The sky above the ruined city didn't just crack; it shattered. A hole of the absolute worst emotions of humanity bled into the cursed city, and from its depths, something was violently ejected.
Not something. Someone.
A meteor of flesh and blood fell from the hole of terror and smashed into the ground with the force of a missile.
BOOM!
The impact created a shockwave of dust and air as nearby buildings shattered, falling like a stack of cards blown away by the air.
At the bottom of the newly formed crater, lay a man as still as a statue. The man was tall, a body composed of dense musculature. He had four arms that laid sprawled at his sides. His hair was an unnatural, pinkish red. Black markings, like intricate tribal tattoos, were etched across his pale skin. His face was unnatural, having two distinct sides. The right side had what seemed like a plate made of flesh having two eyes, while the left looked as though it was another face, also adorning a set of eyes. A secondary mouth, filled with sharp teeth, was slashed across his abdomen. His nails, long and sharpened to a point, were painted a deep, onyx black.
Time seemed to crawl at a snail's pace, the world itself seemed to pause. Then, a single twitch. And suddenly.
Four crimson eyes snapped open.
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My consciousness returned to the familiar comfort of my body. This body was mine, not like the vessels I had inhabited like the brat or Megumi Fushiguru. It was mine. I could feel my immense well of cursed energy coil in my gut. For the first time in what seemed like an eternity, I was whole.
And yet… I was not the same.
A new set of memories had been seamlessly integrated into my own, a full thirty years of a painfully mundane life. It wasn't like a second consciousness was in the back of my head, like how I was possessing a vessel. It wasn't even a secondary soul. It was as though we both were one in the same being, these were my memories.
The last thing I remembered was talking to the patch-faced curse, Uraume at my side as I headed north.
North.
That's right, I had been bested. What a novel concept. A being like me, who had shed every facet of his humanity to reach the peak of existence. My philosophy, built on a mountain of corpses, had been proven flawed by a collective of sentimental fools.
These new memories, they had the one thing I lacked. The one emotion that I had been devoid of to the point I had accepted it as a fallacy. A concept made by the weak to lift themselves up.
Love.
The irony of this was palpable. I had built my life on a single phylosophy–absolute strength achieved through absolute selfishness. But that wasn't all. There was also a litany of pathetic, sentimental weaknesses. The very things I had spent an eternity shedding in pursuit of my perfect existence. I, Ryomen Sukuna, the King of Curses, now possessed a complete understanding of the petty bonds that chained humans to mediocrity.
The old me would have raged at this psychotic poison. But I won't.
My self philosophy had been broken, beaten. While I had won the battle against the Honored One, I had lost the war.
My lips curled into a humorless smile. This wasn't some divine punishment that I had received, nor was it a curse to my existence. It was the answer to the choice I had made, to try and live a different life.
"Well," I murmured, my voice a deep rumble, "let's see where this leads to.
I rose from the crater I had found myself in, my four arms pushing me to my feet. A glint of a familiar metal caught my eye. There, half-buried in the rubble, were what I thought I would ever see again. My two trusty tools that were always by my side–Uraume was more than a tool–Kamutoke the cursed Tokkosho and my favourite, Hiten–the three ponged treasure. With them, I was truly myself. Uraume would be pleased. The thought came unbidden, followed by an echo of sentiment. Annoying.
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I crouched, my muscles overturned like a coil, and then I leaped. The modern- era road shattered into a spiderweb of cracks at the sheer explosive force. I felt the familiar feeling of wind brushing past my face, a genuine smile that I last wore when fighting Okkotsu plastered on my face. I soared hundreds of feet in the air, pushing off the sky as though it was my own playground (air jump).
A minor twist of Hiten pushing the ashy dust of my path, giving me a perfect view of the city below. This level of destruction… It was reminiscent of something I would have done. I landed on the flat roof of a skyscraper, the impact cracking its foundation, and took it all in.
Below, the streets were swarmed with Skeletons, animated by some form of energy unknown to me. A slip of my new memories seemed to surface. Isekai. What a concept. Escapism in its highest form. Yet here I am.
Reborn in another world. What else could it be, unknown energy. Sorcery of some twisted kind. A city cursed to high hell, yet no curses existed.
How marvelous.
New paths to explore. New heights to reach. How could I call myself the strongest if I haven't even mastered everything in existence?
As I watched the skeletons shamble below, another memory flickered. The smell of incense. The somber quiet of a human cremation. The concept of 'respecting the dead'.
The thought was so pathetic that a dry chuckle slipped past me. What an absurd notion. These new memories were going to be an endless source of this kind of pathetic humour.
These skeletons were beneath my notice. Wasting Cursed Energy on them would be an insult to myself. Instead, I let my senses sweep across the city, past this mindless rabble, searching for what could be the cause of all this.
I stretched my senses miles from my vantage point, looking for anything. Then I noticed something. On the bridge about 5 miles from here, three people standing atop what seemed a ritualistic circle. They were pathetically weak, but one of them had this strange feeling about them. As though they were above human, yet not. A living paradox. Curious.
Then I felt it, a presence blaring itself throughout this cursed city. This one was different. It was an inferno of raw, mindless power, a chaotic storm of negative energy. But deep within its core, beneath what seemed endless rage, I could feel a faint, desperate plea. A soul trapped in a storm, begging to be stopped.
Interesting.
My body moved with but a thought, shattering the skyscraper I launched myself towards the bridge. Ready to find some answers.
Getting a closer look, the three figures were human girls. The strange one with what seemed a parasitic existence attached to her had pinkish-purple hair. Wielding what seemed to be a shield too big for her size that gave a strange feeling. Another, with stark white hair, barked commands despite the terror plain on her face–the leader if I were to guess. The third–wait, what is that?
A thread of power, invisible to the naked eye, connected to the readhead to the shield user., flowing from red seals on the back of the redhead's hand. Fascinating. A welder and a battery
My thoughts were cut short by a roar that shook the very foundations of the city. A building at the far end exploded outwards, showering the girls with concrete. The shield user sloppyly blocked the debris.
Then he appeared. The presence I had felt earlier. A colossal giant made of pure grey muscles, easily a foot taller than me, holding what seemed to be a crude stone axe the size of my torso. Pure, unrestrained power rolled off him in waves. He was a walking disaster, a being who existed only to destroy. He was a challenger.
Who was I to deny a dead man his last wish?
I was about to make my move, to intercept and claim the feast for myself, but the giant moved first. With speed that rivaled my own, it swung its axe at the group. The shield user caught the blow, the shield itself holding firm against the impossible force, but the wielder was too weak. She was sent flying like a stone from a catapult, tumbling through the air.
A weapon with the concept of defense woven into it. Something to note for.
I shot forward, a blur of motion tearing through the air, but I was a moment too late for the other one. The giant's follow-up was brutal, a careless backhand. It struck the white-haired girl. Sending her cartwheeling off the side of the bride in the muddy water below. Unfortunate for her. Irrelevant to me.
As the giant raised its weapon to bring it down on the last, terrified girl, I arrived.
I didn't bother with a word or a warning. I simply smashed into the giants side with the full force of my momentum. The impact was titanic. The bridge groaned, its support structure screaming as our combined mass was launched over the side, sending us careening through the air, away from the girls, and into the heart of the burning city.
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The world was a screaming blur of motion as the two beings were launched from the bridge. The four-armed man, the initiator of the collision, twisted his body mid-air, forcing his center of gravity down. He landed first in the wreckage of a city street, a controlled impact that nonetheless shattered the asphalt beneath his feet. The mindless giant was less graceful. It crashed through the facade of a ten-story office building, the sound a deafening symphony of tortured metal and pulverized concrete before the entire structure collapsed in on itself.
Not giving the creature a moment to recover, the pink-haired man sent a volley of invisible slashes toward the cloud of dust, carving the building's corpse to ribbons. A few seconds later, the giant walked out of the wreckage. The shallow cuts across its chest knitted themselves shut, the foul energy that animated it sealing the wounds as if they'd never been there. He was unharmed. In one of his hands, a massive stone axe materialized in a flash of bright motes of light. He was ready.
A savage grin spread across the four-armed man's face. He settled into a loose stance, his cursed tools, Kamutoke and Hiten, held casually in two of his four hands. He wanted to feel this one's strength with his own flesh first. The giant roared, a mindless sound of pure rage, and charged. The man met him halfway.
The ground between them exploded.
The giant's axe, swung with enough force to level a mountain, screamed towards its target's head. The four-armed man didn't dodge. He met it with a reinforced right fist. The sound was like a thunderclap. The jagged stone edge tore into his knuckles, grinding against bone, but the force of his punch stopped its momentum cold. Before the giant could press its advantage, the man's other free hand snapped up in a vicious uppercut that rocked his opponent's jaw, lifting the behemoth a full inch off the ground.
Seeing the stumble, the man pulled his bloody right fist back, the torn flesh and shattered bone knitting back together in an instant, and prepared to drive both his free hands into the giant's chest. But the creature was fast. Its axe seemed to hang in the air, forgotten, as both of its massive hands came up to block the two-fisted strike. The ground cratered beneath them from the sheer force of their collision. Then, just as the giant put its full weight into the exchange, the four-armed man let up completely.
Expecting resistance, the giant stumbled forward, its immense momentum now working against it. In that moment of imbalance, Hiten swung in a low, vicious arc, the trident's prongs smashing into its knee. Bone crunched. The giant bellowed in pain and crashed to the ground. The man moved to capitalize, but the beast, in a feat of impossible acrobatics, used its massive arms to throw itself into a handstand, lashing out with a kick. The kick was a blur, grazing its target's chest with enough power to send him sliding back several meters, his sandals carving twin furrows into the broken street.
They both reset, eyeing each other across the wreckage.
This time, the four-armed man brought his weapons to the fore, holding them in his upper two hands. His lower two hands were held back, palms open, ready. The giant seemed to understand the shift in tone. It got into a low running stance and charged again.
It came at him swinging the blade in a high, vertical arc meant to split him in two. The four-armed man caught the haft of the weapon with his two lower hands, the impact sending tremors through the entire city block. The giant was strong. It used its height, towering over him, putting all its weight down through the axe, trying to crush him. His knees began to buckle under the strain.
Smiling, he lashed out with Hiten in his upper left hand. The trident's prongs stabbed deep into the giant's thigh, punching clean through the dense muscle and pinning its leg to the concrete beneath. The creature screamed in agony and fury, and for a split second, the pressure on the axe lessened.
That was all he needed.
He shoved the axe aside and drove his upper right fist, the one holding Kamutoke, directly into his opponent's chest. A sizzle of black lightning erupted from the vajra. The giant's entire body seized, its muscles locked by the high-voltage curse. With it stunned, he spun on his heel, a roundhouse kick connecting flush with the side of its head with the sound of a wrecking ball hitting a cathedral.
But the beast was not done. Even as the kick sent it stumbling, it reacted on pure instinct. With a roar that shattered the windows of a distant building, it ripped Hiten from its own thigh, ignoring the spray of gore. In the same motion, its other arm came around in a savage backhand. The four-armed man brought three arms up to block, leaving the one with Kamutoke back, but the force was still unbelievable. He was blown back several steps, skidding across the rubble. The giant then roared and hurled the trident at him like a javelin. He caught it with three hands, the kinetic energy forcing him back even further. By the time he had grounded himself, the gushing wound in the giant's leg had already sealed itself shut.
Both fighters reset for the next round. The giant stood ready, axe in hand, while the four-armed man lowered himself into a low, predatory stance.
The giant charged. The man waited. Just as the beast neared, he slammed one of his free hands onto the street. An invisible blade of Cursed Energy erupted from the ground beneath the giant's feet. The street cracked into a spiderweb, and the beast, its footing completely destroyed, went tumbling forward. The four-armed man was ready. Reinforcing his lower two arms with the maximum output of his Cursed Energy, he met the tumbling giant with a brutal one-two punch. The first fist was blocked by a hasty, desperate guard.
The second landed flush on the giant's chest. Space itself seemed to distort for a fraction of a second as a flash of black-red energy erupted on impact. A Black Flash.
The giant was sent flying, rocketing backwards through the air like a cannonball. Not letting up, the man pointed Hiten at the airborne figure. A targeted, hyper-compressed gust of wind shot from the trident, a "beam" of pure air that smashed into the giant and sent it soaring even higher. To finish the combo, he held Kamutoke aloft. The weapon cackled with black lightning, and the roiling storm clouds above answered, thundering with sympathetic energy. He brought the weapon down. A bolt of divine lightning, black and jagged, crashed from the sky and engulfed the airborne giant. A blinding flash, a deafening boom.
The first round was decided. The four-armed man leaped into the sky, in hot pursuit of his falling prey.
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For Gudako Fujimaru, the apocalypse had started with cake crumbs.
One moment, she was in the sterile, high-tech command center of a place called Chaldea, trying very hard not to fall asleep during an orientation she barely understood. The next, a sharp slap across her face from the frankly terrifying woman called Director Animusphere echoed through the room.
"Get this buffoon out of my sight!" Olga Marie had shrieked, her face a mask of incandescent rage.
Mortified, Gudako had been "escorted" out. The cute, pink-haired girl from before, Mash Kyrielight, had followed a moment later and guided her through the pristine white halls.
"This is your room, Senpai," Mash had said softly, before leaving.
The first thing Gudako saw upon entering her new quarters was a man with fluffy orange hair lounging on her bed, happily munching on a slice of cake. There were crumbs. On her brand-new sheets.
"Hi there! I'm Dr. Romani Archaman," he'd said with a lazy smile, completely unbothered.
Their conversation was a whirlwind of confusing facts—Romani explaining the "bare-bones" of Chaldea's mission to "preserve the Human Order," a concept so grand it sounded like it came from a cheap sci-fi novel. She was apparently a "Master Candidate," recruited for her "high affinity." It all sounded like nonsense.
Then, mid-conversation, the world shook. A deep, violent BOOM rattled the entire facility. The lights flickered and died, replaced by the angry red glow of emergency klaxons.
"What was that?!" Gudako had yelled.
"That's not good," Romani had said, all traces of his slacker persona gone. He rushed out of the room. "Stay here where it's safe! I have to get to the generators!"
She had followed him anyway. The girl who fell asleep in orientation, the girl who annoyed the Director—she wasn't going to be the girl who just sat in her room while the world ended. She remembered the direction Mash had gone, back towards the command center, and ran.
The pristine white halls were now a vision of hell. Fire licked from shattered walls, and the air was thick with the smell of smoke and burning plastic. It was in the wreckage of a corridor near the command center that she found her.
Mash. Half-crushed under a massive slab of fallen concrete, her uniform torn, her face streaked with tears as she cried softly.
"Mash!" Gudako scrambled over the debris, trying to get a grip on the slab. "I'll get you out!"
She heaved, but it wouldn't budge. The concrete was hot, searing her palms, and she pulled them back with a hiss of pain. It was hopeless. She couldn't move it.
"Senpai..." Mash whispered, her voice weak, reaching out a trembling hand. "Please... don't leave me..."
Tears blurring her vision, Gudako did the only thing she could. She knelt in the burning rubble and took Mash's hand, holding it tight. "I'm right here," she promised, her own voice cracking. "I won't leave."
Then, a brilliant white light. A feeling of being pulled apart and stitched back together in an instant.
She awoke to the acrid smell of a different fire, under a blood-red sky, a city of flames stretching out before her.
Mash was there too, no longer injured, but clad in a strange, form-fitting armor and carrying a massive shield.
"I am a Demi-Servant," Mash had said, her voice now filled with a strange, new confidence. "I will protect you, Master."
Gudako's world had been a cascade of impossible facts ever since. They found the Director, Olga Marie Animusphere, wounded but alive, whose sheer terror was eclipsed only by her screaming frustration. She had barked orders, leading them through the ruined streets. Their destination: the great Fuyuki bridge.
"It's a leyline!" Olga had explained, her voice frantic. "A place of power! If we can get a connection, we can contact Chaldea!"
The brief, crackling communication with Dr. Romani had only painted a grimmer picture. Chaldea was in ruins. Forty-seven other Master Candidates were in critical condition. "You, and Fujimaru, are all we have left," the Doctor's strained voice had echoed from a high-tech bracelet on Olga's wrist.
The news had hit Gudako with the force of a physical blow. Those forty-seven people… they were dying because they weren't her, because she'd somehow, impossibly, survived. Olga, her face pale but set with a grim resolve, had ended the call.
She knelt, using a piece of sharp metal and a drop of her own blood to hastily scribe a glowing, complex circle onto the bridge's pavement. "We have no choice," Olga stated, her voice tight with concentration. "We must call forth a Heroic Spirit—a Servant. A champion from humanity's history to fight for us."
Hope, a fragile, desperate thing, had begun to bloom in Gudako's chest. A real hero? Someone who could actually fight and save them from this nightmare?
As Olga finished the final line of the circle, A building at the far end of the bridge just... exploded. Not a hero. That wasn't a hero coming out of the smoke. It was a monster. A giant thing made of gray muscle, all twisted and wrong. It was holding a huge, jagged piece of stone that looked like an axe. It let out a roar, a sound so loud it felt like it was shaking the bridge apart.
"What… what IS that thing?!" Olga screamed, her face draining of all color.
The giant moved with a speed that should have been impossible. Mash met its charge, her shield held high. The impact was titanic. Gudako watched in horror as Mash was thrown aside like a ragdoll. The monster's follow-up was a brutal, careless backhand that struck the Director, sending her cartwheeling off the side of the bridge with a scream and a sickening splash.
Gudako was alone.
The giant, the Berserker, turned its burning red eyes on her. It took a single, ground-shaking step, raising its massive stone axe. Time seemed to slow. Gudako was frozen, a small, insignificant thing in the path of a natural disaster. The axe began its descent.
She was going to die.
And then, a blur of pink and black that Gudako couldn't even properly perceive smashed into the giant's side. The two beings were launched from the bridge in a titanic collision that sent a shockwave blasting back at her. She was thrown from her feet, landing hard on the pavement.
She pushed herself up, her ears ringing, and crawled to the edge of the shattered bridge. Down in the heart of the city, a battle of titans was raging. One was the gray-skinned giant. The other... she couldn't see. All she could see were the flashes of their battle, shockwaves of force that continued to rock the very foundations of the city.
Gudako Fujimaru, the girl who fell asleep in orientation, was alone on a broken bridge in the middle of hell. She was alive. A raw, ragged sob of relief and terror tore itself from her throat. She was alive. For now.
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I landed silently on the edge of a deep, smoking crater. At the bottom, sprawled amidst the wreckage of a collapsed skyscraper, was the giant. It rose to its feet, slower this time, a low growl rumbling from its chest. Its regeneration was sluggish now. The charred, blackened wound where my divine lightning had struck was knitting itself together with agonizing slowness, the foul energy that fueled it finally showing signs of strain.
He was slower. Weakened. It was just the opening I needed. I didn't wait.
The giant roared and charged, a predictable, headlong rush. This time, I moved inside his clumsy axe swing. My lower right hand, a blur of motion, deflected the stone weapon, sending it wide. My lower left caught his other arm, halting his momentum with a wrenching twist. As the blackened flesh on his chest finally sealed itself shut, I drove the bladed end of Kamutoke into the fresh scar tissue, and with a thought, discharged a focused blast of pure Cursed Energy.
Electricity erupted from the inside out. The giant's body locked up, every muscle spasming uncontrollably. Seizing the advantage, I pulled my lower hands back, planting my feet and driving my two now-free upper palms into his chest in a powerful double thrust. I didn't need distance.
"Cleave."
The word was a quiet command. His chest didn't just get cut; it exploded, a perfect, donut-shaped hole of absolute nothingness appearing where his heart should have been. The force of the blow sent him stumbling back ten meters, but impossibly, he was still standing, his monstrous vitality refusing to let him fall.
Normally, I would have found this amusing. Commendable, even. Instead, my four eyes narrowed. I had been focused on the raw power, on the flesh, but now, with his body broken and his energy reserves faltering, I could finally perceive the soul within. It was that desperate plea I had sensed from the beginning. It was not a mindless beast. It was a prisoner. The consciousness was trapped, sealed away under a thick, corrupting layer of this world's foul energy, forced to watch as its own body raged.
My mind flashed back to an irritatingly recent memory. Trapped inside the brat's body, a passenger to a fate I could not control.
I knew this feeling.
The new, sentimental memories offered a word for this sensation: sympathy. How utterly distasteful. And yet... the intellectual conclusion was the same. To continue fighting this puppet was pointless. The real opponent, the one who had corrupted this warrior and stolen his will, was not here.
The old me would have kept fighting, would have dissected this creature piece by piece to understand its unique form of immortality. The me that had chosen to go North decided this charade was over.
I planted Hiten into the cracked street, its prongs digging deep. I placed Kamutoke's shaft between my teeth. My lower hands formed a familiar sign—Enma's palm. My upper right hand, fingers splayed, pointed directly at the still-recovering giant. My two mouths began the incantation.
From my main mouth: "Scale of the Dragon."
The giant finally finished healing the gaping hole in its chest and started to lumber towards me again, its movements sluggish.
"Recoil."
Its charge regained some of its mindless fury, driven by the corruption.
"Twin Meteors."
Just as the giant was about to reach me, my abdominal mouth spoke the final word of the chant: "Dismantle."
It wasn't a physical cut. The invisible slash I unleashed was a conceptual blade, aimed not at flesh, but at the bonds of power. It sliced through the link between the warrior's soul and the corrupting energy that shackled it.
The giant stopped dead, its axe clattering to the ground. It began to convulse, a horrifying war playing out beneath its skin. The slate-gray of its flesh started to lighten, returning to a more natural, tanned hue, before the dark corruption began to bleed back in, fighting for control. It wouldn't last. The shackle had been broken, but it would soon reforge itself.
I admired his resilience. His strength was real, not just a product of this curse. "A fine vessel for such raw power," I said, my voice low and filled with genuine respect. "You were an excellent appetizer. I would have enjoyed a true battle against you, warrior, not this mindless husk."
Ending his misery was the only logical, interesting thing left to do. It was… a kindness. Another bizarre new sensation.
I pulled Kamutoke from my mouth. My upper left and lower right hands clasped together. As I pulled them apart, my abdominal mouth intoned the command.
"Fuga."
Cursed Energy ignited, coalescing between my hands. Not lightning this time. Pure, unadulterated flame, condensed into a searing orb, a miniature sun born of my own power. I formed it into the shape of an arrow.
The warrior—the true soul, now momentarily free—stopped convulsing. He stood, broken and exhausted, but his will was his own. He looked at me. And for the first time, he smiled. A warrior's smile, one of acceptance and gratitude.
I took aim. The sun descended upon the city.
The arrow struck, and there was no explosion, only an all-consuming silence as the white-hot energy incinerated everything in its blast radius. The warrior, his corrupt shell, and his trapped soul were erased from existence, a final act of purification.
When the light faded, there was only a molten, glass-lined crater where he had stood. The battle was over. I stood for a moment, a contemplative expression on my faces, and then reached down, pulling Hiten from the scorched earth.
My gaze drifted upwards, to the roiling, blood-red sky of this strange, new world. This... was going to be an interesting life.
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Author's Note
Hello everyone, and welcome to the reboot of A Cursed King's Adventure.
First and foremost, I want to address why we're starting fresh. This reboot is happening for two main reasons. Firstly, as was correctly pointed out by @makensentai1 (FFN), the original opening of Chapter 1 shared too many structural and tonal similarities with A Ghost in a Strange Land, a fantastic fic that I admit I drew a great deal of inspiration from. The line between homage and rehash can be a fine one, and in my previous attempt, it felt a bit too much like something generated from a template. This new version is my definitive take on this story's beginning.
Secondly, a note for @yesyesyes1212 (FFN) and everyone else who felt the same: I will not be making the mistake of repeating entire scenes from another character's point of view. The narrative structure from here on out will be more dynamic and progressive. Your feedback was heard and has been crucial in reshaping the story's flow.
I also wanted to give a quick shout-out to the YouTuber Sensible Saiyan. His in-depth analysis of DBZ fights, focusing on that moment-to-moment choreography, was a huge inspiration for the combat scenes this time around. Do let me know how you feel about the fights in this new version; I tried to make them feel more tactical and visceral.
For my amazing supporters on Patr-eon, the original A Cursed King's Adventure will remain up for archival purposes, but I will be uploading the first six chapters of this reboot by Friday night. Thank you, as always, for your incredible support. If you'd like to join and get early access, you can do so at: patr-eon . Com / st_scarface
Going forward, the official upload schedule for new chapters will be every Saturday.
Thank you all for your understanding and for joining me on this new journey.
Ciao.