Suguru, or maybe just have his attention. Suguru made him feel immature and unkind, and he wanted to become more like his soft-spoken friend who tried to help everyone.
When he was sixteen, he wanted to have Suguru, or maybe be had by Suguru.
Satoru thought that probably, Kenjaku played some role in Geto's life even when they were young. In Kenjaku's plan, Geto was required, and he never would have been able to take Geto's body without being noticed if it was posted up next to Six Eyes. Of all the people in the world, the person most likely to catch Kenjaku was the one Geto was closest to, and the only way to fix that was to remove him from Gojo's side.
Of course, there's no proof of this, and his mind is forever trying to explain Suguru's behavior in a way that is not Suguru's fault. There will probably never be proof that Kenjaku maybe played some role in Suguru's fall from grace, but Satoru will believe it anyway.
He went up to the old dorm where Suguru used to live, knowing it's been empty since he left.
There was a day that Geto woke up in this room, and having lost his battle with depression, left and didn't come back. He turned into something he wasn't supposed to be, and things went the way they did.
He wishes he could talk to Suguru again and about stuff. About how well Mimiko and Nanako are doing, about how he is going to become a dad to a baby girl soon, about everything that's going on.
Satoru still hates it.
He will always hate it.
Maybe he hated this place too, because it was the place that slowly suffocated him until the light inside of him was completely extinguished. That's what this place was for; its where old men exploited young sorcerers by sucking the life out of them, day by day, without any concern whatsoever, telling them that this was their duty.
After he finishes walking around and looking at everything, he thinks about how everything he sees is going to disappear. In a few years, this is going to be Hello Kitty World, probably a very surreal place with a themed hotel, rides, weird character-shaped food, people in costumes. He will probably bring his daughter here and she'll have a good time.
That just leaves the last piece of unfinished business: Tengen.
Satoru doesn't really doubt that Tengen wants what she feels is best for humanity, and he can't really question the fact that Tengen is the reason the Jujutsu Society formed in the first place. She played an instrumental role in formation of organized sorcery on Honshu, which helped Japan become a peaceful place where people could live.
He doesn't really know her personally well enough to say if she's a bad person or a good person.
Maybe he can even say she's saved for more lives than she's ruined.
But Tengen definitely has ulterior motives, or goals, or things that are deeply wrong. Maybe being consistently alive for so long has led her to think of herself as a benevolent god, and that it's okay for sacrifices to be made for her—that it was okay for her to take Riko Amanai's youth away from her.
He's spent months trying to figure out why Tengen never told them anything about Kenjaku, but there's almost no answer that's not 'she had some reason not to.' He has considered the possibility that Tengen entered into a binding vow to keep sorcerers in the dark about Kenjaku because Kenjaku taught her how to refresh her body using the Star Plasma Vessel, because gross biological sorcery was kind of his thing.
Or maybe she felt that Kenjaku's research would ultimately help her ascend into a higher being as well.
Kenjaku, Tengen, and Sukuna were contemporaries that lived one thousand years ago, and he has pondered the possibility that the three of them just agreed not to annoy each other then. If Kenjaku taught Tengen how to use the Star Plasma Vessels and also helped Sukuna become fingers, there's definitely some connection between these three despite their very different goals.
All he knows is that Tengen didn't have anything to say about anything concerning Kenjaku until he was already exposed and she was concerned that there were inevitabilities ahead of them. He suspected the event that had her most concerned was that she'd learned Kenjaku was going to kill her as part of his plan and she wanted to make sure that didn't still happen even though he was dead.
It's less about Riko Amanai—although he sincerely believes Tengen could have stopped that bullet and would have if Riko was still going to merge—and more about the fact that he doesn't believe that one thousand year olds have a right to decide how the world should be for everyone else. They had their time, it was wild, intense, and they owned their world and decided what would happen in it.
Satoru feels like the current generations should have the same right to live in their world as the sorcerers of the Heian Era did.
Why should three people from one thousand years ago get to choose anything for everyone else? Especially considering that each one of them only exists in this era because they killed? Kenjaku stole bodies, Tengen ate little girls, and Sukuna's fingers have killed hundreds over time.
When the elevator dings, she is waiting for him. She knows why he is there; because like Sukuna's incarnation proved to be unavoidable, so would her end be.
Tengen has enormous amounts of power, but not the kind that's necessarily incredibly useful in direct battle, and even if she did, it wouldn't be enough to overcome Gojo.
She has suspected he might do this someday from the first moment they met when he was sixteen and he took off his glasses and stared at her with Six Eyes like he was looking at something truly unnatural and disgusting. His clear and harsh judgements about her nature colored a streak of misfortune where he and Geto considered fighting her and the entire Jujutsu Society—something that also become inevitable for each of them individually, since both of them fought the Jujutsu Society anyway.
They have a discussion that doesn't go particularly well as Tengen believes her existence is important to humanity and Satoru has decided thousand-year-old sorcerers who kill people in order to control the fate of future generations should probably be ripped out of the ground like weeds that have been left to grow too long.
He does not mention Riko Amanai, but he does stand on the bloodstain left on the floor where she died. It would probably be less meaningful if he just spoke her name, and while he explains that she has no role in the future of the Jujutsu Society, Tengen suspects that if Satoru had never met Riko Amanai, he would not have spent so much time thinking about whether she belongs in the world.
In the end, she feared that some fates could not be avoided, and in the end, it turns out that her death was never avoidable at all. Despite her immortality, despite her evolution, despite her goodwill and all the years she spent looking after everyone, he stands there, on the bloodstain that girl left behind.
"It really is about her, isn't it?"
Gojo asked, "None of it matters now, but if you wanted to, you could have stopped that bullet from hitting Riko, right? Shouted at Suguru that they were about to be attacked? Done anything at all to help."
"I could have stopped it from happening."
"Then why did Riko Amanai die?"
"Saving her would have required me to expose myself to Toji Fushiguro. If she was willing to merge, it would have been worth it. Risking my life for hers didn't make sense. My work is important."
Gojo says, "You told me back then that you needed to merge with Riko in order to maintain your humanity. Now I can see that you gave up your humanity a long time ago. It makes it easier."
XXX
Sukuna visits the Tokyo campus a couple of weeks later; he's actually a little confused about things because he felt Tengen's barriers disappear. Even in his time, her barriers were like soft permanent background noise, always present until one stepped outside of them. Tengen was older than he was and had been active a little longer, so the only time he'd been outside of her barrier was when he went north.
He expected the interruption to be temporary, like maybe she was ill or in a battle or doing something, but they didn't return.
It didn't really make sense for any curse user to fuck around with Tengen too much because her work benefited all curse users and sorcerers, even if it was minimal, and Tengen didn't mess around with stuff that wasn't her business. Who would have beef with Tengen? No one? It also seemed unlikely that a cursed spirit would be able to get to her.
There's no security in front; no cameras, no guards, no barriers, nothing.
Even stranger, there's an absurdly huge hot pink and white sign workers are still putting up out front.
After they leave, he just wanders across the street and absorbs the information that there's going to be a Hello Kitty theme park here because the ancient organization of sorcerers has apparently…left?
There are no sorcerers anywhere, or anyone for that matter, and he simply wanders up the steps and looks around. It's actually quite boring with nothing and no one around, just old buildings. It's actually kind of a dump, which is surprising.
There is a giant hole in the middle of the campus, filled with splintered wood, intensely saturated by Tengen's residue, which has already started to fade.
Naoya knows Gojo's residue, so Sukuna is able to figure out that Satoru Gojo very clearly came to this place and obliterated Tengen.
Sukuna initially finds this absolutely hilarious, one of the funniest things he's ever thought about in his life, considering that Tengen, at least as far as he knew, tried not to get involved in any trouble. Naoya's memories suggest she was so detached that almost none of them had ever met with or interacted with her.
The so-called mother of the Jujutsu Society, who ran all about in the Heian Era saying sorcerers needed to organize to protect humans from cursed spirits, being annihilated by a jujutsu sorcerer is funny. He wonders what on earth led to this outcome and continues laughing about it.
To him, it's like when a person decides to have a child and that child grows up and murders them.
On the other hand, Satoru reportedly packed Kenjaku and all his allies in about ten minutes, had done Tengen now, and had destroyed eighteen of his fingers. He felt like maybe Gojo was maybe targeting the people from his era for whatever reason, and that just felt kind of rude, a very specific form of elder disrespect.
All that aside, the entire Jujutsu Society is now missing, so even if he does find a solution to his problem, he can't even come to this location for a battle royale, which had definitely been on his to-do list.
While he's considering what he should do next, he hears a noise, the sound of an assistant who forgot a box of papers in a rarely used closet.
It's his first lucky break in a while, because when he drags her into a nearby building, he's able to extract an enormous amount of information from her. It's during this interrogation that he learns that the Jujutsu Society as a whole has obtained warp ability like the northerners have, and since Uraume was Michizane Sugawara's daughter, he had learned from her that when her father made the warp object, he could no longer use his warp ability.
That meant Satoru couldn't appear anywhere in Japan nearly instantly anymore. He could still move around very fast using the Jujutsu Society's warps and his Blue ability, but there was a margin of error now. Sukuna could do stuff with considerably less risk of being caught instantaneously.
The combination of warp ability and instant information had dogged him since the moment he woke up because he knew from the start he could not get caught even one time by Satoru Gojo.
Sukuna also found out from this assistant that the Jujutsu Society had been relocated to a very remote island, and all the different defenses the assistant was aware of.
An impossibly tall island in the middle of the sea, surrounded by mines and traps, protected by a barrier, stacked with gigantic guns, and probably numerous other problematic forms of defense?
Sukuna has no intention of going anywhere near HQ. Only a very stupid person would go to a very difficult to access and organized location where their enemies have infinite time and resources available to prepare for attack. No one smart enough to navigate the challenges presented would actually go there. Drawing them out by killing civilians was objectively the right choice, easy to do, and allowed him to choose his battlefield.
Still, Naoya's body was continuing to decline; it took a lot of RCT to keep it from falling apart, and he wasn't in any condition to fight Gojo.
The fact Gojo is protecting his army of sorcerers from Sukuna is actually kind of infuriating, because on one hand, killing sorcerers is the only thing he really wants to do, and on the other, he didn't live one thousand years as a collection of shriveled fingers to get splashed by a heavy artillery shell while trying to defend against Michizane 2.0, or Sober Michizane, depending on how one wanted to think of him.
When he returns to his room at an inn, he turns the tv and flips through channels.
There's an international sorcerer on the news again, a big Russian guy named Sasha Przhevalsky, a name that is a blessing to a Japanese tongue and then an unspeakable curse. Literally unspeakable, like Russian is just a language to mock Japanese people.
Sasha was one of the first ones to be publicly outed, and Sukuna has seen him on the news at least twenty times and he always looks miserable and anxious, like a terrified small animal, except enormous. People follow him, snap pictures of him, post his location online, and that led to an incident where his adoring fans caught him in a fight.
Sasha is a special grade sorcerer, and after seeing him fight, he looks incredibly powerful. He's got a gigantic body and some sort of technique that appears to allow him to charge his body with energy somehow. He's probably like Katsu Gojo, and stores a lot of energy in his body, a factor that might make him a good vessel.
Plus, if he goes overseas and takes Sasha's body, it's an outcome no one is expecting, and it might take people a long time to catch on. If he hides his markings and strives to look sort of normal, he can probably move around in Sasha's circle without anyone finding out.
Maybe there was an answer to Satoru Gojo that Gojo hasn't addressed yet because he doesn't know about it, or it is distant to him.
Yes, this is the right way, he decides. There's no guarantee he can force Yuji to give him control of his body even if he gets close to him, and while he considered Megumi Fushiguro as a potential host, he still has no data on his strength level. He could be so weak he won't survive the incarnation or so strong he's able to control the body and does something weird and bad to Sukuna like sealing him in the shadow.
The other powerful sorcerers aren't really accessible to him, or he's not interested in them. Yuta Okkotsu's shikigami would never obey an invader and would actively manifest to harm him, Gojo himself is out of the question, the other Japanese special grade is missing in action and also a woman, and then there's one other special grade overseas who is an older lady.
Satoru Gojo was ten steps ahead of him when he woke up and this is his way to gain control of his situation.