Well, well, well.
Looks like he's not bad at child-rearing.
It's a surprise to everyone: the servants who now tend to them, the Jujutsu Society, everyone who finds out the King of Curses has a child, the actual child being reared, and, of course, Sukuna.
For some reason, he thought it would be more difficult?
Then again, most people in the world were made accidentally, the result of stupid people slapping their genitals together while they lie to each other about their feelings and grunt in a dark room that stinks of bodily fluids.
He's had a few interactions with the Jujutsu Society since she first came to stay with him in the fall, and it's spring again. They all seem very suspicious of the fact that the child is alive and apparently doing well.
Sayuri is at the perfect age for him to take her in, because she can do almost everything for herself, but at the same time, her personality hasn't fully formed. He feels like she's been in a constant state of evolution since they met, as she sorts out various traumas.
As a girl at the Society of the Righteous, and someone pretending to be blind due to her stitched eyelids, she'd had limited freedom. That was the kind of place that raised women to get married, and the kind of place where everyone who had any power was male. So little girls were trained in domestic work and farm subsistence.
Letting her run around outside has made her very happy from the start. She likes to explore, climb trees, run around, and look at stuff. She's intensely curious about all kinds of nature and science and he can reward her for doing well on her training by giving her science books from the salvage depot and she'll just get smarter.
This unfortunately also requires that Sukuna obtain knowledge because anything that she learns, she needs to discuss with him. She's curious about bugs, plants, animals, weather, stars and black holes, space, the origin of the universe, and various other things he doesn't particularly care about.
What does he think is inside of a black hole? He doesn't know. He's never thought about it. Not ever. He came from a time where people didn't know anything about anything and it was okay to just not understand what was going on.
"I bet you thought the earth was flat," she says one day, while he walks with her through the woods not far from the farmhouse.
"It didn't matter if it was flat or not. I didn't care how it was shaped. It played no role in my daily life."
Sayuri asks, "Did you know about other planets?"
"I mean, you can see some of them from earth, but we just thought they were the same as stars."
"What did you think the moon was?"
"The realm of a goddess that banished from earth, who would hide the sun at night."
She laughs, loudly and rudely.
Sayuri is now quite healthy, and is perhaps carrying a small amount of extra weight. Sukuna has chosen not to address this matter because having to carry around extra weight has caused her to become stronger. He doubts it's permanent anyway. Maybe she overate a little after she almost starved to death? That seems like a normal thing to do.
Sayuri asks, "Did you know about bacteria?"
"We absolutely did not. We knew that pouring alcohol on wounds would sometimes keep them from rotting, but assumed this was due to the work of an evil spirit and the alcohol either warded them off or served as an offering."
Near the edge of the woods, she spots a field protected by armed guards.
"Do people steal food from fields?"
Sukuna answers, "Not usually. They're not growing food in that field. Those are opium poppies."
"That's evil stuff, right?"
He rolls his eyes. "Back when everything started changing, I told some local farmers here to grow poppies. Everyone in the other settlements was complaining to Kyoto about it, but when they started running out of anesthesia and pain medication, suddenly everyone thought my idea was cool and neat and I was such a smart guy for thinking of it. A lot of that stuff was made from opium in the first place."
"But people do bad stuff with it, right?"
"Humans are self-destructive by nature, on the individual level and collectively. If you give them instruments, they will turn them on themselves or on others. A group of people sitting in a quiet room smoking opium isn't a problem to anyone. The problem is that this is a commodity that people will buy no matter the cost because they need it for one reason or another. Anything humans need can create a dangerous kind of commerce because humans are primarily motivated by greed."
"Dangerous commerce?"
Sukuna says, "Let's say we have this field. The farmer will turn this into a specific number of shipments at a hundred notes per unit shipped. Another farmer who has been growing wheat realizes that wheat is only worth five notes per unit shipped. So the second farmer plants poppies. The amount of opium that is needed is the same, but now there is twice the amount, so the first farmer's crop is now worth only fifty notes per unit, but the second farmer is making fifty instead of five."
"So the first farmer looses fifty notes per unit and the other farmer gains forty-five," she says, "I bet that pisses the first guy off, right?"
"If the first farmer just burns the crop of the second farmer or kills the second farmer, his situation goes back to normal, but the opportunity for profit is so great that he will have to continually do this. And because he artificially keeps the price high, everyone is motivated to steal the product for him.
"And every field that's not used to grow food causes food to become more expensive. If you're an ordinary person who doesn't need opium on a daily basis, if it's being raised nearby, it can still affect your life by making it too expensive to eat, but officials won't step in to do anything because the exorbitant wealth of the farmers who grow the opium can bribe the government.
"People in this era also had struggles like this over antibiotics, so it's not really the opium, it's just that humans are greedy."
She's very smart, so he can talk to her about whatever and she pretty much always gets it.
"Is that going to happen here?"
Sukuna explains, "No, people here have an understanding that no one is going to become the dope lord of Kyoto because I live here and I would find that annoying."
The girl asks, "Okay, how about gravity?! What did you think about gravity? Did you know about gravity?"
"Well, obviously we were aware that we weren't floating off the face of the earth."
"But did you think it was magic or something?"
Sukuna sighs. "Why are you like this?"
"It's so interesting? You're like an antique, except as a person. Like when the mayor of Kyoto had us for dinner and he was like 'this is my vase, it's eight hundred years old,' well 'this is Sukuna, he is a one-thousand-year-old four-armed mutant and terrorized a world that he sincerely believed was flat. Observe his tribal tattoos, out of fashion in the modern era but perhaps people in that time period found them stylish.'"
He glowers at her and asks, "Where is my damn arrow?"
"I don't know? I can't even see it."
He takes off her blindfold.
Sukuna has a few cursed arrows he's made over the years, and he made the mistake of letting this child fire one at a cursed spirit. She used cursed energy to pull the bowstring on her cursed bow that he made for her to train with, and something went wrong and the arrow went through trees for at least two hundred meters before apparently disappearing.
"Did you destroy it?"
"How should I know?"
He complains, "Because you're the one that did it? How did you miss a target that big from so close? It should have occupied most of your field of vision at the time so it seems like missing would have taken some deliberate effort."
"I killed the curse though."
"You missed a curse the size of a house with a bow from thirty meters, and then accidentally killed it when it chased you. This is not an accomplishment."
Whenever Sayuri panics, her infinity field sort of flashes outward in an irregular shape. It's a very wild and uncontrolled reaction, and also one that's quite dangerous. It's how she killed Hiro when she first arrived and also how she killed the curse he took her to hunt. He views it as being kind of similar to a sneeze, except if being sneezed on will rip a matter apart on the atomic level.
She hit Sukuna with one of these uncontrolled bursts a few weeks ago and one of his arms just sort of disappeared because he was not defending himself at all when it happened. It wasn't a big deal, because he could just grow another arm, but he found it sort of gross.
With her blindfold off, Sayuri can see the arrow very clearly, which just annoys him more because she could have taken it off before and instead was wandering with her dulled sight and antagonizing him with irritating questions.
When she spots it, she pulls it out of the tree where it finally lost its momentum. "See? I didn't break it. But look how far it went. I put so much power into it! I'm getting stronger. If I'd hit the curse, it would have been so cool."
"But you didn't. You seem like you are intelligent, but when you try to do sorcery, you're like an ape juggling dynamite. Awkward to watch, but if I just let you, something interesting will eventually happen because dynamite is dangerous."
Sayuri picks some leaves out of her bushy ponytail and answers, "I'm trying."
When he turns to head back to toward hope, he hears her say, "Think fast!"
The tip of his cursed fire arrow is sticking out of his abdomen, searing heat coursing through his insides.
He feels tearing and burning as he pulls it out with his bare hand and turns to Sayuri.
The girl feigns shock and dismay. "Oops! I actually meant to hit that tree as you were passing by. I wasn't even aiming at you."
"I'd be less irritated if you were actually aiming for me. The fact that you're so bad at this really annoys me more than the fact you shot me with my own damn fire arrow. You have Six Eyes? Archery should be very easy for you."
"Okay, but you just gave me a bow yesterday, and it is my second day as an archer. I have never fired an arrow before yesterday."
"Wait, you've never fired a bow before?"
"When would I have done that?"
It's honestly kind of a relief to him because he's just been wondering what is wrong with this child.
He heals the hole in his belly and gives her the arrow. "Show me your stance."
Sukuna fixes her stance; everything is wrong. When he realizes she just has no idea how to do what he ordered her to do, he's confident that the problem can be corrected.
"Only use your right eye while you aim because the arrow will be traveling in a straight line from your right hand."
After he finishes sorting her out and she's in position, he points to a nearby tree. "Try now."
The arrow goes flying back towards the farm and disappears again, and Sayuri mumbles, "Oops?"
Sukuna rolls his eyes. "Useless."
The arrow at least went flying back toward the farm this time, so he walks quickly in order to leave her behind and she runs to catch up to him.
"Are you mad?"
"You failed and lost the arrow again. You have to go find it and bring it home."
He sulks all the way back to the farm, in an increasingly bad mood at the child, and when he arrives, he takes a long, slow breath.
There is a scarecrow in the middle of the little farm's vegetable patch and the arrow, which was fired from over three hundred meters away, is sticking out of the dead center of its head, which is on fire.
Obviously, the issue was that she didn't know how to use her aiming eye only because she'd never fired a weapon before, and now that she did, she clearly understood exactly what to do.
It's clearly a very good shot and Six Eyes definitely assists archery exactly like he thought it would, but since she aimed at the scarecrow, she knew she hit it and she still let him think she'd just fired into oblivion and lost the arrow again.
Sukuna slaps the fire out and collects his arrow, leaving the scarecrow headless.
"Did I do it right that time?"
Unable to lie and forced to answer due to their binding vow, he simply answers, "Yes, but it only counts if you can hit real targets."
"I am sorry for accidentally shooting you."
"Are you?"
"A little?"
"It just seems like you accidentally hurt me a lot and I find it suspicious because it doesn't happen to anyone else. You have never deleted one of Nagisa's arms."
Nagisa is one of two servants who now lives at the farm in the guest house; she is quite young but a very talented chef. Nagisa behaves at times like she is the personal attendant of Sweet Baby Princess Sayuri, and the child eats it up. Sukuna doesn't mind because Nagisa is her main handler now, and he is only required to deal with Sayuri to train her in sorcery.
But the point is that there's never been a mishap where Nagisa gets hurt, or the cats she keeps bringing in the house even though Sukuna keeps telling her if he keeps catching them inside, he's going to eat them.
The other servant, Shiori, is more like Sukuna. She doesn't like being forced to look after a child. She is a forty-year-old woman who was an astrophysics professor in the prior era, interned at NASA, and there is currently some probe on its way to the edge of the solar system that she helped build.
But no one is going to space in this era, and while there might be a very small number of jobs in this field because some efforts are happening to keep certain satellite systems in orbit because it's the only way the world can connect, there's no room for Shiori Takagi. As soon as the prior era passed away, women were forced into their former roles and men took over everything.
There aren't any settlements led by women in Japan, and Sukuna has been all over the place and the only woman with any political power he's seen is Maki Okkotsu.
Mei Mei could be considered powerful except that no one trusts her, and everyone believes she's playing both sides of a factional dispute between the Jujutsu Society and the Nation of the Rising Sun.
Atsuya Kusakabe once told Sukuna that Mei Mei would eat her own shit if someone offered her enough money.
But none of that had anything to do with Shiori.
Shiori is a servant because she doesn't have cursed energy or sight and there are limited means of survival for single women. At age forty, she can't just marry up and spend her time doing domestic work for her own household as a wife.
Sukuna doesn't mind if her attitude is sour or if she doesn't like Sayuri. She knows about academics that would be useful to someone who is allowed to manipulate the laws of physics. When Sayuri gets a little older, having access to that information will be useful. And besides that, she's responsible for teaching her traditional academics and she pushes the child quite hard because she doesn't like her.
It's fine.
Sayuri makes Shiori miserable on purpose in response, but is always a sweet and perfect angel for Nagisa who spoils her.
Nagisa is objectively nice to look at and only twenty years old. Sukuna wonders why she prefers being a domestic servant because she could probably secure a marriage to someone living reasonably okay, or at least as okay as one could be in this era.
If she wanted to do sex work, she could have been the top girl in Kyoto.
Sometimes she gives him eyes, and he finds it confusing because women are supposed to be programmed for find mates who will be loving partners, good fathers, and excellent protectors.
Sukuna is a mass murderer and a cannibal and the only reason he's been forced to somewhat behave for these last hellish years is because there's somehow something worse than him in the world. Yorozu was out of her mind, but Nagisa seems kind of normal except for this one weird thing she does that he simply ignores.
He's more into murder than sex, but once in a blue moon, he'll get an itch that needs to be scratched. Though to be clear, he'd never scratch it with a person he has to see every day. That would be so awkward, and messing with domestic servants is just a guaranteed way to disturb the peace at home. With a child in the house as well? He doesn't even know how people with one child even obtain a second…do they just fuck with the child in the house? That seems gross.
What about if the child has unusual senses and can perceive the locations and, to some extent, the activities of other people even through walls?
Satoru Gojo had younger siblings, so what about that? Was he just in his house as child, too horrified to tell his parents he knew everything they were doing? And what about being a high school teacher? Kids that age are horny.
Six Eyes was probably just useful for fighting and a curse at any other time.
While he is having a bath later that night, he hears a horrific scream that sounds like someone is being murdered and when Sukuna runs out in a towel, he finds Nagisa standing shocked and terrified in the kitchen.
In between dinner and when she went to do the dishes, the kitchen as become infested with…really, really tiny insects.
Sukuna is dripping wet, barefoot, and asks, "You screamed over bugs?"
"When I tried to turn on the lights, they were crawling on my hands. I apologize."
Bending over at the waist, clutching the towel around his waist with one of his four hands, he examines the little insects, and follows where they seem to be coming from to a little paper like shell.
Sayuri jumped down from the upstairs, over the rail and onto the sofa in the living room.
Sukuna says, "I have asked you not to do that eighty-three damn times. You're going to break the furniture."
"Why are you naked? Were you harassing Nagisa?"
He holds the broken egg casing up and says, "Did you bring this into the house?"
"What is it?"
"I don't know, but bugs are coming out of it."
She enters the kitchen. "They hatched! Oh, they're mantises! How cute!"
Sukuna can see that they are indeed very small praying mantises, and if he had to pick an insect to invade his home, maybe this is best. They're not really creepy crawlies, they don't bite, and he actually likes to see them out in the wild. In his kitchen, not so much.
What's more infuriating is the fact that this child brought bug eggs into the house, clearly did not know what was going to come out of it, and seems completely unbothered with the fact there are hundreds if not a thousand of these little things everywhere.
Sukuna says, "Nagisa, you can go home for the night. The brat can do the dishes and deal with this situation."
"Yes, sorry again for causing alarm. Goodnight."
She tiptoes out the door so she can retreat to the guest house where she and Shiori live, and once she is gone, Sukuna asks, "For what reason did you hatch insects into our kitchen?"
"I dunno."
"Did you know they would be mantises?"
"Assumed it was probably spiders?"
"Why would you want to hatch spiders in the house? We already have spiders. There is a spider problem. This house is very spidery. We live in the country—there are enough bugs in the house as it is," he complains.
Sayuri answers, "I know that you hate spiders."
"Did you attempt to hatch a thousand spiders in our house because you know that would piss me off?"
She puts her finger out so one of the baby mantises can crawl onto it and says, "You really don't have the patience for children."
"I don't feel like this is a normal thing that children do."
"You're the one who says I'm special. And why are you naked? These little babies are too young."
He's not naked, he is wearing a towel, and obviously if he was naked, the little insects wouldn't care anyway.
Sukuna says, "Take care of this. I'm going to finish my bath and go to bed. If you hatch bugs in the house again, you're going to move into the barn."
He's not afraid of spiders or anything silly like that; he just finds them gross and dislikes the fact they tend to be sort of everywhere. There are also a few species in the area that bite, which he mostly knows because the kid is always picking them up when she finds them outside and sometimes, they don't appreciate it.
Sayuri has, since coming to stay with him, fallen out of trees, stepped in an ancient animal trap, been stung by bees and wasps, tried and failed to befriend a bear, got bullied by some wild ducks who came to hang out at the little pond on the farm for a few days, and briefly had a squirrel living in the house.
It just really seems like she's always into something. Waiting months to hatch spiders into the house just to get on his nerves is just incredibly rude, but due to their binding vow, he can't really do much about it.
When he awakens the next morning, the mantises are not only still alive and in the house, but they've spread out to the upstairs and are openly cannibalizing each other all over the place.
Shiori is making breakfast today since it is Nagisa's day off, and she simply ignores the chaos with a rather deadpan, 'what the fuck is my life' kind of expression as she rolls an omelet. She isn't scared or creeped out, but she does seem to acknowledge this situation is very weird.
When Sayuri came down, Sukuna says, "The bugs are still inside."
"You don't want spiders anymore, right? So I thought it would be cool with you."
Sukuna narrows all four of his eyes until they're angry red slits.
Sukuna knows what an IDGAF war is, and he's not going to lose.
Sayuri is an excellent student and despite his complaints, she is very far ahead of even his highest initial expectations. She's adventurous and mischievous and kind of bad, and all those things are signs that she's becoming strong-willed.
Maybe a proper parent would discipline a child, but he doesn't want her to be submissive. He wants her to keep becoming more and more independent and wild and for her to continue challenging him because it makes her confident.
At the same time, he's not going to let her win.
If she wants to live with the bugs, fine, they'll live with the bugs.
He simply sweeps some of the insects away from his place at the table and she does the same, and they have their breakfast like normal.
Shiori leaves the house immediately after serving.
One of the little mantises climbs onto the table and he's much larger than the others. He catches and starts to eat one of the others, and Sukuna casually watches while he has his morning miso soup.
Sayuri says, "Feeling nostalgic?"
"About what?"
"Seeing another many-limbed creature eat its own brother?"
"Are you comparing me to a mantis?"
She answers, "Not really, they're so cool. Whenever you sit with your legs and all your arms crossed, the only thing I can ever think about is how you look like a gigantic cockroach. I've been drawing pictures of you as a cockroach called Roachkuna to work on my art skills since Shiori says I'm 'disappointingly inartistic.'"
Roachkuna.
So she's comparing him to an insect, but not a cool insect that is widely regarded as the greatest hunter of the insect kingdom. No, he's a cockroach. Roachkuna.
"You really take advantage of the fact I can't do anything bad to you, but someday, that protection is going to be gone."
Sayuri asks, "In ten years when I'm all grown up, are you still going to be pissed off I called you Roachkuna on April 3rd, 2027 at 7:22 am? Like do you have a list? Can I see it?"
There are things he could do to her that wouldn't constitute actual harm, but he doesn't want to put out this weird little fire of mischief because it will serve him well when she is an adult, and he needs her to do things for him.
She's not in this mood all the time. Sometimes she's quite pleasant and she's just funny company. He thinks she's still annoyed that he bitched at her for giving her a bow without any instruction and then expecting her to be able to use it to kill a cursed spirit.
If he was a normal person, maybe he would apologize, but he's not going to do that. He'd rather deal with her being a little shit until she feels better.
"Is your twin that you ate the other person that's in your body?"
Sukuna bursts out laughing at her, asking, "Have you been able to see Megumi all this time?"
"Megumi?"
"Megumi is the person who was born into this body. I took it from him a couple of months before you were born."
The girl isn't really surprised to hear about anything terrible that Sukuna has done. She's not entertaining any misconceptions about what he is or what he intends to do with her once he's done using her. Maybe in the very beginning, she thought maybe if they were on good terms for a long time, maybe he would decide he liked her.
But he does like her, and that has nothing to do with the fact that he looks at her sometimes in this very weird and unsettling way, the pupils of his eyes sort big like a cat about to pounce on a mouse. She thinks he is probably like a cat, who will play with a mouse its caught until it's too broken to fight back anymore, and then eat it.
That's not going to happen now.
For now, she has to do everything she can to learn everything she can.
Sukuna has gone back to his breakfast when she abruptly asks, "Will you teach me how to swim?"
Sukuna is surprised by this question because he has seen her swim, and she is quite adept at it. Since she's been learning to use her cursed energy, he's seen her swimming in the lake with Ryosuke when he last visited by making a little bubble around her using cursed technique and swimming like a little mermaid and she as been in the lake many times recently.
"I already know you're a very good swimmer. You think you've ever been near a danger without my eyes being on you? It would be inconvenient for me if you drowned. What do you actually want?"
Sayuri says, "I want to see what you look like when you swim."
Sukuna takes the most measured breath he has ever drawn in his life, exhaling slowly, trying to find a place of zen. If he breaks the binding vow, he will die, and there is a part of his mind that believes that's acceptable.
Of course, she's being a little shit because he was too hard on her and he's not going to apologize and she's not going to stop being a little shit until she's over it.
If he disciplined her for bad behavior, that wouldn't technically constitute harm as long as it wasn't harsh, but if he kills this unpleasant little side of her, it will make her more pleasant to live at the expense of removing some of her self-will. That ultimately works against him.
Sukuna says, "You did fine with the bow. Perhaps I could have explained how to use it before telling you to exorcise a curse with it."
"I didn't shoot you with the arrow on accident, I stabbed you with it from behind."
"At least you didn't hesitate this time. I didn't hear you behind me that close either. Excellent. If you can draw blood from me again, let's say, in the next two weeks, I'll treat you to a special reward."
She answers, "I want to go on a trip."
"Fine."
Of course, he has no intention of letting her hurt him and no intention of giving her a reward. He is dangling a carrot in front of her that she can only snap her teeth at; in the end, it will elude her. It's his fun little way to make her work harder in training without having to give her anything in exchange.
Having admitted he was perhaps harsh, Sayuri's mood immediately changes and she's quite sunny. A joy, pleasant, fun, and happy to go out and train.
The servants clearly don't want to be in the house due to the insect infestation despite the fact that mantises are probably the least-offensive insects one could have in the house. He's sure that by the time they've all eaten each other that all the other bugs in the house will also be gone, so he's decided he's just going to be fine with the situation.
Sayuri is so pleasant when she's not purposefully making him miserable, bushy pink ponytail and a bright smile with a few missing milk teeth and a couple of adult teeth that look cartoonishly huge in her mouth. People don't really do orthodontic work in this era, but he's sure he can find someone who can do something about whatever nature is trying to do in there.
Despite his frustrations and complaints, Sayuri is athletic, bright, extremely talented at almost everything, and exceptionally gifted in all the areas he needs her to be. Her progress with her technique is slow-going, but part of that is because Sukuna decided not to tell her about Blue, Red, and Purple.
Sukuna feels like Limitless has vast potential beyond those skills, and that she's smart enough that she'll eventually figure out how to cook on her own. With a technique as abstract and complex as Limitless, this will slow her down from acquiring powerful skills, but he thinks the skills she develops will be more interesting and powerful.
Besides, he can guide her development of those abilities.
It's a good morning, his spirits are lifted, and he no longer wants to murder-suicide himself and the brat.
After conditioning, some martial arts training, a little archery, and a little practical sorcery outside, he's in such a good mood.
"…but really, how do you swim? Do you sort of crawl across the water like a bug, or use all your arms at the same time like a boat with two sets of oars, or what? Now that I've thought about it, I can't stop. I need to see what you look like when you swim."
Sukuna grabs her by the obi and uses his cursed energy to catapult himself quickly from the farm to the lake, and throws her in.
Shoes on, clothes on, all of it. Just throws her in the water.
To answer the question, he swims by extending his top set of arms out in front of him like a person does while diving and uses his lower set of arms to push himself through the water. This is highly efficient and works well. It also leaves his top arms free, just in case he needs to use them for something, like drowning other people who are also in the water.
Sukuna is an incredible spearfishing expert due to this advantage. If they lived by the sea, they'd eat the riches of the ocean.
He's powerful and deadly by land or sea and decides that he'll drag the child to the bottom of the lake. It's dark down there and a bit spooky, and this doesn't constitute harm because building her lung capacity and teaching her how to grapple with an opponent underwater are both quite important to her training.
Sukuna kicks off his sandals and peels off his socks and dives headfirst into the lake, and then prepares to drag Sayuri down, only to find she is bone dry and floating in a little bubble of infinity not far from the surface. It's a complete bubble, and still dry so she's had it up for a few seconds.
He can't simply push the infinity bubble down because it is a momentum-eating field that will absorb any force applied to it, so until she falters, even if he pushes against her infinity, nothing will happen. Not even gravity gets to pull her down as long as she stays like this.
Of course, she can't. It's impossible. The fifteen or so seconds she's kept it up are probably close to her limit.
The size of the bubble changes, and he sees her take a deep breath, knowing he's about to have his moment.
Before he can push her down to the bottom of the lake, the bubble fails, and she swims to the bottom on her own with her strange, unrefined cursed energy wrapped around her legs so she can whip her legs around like a mermaid's fin. It's surprisingly fast, but nowhere near as fast as he was.
Sukuna is surprised she's swimming this deep on her own, but it seems like she's done it before. He sees an eerie green glow suddenly as they go deeper; she's revealed her eyes.
She can see in the dark, but he can't, and maybe when he was annoyed, he didn't consider this because she hurled a rusty propeller blade at him from the bed of the lake and he realizes there's probably a lot of hazardous stuff down there.
He dodges the propeller blade, but when a piece of rebar flies toward him he grabs it. It's long and skinny like a stave or spear so he has no problem handling it under water, and when she makes her next attack, he charges forward and very lightly presses the tip of the dull rebar right between those otherworldly, glowing eyes, a 'this is the moment I can kill you' moment.
They both swim to the surface, and as they get closer to the surface and there's more light, he notes there's a pinkish cloud following her right hand.
When they reached the surface, Sayuri huffed for air, and he says, "Are you bleeding?"
"That's a rude thing to ask a girl."
"Do you even know what that means?"
"No? I just heard my mom tell me not to tell a man if or when I'm bleeding."
"Your mother was talking about something else. She probably wasn't telling you to keep it a secret if you slice your hand open trying to stab someone with a rusty propeller blade."
Sukuna drags Sayuri to the dock and pulls her out of the water by her belt.
She has a large cut across the palm of her hand, and down between her index finger and thumb. Any other kid would probably be screaming in pain and terror, but she had been through worse and knew she could be incredibly reckless around him because as long as she didn't instantly kill herself, he'd just fix her.
He doesn't mind her being reckless like this, even the rate of injury, because when she is fighting, being able to stay calm and not panic at the sight of one's own blood or feel fear or distraction from pain is important.
Being healed using RCT will probably help her master it anyway.
"Three things: don't throw anything at an enemy that they can use as a weapon. And second, unless you can heal yourself, you need to be careful with your dominant hand. This injury sliced through tendons and nerves. If I wasn't here, this could be debilitating. And third, if you ever get injured in fresh water on your own, clean and disinfect the wound and assume you need antibiotics. Lake or river water in open wounds will kill you faster than just about anything."
After he heals the injury and they return to the farm, he finds Yuji Itadori sitting on the porch, looking like he just came from some horrible something or another. It's clear he's come with bad news, although Sukuna would argue that the worst news is having to see Nephew without warning.
"What do you want?"
"We need to talk."
"About what?"
"Yuta Okkotsu is dead."
Sukuna's good mood cracks and shatters; Yuta was arguably the most important person besides Sayuri and himself to any plan to eliminate Alghera, and his disappearance from the world represents a drastic drop in the available power and aptitude for an assault on the Great Curses.
This was basically the worst thing that could possibly happen short of losing the kid.
"Did Alghera decide to kill him for some reason?"
Yuta shook his head. "She's not the one who did it."
In Japan, Alghera is the most powerful being, and Sukuna would rank himself second, and Yuta third, with everyone after that far more distant, although if he was really, really, really honest with himself, Yuta probably belongs in the top tier.
If Yuta died and Alghera didn't do it, he's perplexed about who did, and Yuta's death requires a lot more questions to be asked, like what happened to Rika, who had a reason to kill Okkotsu, what was going to happen to the Jujutsu Society, etc.,
Sukuna opens the door and sends the Sayuri to take a bath.
"Tell me everything that happened."