Whose fault was it that that 99.9% of the people living in what used to be called Japan died?

Sukuna wakes up in a big bed and rolls over because there is an unpleasant noise reaching his ears. It's that thing, he thinks, annoyed because he's sure he told his servant to get rid of it before it attracted cursed spirits.

But to answer the question at hand, the person responsible for this era was that shitbrained freak Kenjaku, who either did not realize that his pressure-cooker of cursed energy might evolve cursed spirits and not humans, or he thought the risk was worth it.

A floorboard creaks under his heavy body as he heads down the hall to relieve himself and brush his teeth in the farmhouse where he's been living since shortly after everything went to hell. While the world just sort of wasted away, he hung out here, away from the chaos. Mayhem was only interesting if he was the one causing it, after all.

The farm where he lived was outside of Kyoto, right next to a river and around wilds near the lake that were suitable for hunting. It had solar panels and batteries, satellite tv, a huge farmhouse, a greenhouse, a decent little space for growing plants, a heated barn and coop where he had chickens and a couple of milk cows, fruit trees, and a little guest house where his servant, Hiro, lived.

Sukuna spent most of that first year sitting in front of the tv watching all the channels slowly disappear. One of the most reliable satellite channels, and one that still existed, just played random reality tv from before the cataclysm and sometimes, he'd stay up late watching it and think that maybe the universe was right to try to extinguish the flame of humanity.

As he yawns and stretches his four arms and back, he trudges downstairs, passing by his study, which is piled high with books and scrolls. The answers he needs are not in this room, but he'll still spend hours in here each day, and then he'll watch two hours of Keeping Up With the Kardashians, because these are equally effective in finding an answer to the most important question:

How do we kill them?

It has been almost eight years, and humanity as a whole still has no idea. The ten evolved godlike Great Curses that emerged from the Culling Game are as far as Sukuna knows, not killable by any means that is available to them. Trying to figure out how to kill them was like living in an anthill where most of the ants have been stomped on trying to figure out how they're going to kill an elephant when they can't even bite through the elephant's skin, and even if they could, it would probably just get more of them stomped.

His breakfast is ready, and he sits shirtless at the table and eats while Hiro washes dishes in the adjoining kitchen.

Hiro was a guy in his late twenties, and during the cataclysm, he escaped from prison. When Sukuna asked him what he did to be put in prison, he was dodgy and didn't provide an answer, which was honestly sort of interesting to him at first because what could this scrawny man have done that he would be ashamed to tell Sukuna about? He could have said 'I burned a few thousand people to death,' and Sukuna would have said, 'me too!'

Hiro is a really good cook, so Sukuna is just fine with letting it be a mystery. But he's sure if he absolutely had to guess, he'd only need one try to name the crime. After all, there's only one kind of monster that all the other monsters hate.

After he finishes his meal, Hiro takes the dishes and asks, "Do you want to take your midday meal when your shows come on at two?"

"Yes, that's fine."

Hiro asks, "If I may, can I ask why what it is that you like about the Kardashians? They seem like a cancer of modern society."

Sukuna answers, "The woman's husband perished from disease, so she offered her oldest daughters as famed courtesans in order to guarantee her own success, wealth, and power. A thousand years ago, every fading widow with attractive daughters was the matron of that clan. The race mixing thing is modern, I suppose. In my time, if a courtesan performed for a person of another race, they would burn her to death in front of the other courtesans."

Hiro's brows rise. "Are you against that sort of thing?"

"Humans are like Fruit Loops. Different colors, but they all taste the same."

Hiro's a bit disturbed by this answer, but he's been with Sukuna for years now and knows that one of the most important characteristics about him is his hunger for flesh. It doesn't really matter what kind; if he's hungry or bored or curious, he'll eat whatever is around. Hiro always strives to improve his cooking out of the fear that if he doesn't feed Sukuna well, Sukuna will simply eat him.

Sukuna once sent him on an errand that took him away from the farm overnight, and while he was gone, he ate the cat that lived in their barn. From then on, if Hiro had to go do something, he always prepared meals for him in advance.

Sukuna adds, "Her second husband has achieved incredible feats of might, yet is not dominant as the leader of the clan and seems uninterested in preventing his wife from subjecting his biological daughters to the shame of the stepdaughters? As the head of the clan, he lacks the power the dominant male in a family should possess."

Hiro decides not to spoil it for Sukuna because he's curious about how he will react. Sukuna is very, very old and he has some interesting reactions to the modern world at times.

Before Sukuna heads to the study to continue his eight year long pointless endeavor, he reminds Hiro to get rid of the thing that caused him to awaken that morning, an almost-dead child that wandered up the river onto the farm.

She showed up the day before and spent most of her time crying and eating half-rotten apples that had fallen from his tree and then puking and crying more. The noise was irritating, and she appeared to be diseased from infected injuries, so he didn't want her around the farm in the first place.

"Should I throw the body in the river?"

Sukuna stares at him sort of blankly for a minute, because he came from an era where a majority of people were illiterate and people genuinely believed night happened because a goddess hid the sun in a cave, yet they knew not to throw diseased bodies into rivers.

He says, "Diseased bodies should always be burned and not thrown into sources of water that people drink. If you're going to kill a lot people, there are more interesting ways to do it?"

When he enters his study, he takes a deep breath.

He's so fucking bored.

Sukuna enjoys killing, but he doesn't want everyone to die. He's not going to weave fabrics or sew his own clothes, make a saddle for his mount, or craft new lightbulbs when the ones in the farmhouse burn out. Some humans are necessary if one doesn't want to live in an incredibly primitive world, and he doesn't. Sukuna enjoys a number of creature comforts and wishes to keep those things within reach.

The people who have survived to that point live in scattered settlements across what used to be called Japan; most are part of factional alliances. They have different laws and systems, and the factions do not get along with each other, but also, can't really afford to fight because there literally aren't enough living humans to spare a few thousand here or there without things going really wrong.

So he can't just go kill people.

He can't kill the sorcerers either, because every one of them that dies subtracts some notable percentage of the combined force they could summon if they did have a way to meaningfully attack the Great Curses.

The 'Great Curses' refers to ten deific curses that emerged from the Culling Game colonies, each of them has some or all of the techniques of all the sorcerers who died across all the colonies. Their emergence is formally called the 'Demon Bloom,' and occurred exactly seven minutes and thirteen seconds after Satoru Gojo perished.

Satoru Gojo's death is the fucking problem. Therefore, it is also Gojo's fault that this happened, for dying like a soft little twat in the first place.

These irritating curses had an ability that could best be described as 'anti-infinity,' a barrier of nothingness. It can't be penetrated by basically any means that they are aware of, although Sukuna is absolutely positive that someone with a technique that allowed them to interact with infinity would be able to cancel it out.

Even though Satoru Gojo died, Limitless wasn't an incredibly uncommon technique in the family; the others who had it just weren't very strong because they didn't have Six Eyes. The most compelling evidence that Limitless was the silver bullet they needed was the fact that by the time Sukuna and a few of the Jujutsu sorcerers made it to the Gojo clan estate:

First, all of the Gojos were dead, regardless of whether they were at the clan estate when the Great Curses decided to kill them.

Second, all the known distant cousins were also dead.

Third, all the bodies were destroyed so it would be impossible to take genetic material like eggs or sperm and try to make a person with Limitless.

Limitless was gone. Eliminated. Doesn't exist anymore. Extinct.

It wasn't like infinity was a common element and that there might be other people in the world who could interact with it. Historically, they were the only people who had ever been able to do it, and the Great Curses seemed to understand that they were untouchable in a world with no Gojo clan.

If Satoru Gojo was alive, he could probably peel those bastards like shrimp so they could be killed.

But he's not.

Sukuna does not accept responsibility, as he feels the person who dies is far more responsible for being dead than the person who kills them.

He is in something that vaguely resembles an alliance with the Jujutsu Society sorcerers; whenever they find a way, he knows he will need them. Because he knows more about sorcery than any of them by an incredibly wide margin, he's the one mainly responsible for devising a strategy.

It has been eight years, and he is no closer to finding a method to attack than on the first day, despite being given access to basically all the available sorcery knowledge in Japan. He's even been permitted to look through the most sensitive scrolls and archive data from the Gojo estate, which only left him more in awe of what a bizarre and magnificent ability Limitless really was and how all that silly Blue-Red-Purple nonsense barely scratched the surface of what it might have been used to do.

Sorcery was a self-balancing world, so in theory, when these special cursed spirits were born, some power should have entered the world around the same time to offset them or create a route for eliminating them. Sukuna was unsure if this would happen because they were not organically spawned like most cursed spirits are, and also because modern people aren't just making more people.

There are simple ways to keep people from being born in this era and people use them because the world sucks and bringing a child into a world that is obviously shit doesn't make a lot of sense. The only powerful sorcerer he is aware of that has procreated in this era is Yuta Okkotsu, and he felt like that wasn't on purpose and they just didn't want to kill it.

Sukuna thumbs through notes that are absolutely worthless as shit, aren't going to help him, and mean nothing.

Bored, bored, bored.

There are loud noises outside: a few seconds of high-pitched screaming and then a very loud pop.

Sukuna assumes this was the sound of Hiro eliminating the trespasser and went about his business until it was time for his shows.

Armed with microwaved popcorn and very expired Pocky, he sat on the couch for a couple of hours and watched the Kardashian family saga, annoyed when his regular midday meal was never served.

There's nothing pre-made in the refrigerator, and Sukuna pouts.

Maybe he'll eat another one of Hiro's cats and see if he forget to feed him again.

Sukuna's stomach is now growling, because his enormous body actually requires a lot of food throughout the day, and he slides his shoes on as he steps out, still wearing his pajama pants because he in the kind of bored depression where sometimes he just doesn't feel like getting dressed.

When he goes out to find Hiro, he's halfway between the farmhouse and the barn with his head exploded like he got hit in the head with an artillery shell.

He thinks back to the commotion he heard earlier, the girl screaming and then the popping sound, which evidently was Hiro's skull exploding like a watermelon.

There's thick residue on his body, like something dangerous was there.

A cursed spirit?

No, that kid.

Sukuna had only seen her from afar, but she was covered in festering wounds, nearly starved to death, and was blind, which was why she probably wandered up the river. He had no idea where she had come from before that.

She is sleeping in the barn, curled up with one of the cows for warmth because it's already quite chilly.

When he enters the barn, she remains perfectly still like she's hoping he won't see her, almost like a baby deer.

This is a small child, probably born around the time everything went to shit, with white hair that was matted together, and emaciated limbs that didn't have much strength left to them. There are infected injuries on her hands and feet, although they look like they came from being tied with shackles. She has apparently been blind for some time because her eyelids are stitched together and healed completely.

There are a litany of other injuries that look like they were caused by humans and not cursed spirits.

"You killed my servant?"

No response.

Sukuna kicks at her with his foot, except his foot never makes contact because it encounters an invisible wall. Well no, not a wall. His foot has entered a strange field where it suddenly began moving increasingly slowly, so that it can never impact its destination.

He withdraws his foot, and stares.

White hair.

Unusually long limbs and fingers.

Is this creature what he thinks she is? Surely not. Nothing like that could ever happen, that's ridiculous.

Sukuna puts his foot on the barrier and leans in. "Are you a damn GOJO?"

The barrier fails because the kid can't maintain it and he grabs her off the floor. He dunks her head in the cow's water trough because there's one very unique thing that he's noticed in all the white haired Gojos and the ancestors. Michizane Sugawara had it, Uraume had it, Satoru Gojo had it, Mei Mei had it despite being a fairly distant cousin: slightly opalescent white hair.

He's never seen anyone else with it.

When her matted hair comes out of the water, the light coming in from the door hits her hair and a slight pastel iridescence is clearly there.

She is screaming, squirming, crying as he holds her by the hair. "Let me go you four-armed freak!"

His head tilts. How on earth did she know he had four arms if she was blind?

Sukuna cuts one of her sewn-shut eyelids, and an unnaturally bright, glowing blue eye he would have recognized anywhere stared out at him.

How on earth did a baby Satoru Gojo fall out of the sky and land in his yard?

It is at this moment that he remembers that this child is diseased and nearly dead from starvation and infection.

Sukuna opens the other eye and says, "What's your name?"

"Sayuri."

"Gojo?"

"Huh? Who are you?"

"Ryomen Sukuna."

Neither the name Gojo nor his mean anything to her at all, which is quite odd. He heals her physical injuries and takes her inside, straight to the bath.

Certainly, a filthier child has never existed.

Sayuri is basically limp, with no energy left to really move around.

He cuts most of her hair off; it was clearly in a braid the last time anyone messed with it, but it had matted together like that. A patient person might have been able to sort it out, but he wasn't patient, and he doesn't care about her hair. After he's scrubbed her head to toe, clipped her nails, and brushed her teeth, and he wonders after doing this only one time how parents continually deal with their children's hygiene.

Why not put the child into the bath and just hold them under the water?

Sukuna is forced to make lunch, and since Sayuri is so close to starving to death she's probably going to get very sick, he puts effort into it instead of feeding her instant noodles.

Sayuri watches him in anticipation as she sits wearing one of his shirts at the kitchen table.

"Who stitched your eyes closed?"

"My mom. She said I can never show anyone my eyes or my secret power, no matter what."

"Is she still alive?"

"No."

"Do you look like her?"

"No."

"Have you ever met anyone who had white hair like you?"

"No."

"Have you ever heard anyone tell you that you have Six Eyes?"

"I only have two?"

Sukuna slides the omelet onto a plate and lets her start on it while he finishes cooking. "Don't eat too fast. If you puke in my house, I'll send you right back to the barn. I have to go the Kyoto settlement to get a few things. Stay in the house. Do not go outside, and if anyone comes to the door, don't answer it. Do not let anyone else see your eyes, no matter what."

He dresses for the day at three in the afternoon like any depressed and bored person and leaves Sayuri alone with her meal, assuming she'll probably eat and pass out in the living room. People suffering from starvation have no strength or energy except what comes from the pangs of hunger and adrenaline from the fear that they will die. Once the hunger is resolved and they're safe, the adrenaline disappears and they suddenly get very sick and lethargic.

Kyoto is the only major settlement that isn't associated with some sort of factional alliance. Since it's the closest place to where he decided to stay, and he didn't want to be a part of this or that, the factions just never tried to claim the area. Since it's oddly neutral ground, everything comes through Kyoto to get traded. It's the center of post-apocalyptic commerce, which suits Sukuna because it means he has access to stuff.

There are also basically no laws except not to cause problems that would require him to take any action whatsoever. It's packed to the gills with all kinds of debauchery: a slave market, a body parts dealer, whorehouses for whatever one's fancy happens to be, marketplaces to hire assassins, unrestricted access to drugs...traders come in to sell goods and lay up in houses of ill-repute.

Everyone has something bad to say about Kyoto, but it's thriving, which is surprising considering how people in general were doing right at the beginning of the cataclysm.

Sukuna had been kind of stunned by how helpless modern people were when things started to unravel. Heian Era people were so limited, but they would have fared so much better.

There was a shop in Kyoto that sold medicine, and he went inside to acquire vitamin injections, IV fluids, supplements, antibiotics, and anti-parasitic medication for his house guest, who was half-dead and probably full of bacteria and intestinal worms from walking around outside for what he assumed was probably at least a couple of months.

Sukuna's first thought about what he should do with Sayuri was to ensure she didn't imminently die and then leave her with Yuta Okkotsu. He and his woman had a child that wasn't that much younger, and he knew he'd protect her.

Giving her to Okkotsu had some really serious risks though. Many people lived in the Jujutsu Society's settlements, so she would be around other people often and she would most importantly be around other people who had known Satoru Gojo. Her identity as a Limitless Six Eyes user would not remain a secret.

The Great Curse who rules Japan, Alghera, has curse users who will do things for her in exchange for her enhancing their power, and since no one knows who these people are, they come and go from settlements.

Notably, someone closely aligned with the Jujutsu Society was outed as one of these people, and in theory, there are more like him.

If he dumps Sayuri at the Jujutsu Society, people will find out she's like Gojo, and one of these unknown traitors will tell Alghera, which will result in Alghera not only killing Sayuri but also wiping out the Jujutsu Society.

She is currently ignoring everything the humans are doing for unknown reasons, and it's best if things stay that way.

Sukuna doesn't really think of Sayuri as being a person at all in the first place, but a lump of raw ore that could eventually become an instrument to get him what he desperately wants. If Alghera finds out that the humans have obtained this ore, she will destroy it, but there are a lot of other things that can also go wrong.

In order for Sukuna to achieve the outcome of killing Great Curses, the little lump of ore needs to become an incredibly powerful and sharp blade.

Wouldn't the blade be sharpest if he was the one sharpening it?

This is an unpalatable idea, but probably, they will get this one opportunity, and if they fuck up, it'll be a long time before any sort of opportunity comes again. If Alghera finds out and their little lump is destroyed, if she isn't strong enough or sharp enough when the time comes, if she develops some defect or gets physically handicapped in some other fight before reaching Alghera…all of these outcomes are bad.

Sukuna can escape from his boredom if the lump reaches its full potential, and if not, things won't change.

While walking around the market, he mentally calculates if being annoyed as shit about having a child in his immediate orbit for at least a decade or so is as bad as being perpetually bored. The Annoyance would probably cancel out the boredom that has become his constant and inescapable permanent state for the last eight years, but it would do so by replacing that with a mood that is even more intolerable.

On the other hand, if he sends the Annoyance to Yuta Okkotsu, there's a higher risk the Annoyance will be killed or will grow into an unsatisfactory instrument, which will result in the boredom extending indefinitely into the future.

Is he willing to be annoyed every second of his life for ten to fifteen years in exchange for the highest chance of not being trapped by boredom for a much longer period of time?

XXX

February 19, 2019

Sukuna is sitting in front of the television watching the news when someone knocks on the door of his new house. He's been living here for a few weeks; everything everywhere sucks, so he just sort of wishes he could hibernate like a bear and wake up when things stopped sucking.

Since the farmhouse is a good location to be situated in during the apocalypse, people keep coming around, some to beg, some to try and take the location by force. He assumes he'll find some random wanderer, and doesn't wish to be irritated with disposing of bodies because it's raining.

A greater source of irritation awaits: Yuji Itadori.

Sukuna can't exactly explain what it is that he hates about Yuji, but he really does just absolutely loathe his existence. Most people he regards with a casual kind of indifference, but for Yuji, he has genuine dislike. Even thinking about him makes Sukuna feel a little sour.

He crosses two sets of arms. "What do you want?"

"Can we talk?"

"About what?"

"That thing."

Sukuna lets him in because he doesn't want more chilly air to blow in. He's having a warm and comfy day consisting of ignoring the world as it slides into hell.

Yuji smells food and rudely makes his way to the kitchen to help himself to a pot of soup simmering on the stove.

"You're just feeding yourself now?"

"Yeah, what are you going to do about it? You're basically just a giant parasite that lived in my body for a while. Like a tapeworm."

Sukuna says, "For some reason, it pleases me that terrible things seem to be happening to you continuously."

"You mean all the horrible shit you did to me?"

"I don't remember it like that. What. Do. You. Want?"

Yuji looks down at the soup and asks, "What kind of meat is in here?"

"Why are you asking?"

"You know why!"

"It's obviously chicken, you shitbrained brat."

Yuji opens the refrigerator and takes out a beer, and then after popping the top off, sits down at Sukuna's table.

Sukuna is so irritated, but he's probably not going to destroy his own house because Yuji is in it. Probably. "Why are you here?"

"You know how to kill them, right?"

"If I knew that, I would have done it already. The obvious answer is to use Limitless, but we don't have that. And Gojo killed Mahoraga, so we can't try that. Sorcery is self-balancing. The means to kill the new curses will eventually enter the world. That's probably going to mean new people. And new people are unfortunately useless as shit for a very long time and require enormous amounts of work to become even minimally useful."

Yuji listens to Sukuna describe babies as 'useless new people,' and wonders what on earth is actually wrong with him.

Sukuna is tired of this new era already and has seriously considered turning himself back into fingers and letting the people of this era figure it out on their own. He's sure they'll manage eventually; either that, or humans will go extinct. It was kind of a gamble to risk being fingers in a world without any living humans. He assumes curses would eventually get their hands on them, and that was annoying.

The biggest reason he won't turn himself back into fingers is because Yuji might eat them, and then he'll not only still have to live in this shit era, but he would also have to share a body with Yuji again. Sukuna would rather die a thousand times than return to Nephew.

Yuji said, "We want to know if we're safe from you for now. You obviously decided not to kill us all back then, and you haven't bothered anyone."

"I've been busy."

"Doubt that."

Sukuna says, "I really don't like you."

"Good, I hope seeing me ruins your day."

Glaring at his nephew, Sukuna says, "My priority is obviously to get rid of the Great Curses. That may require the use of other sorcerers who actually useful like Okkotsu. Not you."

They don't say anything else for a long time; Sukuna just glares in mild fury at the brat sitting at his table, eating his food, after intruding on him.

Yuji finishes his soup, leaves the dishes, and says, "Well, it sucked seeing you. You're still a fucking evil piece of shit."

"I don't accept insults from you because you entered the world through Kenjaku's cunt, and you are so dislikable it is the only one you will probably ever know."

The teenager feels like his uncle responded to a rude but normal level insult with a full tactical nuclear strike. He's had enough of his only living relative, since all he came here for was to make sure Sukuna was really going to leave them alone. That question has been answered, and so he decides to leave.

Yuji gets to the door and then turns and says, "It's not like you're good with girls either."

"Women worshipping me as a god showed my dismembered fingers more action than you've had."

"Yuck! I ate those things!"

"That sounds like a 'you' problem. Begone, brat."