### The Weaver's Final Loom**
The psychic scream wasn't a sound. It was a violation.
It tore into Yuji's mind, bypassing his ears and etching itself directly onto his consciousness. It was a voice he'd hoped never to hear again—smooth, intellectually curious, and utterly monstrous.
***Acknowledgment: Vessel Ryomen Sukuna. Catalyst: Satoru Gojo. Fuel: The Culling Game. Process: Complete. Commence: The Great Encompassing.***
The words were devoid of triumph. They were a clinical report, a machine confirming its primary function had been achieved. As the last syllable faded from his mind, Yuji's working eye refocused on the sky.
The web was no longer subtle. It was a vast, shimmering tapestry of malignant energy, each thread a condensed scream from the Culling Game, a wisp of Hollow Purple, a fragment of a life extinguished in Shinjuku. It pulsed with a sickly violet-and-black light, casting a grotesque, shifting glow over the ruins. It wasn't just in the sky; it *was* the sky, descending slowly, inevitably, to smother the earth.
A roar of pure, unadulterated fury shook the very foundations of the world.
It came from Sukuna. The smug victor was gone, replaced by a betrayed, primordial beast. His face, all four eyes wide with a rage so deep it was almost awe, was contorted into a mask of utter hatred.
"KENJAKU!" he bellowed, the name a curse that ripped through the air. The ground around him fractured, not from an attack, but from the sheer pressure of his wrath. "You thieving *maggot*! You dare! You dare use me as a *component*!"
He wasn't a king anymore. He was a battery. A glorified ingredient. His ultimate victory, the pinnacle of his power, had been nothing more than the final keystone in another being's design. The boredom he felt moments ago was incinerated in the heat of this new, humiliating anger.
Yuji could only watch, his own despair momentarily frozen by the shocking turn. The villain had been betrayed by a worse villain. There was no satisfaction in it, only a deeper, more profound terror.
*Get up.* The thought was a weak spark in the frozen tundra of his mind. *Get up. Now is the… what? What do I do?*
His body refused to answer.
---
Miles away, deep in a reinforced sub-basement beneath the ruins of Jujutsu High, the air was thick with the smell of antiseptic, blood, and panic.
Monitors flickered, displaying energy readings that defied all known scales. Red warning lights strobed across the room, illuminating the exhausted, terrified faces of the last non-combatants.
"It's not stopping! It's just… climbing!" Momo Nishimiya cried out, her voice cracking as she gestured wildly at her console. Her own injuries were bandaged, but her hands trembled uncontrollably.
"The source isn't localized," Ui Ui said, his usual eerie calm replaced by a sharp, focused anxiety. He frantically patched feeds from observation posts across Japan. "It's appearing simultaneously over every major population center. Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka… New York, London, Beijing. The pattern is identical. It's a coordinated phenomenon."
In the center of the chaos, Shoko Ieiri stood perfectly still.
Her lab coat was stained with blood—some of it hers, most of it not. A cigarette dangled, forgotten, from her lips, its ash growing long. She wasn't looking at the panic around her. Her dark, hollow eyes were fixed on a single primary monitor, watching the energy curve not as a sorcerer, but as a diagnostician.
She saw a pattern the others missed. The initial, massive spike was the battle's end—Sukuna's triumph. But the energy didn't decay. It plateaued. And then, it began to climb again, not from a new source, but as if the existing energy was being… *repurposed*.
"It's a feedback loop," she murmured, the words barely audible.
"What?" Ui Ui asked, turning to her.
Shoko's eyes narrowed. She stubbed out the cigarette on a metal tray already filled with them. "The energy from the battle isn't dissipating. It's being fed back into a pre-existing system. A binding vow on a planetary scale. Kenjaku didn't just want to start a war… he built a damn engine."
Her hands, usually so steady for surgery, shook slightly as she grabbed a stack of ancient, brittle scrolls from a nearby table. They were the last salvaged records from the Zenin and Kamo libraries, retrieved at a horrific cost. She unfurled one, her finger tracing a complex diagram of interlocking circles and cursed script.
"He didn't want to win a battle," she continued, her voice gaining a grim, horrified certainty. "He wanted to change the rules of the world. Permanently. He's using the death of the strongest—Gojo—as the ignition. The mass death of sorcerers and civilians as the kindling. And Sukuna's ascended power as the… the permanent catalyst."
She looked up, her face pale. "He's not creating curses. He's making it so *everything* is a curse. Humanity's negative emotions will no longer *form* curses. They will *be* curses. The human soul itself will be a cursed spirit. There will be no more separation. No more exorcisms. Just an eternal, suffering… encompassing."
The room fell silent. The horror was no longer an immediate threat of death. It was an existential damnation for every living thing.
A static-filled voice crackled from the main comms unit—a line everyone thought was dead.
*"…eiri… an… hear me…?"*
It was Yuta. His voice was weak, ragged with pain, but unmistakable.
Shoko lunged for the console, slamming the transmit button. "Okotsu! Status report! What is your location?"
*"…Alive. For now. Rika is… fading. I see it. The web. I can feel it… pulling."* A wet cough. *"It's eating our energy. What… what is this?"*
"It's Kenjaku's masterpiece," Shoko said, her tone brutally clinical, a defense against the terror. "He played us all. Sukuna most of all."
A moment of static-filled silence. Then, Yuta's voice, harder now: *"How do we stop it?"*
Shoko's mind raced. She looked at the scrolls, at the energy readings, at the horrifying logic of it all. An idea began to form—a terrifying, insane idea.
"You don't attack the web," she said, her voice low and urgent. "It's self-sustaining. Any direct attack just feeds it more energy. You have to reverse the process. You have to break the *loom* itself."
*"How?"*
"It requires a paradox. A reversal curse on the same scale. We need to create an 'antibody' and inject it directly into the system." She laid out the terms with the cold precision of a surgeon describing a terminal procedure. "We need a Vessel capable of containing the reaction. We need a Core technique that can manipulate the soul and reality at a fundamental level. And we need Fuel. A source of power greater than the initial catalyst, offered willingly, to break the cycle."
She didn't say the names. She didn't have to.
The silence on the other end was heavy. When Yuta spoke again, his voice was quiet, calm, and utterly resolved.
*"Tell me where to go, Shoko-san."*
He had already made the choice. He understood the cost. The Fuel would be himself. The Core was the friend trapped within the monster he'd failed to kill. The Vessel was the broken boy who had never asked for any of this.
It was the only way.