January: he crossed over.
February: he adapted.
March: he lost his mind in Shibuya.
April… the new school term began.
The new school was not far from the children's welfare institution; a brisk half-hour walk brought him to the gates. Yet the Asou Akiya who stepped back into a classroom was no longer the boyish bundle of nerves he had been at the start of the year. He slept exactly eight hours every night, ran every dawn, and drank his milk without fail. A body still in its growth spurt shot upward; at fourteen he finally reached 165 centimeters.
A death sentence hung over his head, ticking down to May 1, 2005.
The way he looked at the world had changed beyond recognition.
It was the gaze of a man with his back to the river, sword in hand: succeed or perish.
He had deliberately cultivated a heart-demon. The mere thought of "May 1, 2005" was enough to freeze his limbs and bleach the blood from his face. On worse nights his heartbeat staggered into arrhythmia, and he lay awake until sunrise, drowning in anxiety.
The instinct to live and the resolve to court death tore at each other inside his chest. As a result, he began to hallucinate his own endings in vivid, recurring detail.
Pulverized by Gojo Satoru's Blue.
Swallowed whole by one of Geto Suguru's tamed curses.
His skull politely cracked open by Kenjaku, memories rifled like a drawer.
Dragged before the elders, tortured until he coughed up every secret of his previous life…
Every time he jolted awake from those nightmares, his pillow was soaked with cold sweat that had not yet dried. His brain, cruel as any tormentor, replayed the scenes on endless loop.
"I still have value, I want to live, Mom, Dad!"
His entire nervous system had been tuned to crisis pitch. His face flickered between manic smiles and the brink of tears.
The three roommates who shared his dorm now regarded him with open terror.
To the outside world, Asou Akiya explained that he had dreamed of the day his parents died and cried out in delirium. To make it convincing, he would sometimes murmur "Mom… Dad…" in a dazed half-sleep, deliberately blurring which set of parents he was calling, letting the original owner's ghosts overlap with the ones from his old life.
He was Asou Akiya. That truth would follow him to the grave.
The man who cannot keep his own secret dies fastest1.
"Asou-kun, what do you like to do in your free time?"
Early spring, cherry petals drifting. A strikingly handsome transfer student had joined Class 3-A of Yokohama National Middle School, and the girls of the class were inevitably curious.
"I like reading," Asou Akiya answered obediently, producing a book during break and answering every question with gentle politeness.
It was a second-hand volume he had hunted down with great difficulty.
The cover was wrapped in plain brown paper, hiding the original title. Japanese social distance ensured no one would flip it open, but even at a glance it clearly wasn't the trendy magazine of the season.
Once attention drifted away from the quiet bookworm, Asou Akiya opened the volume he had been devouring lately.
The Complete ■■ Manual.
In truth, the book was deeply educational. It urged people to stay alive, arguing that suicide was extraordinarily painful.
Asou Akiya read with relish, thinking: Only idiots choose painful ways to die.
With the experience of a twenty-nine-year-old adult, he was long past the naïveté of a schoolboy. He saw through many things, and what he saw through left him numb. He had grown up comfortably, spoke several languages, and devoured foreign classics without effort. The emotional lens literature had given him became the greatest source of pain in an otherwise rational life. He was, at his core, a rational creature: he arranged his days rationally, weighed gains and losses rationally, and lived by the creed that everyone should end up happy.
That stable, ordinary first half of life had shattered over one thing: marriage.
He had never been in love, not once. His romantic history was a perfect blank. Yet he had been dragged to blind dates again and again.
A twenty-nine-year-old man: decent looks, car, apartment, stable income, refined speech, no smoking, no drinking. When he rationally followed his parents' wishes and stepped toward the future of arranged marriage…
For the first time, something inside him broke.
Rational thought questioned why he was suddenly rebelling. Emotional thought collapsed into ruins. In a daze he pulled a beloved book from the shelf. Its title: Find Someone Willing to Wander the World with Me.
At twenty-nine, in the deep silence of a certain night, he went quietly, completely mad.
The reason he went mad that night was simple: he could not go mad enough.
Every coin has two sides. Transmigration had stolen the family he loved, but it had also stolen the life he never wanted.
His days at this foreign middle school passed in bland tranquility. Asou Akiya dealt with the children around him with effortless grace (whether their intent was kind or cruel made no difference). He understood how to wield his own advantages, seize the moral high ground, and keep evidence. They were not even playing the same game. While his classmates still reveled in childish cliques and schoolyard violence, he sat cradling The Complete ■■ Manual, calmly studying where best to cut and how to stitch the wound afterward.
All dissatisfaction stems from the holes inside the human heart.
[And what is the hole in mine?]
[A lack of resilience. The fact that reality once crushed me so completely I could only cry weak, useless tears.]
Asou Akiya judged himself without mercy, sparing no harshness, if only to never repeat the mistake. Once more he walked out of a pharmacy, fresh bandages circling his slender wrists. After classes he skipped club activities; instead, he often joined the volunteer work organized by the welfare institution.
The greatest difference between him and Dazai Osamu of the literary wilds was this: he was optimistic.
He lived with radiant health!
Give him a lever long enough and a place to stand, and he would tilt the whole damn planet.
Asou Akiya laughed silently at his own exuberant inner monologue while outwardly remaining gentle and composed, honing his acting skills every waking second.
Suddenly he sighed. "My luck really is mediocre, isn't it?"
In the accident that killed his parents, no sorcerer had appeared.
In the welfare institution, no child with latent talent had ever shared his dorm.
At his new school and the neighboring ones, not a trace of Geto Suguru.
Aside from the extra lifetime of memories, he was utterly, excruciatingly ordinary. No one around him could offer the slightest boost.
Heaven seemed determined to treat him as just another face in the crowd.
Reality, truly, was infuriating.
Passing the mouth of a dim alley that would have shaved minutes off his walk home, Asou Akiya refused to set even one foot inside. He feared a fourth-grade or higher curse might be gestating in the shadows. Truth be told, ever since arriving in this world he had avoided danger at every turn, yet the greatest danger was entirely self-inflicted, the bitterness he brewed himself he drank like fine wine.
Why not choose a different target?
Was the only thing drawing him to the jujutsu world the chance to become Gojo Satoru's classmate?
Asou Akiya knew the answer was no. The version that set his blood alight was the scarred, twenty-eight-year-old Gojo Satoru, not the still-green high-schooler.
Three people in this world held special gravity for him.
Gojo Satoru: arrogance that looked down from the heavens, nearly impossible to approach.
Ryomen Sukuna: vicious, cruel temperament; touch him and die.
Fushiguro Toji: a man who adored rotting in place, who had chosen degeneracy with open arms.
If one asked who possessed the rawest, most lethal sexual tension, it was not the modern strongest sorcerer nor the King of Curses.
It was the man born with zero cursed energy, bearer of the Heavenly Restriction, the "Tyrant of Heaven," the legendary professional pretty boy who dined on rich widows, Fushiguro Toji.
Asou Akiya was deeply fascinated by Fushiguro Toji. Rescuing a fallen star was etched into the very DNA of his previous life's desires. The ancients had passed down one eternal truth to their descendants: domestic flowers cannot compare to wild ones, and the top courtesan is the wildest bloom of all.
Fushiguro Toji was absolutely worth investing money in. No one could ignore the physique of the Heavenly Tyrant.
Yes, women loved it.
Men loved it too.
Asou Akiya's mood grew complicated for exactly one second.
The timeline he had landed in was 2004. According to the original story, Fushiguro Toji was currently styling himself "Zen'in Toji," had already married once, and fathered a son. Having lost the love of his life, the man had let himself rot completely: addicted to horse racing, broke half the time, dragging his young son to sponge off wealthy women, and in the end scarring Megumi's childhood forever.
In Asou Akiya's eyes, Fushiguro Toji's life was an unbearable tragedy. Fate had snapped his spine clean through. The one time he finally scraped his pride off the floor, fate mocked him again and let him die by Gojo Satoru's hand.
Because of the impression Toji left behind, Asou Akiya had visited Tokyo's racetracks several times.
Nothing.
"I was hoping we could place the exact same losing bet next time and go broke together," he murmured to the empty air. It was not purely lust for Toji's body; he simply craved variety in life. He refused to limit himself to the two sanctioned roads upward. The path Fushiguro Toji represented, utter hatred for the jujutsu world, was clearly the most thrilling.
Just imagine standing against Gojo Satoru, Geto Suguru, Tengen, Kenjaku, and all Three Great Families at once…
Asou Akiya's fingers curled involuntarily. A faint ache bloomed beneath the bandages on his wrists. An unbidden hunger surged: to grasp that peerless blade called Fushiguro Toji, to whet its edge to razor perfection, and together plot two or three exquisite ways to burn the entire jujutsu world to cinders…
Jujutsu Kaisen was sometimes jokingly called Gorilla Kaisen.
There were simply too few sorcerers who excelled at strategy.
If gender were set aside, Asou Akiya was quietly certain that the adult version of himself perfectly matched Fushiguro Toji's taste in partners: decent-looking, respectful of the professional gigolo lifestyle, willing to pay handsomely, good at managing a household, capable of loving with absolute devotion, and able to give little Megumi a warm, affluent home.
If the two of them ever came together, it would be the union of mind and raw force.
If he poured every ounce of effort into rewriting Fushiguro Toji's fate (shielding Megumi, dodging every original tragedy), what terrifying destructive power would emerge ten-plus years later when a peak Heavenly Restriction and the Ten Shadows Technique stood side by side?
Truth be told, he never found Kenjaku's millennium-long conspiracy all that frightening. Give any other immortal transmigrator a thousand years and they could have conquered Japan twice over.
Asou Akiya was deeply curious.
Yet curiosity was all he would ever have.
A version of himself that never encountered Fushiguro Toji was nothing more than a daydreaming transmigrator.
"What I can grasp is only what fate allows me to reach," the black-haired boy murmured, shaking his head and discarding the fanciful notion. The moment he awakened cursed energy, he would already stand on the opposite side from Fushiguro Toji.
An ordinary person's luck was nowhere near enough to collide with Toji.
And Toji's own luck… well, better to perform one small act of kindness today and leave the man's wounds alone.
…
Several hundred kilometers away, at a racetrack in Tokyo.
Zenin Toji, a regular whose face was known to every ticket window, leaned over the outer railing, crumpled another losing slip, and pulled the same sour scowl he wore every time the horses betrayed him.
His life, like his luck, seemed cursed by the heavens themselves.
Rotten beyond salvation.
Still, Toji stubbornly studied the racing form. "Next time I'll win it all back."
Perhaps it was the spring air, but he had been unusually busy lately. Every time he tried to hit the track, some high-quality sugar mama appeared. Not wanting to offend potential clients, he had rolled out his very best service with a smile.
Come to think of it… his luck with being kept wasn't half bad?