There's a cat in his room. He can see snow outside the window, but it's toasty and warm inside, especially with a giant orange cat laying on him.

His name is Ganymede, and one day, he followed Sayuri home from the settlement and just entered the house like he lived there, and she let him. They both just sort of acted like he had been living there all along.

Ganymede is the Official Private Masseuse to the King of Curses according to Sayuri, and Sukuna tolerates him better than most critters because he likes to sit with Sukuna while he watches wrestling, and he will sometimes slay spiders and bring them to Sukuna to as offerings.

Sukuna fell asleep on his belly, so this morning, he awakes to the cat sitting on his back, purring and kneading his shoulders. It's quite relaxing, actually, and once he's been gently awoken by Ganymede, the cat jumps down and finds something to play with on the floor.

A dead wasp.

Sukuna has no idea where he found it, but presumably, there are more of them in his room.

In response to the Kyoto Child Brawl that happened in May, Sayuri seemed initially unbothered even though everyone else was mad at him.

But the next morning, he woke up to one of the halves of Wormhole roaring directly over his bed and exactly one second later, a massive wasp nest that was roughly as tall as Sayuri was hurled directly at him as he lay in bed.

There were thousands of huge angry wasps trapped in his room, and he couldn't dispose of them using cursed energy without damaging that part of the house.

He had to leave through a window, and, he estimates, he was stung more than five hundred times, in his eyelids, inside of his nose, in his ears, and any other place adventurous wasps could travel under his yukata.

Sukuna healed himself instantly, but even with healing ability, it is still better to not get stung five hundred times by wasps first thing in the morning.

It's been more than seven months, and he still finds little dead wasps around his room now and then.

He gets rid of the wasp and carries the cat downstairs, cradled like a baby because that is how Ganymede prefers to be carried.

Cats live for fifteen or even twenty years when they're cared for, so sometimes he thinks about how Ganymede will probably still be alive when the world changes and the kid leaves this house for good.

December 24, 2035 is currently 2,166 days away, or 5.9 years, from the current date of January 18, 2030, and Sayuri has begun her eleventh year on earth. Het met her 1,161 days ago on November 14, 2026.

The expanse of time between November 14, 2026 and December 24, 2035—the duration of all the time that she will stay with him—is 3,327 days.

The time from when the Being spawned to when they will destroy it will last from December 24, 2018 to December 24, 2035, a 6,209 days and he has already passed through 4,043 of those days.

With all of this inconsideration:

The period he will be restrained by the Being is basically two-thirds over.

The period he will spend with Sayuri is already one-third over.

Sukuna has never counted days before, as time has never mattered much to him in the first place. He's not sure why his brain wants to do it now; maybe he wants encouragement that he's served most of his prison sentence, but these calculations don't make him feel better.

While he likes his farmhouse and it's been a fine place to wait this horrible time out, he looks forward to the day he will leave it behind. He truthfully doesn't plan on returning once they go to fight, because he will be free then and will no longer need this ordinary life to keep him occupied.

Ganymede always waits for them whenever they go somewhere, and unless something happens to him, he'll probably still be around on a day that they leave and never return.

He wonders how long Ganymede will wait for them on the porch before he walks back to the town to find someone else to move in with?

Back after the child brawl, when Maki was yelling at him about inciting children to engage in 'barbaric boy behaviors,' she told him that even if he pretended that he was just being messy for fun, she knew that he had committed an act of willful vengeance. He wanted the kid to be humiliated and to lose his standing with the other kids and have to deal with that because he had done that to Sayuri.

"Vengeance is a crime of passion."

She told him that if he found something he was that passionate about, it proved that he could be satisfied by something besides mindless violence, and that when the time came, he could make a different choice.

Did he want to see Sayuri grow up? Talk to her when she was a fully-fledged adult, in her twenties and living her life happily?

Sukuna was curious, but he was not more curious than he was bloodthirsty, and he told her that there were arguments that might sway a man's actions, but never any that would change his character.

Sayuri was not a magical being that would turn him into a different person. Modern people are such suckers for redemption arcs, but he's not a character in a silly story.

He dresses and heads downstairs, where Sayuri is pouting as a pastime over recent changes to their household.

Nagisa, the most beloved servant, left the house to get married.

The servant who tutors her in regular academics, Shiori, was very gradually warming up to Sayuri until she saw the kid use Wormhole out in the backyard, and now she's obsessively fascinated by the idea that there is a person just living in the world that can manipulate the laws of physics. For someone who was an astrophysicist in the old world, her curiosity and obsession are intense, and their studies are veering toward her specialty.

They have a new chef and farmhand, a deaf man named Miyagi. His deafness doesn't seem to affect him in any sort of way that interferes with work, and he's a good cook.

Sayuri pledged to learn sign language so she could talk to him, but the only sentence she knows how to sign is, "Please leave me alone and let me work."

Sukuna has an agreement to loan her to the Jujutsu Society for one month in the spring so they can use Six Eyes to hunt the first and special grades in the Tokyo metro. The agreement is that she will stay with Yuji and wife and he will be her primary handler.

He truthfully trusts Yuji's power a lot more than anyone else's. Special grade curses are no joke, and Sayuri is too young to engage with them, so the hunting party has to use her eyes only. Wormhole might already be superior to many techniques grown sorcerers have, but it is possessed by someone who is simply not old enough to make the kinds of decisions that difficult battles require. And certainly, she wasn't functioning on that level in the first place.

They go into Kyoto together that day, discussing the trip along the way, and Sukuna discovers a Dance Dance Revolution machine has made its way to Kyoto and is currently in a café. She has no idea what this wonderous machine is, but Sukuna knows about it.

They play for an hour, and during that time Ijichi comes into the café for coffee.

It seems to Sukuna like there is a very specific group of people who get weirded out if they see him doing normal things in public.

When they leave, they're walking through an increasingly varied and developing business area when she pauses and asks, "Would it be weird if I got my ears pierced?"

"Do you want to get your ears pierced?"

"I think I do, but am I that kind of girl?"

Sukuna asks, "If you want holes in your ears, you can have holes in your ears. I'm not sure that I understand the question."

She says, "I've been reading a lot of magazines from before. One of them had a personality quiz. It was to see if I was a tomboy, a geeky girl, a girly girl, or a rebel. It said I was a tomboy, and tomboys are rough outside girls who don't wear dresses or makeup. They're not pretty girls like girly girls."

Sukuna is wildly confused about this and requires a more thorough explanation, but discovers that some nine months ago, the brat consumed a silly magazine article telling her what kind of girl she was, and she has been trying to assimilate herself to the tomboy personality type.

He says, "Do you know what an archetype is?"

"Like an example of something?"

"Not exactly. It's more like taking an average number in math, except with humans in some sort of role. To be something like that, fundamentally, is to be average. You should always do whatever you truly want to do. Don't allow yourself to be restrained by anyone or anything. Even if it's a trivial matter, if you limit your heart when it has a desire, it will become weak."

Sukuna takes her to get her ears pierced, and she has some idea in her brain, and gets three in a row on the lobe and one in the upper cartilage on each ear.

She gets injured worse than a little poke on a daily basis, so she is unfazed and spends thirty minutes standing in front of a mirror at the little shop looking at the sparkly little clear studs dotting her ears, twisting her head this way and that way.

He lets her look through the cosmetics at the salvage depot. A few nail polishes, some makeup…she tests some perfumes.

Sukuna isn't sure how much of this stuff is actually going to stick and how much she'll try out and discard.

Sukuna knew from the Kardashians that it apparently wasn't uncommon for women to change how they look on the outside when a change is going on inside.

"Is this a makeover? Are we doing a makeover?"

"Maybe? Would that be weird?"

"You should do whatever you want to."

As they walk around, Sukuna can't help but note how incredibly normal Kyoto is becoming. Back in the beginning, the Kyoto settlement was a couple of hundred people hunkered down in concrete buildings in an area that was less destroyed, living off salvage.

One of the saving graces of so many people dying very quickly was that a lot of stuff was left behind. Dry foods, canned meats, things like that. Obscene amounts of flour and rice.

It evolved from that, to a little farmer's market, to the biggest marketplace in Japan, and now in part due to that, progress is continually happening. There are places that exist for leisure now, different kinds of shops, and more people are moving in very quickly because Kyoto is hurdling something approaching a state that vaguely resembles what was once normal.

Once the fiber connections between the settlements were repaired, things were going to change rapidly for many reasons, one of them being that cell phone towers and fiber networks could be used together, according to the newish government. So if there is a cell tower in Kyoto and one in Shibuya, if there's a fiber connection between them that can carry information, it's possible that a cell phone network could exist.

Additionally, connecting the settlements will allow servers to communicate in various places.

When it became clear that the world was basically about to end, the Japanese government sent a command to its servers to start copying information from a number of places on the internet onto hard drives. The entire contents of Wikipedia, medical and science journals, all kinds of educational resources including online universities, news archives, patent information, engineering and architectural diagrams, movies, music, history books, digital translators, etc.,

This resulted in the creation of a massive collection of hard drives that were sealed in thick, airtight plastic and stored in a dry, dark vault underground.

The internet was a hulking behemoth when billions of people were using it, but there aren't billions of people anymore so the infrastructure required to start it again wasn't as great either.

Through limited satellite comms with other places, different places in the world fared about as well as Japan, and there's been a global population drop of 99.9% compared to 2018, meaning there are maybe eight million people living on the entire planet. Over four times that many people used to live in Tokyo alone.

They're not going to go extinct, but they certainly came close.

Sukuna realizes he's incredibly bored when he catches himself thinking about all of this, but the brat is doing whatever she needs to do. There is a lot of stuff that she's decided to get, and he doesn't care at all. This process is simply puzzling to him.

He does stop her at one point and puts a lipstick from her shopping bag back onto the display.

"Probably not that. I don't really care if you want to look any sort of way, but if you put red lipstick on a rusty bear trap, multiple men in this town would try to have sex with it, even after hearing that it was only a bear trap and that bad things keep happening. Each man would say, 'She won't snap my genitals off, these other men just didn't know how to romance her.' You can pop a grown man like a zit, so I don't think you'd be in any danger, but it would be annoying."

She laughs.

"It's actually not a joke."

They go on to a massive warehouse with all kinds of clothes that were salvaged from warehouses. It's a smattering of everything, and he stands bored while she buzzes everywhere like a little bee.

Sukuna isn't sure what he expected; there is a section where children's stuff is, and they passed that because Sayuri is the same height as Toge Inumaki. For some reason, no one else seems to find this as funny as Sukuna does.

She emerges from a dressing room in a little light green sundress. It's not immodest in any sort of way, but it clearly shows that she's got a more feminine form. The bottom is kind of fluffy.

"What do you think?"

"It's the middle of winter?"

"It won't be winter in spring."

"Tell me more, oh Wise One."

Sayuri asks, "Do you think Ryosuke will like it?"

"If you want to tease the boy, tease the boy. He'll definitely like it."

He looks down and asks, "Did you shave your legs?"

"Yes, why?"

"…with what?"

"The bathroom razor."

Sukuna frowns. "There's no such thing as a 'bathroom razor.' What you are talking about is my razor, which I use on my face. Where else has it been?"

"I did my armpits."

"My face razor…went in your armpits."

"My arms too."

Sukuna has a very specific question he wants to ask, but he really doesn't want to hear the answer. "This from the girl who got mad I used her body wash."

"Only one of us can smell like sweet orange blossoms. You don't really look like someone who should smell good in the first place."

He answers, "I'm going along with whatever this weird thing is that you are doing today, and you're being very rude."

"Haven't you ever wanted a new look?"

Sukuna explains, "When a man finds a haircut that doesn't make him look like a retard, he'll keep it for one thousand years."

"We don't say 'retard,' it's insensitive."

"We can't have that. People might start thinking I'm not a kind person."

After their shopping trip, they walk back to the farm, and he finds her little mind is full of all sorts of questions about things she wouldn't have asked a year earlier. In some ways, she seems strangely restless.

When a caterpillar changes into a butterfly, it goes into a cocoon, and according to an explanation he didn't ask for, a lot of crazy stuff happens inside the cocoon. They basically dissolve and rebuild themselves in a different shape, but from the protection of the cocoon, they are never seen in this vulnerable, ugly, messy state.

Humans do their transition to their adult form out in public, as they live their lives, and all the ugliness and messiness is on display for everyone, without the protection offered by the cocoon.

At home, she shows him a picture from an old magazine, and asks, "Can you make my hair like this?"

"Am I a hair stylist now?"

"I'm sorry. I thought you were the guy who cuts things."

"Brat, shut up and go get your hair wet."

A few minutes later, she's sitting on one of the backless stools in the kitchen while he combs through her damp hair with his long fingernails. Her hair is very silky, almost unnaturally so, so it glides through his fingers.

He puts up sections of it and starts to work, holds the parts he's not ready to cut in his top arms while his lower arms comb and cut.

While he starts making little snips, he says, "About what we were talking about earlier: most people's lives have almost no value, and killing one is no different than snatching a fish out of the sea. You can make whatever moral arguments you wish about whether that is something that is right, but you can't escape from the foundational truth that the lives of almost all the humans who have ever lived served no purpose at all.

"Maybe ten thousand people did something extraordinary enough to change the world in some way, the other billions came and went. They produced a little more than they consumed, replaced themselves, and left.

"Society will be presented to you continually as humanity working for common good in the advancement of itself, but in reality, it is a giant machine built by powerful men for their own benefit.

"Somewhere in the back of your mind, I'm sure you have an idea that so-called 'girly girls' are most preferred by everyone in society especially men, and if I asked you to describe how you imagine this type of female, you'd say she dressed pretty, never talked back, forgave easily, apologized when she wasn't wrong, spoke in a soft tone, was squeamish about bugs and easily frightened by danger, someone who can't open a jar or repel an attacker."

The idea that Sukuna knew what a girly girl was…odd.

"I mean, yes? That's basically how I see it."

Sukuna says, "Absolutely none of those things has anything to do with being female. That is the portrait of a person who is weak. Subconsciously, you understand that your place in human society would be better if you were a weak person, but you don't know where that idea came from or why you would believe it so easily.

"How can you let that idea inside of your mind, which can bend the very fabric or reality according to its own will? Other girls your age are being raised so they can provide sex and domestic labor to some inadequate male when they grow up. You're basically a god. The trifling rules of society don't apply to you. The men who control the machine will try their hardest to convince you that they do so they can control you and your power, but it was not given to them. It was given to you, without conditions or limitations or expectations. You can do whatever you want with it. That is your right."

Sayuri genuinely thinks most of Sukuna's advice is actually very good, but taking his advice, there's always an aftertaste of poison, an understanding that Sukuna's thoughts on humanity, while insightful, are tied somehow to deeply twisted nature.

She doesn't think he's trying to make her like him in any sort of way, but she wonders if there's going to be a day where she understands why he is like this and not some other way.

Sukuna is a good teacher, so intelligent, so insightful, and he's actually very fun to be around most of the time.

The fact he's such a terrible person is honestly just a huge waste of everything.

After he finishes cutting her hair, she runs off to mess with it in her room, and Sukuna has a quiet evening watching television. He doesn't really understand the business of changing one's appearance for emotional purposes, but it doesn't seem like Sayuri is doing anything particularly weird for her age.

Sukuna comes downstairs the very next morning for breakfast and finds she is not there. Miyaga informs him with hand gestures that she's eating in her room, and after he finishes his own breakfast, he waits outside in the snow for Sayuri to come out.

She doesn't.

Annoyed, he heads inside, to her room, and is not invited inside.

"Time for conditioning."

"Have fun with that."

Sukuna slides the door open, and finds she is in bed, eating fluffy pancakes with strawberry preserves with her hair still curled from messing with it the night before. She fell asleep with makeup on her face, and there's colorful smears on her face and on the pillow.

"Rough night?" he notes.

"Why are you making fun of me, you monster?"

"Because you look like you went out on a hot date and passed out drunk in a ditch on the way home?" he teases.

She looks up at him and says, "This is why no one likes you."

"Get up and get dressed. We have work to do."

"The only thing I'm doing today is eating these pancakes and staying in my room with the door shut. And while we're on the subject, you didn't ask to come into my room."

Sukuna smirks. "Awww, are you in a bad mood or something?"

"I started my period. Get out of my face unless you want wasps again."

He thought it still wouldn't happen for a while, so it was sort of surprising.

"Did you actually have an existential crisis yesterday because you were hormonal?" he asks.

From her face, he determines that this wasn't the right thing to say.

Sukuna ponders making her get up and work out anyway, and it's not like they can just take one week off every month. Sayuri seems to be in some sort of dysphoric state, and he ponders if it would be worth it. In many cases, it can be more of an advantage to be lenient.

Sukuna says, "I will allow you to wallow in your misery, disgust, and estrogen today, but tomorrow, you have to work out. And don't eat in your room, that's how we get ants."

"That's what you said when I wanted an ant farm, you liar."

She finishes the last bite of her breakfast, and he says, "The least you can do is take your dishes down to be washed."

A little wormhole appears, splits, and one side floats downstairs to the kitchen sink.

When she puts her dishes into the wormhole, they immediately hear the sound of shattering dishes as they fall into the sink on the other side and break.

"Done!" she announces.

Sukuna says, "If you're going to act like that, you deserve to have a bad day. I will be downstairs, watching Wrestlemania. Which you will know because the only way to do that is on maximum volume."

Sayuri answers, "I can't believe there's someone who is sitting somewhere in the world, beaming that shit into space, so it can come to our satellite dish, and gradually make you just a little bit stupider every day," she answers.

Sukuna blinks. "Did you just use a bad word? Am I supposed to wash your mouth out with soap?"

"I'd like to see you try. I bite."

"What are you going to bite me with? Your teeth are so crooked I don't even know how many of them would hit."

"Get out of my room!"

"Next week, you're going to go see someone about that. You better watch how you talk to me, or I'll let you live the rest of your life with teeth looking like that. Ryosuke probably doesn't want a woman with a foul mouth and bad teeth."

Sukuna leaves her and spends his day drinking beer and watching American wrestling, then gets bored and wanders outside to find someone he can use wrestling moves on.

The local sorcerers that were sitting on Kyoto were honestly trash, and the area was basically absent of curses because Sukuna was using Six Eyes to find them and use them as teaching lessons.

Ijichi supervises the locals, and Sukuna heard he was training to become a sorcerer at some point, which implies he probably has a technique and also knows how to fight on some level. He wonders what would happen if he just showed up at Ijichi's office and demanded a friendly scrap.

Probably, Ijichi would shit himself and die.

Sukuna knows the best hand-to-hand brawler is Yuji, and he'd probably have fun practicing a Jackhammer or a Piledriver or giving him an Attitude Adjustment.

Ijichi just doesn't look like he wants to know what a Piledriver is, or to become the victim of one. He just has a certain look about him, so much that the first time Sayuri met him, she was excited and said he 'looked like he knew a lot about science,' something she earnestly intended as a compliment. She was then disappointed when that turned out not to be true, and while Ijichi doesn't know it, that was just another time a Gojo made his life a little miserable.

He wanders around Kyoto, looking at this and that.

Bored.

And so he finds Kiyotaka Ijichi, minding his own business, pathetic little face as alarmed as always about encountering Sukuna in the wild despite the fact he hadn't actually killed anyone from the Jujutsu Society since Gojo.

Ijichi tells himself that everything is fine, there's no reason for him to be concerned if he encounters Sukuna in Kyoto.

"Kiyotaka Ijichi. What is your cursed technique?"

This question made him nervous, and he answers, "I can breathe fire."

Sukuna is a bit disoriented by the answer. "…seriously? That doesn't suit you at all. You're a collection of random twigs wearing glasses."

Pushing his glasses up on his nose, he says, "I get that a lot."

"If I could breathe fire, everybody would know about it," Sukuna answers.

"I'm sure we would."

"It's cumbersome for me to burn people with my technique, but it really is the best way to kill someone. Setting a person on fire is like lighting a scented candle except the scent is always barbeque."

Ijichi withers at this comment and stares, unable to begin to formulate a response.

Sukuna asks, "Do you want to have a friendly scrap?"

"No, I don't think I do. I appreciate your consideration, but I'm afraid I must decline."

Exactly seven seconds later, Sukuna is holding this mysteriously frail man over his head, asking him if he is ready, and no, he's not ready because how could he be ready? Two minutes before, he was on his way to get coffee.

Sukuna slams him into the ground. Attitude Adjustment achieved!

He does not bounce like on tv because a Kyoto sidewalk is not bouncy like a professional wrestling ring, and Ijichi twitches on the ground, murmuring something under his breath as he reaches for his glasses.

This response isn't interesting, and Sukuna simply walks away, unsatisfied, leaving Ijichi to forever wonder why on some random day, Sukuna sought him out, slammed him onto the ground, and left without explanation.

When Sukuna returns home, unsatisfied, things really haven't changed much.

The dark cloud passes after four days like it was never there, and she is back to normal. Mostly.

When spring comes around, she packs a bag and Sukuna drops her off in Shibuya, where she is to spend a month helping them find all the higher grade curses in the Tokyo metro.

Sukuna has laid out the rules very clearly that she's only allowed to leave the settlement with Yuji, both because Yuji is the most capable fighter and the only one who has RCT powerful enough to fix wholesale damage in another person fast enough if something goes wrong. If she stays with Yuji, as long as he doesn't burn out and she isn't killed instantly, a plethora of things can go very wrong, and things will be fine.

This gives him time to work on his own plans to evade his binding vow with Megumi that forbids him from using his stolen techniques, including the somewhat omnipotent Temporal Distortion, on anyone except the Being or the Being's allies. In the same way that the World Cutting Technique was derived from Ten Shadows but not ultimately a product of Ten Shadows, there are ways to 'inform' his innate technique using these other abilities.

Sukuna doesn't feel safe doing this in front of the brat because he has no idea what actually goes on inside of her head. Sukuna wonders if she's developed a powerful sense of loyalty and would keep her mouth shut willingly. With their binding vow, he can order her to tell any lie he wants, but she's someone who will find a loophole if one ever presents itself.

It's also probably equally possible that she's accepted the fact that they're destined enemies, and she's almost inevitably end up in the Jujutsu Society's camp. Keeping him from killing those people has always been in her best interest.

On the other hand, the Jujutsu Society probably also has these reservations. There's no way they aren't trying to figure out if she's wrapped around his finger because he's the one who takes care of her. If they're overtly distrustful of her, it'll increase the possibility that she won't cozy up to them, and all of them want that for various reasons: guilt about how she is being raised, sentiment toward Gojo, and more pragmatically, they all know she's going to be strong.

He doesn't think they'll trust her with any secrets about him, and he doesn't trust her with any secrets about them. It's not even necessarily a matter of intent; like with the case of Yuji's kid, she accidentally bridged a gap and fed Sukuna information that no one wanted Sukuna to have.

It's an interesting situation.

Before leaving Shibuya, he gives Yuji a set of instructions:

"Sayuri has a thin armor made from cursed spirit scales. Make sure she wears it under her clothes if you take her outside the settlement. She complains that it's itchy, being itchy is probably better than being eviscerated.

"She has braces now and if she gets hit without her mouthguard, it rips her mouth apart, but she still hates wearing it.

"If you see her eyeballs and you're not using them for something, make her cover them up. She keeps leaving them out because she thinks it makes her cute, but it makes her tired.

"She menstruates now. She is synchronized with the moon so if you just think of her as a werewolf, it'll be fine. Werewolves are not effective or willing workers, they do not follow instructions or accept constructive criticism. It is best not to acknowledge the fact the werewolf is a werewolf, or question if being a werewolf affects their ability to think rationally."

Yuji listens, but the instructions are also written down on paper.

He kind of wants to laugh at Sukuna, who is vaguely acting like an overprotective parent dropping his kid off at a sleepover with a printed list of everything the child is allergic to, their bedtime, a warning the kid likes to ride her bike without a helmet, and so forth.

Yuji is a man in his late twenties who is married with children, and really already knows how to take care of a kid for a month.

On the other hand, she's not Sukuna's 'kid' at all; he probably views her as the most important possession he has ever owned because she's the golden key that will unlock his cage and loose him on the world again, so he's very particular.

The only reason Sukuna even agreed to let her stay without him there is because he needs secret time away from her to work on his own stuff. Also, he just doesn't want to hang around Shibuya with people he hates who also hate him.

Sukuna has a strange curiosity in the back of his mind, about that baby that lives in this settlement that was born with a face so similar to his. He wants to find Yuji's son and just look at him for some reason.

Yuji seems to know that curiosity might be there too, because he doesn't take his eyes off Sukuna until he leaves the settlement.

Once he leaves, Sayuri settles in and has a few days that go how anyone would have guessed: long days travelling through a sea of ruins looking for curses that are just about everywhere, from underground to holed up in structurally compromised high-rises, crawling out of every crack and crevice.

It's incomprehensible that this place used to be filled with people even though she's seen pictures of it. The world that ended around the time she was born seems like it must have been a strange place, where everyone in the world could access all of human knowledge of any time, but according to Sukuna, they mainly used this power to look at pictures of cats.

The fact that she is being raised by Sukuna and almost everyone believes she has his blood running through her veins always causes a certain amount of disdain in other many people, a fact she becomes increasingly aware of as she gets older, and those gazes become a little more pointed.

People seemed to pity her at first, like she was a victim.

It seems like they're gradually beginning to view her as a willing accomplice, because Sukuna is a well-known person, and it is not a secret that they're often seen in Kyoto getting along well. There are people in this settlement who have tasted the sting of his malice, and it was impossible to ever forget the fact that Shibuya actually sailed through the cataclysm in a mostly unchanged state because it was already abandoned because of Sukuna.

Sukuna tells her that she shouldn't tolerate casual disrespect from anyone she can pop like a pimple, but she doesn't really want trouble with anyone. As was the case with the boy who called her a 'stuck up bitch,' she's content to just ignore many things that Sukuna would fight about.

She mostly has a good time. She enjoys exploring the ruins to some degree, and seeing people who care about her is always nice.

Wearing the little green dress when she walks around Shibuya with Ryosuke is a good memory. There is handholding, and a first kiss.

She spends a lot of time with Yuji's babies, laughing and letting Kyo play fight with her.

He only saw Sukuna that one time, but he was so weirdly amused and obsessed that he started greeting people the same way, putting his hands up like little claws and shouting 'RAAAAAWR!' before breaking out into giggles.

The neighbor thinks he is 'playing monster,' which isn't factually inaccurate.

Sayuri is curious about how to look after a baby, in case she ever needs to know, since Sukuna clearly isn't someone who can teach her. Sayuri has confirmed that Sukuna does not know how to interact with children and has always spoken to her like an adult because he didn't know until fairly recently that adults didn't just say whatever they wanted to kids all the time.

Yuji observes his house guest curiously.

Sayuri is such a strange mystery to them in many ways, and there's a lot of debate within the Jujutsu Society about how Sukuna and Sayuri feel about each other.

There is something fundamentally good about Sayuri, which leaves the inescapable fact that this goodness is being carefully nurtured and protected by a person who is evil in the deepest depths of himself.

Ijichi submits reports to them about whatever they are able to observe about Sukuna in Kyoto, and what they know is that Sukuna is actually very rarely seen by himself. If he goes somewhere, she goes with him.

Sayuri seems like such a well-rounded kid that if Yuji just met her without knowing anything about her, he would assume she came from a very stable and loving family. She even has some behaviors he would call 'Daddy's Girl tendencies' if they occurred in someone else.

Yuji doesn't think it'll change the outcome of anything, but it's clear that Sukuna's path to inhuman cruelty is directly through the deepest part of humanity.

Sukuna is going to do what he's going to do, and everyone knows what that is.

But somewhere, in the back of his mind, Yuji believes Sukuna will experience something…maybe a sense of loss or regret, or maybe his world will just seem a lot darker with the singular source of light missing from it.

It's strange, how they all know how the story will end.

Anyway, their hunts are productive, and followed a routine each day:

Yuji would assemble a team of heavy-hitters, and Sayuri would pre-scout to find an infested area, warping around the ruins of Tokyo like a pinball. Then she would summon them to the location they needed to go, and if she could read any part of their ability, that as well.

She is accustomed to hunting with Sukuna, and they learn from talking with her, that while Sukuna travels with her so she can see as many different techniques as possible to develop her technique-reading ability, they also hunt and he wipes out powerful curses.

When she hunts with Sukuna, he requires her to stay very far away from him in case he opens his domain at maximum range.

Sayuri zips all over the place like Gojo used to, here and there, everywhere and also nowhere, one minute at the top of a building and the next, a block away on the ground.

This probably isn't a difficult task for someone with Limitless, and she is being very carefully hand-raised by the most accomplished sorcerer to ever exist, so it probably shouldn't come as a surprise that she's suddenly beginning to show signs of her power.

Ryosuke has always seemed like he is ahead of her in some way because he was able to transform into his demon dog form very early on, but with Six Eyes and her lightning-fast movements, and the strange and oddly scary Wormhole, she is suddenly the one who is ahead.

The cursed spirit situation remains such a massive task; the plan now is to just get rid of the ones strong enough to disrupt their plans, but there are so many in Tokyo.

It's rare for circumstances to create the correct environment to spawn a special grade curse, so they are rare, but the cataclysm produced those circumstances consistently over the course of about two years. Since cursed spirits are born from negative sentiment that churns in a particular place, the condition for a special grade to be born is 'something horrible happening in a specific place.' The more horrible, the more lives lost, the more powerful a curse can emerge.

Much of Tokyo was evacuated when the cataclysm started and twenty million people still died there, and the ones that were evacuated just died at whatever place they evacuated to.

In addition, much of the destruction in Tokyo was actually done by foreign military powers that thought they could save themselves from what was happening in Japan by bombing the hell out of Tokyo.

But the Being with it's ten so-called 'Great Curses' could only be killed by sorcerers, and no other countries had powerful sorcerers to send.

People formed groups and killed each other over food in grocery store warehouses, hoarded life-saving medicine, fought to the death over locations that seemed safer than others, all while trying to stay alive while the Being went from place to place, killing everyone and controlling whatever cursed spirits were around to help hunt humans.

All of this accelerated both the rate at which cursed spirits were spawning and the power level they were spawning at, until it was a fire that burned out of control until it basically ran out of fuel, with the fuel being people.

A fact often overlooked among sorcerers is that ordinary people couldn't see cursed spirits, so nearly everyone who died was killed by a monster that was invisible to them. Perhaps they heard footsteps, or the sound of glass breaking, or nothing at all until it was too late.

It was horrifying and scary, and being a young sorcerer, incredibly demoralizing. Whatever they tried to do, their efforts didn't even slow down the process. Everything just…slipped through their fingers as the Jujutsu Society, in agreement with their worst enemy, agreed that they wouldn't risk their lives to kill the other spawns because they needed to protect and conserve their strength for whenever they had an attack plan for the Being.

Almost no one's body was properly buried, and since there are over one hundred and twenty-five million of them, it was incredibly commonplace to just see human bones wherever, or if they were in the right conditions, mummified remains, or in the wrong conditions, liquefaction—that scent, that horrifying scent…

The task of burying the dead is so enormous that no one has any expectation that it will ever be completed.

But as the hunting party breaks open a window to enter an old electronics store on one night, Yuji, Maki, and Megumi are greeted by two skeletons, a larger skeleton holding a much smaller one, probably a parent and child, who died in this strange place where they'd evidently been hiding.

They both have gunshot wounds to the head, and there's a gun on the floor, making it seem like the guardian felt it was best to end it all without a fuss. Maybe they'd run out of food, or they were sick, or there were cursed spirits outside.

They are reminded of how cruel and terrible the cataclysm was, and how desperate they are to end this era and move on to whatever will come after this.

The fight just to get back to where they were before seems so tiring most of the time, but they are the ones who were able to survive, and so they continue.

During one night of their hunt, Sayuri feels that presence.

It's not surprising, since the Alghera, the biggest piece of the Being, stayed around Shinjuku and killing curses around that area was the highest priority. It's quite far from her, but it still leaves her feeling incredibly uneasy. When she moves, it moves too, which is scary.

Scary, scary, scary.

Getting caught using Limitless by Alghera is a game-ending and life-ending mistake, but as it gets closer, she can tell the other soul is currently controlling it.

When they return to Shibuya, they end the night like they always do, with a briefing, shower, meal, and then straight to bed.

Except on this night, she slips out, and using her technique, leaves the settlement alone.

She makes her way toward Shinjuku to see if the Alghera was still under control of the other soul, and she is.

Sayuri knew Sukuna would throw an absolute fit if he knew she was walking directly into the jaws of the beast, but when she arrives, she finds Alghera sitting on the steps of a building that was otherwise collapsed.

Darkened eyes look up at her. "You're out of your mind for coming here."

"Anyone still alive in this world has to be a little bit crazy, right?"

Gojo asks, "Are you the same person I sensed at Sukuna's home?"

"Yes."

He then inquires, "Who the hell are you? I've been trying to think of who you might be. I was in this body when the rest of our clan got wiped out. No one was expecting a baby. That's something I would have known about as head of the clan? So where on earth did you come from?"

Sayuri answers, "My mother's name was Ingrid Reksten."

For a moment, his face is frozen, and then it droops into a deep frown as he stands up and slips the sunglasses off her face and reveals two glowing green eyes.

"Well, damn. I don't think apologizing really suffices. I don't really have my human emotions anymore, but I'm sure if I did, I'd feel like shit about leaving you to live in this awful world."

"It's fine. I didn't know anything about you for a really long time, so I never felt any way about it either. To me, you're like a character in a story that other people tell me about."

Gojo asks, "Why were you with Sukuna?"

"I stay with Sukuna. It's to keep me safe, and also so he can train me. It's not a bad situation. Nothing bad is happening to me or anything. I've been all right since he found me," she answers.

Gojo can't really conceptualize this in any sense because it seems nonsensical to him.

"How did Sukuna change the color of your eyes?"

"I actually don't know. I was sick when he found me, and there's some time that I don't remember."

Gojo stares down at her and says, "Disguise aside, you look like me."

"Can you come out of there? Like how Sukuna can move bodies?"

He answers, "Even if it was possible, I don't want to live that way. It's okay for someone to die. The process of dying is scary, and uncomfortable, and it is sad to be left behind when someone dies, but death is okay. It is the last and greatest transition a person completes in their life. It is meaningful and important. I want this monster to perish so that the world can survive, but on a much deeper level, I want the Being to die so that I can finish my journey."

When he reaches out and puts a hand on her head, he adds, "Now that I've been in this state, I believe that Sukuna's soul probably also deeply desires to be completed and to finish its journey. When he says he wants to fight until he dies, what is important is that what he truly wishes for is not life."

She says, "I don't think Sukuna wants to die."

"You'll understand a little better later on, probably. Just remember that and think about it once in a while. It'll make sense to you eventually."

He bends down and says, "Anyway, we don't have much time. I won't be able to help you as you grow up. Our clan is gone. You'll have to find your own way in this horrible world. But I'll tell you my secrets. That's all I have that I can give to you."