The smell was the worst part. It wasn't just the Lily of the Valley—that sickly sweet floral shroud that triggered a cold, atavistic fear in the pit of Kaito's stomach—it was the underlying scent of wet copper and old, recycled air. The walls of the Shinjuku Grand, once adorned with tasteful, understated wallpaper and gold-leaf sconces, had become a frantic, pulsing landscape of muscular tissue.
Kaito stood perfectly still. In the world of Jujutsu, movement was often an invitation for a Curse to finalize its logic. If the hallway was breathing, it meant he was inside something's respiratory system, or worse, its digestive tract.
"Don't look for the exit," he whispered to himself, his voice sounding like dry leaves skittering across pavement. "Look for the lie."
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, blackened tuning fork. It wasn't a cursed tool in the traditional sense; it didn't hold a technique of its own. It was merely a conductor for his own dissonance. He tapped it against his thumbnail. The vibration traveled up his arm, a sharp, buzzing frequency that felt like a localized seizure in his nerves.
To anyone else, the hallway was a visceral, biological horror. To Kaito, through the lens of Cognitive Dissonance, the hallway was a poorly rendered simulation. He could see the "seams" where the Cursed Energy didn't quite match the physical laws of the hotel. The way a vein on the wall pulsed a fraction of a second before the floor beneath him rose; the way the shadows in the corners didn't follow the flickering light of the remaining overhead lamp.
He began to walk. Every step felt like treading on an overripe plum. The meat-walls shivered at his touch, the surface slick with a translucent, gelatinous film that clung to his boots.
"Kaito… why did you leave me there?"
The voice didn't come from the hallway. It came from the marrow of his bones. It was his mother's voice, but stripped of the warmth he remembered. It was the voice of a woman who had spent twenty years screaming in the dark.
He clenched his jaw so hard his molars ached. He knew the tactic. Curses were scavengers of trauma; they found the most jagged piece of a person's soul and used it as a hook.
"You aren't her," Kaito said, his voice flat, devoid of the emotion the entity was fishing for. "She didn't speak with a three-tone harmonic distortion. You're flat, you're sharp, and your tempo is all wrong."
He struck the tuning fork again. Clang.
The sound waves rippled through the air, visible to him as shimmering, obsidian lines. Where the sound hit the "meat," the flesh recoiled, turning back into drywall and wallpaper for a fleeting second before the Curse reasserted its dominance.
He was close to Room 1408.
The door to 1408 didn't look like a door anymore. It looked like a sphincter, a circular muscle that sat tight and defensive in the middle of the hallway. It was the "Impenetrable Bastion" of Ryoma Sato, inverted and turned inside out. Sato's technique had been designed to keep things out; now, in its corrupted "Echo" state, it was designed to keep something—or someone—trapped within a perpetual state of extraction.
Kaito knelt before the door. He didn't try to force it. You didn't break a Bastion; you convinced it that it had already been breached.
"Cognitive Dissonance: Second Movement," he murmured.
He placed the vibrating tuning fork directly against the pulsing muscle of the door. He closed his eyes and began to hum, matching the frequency of the hotel's ambient hum, then slowly shifting his pitch by a quarter-tone. It was the sound of a nail scratching a chalkboard, the sound of a radio caught between two stations. It was the sound of reality losing its grip.
The door began to spasm. The Cursed Energy holding the shape of the meat began to "leak," dripping onto the floor like black tar. The sphincter dilated, then tore, a wet, visceral sound that echoed through the breathing hallway like a sob.
Kaito stepped through the breach.
The room inside was a vacuum. The air was gone, replaced by a dense, pressurized miasma of Cursed Energy that felt like walking through deep water. In the center of the room, Sato's robes were still standing, but they were no longer empty.
A translucent figure sat within them—an Echo. It looked like Sato, but his features were blurred, as if a painter had run a wet thumb across his face before the oil had dried. His eyes were two hollow pits of white static, and from his chest, a thick, umbilical cord of pure, golden energy stretched toward the ceiling.
It wasn't a Curse killing him. It was a harvest.
"Sato," Kaito said, his lungs burning as he fought to breathe in the oxygen-depleted room. "Can you hear me?"
The figure's head tilted with a series of sickening, wet clicks. Its mouth opened, but the sound that came out wasn't a voice. It was the sound of a thousand people screaming at a distance, a white noise of agony.
"...The Architect… he needs the foundations…" the Echo hissed, the words forming in Kaito's mind rather than his ears. "...The world is a house with no floor… he is building the basement… with us…"
Kaito looked up at the ceiling where the golden cord disappeared into a swirling vortex of shadow. This wasn't a rogue spirit or a random haunting. This was industrial-scale sorcery. Someone was using Grade 1 sorcerers as batteries, stripping them of their techniques and their souls to power something massive hidden in the interstitial spaces of Tokyo.
Suddenly, the golden cord turned from gold to a bruised, violent purple. The Echo of Sato let out a genuine, human shriek as its form began to collapse, the static in its eyes turning to black liquid that poured down its face.
"Someone's cutting the line," Kaito realized.
The room began to shake. The breathing walls outside reached a fever pitch, the rhythmic expanding and contracting turning into a violent, convulsive thrashing. The ceiling began to sag, the weight of the hotel above pressing down as the Cursed Energy holding the 14th floor in place began to fail.
Kaito lunged for Sato's Echo, hoping to disrupt the cord and save whatever was left of the man's consciousness, but a hand—solid, cold, and immensely powerful—grabbed his wrist.
He looked up.
Standing in the shadows of the corner, where the light couldn't reach, was a man in a pristine, white suit. He wore a mask made of cracked porcelain, a smiling face that looked utterly absurd in the middle of a meat-slaughterhouse.
"The dissonance is a beautiful thing, Arisaka-kun," the man said. His voice was melodic, cultured, and entirely too calm. "But even the most beautiful song eventually reaches its coda."
The man in the mask didn't use a technique Kaito recognized. He simply tapped the floor with a silver-topped cane, and the world shattered.
The floor beneath Kaito didn't just break; it dissolved. He was no longer in the Shinjuku Grand. He was falling through a void of grey static and discarded memories. He saw flashes of his mother, flashes of the Shoko in the alley, and flashes of a version of himself that stayed at Jujutsu High.
He slammed into something hard. Stone. Cold, ancient stone.
He gasped, his lungs finally finding air that didn't taste like meat. He was in a chamber, underground, illuminated by thousands of candles. The walls were lined with rows upon rows of those golden umbilical cords, each one leading to a pair of robes or a set of clothes.
There were hundreds of them.
Kaito tried to stand, but his legs were lead. He looked at his own chest and felt his heart stop. A thin, translucent thread was beginning to sprout from his own sternum, glowing with a faint, hesitant light.
"Welcome to the Foundation," the man in the mask said, his voice echoing from every direction at once. "You're going to be our most resonant pillar."
As Kaito's vision began to blur, he noticed the robes directly across from him. They weren't from a modern sorcerer. They were ancient, rotted, and bore the crest of a clan that had been extinct for five hundred years—the same crest he had seen in his mother's hidden diary just weeks before she died.