Sayuri Gojo spends the first couple of weeks mostly in bed in a room upstairs, only leaving to relieve herself down the hall and take a bath once a day.

During this time, Sukuna has fairly limited interactions with her because she crashes quite hard from illness and malnutrition and seems to have a fairly cloudy mind and weak body. He brings her food and medicine and checks on her now and then.

It's clear she's quite frightened of him and does whatever he says without complaint, which is favorable.

During the third week, she wakes up in the middle of the night one evening and tiptoes around the house. He has no idea what she's doing, but as long as she doesn't try to leave, he decides he doesn't care. It's probably more important that she's up and walking around in a deliberate state of mind.

Sukuna remains in bed as the footsteps get further away. The house's security system will announce if a door or window opens, so he's not particularly worried, but he assumes she's already heard these alerts and knows he'll know if she tries to leave.

After a while, the footsteps come closer again, featherlight due to her small size and the very careful way she is walking.

His bedroom door slides open very softly, and he pretends to be asleep.

He wonders if she's just exploring the house, but for someone with Six Eyes, even in the dark, she's definitely able to see that he is in this bed.

Closer, closer, until she is next to his bed.

Sukuna hears Sayuri's breathing increase, and he has a decent idea about what she's about to do and decides to let her do it.

He feels a stab and reaches out to put his hand around hers with one arm and turns on the light with the other. Sayuri tries to pull back, but he clenches his hand around hers and pushes the knife all the way into his part of his bare chest that is exposed by his loose yukata.

She screams in horror, and stumbles backward, and he pulls out the knife and lets blood gush onto the floor.

He heals the injury to his chest and holds out the knife while she sits on the floor against the wall, mortally terrified that he's about to kill her.

Sukuna says, "If you want to kill me, you're going to have to do better than that."

Sayuri asks, "Are you going to kill me?"

"No, I need you alive so you can do something for me."

"My mom told me what grown men do to little girls who are alone in the world."

Sukuna blinks all of his eyes a few times. "Huh? Oh, no, this isn't that. Holy what the what? Did you think I was feeding you so I could rape you all this time?"

"Mom always told me the truth."

"That's not what we're doing here, you horrible child!"

She says, "You're not a bad guy? You look like a bad guy. Like a monster."

This situation is absurd, and Sukuna says, "There are a lot of different kinds of bad people. I do bad things. Not that kind of bad thing."

"Mom also told me that men are liars. They'll say 'of course I'd never hurt you,' and then do it," she argues.

Sukuna takes a long, slow breath. He knows if he tells her that her dead mom was full of shit, she will trust him even less, and also, the Mother wasn't incorrect about the fate little girls suffered in a world where all their meager protections had been stripped away.

The girl asks, "And how can you heal like that? You did it to me too. Are you a demon?"

This particular use of the word 'demon' held significance and suddenly, Sukuna knew where this child had been before she wandered into his yard.

He pointed at her and asked, "A demon? Did you come from the Society? How is that even possible?"

It is three o'clock in the morning, and they are yelling, there is blood on the floor, a poorly-executed murder attempt has taken place, he has realized where she came from and it makes no sense, she has accused him of being a child molester…it is very chaotic and he immediately decides that he has made a mistake and the thing he needs to do right away is stuff this child in a duffel bag and hand her off to Satoru Gojo's allies immediately, because he can't with this brat.

His sense of peace has been disturbed by this little creature and her wild accusations and that was ignoring the fact she tried to kill him with his own knife. Actually, she has been a disturbance since she wandered into his yard and has never stopped.

Sukuna manages to maybe convince her that he is not a child molester.

Her stomach growls loudly, and she asks, "Can I have a snack?"

"I know you just came from the kitchen," he answers.

"I want cooked food."

"You just tried to stab me."

"It was a misunderstanding, so it doesn't count?"

Sukuna hands her the knife, and says, "Wash and return this to where you found it."

Judging by the very healthy snap in her step and how she stampedes down the stairs, he assumes she's been feeling much better for a longer period of time but pretending to be weak so she can plan out how she will murder him.

Sukuna cleans the blood off himself and the floor and heads downstairs to find the knife still covered in blood and thrown blade side up in the dishwasher.

Sayuri is sitting on a barstool, her legs dangling and kicking slowly in anticipation.

Now that he is unfortunately wide awake, he also wants to eat, so he looks through the refrigerator. "Fried rice."

"Can you do golden fried rice?"

"I don't know what that is."

At this point, she replies by giving him a recipe with exact measurements and ingredient names, instructions for adding ingredients and in what order, how to tell if the pan is the right temperature, and the correct method for not charring the rice when it's being tossed in the wok while it is covered in egg yolk.

Sukuna puts the eggs on the counter, crosses all of his arms, and says, "For what reason did you ask me for cooked food when you know how to cook?"

"Food cooked by other people tastes better."

Sukuna says, "Listen, you little shit, I've just about had it. I'm not cooking anything else until you make me golden fried rice."

"Boo," she answers, giving him a thumbs down.

"I guess we'll just go hungry. Have fun with your post-traumatic stress disorder."

"What's that?"

"It's a fun trick your brain will play on you so you can relive the most horrible events of your life over and over again until you die."

"That doesn't sound like fun."

Sayuri prepares the meal for them and serves him at the table. It's a decent meal, rich in egg yolk and quite spicy.

It's the first time they've sat down at the table together, and Sukuna asks, "You did come from the Society, right?"

"I did."

The Society of the Righteous was one of the oddest settlements in Japan, a cultlike encampment where the members believed that eradicating sorcerers would also eradicate all cursed spirits. They were a settlement made up entirely of non-sorcerers without sight; even being able to see curses is enough to make someone a 'demon,' a person they claim was tainted by the dark energy of this world.

One of the odd mysteries about the Society was that cursed spirits didn't attack it for a very long period. Due to the fact almost everyone had died miserably in a short period, the wilds of Japan were absolutely infested with low to mid-grade cursed spirits and keeping them from attacking settlements was an important task.

Sukuna says, "I thought they didn't like sorcerers."

"At the Society, everyone thought I was blind and not a sorcerer. But I accidentally used my power without meaning to, and everyone found out. So they executed my mom and chained me up. They were fighting about whether they should kill a baby sorcerer and they decided to just put me outside instead."

Sending a child out into the curse-infested wilderness so she could be eaten was considerably worse than just executing her in the settlement. He does not think that she comprehends that they weren't being nice when they let her go.

Sukuna's ire decreases while they talk, because she is old enough that they can have an actual conversation, and she seems quite bright. He has no idea if she is smarter or dumber than other kids her age, but she understands what he is saying and he understands what she says.

The Mother is an interesting character in this story, because her entire goal was to hide her daughter. Her instructions to Sayuri were if something happened, to avoid the Jujutsu Society and other sorcerers and lay as low as possible, never let anyone see her eyes, and never let anyone see her technique. She had her lying and acting from toddlerhood, and taught Sayuri to understand that people knowing anything about her was extremely dangerous.

Sayuri was only born two weeks after Satoru Gojo died, when the world was in the middle of a hellish transition, but it was interesting to Sukuna that the Gojo clan didn't know the head of their clan had a kid on the way. No one in the Jujutsu Society knew about it either or they would have gone looking for the Mother. Sukuna wondered if perhaps Satoru himself did not know that he had a wild seed about to sprout from the earth.

Sukuna says, "Did you hear what happened to the Society?"

"No?"

"So, without sorcerers, the fact they don't get attacked has always been odd. Cursed spirits will usually avoid really powerful sorcerers and cursed objects. I thought all this time that they were secretly keeping some sort of powerful cursed object, like a cursed sword or whatever, and lying to people and saying, 'God is protecting us.'"

"Doesn't God protect them?"

Sukuna answers, "The reason they probably didn't get attacked is because you were there. A couple of months ago, cursed spirits overran the place and ate everybody. So, in a sense, a god was protecting them, but the god was you."

"They all died?"

"Kyoto is the closest settlement to the Society, and no survivors showed up. Even if some of them managed to run during the attack, it was out into the wilderness where the curses are and none of them can even see them. They left you alone because you your power gives them very bad vibes."

Sukuna wonders how much he can disclose without causing a problem; he plans on keeping her identity a secret, but not her existence. He can't just secretly keep a child in complete isolation for at least a decade and expect good results. Personality and social defects can be more debilitating than physical ones.

If Sayuri suffers from perpetually low morale, she won't reach her potential and won't feel motivated to fight Alghera, the Great Curse that rules over Japan. He doubts he can convince her to have the same motivation as him, but he suspects he can develop a little hero complex in her and convince her to 'save the world,' because that's the kind of stupid thing children can believe in.

That requires her to understand what the world is, and to develop a genuine interest in helping the people who live in it. So far, all the people she's ever known besides her mother turned out to be shit and she seems fairly indifferent to the fact they died. In all likelihood, she probably hoped something bad would happen to them while she was wandering around dying because they were stupid and crazy.

As they talk, he finds the Mother's fingerprints everywhere on her. She told her daughter to survive, no matter what that meant, and to not worry about other people, because they weren't going to worry about her. Stay away from men, stay away from sorcerers, lie and hide for as long as possible…

Sukuna isn't sure what the long-term plan was, but it was clear that at least while Sayuri was at a vulnerable age, the Mother just intended for no one at all to know who her daughter was, and for that reason, now Sukuna is the only one who knows.

He doesn't really want to gloss over a bunch of stuff that is likely to cause problems in the future. Leaving out information because it seems easier might lead to some 'dramatic reveal' in the future and he just doesn't have the fucks to give about something like that. It seems like this brat has had a bad enough misadventure in the world that he can just put the relevant facts on the table, and she will defer to the Mother's instruction.

Sayuri's best chance of even surviving winter is with him, so it doesn't matter if he's a mass murderer or if he killed her dad. She has come to him pre-programmed to not care about anything besides her own survival and to find ways to be okay with whatever that meant.

He says, "So anyway, I knew your dad. His name was Satoru Gojo. Before you were born, we agreed to meet at a specific place and fight until one of us died. I killed him, so…there's that. I also kill people for fun and have killed many people. Sometimes I eat them.

"But I need you, so I'm not going to kill or eat you. I want to say this up front because I don't want stupid dramatic shit going on in the future. When I take you outside and let you meet other people, they're going to tell you right away that I'm not one of the good guys."

The child seems sort of blank for a while. "So you are a bad guy."

"Yes. If the Great Curses didn't exist, the thing everyone would be scared of is me."

"But you're not going to hurt me."

"Correct."

"What do you need me for?"

Sukuna said, "It is a very long story, but basically, the Great Curses stole your father's power out of his corpse when he died. They've used it to create a forcefield…do you know what a forcefield is?"

She nods.

"Your family's power is very rare and very difficult to explain, and I can tell from looking into your eyes that your little half-baked brain isn't ready for the specifics. The important thing to know is that we need someone with the same ability as Satoru Gojo in order to take away the forcefield. Then, we can kill the Great Curses."

Blankness.

Nothing.

Sukuna says, "That's you. I am talking about you. You're the only person living on earth who can do this, because the Great Curses already killed everyone in your family. They will kill you too, if they find out about you. That's why your mom was protecting you."

There are so many questions; he thinks he might die from answering them. Sukuna is sure after only ten minutes that no one has ever asked as many questions about anything as this child, and he believes that while she follows the conversation and converses in a way similar to the way an adult does, there's some sort of filter in her brain that randomly selects about sixty percent of the information to commit to memory.

Sukuna discovers during this conversation that she can't listen and have her eyes open at the same time, almost like opening her eyes overclocks her brain.

He is thinking about shoving her in a duffel bag again when she suggests they have another meal and explores his cupboards for raw ingredients. Since she killed Hiro, he's been cooking for himself and her for three weeks, so he doesn't mind letting her do whatever. She keeps asking him questions while she pours things into a bowl for a cake.

"Do you really eat people?"

"Occasionally."

"Do they taste good?"

"It depends. Some of them are actually quite gross."

"Would I taste good?"

Sukuna says, "You're too skinny to eat. You lost your baby fat. When you gain weight again, it won't be the same."

While a cake bakes, she asks, "Is being a monster your secret power?"

"It is not."

"So why do you look like that?"

"Like what, specifically?"

"Like a giant freak of nature?"

Sukuna decides to mess with this annoying child and says, "All grownup sorcerers look like this. In the Society, they weren't allowed. You've just never seen an adult sorcerer before."

"I've never seen a picture of someone like you in a book."

"The Society would obviously just get rid of those books. When you get a little older, you're going to get little bumps on your sides and your second set of arms will start growing in. And after that, your second set of eyes. You know what comes after that?"

She seems fearful, stunned, and confused by this information.

Sukuna opens his yukata further; it was hanging half-open when she stabbed him, but he's sure she didn't see it. He drops the yukata down around his waist so she sees his extra mouth and snaps the extra set of teeth together.

She screams, "WHAT IS THAT?!"

"There's no reason to yell. Among sorcerers, it's normal. When you get a little older and start going through puberty, your body will change a lot. It's very different for sorcerers."

"Puberty is when I turn into a woman and get my feminine curves. I'm not turning into a monster."

Sukuna answers, "We also have extra armpits, so there's the smell. Plus, you have Six Eyes, so you'll have two extra eyes, even more than me, except the fifth one will be a big one right in the middle of your forehead and the sixth one will be a little one on your chin that only opens when you're asleep."

Despite being over one thousand years old, Sukuna really had no idea how fun it was to absolutely bullshit a child with lies and watch them freak out, and he wonders if this is amusement is what keeps parents from killing their offspring.

When the cake comes out of the oven, she still seems depressed because he has convinced her that she's going to sprout an extra set of arms.

She does something he finds somehow incredibly annoying and cuts a big slice of cake out of the direct center. He can't explain why it bothers him, but he finds it annoying that she didn't start at the corner like a reasonable person would. He views this act as being similar to tossing the bloody knife into the dishwasher instead of cleaning it.

The cake is warm, sweet, and buttery, not bad at all, and tastes even better because the brat seems quite despaired over her belief that she's going to turn into a freak soon. It's a hilarious thing to lie to a Gojo about, since this kid will probably always be stupidly attractive.

Satoru Gojo was somehow still a pretty boy even when he was dead.

Sukuna says, "Anyway, my offer is this: I'll take care of you and help you get strong if you help me kill the Great Curses when you grow up. If you don't want to accept my offer, you can leave and take your chances."

Sayuri looks up from her cake. "I just remembered something my mom told me."

"What now?"

"We should make a binding vow. My mom said it's necessary if I ever have to make any deal with a sorcerer. She said sorcerers are liars, and binding vows are the only way to ensure they keep their end of the agreement. She also said that I have to be careful about the terms of the agreement, because sometimes sorcerers trick people by making bad rules, like 'I won't hurt you for now,' but 'now' ends right after so that doesn't mean anything."

Sukuna feels like he has been struck with an anvil that fell from the heavens, undoubtedly dropped by the Mother. The little girl rambles on; she knows all about binding vows and most of all, she knows not to make any agreements with a sorcerer without one.

"What kind of terms do you want?" he asks.

"I need time to carefully consider this."

A terrible answer for Sukuna, who wants to use Sayuri to get what he wants without being forced to guarantee anything in return.

He is very sour about this, stands, dumps the entire rest of the cake into his second mouth, and says, "I'm going to bed."

His mood improves somewhat when he remembers that a binding vow will also allow him to guarantee she won't be able to defect to the Jujutsu Society when she meets them and inevitably decides they're better people because he's not about that in the first place. She doesn't know them right now; currently the Jujutsu Society sorcerers are people she doesn't know that the Mother told her to stay away from.

The next morning is actually very cold. Early winter in this era means something, like back in his era where an early cold snap affected food stores and travel.

He doesn't want to go out to the barn to collect eggs and milk and desperately wants to go find a new servant, but he doesn't want anyone to know about his houseguest for the time being. Having to do chores has been irritating, and he's still bored.

When the kid comes downstairs with a pen and notepad, he asks, "Do you know how to milk a cow?"

"I learned at the Society."

"Can you go collect milk and eggs and see what's up in the greenhouse?"

"Okay. I haven't gone outside for a while."

She finds shoes at the door that appear to be her size, and after putting them on, and finding a coat also, she grabs an umbrella and heads out with a big basket by the door.

The level of autonomy she has at this age is interesting. He assumes she's a lot more capable than other children due to the diligence of the Mother, but she still almost died when she ended up outside on her own.

While she is out, he picks up the notepad to see her wish list of binding vow terms:

Sukuna cannot lie to Sayuri, and if asked a question by Sayuri, he must provide an answer he thinks answers the question completely.

Sukuna cannot commit any action that he thinks is harmful to Sayuri.

Sukuna must take what he thinks is excellent care of Sayuri.

There are only three conditions, and they are written at a level that would make him assume she was actually much older. There are some phrasing issues, but the Mother taught her well; each of these conditions is constrained by his own judgement.

With Yuji, Sukuna was able to exploit the binding vow because it was based on Yuji's determination at the time, and he didn't consider himself to be part of 'anybody' and he didn't have a clear idea of what would constitute harm. Eating something isn't necessarily harmful in most cases.

If his binding vow with Yuji had been 'Sukuna will not do what he thinks is harm to anyone,' the fact that Sukuna understood what he was doing would be harmful to Megumi would have prevented him from doing it.

This is objectively the right way to do it if one doesn't want to get fucked over, since the judgement of the person doing the action is used, rather than the judgment of the person the action is being done too. A person doesn't know what someone else is going to do to them before it is done and therefore may not form an opinion about it. But the person doing the action always knows the action is going to be done and generally has an idea of what the action will do because that is why they are doing it.

He is not pleased.

It takes a while, but Sayuri returns from doing the chores.

She cooks again, because she was excited about fresh tomatoes from the greenhouse.

Sukuna asks, "Are we eating again?"

He is a glutton, but he had a gigantic meal of golden fried rice and then ate most of a cake only a few hours earlier.

While she cooks, he writes his conditions down:

Sayuri cannot leave Sukuna's supervision without permission from Sukuna.

Sayuri cannot deliberately act against the interests or goals of Sukuna.

Sayuri must complete all training prescribed by Sukuna.

Sayuri cannot reveal her identity to anyone without permission from Sukuna, except in situations where she believes her life is in danger.

Sayuri must assist with assault on Great Curses.

Sayuri must tell any lie that Sukuna asks her to tell and abide by their intent.

Binding vow expires when all Great Curses have perished.

"Why do you have more conditions?" she complains.

"Your conditions are much more demanding and require effort from me. Mine just keep you from causing me trouble or joining the Jujutsu Society."

"I don't even know who those people are. But maybe I should go over there."

Sukuna says, "Walking from Kyoto to Tokyo when it's already getting cold? It's over twenty times the distance between the Society and here. And while the little curses around here didn't bother you, there are special grades out in the wild in the Tokyo ruins. They won't ignore you. Of course, you can stay here without the binding vow."

"Without it, you will do something bad to me eventually."

"Choose your adventure: try to walk to Tokyo, stay here without a binding vow, or agree to my terms."

She says, "But then how would I know if you were planning to kill me after all the Great Curses are gone?"

That was exactly Sukuna's plan; fighting Satoru Gojo was the highest high. Getting that kind of fight out of this annoying child someday was a reasonable return on his investment.

It's non-negotiable for him. He doesn't answer her.

There is some negotiation about wordage, but more or less, the major terms are agreed upon.

Sukuna tries to think of this as a victory of sorts since Sayuri can't leave, can't tell anyone who she is, and has to tell whatever lies he tells her to. In exchange, he can't lie to her, can't hurt her, and has to take care of her.

In reality, being forced into a binding vow by a little girl is annoying and while he could have told her to eat shit, as soon as she figures out how to use her technique on purpose, moving around the world will be very easy for her. Defecting to the Jujutsu Society is impossible if she has to walk in the cold to Tokyo, but when she can just use her technique to zip across the country at high speeds, not so much.

If he loses control of her after she figures that out, it'll be impossible to regain it without deliberate force and while he's somewhat getting along with the Jujutsu Society due to their situation, they would give him problems if they knew what he was doing and who he was doing it to.

Two of Sayuri's terms were things he was going to do anyway, but being forbidden from lying to her was kind of a bummer because he'd been thinking about other things he could lie to her about since convincing her she was going to turn into a monster at puberty had been so much fun.

In the broadest sense, the binding vow required him to be honest, and protect and care for her, and in exchange, he got to control her.

Since she was vulnerable and needed his protection and he needed to ensure she didn't run off, in some ways, they both gained, but he was not pleased he'd had to do it in the first place. If this hadn't happened, he probably could have just manipulated her into doing what he wanted.

But the Mother knew sorcerers were liars and bastards and that exploiting her child's power is the first thing they'd do.

Sukuna creates a list of the lies she will live by for the duration of their agreement, and then does two things to fundamentally change the way that she looks:

He dyes her hair pink.

He drugs Sayuri, and while she is asleep, presses citrine gemstones crushed into powder into the irises of her eyes, healing them with the foreign sparkly dust trapped in them. The blue color and light hit the yellow dust, which diffuses it and makes her eyes appear green with a much different and less piercing glow and not blue.

Then he tattoos one of them, so it looks like a curse swiped at her face and cut her eye and around it. This gives her the ability to say she wears sunglasses because an eye injury makes her eyes sensitive to light, otherwise covering her eyes all the time will be viewed as suspicious.

A few days later, he takes her into town on his mount, a little two-headed dragonesque curse he keeps chained up in his stable.

Sayuri grew up in a weird religious cult where information, people, and stuff was censored, and Kyoto was just everything there was all at once. Bright lights, street food, prostitutes, market tables and shops with all kinds of things she'd never seen before in her life…everything is also moving a lot faster and the crowd is more aggressive.

People in the crowd bump into her several times in a row because she's just tiny and nearly nothing. She doesn't walk particularly close to him and Sukuna notices eyes people watching her right away: a teensy, weak-looking girl seemingly at the market alone.

Sayuri stumbles back and grabs onto his sleeve.

When she closes her fist around the sleeve of his kimono, suddenly the crowd parts around her, and the scary man on the corner she saw watching her immediately has something else to do.

Sukuna finds the age this child at to be so odd, because there are things about her that are incredibly childish, but she is also bright and can think about things as well as some adults.

He hires a porter, who follows them around town wearing a big basket, and they shop.

"That man with the scar…" she says.

Sukuna answers, "That's Sven, he's a foreigner. He trades slaves. He was probably thinking about kidnapping you and selling you. If people know you're staying with me, they won't bother you."

"Why can I sense cursed energy in a lot of these people and none of them have four arms?"

"Because I lied to you about that."

Sayuri frowns. "I'm not going to turn into a monster?"

Sukuna answers, "No, of course not. People don't just grow arms. There was one boy once. His name was Megumi."

"Then why are you like that?"

"I had a twin that I ate in the womb."

"Ewww! Gross."

Sukuna had a lot of reasons for coming to the market today, but the main one was to get 'kid supplies.' He'd acquired one kimono, a coat, and shoes that didn't fit for the brat. He also needed to find one or two servants.

Since she was still bone thin and ate constantly, and also growing anyway, fitted clothes were mostly a no-go. Japan was initially flush with whatever was popular when the cataclysm happened, but traditional garments had resurged in popularity because the synthetic materials in most western and modern clothing was in very high demand for other reasons.

The islands in their entirety lack the ability to do anything involving petrochemical industry, first because Japan didn't have many oil reserves in the first place, second because infrastructure failures have made it impossible to move it around if they can get it out of the ground, and third because it requires thousands and thousands of workers in different plants across Japan which would have difficulty moving large amounts of product between different locations.

That meant no gasoline, no diesel, no synthetic fabrics, no plastic, and the inability to make many things the way they were made before, like adhesives and paint. The concept of wearing virgin polyester for clothing is something that seems crazy in 2026 that was incredibly normal in 2018.

Sukuna lets the kid get whatever she wants. He doesn't really care. The trip is annoying because she talks constantly, and while perusing books, asks him questions that he finds inane, like what his favorite planet is.

Why the fuck would he have a favorite planet?

He's only lived on one, and plans on keeping it that way.

"…Earth?"

"Mine is Uranus," she says, letting go of his sleeve to wander from his side giggling.

If Uraume hadn't been ripped in half by Alghera the first time the sorcerers took a swipe at her, he was sure they would have found this situation hilarious. The idea that the King of Curses would be hindered and the only way to overcome that hindrance is to raise a child in a way that she doesn't turn out bad is comical, the plot of a stupid story.

For the last eight years, he's had about two minutes of conversation per day with a few real conversations sprinkled in here and there. This child talks constantly, because he is the only living person that she knows.

When the basket is full, they buy street food and go to an agency where slaves and servants are available for hire.

He looks through files and meets a few and decides on two. It's a rather simple process. One is a foreign woman who held a high academic role that simply no longer existed, the other a woman who came with commendations from her former employers for being a good chef and a hard worker.

Sukuna really didn't want to add more people to his orbit, but he wanted even less to have to continue doing farm chores, cooking, and being bothered with the brat.

He dislikes childcare enormously. There are no benefits to having a child; they're irritating, require frequent attention, ask too many questions, and are immature. It seems that people who have children receive all the joy of their existence right at the moment of their creation and everything after that is just hell.

This specific task being the thing he has to complete to escape from his Bored Boy Era is a joke for the universe. All of creation laughs quietly at how incredibly annoyed he is and how he knows that he will have to suffer this irritation for years.

A woman at the market selling kabobs remarked that Sayuri was at the 'best age,' and he doesn't understand what this could mean. Does this mean she was worse before this, and would become more terrible after this age? This was when she would be least awful to be around?

When they are preparing to go home, she suddenly cranes her head and takes off her sunglasses, staring like she's looking through a nearby building with her Six Eyes.

She grabs his sleeve again and says, "There's something bad."

"Let's go see."

They walk for a surprisingly long distance, and she just sort of gradually disappears behind him like she's using him for cover.

What she sensed was Yuta Okkotsu, who was arriving at Kyoto. The fact that she clocked him from over two hundred meters away using Six Eyes was kind of surprising. Since Sayuri didn't wig out about his presence, he assumed the thing that was frightening her was Rika, which seemed like a reasonable instinct.

Yuta has come with traders and doesn't seem particularly happy to be greeted by Sukuna.

Even though it's been years, Yuta's rage over his teacher's death still burns very hot, and every time they meet, Sukuna is reminded that no one has ever wanted to kill him as much as Yuta Okkotsu does.

Yuta's little mini-me, Ryosuke Okkotsu, is perched on his back, and that is very odd to Sukuna because bringing children outside of safe settlements was a poor choice.

Yuta looks down and sees green eyes peering at him from behind Sukuna's sleeve. There's an ugly scar on one of her eyes—or so he thinks—and a head of fine pink hair that matches Sukuna's.

"Oh god, do you have a kid?" he asks, horrified.

Sukuna answers, "That's very rude. But yes. This thing is mine," he holds her up in front of him by her obi, "I didn't really want to be bothered with it, but it's strong, so I decided to bring it here."

As soon as he puts her down, she scurries back behind him because she is scared of Rika.

Yuta has no idea that she can detect Rika's presence, and just sees her run to hide behind Sukuna.

He kneels down. "Hey there, princess. My name is Yuta. What's yours?"

She doesn't answer him, and Sukuna says, "Sayuri is feeling shy."

"She looks unwell. What did you do to her?"

"She was recently ill from an attack by a cursed spirit. I feed her well, if that's the question."

Yuta is disgusted and appalled by the entire concept of Sukuna as a father and wonders if he should offer to take the child off Sukuna's hands or attempt to rescue her or whatever. He assumes her illness and injury were probably the result of his cruelty in some way or another, and she seems very frightened to be away from him.

Then again, there are many, many children that are in situations that are more dangerous. If Sukuna is keeping her alive, he doesn't think he should over-extend himself or the resources of the Jujutsu Society.

Sukuna feels a sense of mischief he has not known in a while, passing off the child of Satoru Gojo that he has stolen as his own. He is looking forward to the distant future when Yuta finds out the truth and freaks out that his teacher's baby was right there in front of him the whole time and he never saved her from her father's killer.

"We have something to talk about."

"I doubt that."

Yuta puts his son down on the ground and whispers in his ear, and he uses his technique in front of Sukuna, who remains silent for a moment and then asks a single question.

"Okkotsu, what the hell did you make?"