Curse of Ignorance Ch 11
The next day, I woke up, did my usual morning routine, and walked down the stairs to find my parents putting their shoes on by the front door, getting ready to go out to work. Mom spotted me coming down and smiled. In a cheery voice that filled the entire room, she spoke. "Good morning, Kei!"
With a voice deepened from being pretty much freshly woken up, I mumbled a "Good morning" back to her. With that, I turned to the direction of the kitchen in order to get some breakfast in me.
"Wait a moment, Kei!" Mom called out to me. "Do you know how we usually tell you to go to Mrs. Fujita if you run into any trouble and need something?"
"Yes," I nodded.
"Well, Mrs. Fujita suddenly went on vacation. I think she said she was going to Malaysia? The conversation went by so quickly, but she said that she was the ten millionth customer for some product, so they gave away an all expenses paid vacation for the entire summer. This really snuck up on your father and I, because she won the prize just yesterday and she has to leave today to catch the plane. She only just told us this morning, and I thought, 'Does this make sense?' because what kind of company just springs that on you? I told Mrs. Fujita as much, that this was suspicious and she shouldn't go, but she just told me that 'No, this is a really respected company that does giveaways like this all the time', so I really couldn't convince her. Did I tell you the conversation went by really quick? Because it really did—I was busy getting ready for work and Mrs. Fujita was packing for her trip, so there really wasn't much time to talk—"
Mom's deluge of words was cut off by Dad placing a hand on her shoulder. "Dear," he said. "We have to go in a second, so tell Kei the most important parts first. You can talk to him more after we get back from work."
Mom nodded. "Right! Kei, since Mrs. Fujita won't be available, if you ever have something that urgently needs an adult, call one of us, okay? I left a note on the kitchen table with our work phone numbers, which you should keep somewhere where you'll remember if you ever need it."
And with those parting words, they left for work.
I was left standing there a little dumbfounded, pondering the implications of this news. I think that it's pretty safe to say that this unexpected vacation was arranged for by someone in the jujutsu world. The timing is just too suspicious. It had to be part of the method that they cooked up to mitigate her suspicion. Mr. Aizen using his curse technique was one part, and this sudden vacation is the other.
But what does it accomplish? My mind ran through the possibilities. The first thing that came to mind was my own recent experience with Mr. Aizen. Maybe there is someone in Malaysia that the person who planned this wants Mrs. Fujita to make contact with? Someone with a helpful innate curse technique, maybe. But what kind of curse technique would be needed in this situation? Mrs. Fujita's suspicion of me is already drowned out by hatred. The only real issues I can find with the current situation are that the effect of Mr. Aizen's technique is temporary and that Mrs. Fujita has the memory of seeing me kill the curse at all. If the hypothetical sorcerer in Malaysia had a memory erasure technique, then there would be no need for Mr. Aizen to come and use his technique at all. So some sort of technique that makes temporary effects permanent? My instincts say that something like that would be very powerful. However, you can't get something from nothing. This means that the greatness of this hypothetical technique would come with an equally great price. Would whoever planned this be willing to pay that price for a situation that's basically solved already? I didn't think so. Reaching a dead end on this train of thought, I considered other possibilities.
Maybe it's not the "going to Malaysia" part that's important, but the "leaving Japan" part? Maybe the purpose of this vacation was just to separate Mrs. Fujita from me? Looking at it this way, I could see multiple benefits to this move. One, it prevents me from interacting with Mrs. Fujita and thus, prevents me from breaking my binding vow. Two, it prevents Mrs. Fujita from seeing me, decreasing the chances of her thinking about me, which decreases the chances of her thinking about her strange encounter with me. Of course, thanks to Mr. Aizen, even if Mrs. Fujita does think about that moment, she would have to push through the feelings of irrational hatred towards me and grasp that sense of vague suspicion in order to put the secret of Jujutsu Society's existence in danger. So all in all, it diminishes chances which are already miniscule. Putting it that way I feel a bit less confident about this idea, but maybe that's just me not giving this secrecy thing the level of importance that the people in charge have. To me, it feels kind of crazy to be spending so many resources on diminishing an already unlikely event, but maybe to them, it is putting completely justified effort into preventing the collapse of the world as they know it.
Having giving myself a satisfying enough explanation for the unexpected news I received, I went to eat breakfast.
News of Mrs. Fujita's sudden vacation wasn't the only surprising thing that happened today. This second event happened when I was doing my daily training.
Since yesterday was physical training, today was a day for cursed energy control. I was sitting cross-legged on my bed, feeling for the cursed energy inside of me. To my surprise, I could sense it very clearly, much more clearly than just a few days before. If I had to describe it, it was like I had given my sense for cursed energy glasses that fixed its farsightedness. It was much easier to tell where my cursed energy is or isn't. The borders of my cursed energy became much more defined to me, where before they were hazy.
All thoughts of training left my mind. I needed to figure out what caused such a drastic change to my sensing ability first. Well, it's not too hard to figure out. The only recent event that stands out is my encounter with Mr. Aizen. I can almost certainly say that my increased capability stems from that. The real questions are: "What exactly caused this?" and "What are the implications?".
The cause probably is not Mr. Aizen's curse technique. He said that its effect was strengthening feelings of hatred in order to produce cursed energy which he harvested for his own uses. He didn't say anything about increasing sensitivity to cursed energy. While it's possible that he just left it out of his explanation of his innate curse technique, that's not considering the reason why he was explaining his curse technique to me in the first place. It was all for the sake of activating his binding vow, Revealing One's Hand, in order to gain more cursed energy with which he can activate his extension technique. If increasing the sensitivity to cursed energy of a target was really a part of Mr. Aizen's curse technique, he might as well have explained that part too, since there is no downside and only benefits, since he gets more cursed energy to work with.
If its not the curse technique, then it must be the large amounts of cursed energy that he had to build up in order to use his curse technique. Certainly, there was enough concentrated in one place that I was feeling pressure weighing down on me just by being near it. Who's to say that feeling like the air is pressing down on me is the only effect? I don't know for sure, but it seems at least somewhat reasonable that exposure to large amounts of cursed energy increases sensing ability. By being so close to so much cursed energy, it seems that what cursed energy feels like has been burned into my subconscious and when I look for it, I can now find it better within myself, or something along those lines. Seems plausible enough.
So now that I know that being exposed to large amounts of cursed energy could potentially increase my sensing ability, what am I going to do about it? After thinking about it a bit, I concluded that I could do… nothing with this information. The only person with which I could replicate the circumstances under which my sensing ability increased is Mr. Aizen himself. No one else I have encountered before this has made me feel that great pressure brought about by sheer cursed energy, not any of the teachers or Gojo Satoru, the genius of our generation.
And even if I asked Mr. Aizen to subject me to that pressure again, would he even be able to? He built up his cursed energy by taking advantage of his Revealing One's Hand binding vow and revealing information about his innate curse technique to me. That information is known to me now, and can't be used to activate his binding vow. So, it's very likely that he wouldn't be able to accumulate enough cursed energy to improve my sensing further.
Even if he somehow was able to accumulate enough cursed energy, would he be willing to do so? I don't think so. Judging by his initial words to me, he's a busy guy. That makes sense, if he's constantly taking care of cases like these. So, I would need to give him some sort of benefit for him to do this favor for me to make up for the time he would be using. I had no resources to provide him with such a benefit.
The only thing I could really do was make the most out of this unexpected boon. My increased sensing ability should make fine control much easier. This means that I need to adjust my training plans on that end. Since my control has improved, I can probably dedicate less time to it, seeing as I now have quite a bit more control than what is required for the techniques I currently know how to perform. Using that free time, I should probably try to figure out a technique that requires a bit more finesse. That was the entire point of training cursed energy control, after all. It was to prepare for the future where I would need to use those sorts of techniques that required more control. Well, the future is now, albeit a bit earlier than scheduled. Originally, when I was creating my training plans, I was acting under the assumption that when the time came, I would have a technique to use my new skills on. Obviously, that did not turn out to be true, so I was going to have to brainstorm a bit.
The first idea that came to mind was that off-handed remark from Mr. Amano. He mentioned something called a "Curtain", something that is supposed to put up before any fighting takes place. Since it's something that needs to be used before every single fight, it is probably something that is learned by all sorcerers. So, it would be nice to get a head start on learning it. However, I almost immediately dismissed any possibility of learning it. Based on the name and how it was brought up as something that prevented situations like mine, where someone witnessed the exorcism, I can guess that the technique is something that hides fighting somehow. This end goal isn't really helpful, though, when I haven't the slightest clue on how to make cursed energy do anything close to that. I can already predict that trying to go down this route would just have me bashing my head against a brick wall, so it's a no go.
My other, more plausible idea is to try to create a shikigami, which at the very least has been covered in class before, though not in too much detail. Shikigami are creatures that a sorcerer can create or summon, either through the use of a ritual or an innate curse technique. For sorcerers, shikigami can serve as scouts or extra fighters, which is undeniably appealing. The drawback, though, is that shikigami, being creatures who are alive only thanks to cursed energy, a byproduct of negative emotions, have a tendency to disobey or even attack their master. The solution to this is a secondary taming ritual, which shouldn't be too hard. It's basically a binding vow between two parties, which I know how to do and have done before in the past, even. The terms would be along the lines of: I get your service, you get… continued existence? Something like that. All I need to do is somehow figure out how to enforce those terms on something that's not smart enough to agree to a binding vow using a ritual. Easy.
The real hard part is the creation ritual, since I have no reference point for how to create life using cursed energy. On the bright side, though, I have several things to guide my way. The first is the fact that shikigami are known even to normal people, as a being of folklore. I can try to research if any records of the rituals used to summon shikigami are available and try them myself. Every rumor has a grain of truth and all that, and since I know shikigami are real things, there's a good chance that the rituals recorded have some aspect that is used in the actual jujutsu rituals.
Secondly, I have my newly increased ability in sensing my own cursed energy. Since cursed energy is the source of all jujutsu, logically, the rituals for creating shikigami must do something to cursed energy. So, when trying out the rituals recorded in books from the mundane world, if I sense that my cursed energy has changed in any way, then I know which portions of the rituals are legitimate and can follow those threads until I have a complete, successful ritual. Once the threads I can follow have been found, it's just a matter of trial and error, which I'm no stranger to.
Okay, I had a plan. Now all I need to do is follow through.