The Spirit World, 5th Epoch, The Year 1349
In A chaotic sea mixed with land, where consciousness, unconsciousness, and reality seemingly overlapped and combined into one fused world. In this place of thundering storms and calm painted landscapes that encompassed the past, present, and future - a spiritual creature had just awakened after its spontaneous birth.
This creature was over four-meters tall and very muscular, resembling a type of giant. It's color was a deathly pale white, and it possessed four wings protruding from its eye sockets and a tail-like appendage extending from the back of its head.
Hovering just above this is a large eight-handled golden wheel that was crafted to the utmost perfection, with no scratches nor scrapes etched on it. The mysterious spirit being wore black hakama bottoms and a white sash around its waist to cover most of its lower body.
The Spirit creature slowly gazed at its surroundings trying to distinguish its current location, but the entire area kept shifting time after time, making it hard to determine whether he was up or down, standing up straight or sideways.
Utterly confused, the creature began to try to think of ways to escape this place, or how it even came to be there in the first place, but memories of another unknown life instantly plagued its mind. As memory after memory seared itself into the being's brain, it felt as if its entire head was being poked by a thousand needles and began to hold its head in excruciating pain.
Once the long assault of memories finally ended, the creature stood in a silent daze for a few moments and immediately snapped out of it, gaining full awareness and cognition throughout the entire process.
'Where...where am I!?'
'What am I!?'
One by one, rationalized thoughts quickly began to fill the inside of its mind.
'Wait... I remember now. I'm... Arthur Mason!'
The realization struck like lightning through heavy fog. Fragments of memory crystallized into coherent form—a modest apartment near campus, the worn leather of his father's briefcase he'd inherited, late nights studying consumer behavior models, the acrid smell of coffee that had sustained him through final exams.
He'd just graduated three months ago with a degree in business marketing from State University. The interviews had been going well. Life had been absolutely normal.
'But the truck...'
The memory surfaced unbidden inside of his mind. He'd been crossing the street, distracted by a notification on his phone—some recruiter finally responding to his application. While not paying attention, a huge garbage truck had driven right into...onto him as it screeched the brakes to stop. Absolute, suffocating darkness that seemed to stretch for an eternity, yet lasted no time at all.
And now this.
'So I died. And now I'm here, in this—whatever this body is.'
Arthur—for he still thought of himself as Arthur, despite everything—forced himself to examine his new form methodically. The pale white limbs, thick with unnatural muscle. The strange protrusions from where eyes should be. His tail-like appendage he could somehow sense extending from the back of his head. Most peculiar of all, the eight-handled golden wheel hovering just above him, pristine and otherworldly.
As a longtime fan of Jujutsu Kaisen, recognition came to him swiftly. He'd watched the Shibuya Incident arc at least four times, had debated scaling and abilities with other fans online during slow work days at his old internship.
'Mahoraga! I've become the Eight-Handled Sword Divergent Silla Divine Genera!.'
The absurdity should have broken him. Death, reincarnation, and transformation into a fictional creature—any rational person would spiral into denial or madness. But Arthur had always prided himself on pragmatism. He had often said afterall, "Don't cry over spilled milk, son. Just grab a mop and figure out your next move."
'No use lamenting what I can't change. I'm here now. I'm... this. I need to figure out where "here" even is.'
He turned his attention outward, attempting to survey his surroundings properly. That's when the true wrongness of this place crashed over him like a wave of needles stabbing directly into his consciousness.
The landscape refused to obey any natural law. What had been a crumbling gothic cathedral to his left was now somehow beneath his feet. No—he was upside down. No—the cathedral was sideways. The orientation shifted again, and nausea roiled through him with such intensity that Arthur nearly collapsed. His vision swam, the very act of looking causing his newly-formed consciousness to rebel against the impossibility of what it perceived.
Ancient stone temples materialized floating in mid-air, their weathered surfaces covered in languages he didn't recognize. These would dissolve like watercolor in rain, replaced by sleek glass skyscrapers that defied gravity, hanging at impossible angles. Victorian mansions sprouted from nothing beside neon-lit modern convenience stores. A baroque palace inverted itself, its chandeliers hanging upward, before being swallowed by a sprawling industrial complex that smoked and churned despite having no apparent foundation.
Arthur's position in this chaos proved no more stable than the scenery itself. One moment he seemed to stand on solid ground; the next, that ground was the sky, or a wall, or existed in three places simultaneously. His spatial awareness, so carefully honed by years of navigating crowded city streets and university campuses, screamed in protest.
'Come on, there has to be some type of pattern to how it changes.'
He forced himself to observe despite the vertigo that threatened to overwhelm him. Minutes passed—or what felt like minutes in this place where time itself seemed negotiable. He tracked the transformations, tried to map the sequence of changes, searched desperately for any mathematical progression or cyclical repetition.
Nothing.
The changes were utterly random. A medieval fortress might be followed by a subway station, then a tribal hut, then a space-age dome that looked ripped from science fiction. No correlation between architectural styles, no temporal progression, no spatial logic whatsoever. Each shift came at irregular intervals, sometimes seconds apart, sometimes longer. Sometimes multiple changes occurred simultaneously in different directions—assuming directions even existed here.
Five minutes became ten. Ten became fifteen. Arthur's legendary optimism, the half-full mindset that had carried him through this entire situation started to utterly crack.
'I'm going to be trapped here, forever! Stuck in this impossible place, unable to even perceive it properly, just existing in eternal confusion until I lose whatever's left of my sanity.'
For the first time since awakening in this body, despair crept in with icy fingers. His thoughts, previously so organized and rational, began to fragment.
'Please. Whatever brought me here, whatever power thought this was a good idea—please, just one more change. Send me somewhere else. Anywhere else. I'll take oblivion over this. I'll take—'
The golden wheel above his head suddenly rotated with a sharp, metallic click that resonated through his entire being.
Instantly, the world changed.
The nauseating vertigo instantaneously disappeared—and somehow, Arthur could now perceive through everything. The shifting perspectives that had scrambled his consciousness moments before became easily comprehensible. It was as if his brain had suddenly learned to process impossible geometry, to hold contradictory spatial information simultaneously without breaking.
'Mahoraga's adaptation ability. Of course!'
Mahoraga's signature ability—to adapt to any and all phenomena after sufficient exposure. He'd just adapted to the mere act of perceiving this place.
'If I can adapt to seeing it, maybe I can adapt to understanding it. Even to navigating it.'
Hope flickered back to life in Arthur's chest. He settled into a waiting stance, letting the chaos wash over him, trusting in the ability that now defined his existence.
CLICK
The wheel turned again after what felt like a minute. The architectural shifts became slightly more predictable—not in their content, but in their rhythm. He could sense a transformation coming half a second before it occurred.
CLICK
Another minute, another rotation. Now he could distinguish between different types of spatial distortions. Some changes were complete replacements; others were overlays, multiple structures occupying the same impossible space.
CLICK
The fourth rotation came after two more minutes of patient observation. And suddenly, Arthur could predict with reasonable accuracy not just when the shifts would occur, but how his position relative to the architecture would change. The minimal left over nausea had faded to a mild discomfort, easily ignored.
'Incredible. This ability is even more powerful than the anime portrayed.'
He took in his surroundings with new clarity. The architecture remained bizarre and disconnected—ancient stone castles floating inverted, modern shopping malls erupting from nowhere, Gothic cathedrals melting into Buddhist temples into art deco theaters. But now he could process it all, could even appreciate the strange beauty in the chaos.
'This place makes absolutely no sense even with adaptation, but at least I can somewhat function now. And where there's architecture—buildings, structures, theaters, factories—that implies builders. There's most definitely other people, or maybe creatures...'
Arthur clenched his large, pale fists with determination. 'I need to find whoever or whatever is in this place with me. Get answers on how to leave. Figure out what world I've been dropped into and—'
High above—and the fact that he could confidently identify a direction as "above" felt like a victory—something changed.
Light erupted in the sky of this realm. Not normal light, but a brilliant, overwhelming radiance that seemed to shred through the fabric of reality itself. It was pure white at first, so bright that it obliterated all other sensory input. Arthur's vision went completely blank, the carefully adapted perception he'd just gained stripped away by the sheer intensity.
'What the hell?'
Instinct drove him to raise his massive arms, covering the area where his eyes would be if he were still human. But even through his limbs, even through the strange wings protruding from his eye sockets, the light penetrated, absolute and inescapable.
But Arthur didn't panic. He'd learned patience in his new ability these past few minutes.
He'd learned to trust the wheel.
CLICK
The rotation came rigid and sharp, faster than before, as if responding to urgent need. The adaptation took hold immediately.
As his vision cleared, Arthur realized his initial perception had been wrong. This wasn't a single white light—it was seven distinct orbs of light, each a different color of the visible spectrum. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet, each radiating with an intensity that suggested they were fundamental forces made visible.
The rainbow of lights hung suspended in the "sky" of this impossible realm, arranged in a pattern that seemed almost deliberately formal. And they were moving! Descending steadily toward Arthur's position with what felt like a terrible purpose.
The lights drew closer, their radiance painting the shifting architecture in spectacular hues. And Arthur Mason, former university graduate and current Divine General, stood his ground and waited to see what impossibility would greet him next.