The report sat on Yaga's desk for three days before he did anything with it.
Not because he was lazy. Masamichi Yaga had never been lazy a day in his life, and he'd sooner eat one of his own cursed corpses than admit to procrastination. The problem was that the report didn't make any sense, and the things that didn't make sense in jujutsu were usually the things that got people killed.
A window. Not a real sorcerer, just someone with enough cursed energy perception to see what most people couldn't, had filed it from a rural district about two hours outside Tokyo by train. Farmland, mostly. The kind of place where houses sat far apart and old people hung laundry on lines strung between wooden posts. The window had been visiting family and noticed something off about a patch of abandoned fields on the edge of town. Rice paddies that hadn't been worked in years were suddenly green. Not just green, thriving. Shoots that should have taken weeks were standing tall overnight. And underneath all of it, threaded through the soil like roots, faint traces of cursed energy.
The window's report was short and uncertain. Possibly a cursed object buried in the field. Possibly residuals from a low-grade curse nesting in the area. Energy signature is unusually stable. No hostile activity observed. Requesting investigation.
Yaga read it again on that third morning, sitting in his office with a half-finished cursed corpse in his lap, a small round thing with button eyes that he was stitching shut. He set the needle down and picked up the phone.
…
"No."
"I haven't said anything yet."
"You're calling me during lunch," Gojo said through a mouthful of melon bread, "which means you want me to do something, which means I don't want to do it."
Yaga could hear the cafeteria noise in the background. Someone, probably Geto, said something he couldn't make out, and Gojo laughed at it.
"Get to my office," Yaga said. "Both of you. Bring Geto."
"He's right here. You want to talk to him? He's more polite than me."
"I want you here. Five minutes."
"Fifteen."
"Five."
Gojo hung up. Yaga stared at the phone for a moment, then set it down very carefully so he wouldn't break it. He picked his needle back up.
They showed up in twelve minutes. Gojo came in first without knocking, he never knocked, with his round sunglasses pushed up into his white hair and a crumpled melon bread wrapper still in his hand. His dark blue uniform jacket was unzipped halfway, collar popped up, and he had the general energy of someone who had been doing absolutely nothing important and resented being pulled away from it.
Geto followed a step behind, closing the door that Gojo hadn't bothered to. His hair was tied up neatly, uniform buttoned properly, and his expression was the practiced patience of someone who had been managing Satoru Gojo on a daily basis for over a year now. He had a carton of milk in one hand.
"Twelve minutes," Yaga said without looking up from his stitching.
"Traffic," Gojo said.
"You walked across campus."
"Foot traffic." Gojo dropped into the chair across from Yaga's desk and immediately tipped it back on two legs. "What's the mission? If it's another sewer thing I'm turning it down. Last time I smelled like-"
"It's fieldwork."
"Literally fieldwork, or-"
"Literally." Yaga set the cursed corpse aside and slid the report across the desk. "A window flagged unusual cursed energy activity in an agricultural district outside the city. Abandoned rice paddies are growing crops overnight. Faint cursed energy residuals in the soil. No hostile curse sighted."
Geto stepped forward and picked up the report, scanning it. Gojo didn't move from his tipped-back chair, just tilted his head to read it upside down from where he sat.
"So, what," Gojo said. "Haunted vegetables."
"Possibly a cursed object," Yaga said. "Something buried in the soil. Could be the remnant of an old sorcerer. The area's rural enough that anything could have been sitting underground out there for decades without anyone noticing."
"Or it's just a low-grade curse that likes dirt," Gojo said. "Seems like a Grade 4 job. Why are you sending us?"
"Because the energy signature is stable," Geto said, still reading. He turned the page over. "That's unusual. Low-grade curses don't produce stable residuals. They're erratic. This reads more like sustained, intentional output."
"So it's a sorcerer?"
"There are no registered sorcerers in that district," Yaga said. "No curse users flagged in the surrounding prefectures either. Whatever's out there, it's unregistered."
The front legs of Gojo's chair came back down. Not with alarm. Gojo didn't really do alarm, but with the mild interest of someone whose afternoon had just gotten slightly less boring.
"Unregistered what, though?" he asked. "Sorcerer? Curse? Cursed object?"
"That's what you're going to find out." Yaga pulled a second sheet from his desk drawer, a mission brief with the location details. "Investigate the source. If it's a cursed object, recover it. If it's a curse, exorcise it. If it's-"
"A person?"
Yaga paused. Geto had set the report down and was looking at him directly.
"If it's a person," Yaga said, "assess the situation and report back. Do not engage a potential sorcerer or curse user without authorization unless they present an immediate threat." He looked at Gojo when he said this.
"Why are you looking at me?"
"Because you punched that curse user in Chiba before confirming whether he was actually a curse user."
"He was a curse user."
"You didn't know that."
"I had a feeling."
Yaga closed his eyes. Took a breath. "Geto. Keep him in line."
Geto took a sip of his milk. "I'll do my best."
"That's not reassuring."
"I know."
…
The train ride was long enough for Gojo to fall asleep, wake up, eat a convenience store onigiri he'd stuffed in his jacket pocket, and then complain about being bored three separate times.
Geto sat by the window and watched the scenery change. Tokyo's density thinned out in stages, the buildings got shorter, the gaps between them wider, and then the concrete gave way to stretches of green and brown. Fields. Hills. The occasional cluster of old houses with tiled roofs. It looked like a different country from the city.
"You think it's actually anything?" Gojo asked, slouched in his seat with his knees against the seatback in front of him. His sunglasses were back over his eyes.
"Yaga wouldn't send us if he didn't think so."
"Yaga sends us places to get us out of his office."
"That too." Geto turned from the window. "But the stable cursed energy output is worth checking. If there's something producing consistent energy in one location for an extended period, it's either very controlled or very old. Neither of those is nothing."
"Controlled or old," Gojo repeated. "What if it's both?"
Geto didn't answer. He looked back out the window.
The station they got off at was small. Two platforms, no gate, a ticket machine that looked like it hadn't been updated since the eighties. An old woman with a shopping bag was the only other person who got off. She gave them a long look, two teenagers in dark uniforms, one with white hair and sunglasses, and then shuffled away without comment.
The walk from the station took about twenty minutes down a road that turned from asphalt to gravel to packed dirt. The air was different out here. Cleaner, obviously, but also quieter in a way that Geto noticed immediately. In Tokyo, there was always a low hum of cursed energy in the background, like static. Millions of people generating tiny amounts of negativity that pooled in train stations and hospitals and school hallways. Out here, that hum was almost gone. The cursed energy background was thin, pale, barely there.
Which made the anomaly ahead of them stand out like a campfire in an empty field.
Gojo noticed it too. He pushed his sunglasses down his nose and looked over the frames, his Six Eyes doing whatever it was they did, reading the energy landscape in a way that Geto could sense but not replicate.
"There," Gojo said, pointing down the road toward a stretch of land that sat behind a leaning wooden fence. "About three hundred meters. Consistent output. Low volume. Really low, actually."
"How low?"
"Like..." Gojo squinted. "Grade 4, maybe? The output is tiny. But it's even. There's no fluctuation. It's just... sitting there. Like a heartbeat."
They walked closer. The fence was rotted in places, some posts tilted at angles, the wire between them rusted and sagging. Beyond it, the land opened up into what had once been rice paddies, tiered plots separated by low earthen walls, the kind that needed standing water pumped in during growing season. The paddies hadn't been worked in years. That much was obvious from the state of the infrastructure: cracked irrigation channels, collapsed wooden sluice gates, weeds everywhere.
Except in one section.
About fifty meters in from the fence, a single paddy was green. Not just green, absurdly, impossibly green. The rice plants stood straight and tall, their stalks thick and healthy, the kind of growth you'd see in late summer after months of careful tending. It was early spring. Nothing should have looked like that. And around the edges of the paddy, the soil had been recently turned, dark and moist, with neat rows of something else growing. Root vegetables, maybe, or herbs. It was hard to tell from the fence.
Geto stared at it. Gojo let out a low whistle.
"Okay," Gojo said. "That's not normal."
"No."
"Think a curse did this?"
"A curse that farms rice?"
"Weirder things exist."
They climbed the fence, Gojo vaulted it, Geto stepped over a collapsed section and walked along the raised path between the old paddies. The cursed energy got clearer as they got closer, and Geto felt his initial impression sharpen. Gojo was right. The output was low, almost negligibly so, but the quality was strange. It didn't feel hostile. Cursed energy was supposed to be rooted in negativity. Fear, anger, hatred, even neutral residuals carried an edge, like touching something cold. This didn't. It felt warm. Settled. Like sunlight that had been left to soak into the ground.
"I don't think this is a curse," Geto said quietly.
"Could be a cursed object. Something leaking energy into the soil."
"Could be. But cursed objects don't tend the soil afterward."
Gojo stopped walking. He tilted his head slightly, the way he did when his Six Eyes caught something his regular senses hadn't.
"Someone's here," he said.
Geto followed his gaze. Past the green paddy, about thirty meters farther, there was a small cluster of trees. Old ones, gnarled and leaning, the kind that grew along property borders in the countryside. Underneath them, mostly hidden by the shadow and a tangle of low brush, there was a shape. Small. Human-sized. Sitting on the ground.
They looked at each other. Geto nodded.
They approached without trying to be quiet about it. Whatever was sitting under those trees, it clearly wasn't powerful enough to be a threat, not with that cursed energy output, and sneaking up on a potential non-combatant was more likely to cause problems than solve them. Geto kept his guard up anyway, because that was what you did, but his posture was open. Non-aggressive. Gojo had his hands in his pockets, which for him was roughly the same thing.
As they got closer, the shape resolved into a person. A small person, sitting cross-legged in the dirt at the base of the largest tree, with a wide conical straw hat pulled low over their face. They were wearing a loose, pale linen tunic, not a kimono, not modern clothes, something in between, with a thick woven scarf bunched around their neck despite the mild weather. Their hands were in the dirt. Literally in it, fingers buried past the knuckles in the dark soil around the tree's roots. And around those hands, thin green shoots were pushing up through the earth in real time, uncurling like slow fingers reaching for the light.
Geto stopped walking. Gojo stopped next to him.
The person under the hat didn't move. Their hands stayed in the dirt. The shoots kept growing, tiny, delicate, but fast, faster than anything natural. A soft pulse of cursed energy rippled outward from the contact point with each new sprout, barely perceptible, like the vibration of a plucked string fading into silence.
Then the hat tilted up.
The face underneath was young. Younger than Geto expected, seventeen, maybe eighteen, with soft features and wide dark eyes that blinked at them with the blank surprise of a rabbit that had just noticed a hawk overhead. There was a stalk of something, wheat, maybe, or barley, clenched between their teeth, the chewed end sticking out one side of their mouth. Two rounded shapes sat on top of their head, poking up through the hat's gap, bun-like bundles of black hair tied into upright shapes that stood straight up like ears.
For a long moment, nobody said anything.
The hair-buns on top of the person's head slowly tilted to one side. The wheat stalk twitched.
"Uh," the person said.
Gojo pushed his sunglasses up. "Yo."
The person pulled their hands out of the dirt very slowly, like a child caught drawing on a wall. Soil crumbled off their fingers. The green shoots around the tree roots stopped growing and went still, just regular plants now, standing at about six inches tall where seconds ago there had been nothing.
"You, uh." The person's voice was quiet. Soft. A boy's voice, Geto realized, though it was hard to tell at first. "You can see me?"
"We can see you," Geto said.
The boy looked from Geto to Gojo and back again. His eyes dropped to their uniforms, the dark blue jackets, the high collars, the Jujutsu High pins, and something shifted in his expression. Not quite fear. More like the careful stillness of an animal that wasn't sure yet whether to run.
"You're from the schools," the boy said. Not a question.
Geto raised an eyebrow. "You know about jujutsu schools?"
"I've... heard of them." The boy swallowed. The wheat stalk bobbed. "A long time ago."
"We're from Tokyo Jujutsu High," Geto said evenly. "We were sent to investigate reports of unusual cursed energy in this area." He gestured at the green paddy behind them, the impossible rice, the freshly turned soil. "That's you, isn't it?"
The boy looked at the paddy. Then back at them. His hair-buns drooped slightly, curving downward like wilting stalks.
"I didn't mean to cause trouble," he said. "I was just, I was trying to stay out of the way. I thought nobody came out here anymore. The fields were empty, so I-" He stopped. His fingers curled into the fabric of his tunic, leaving smudges of dirt. "I can leave. If you need me to leave, I'll go. I'm sorry."
"Nobody said anything about leaving," Gojo said. He was looking at the boy with an expression that Geto recognized, not hostile, not even particularly serious, but interested. Gojo got that look when something didn't fit into the categories he expected. "What's your name?"
The boy hesitated. The wheat stalk shifted from one side of his mouth to the other.
"Haru," he said. "Nozomi Haru."
"Gojo Satoru." Gojo jerked a thumb at Geto. "That's Geto Suguru. He's the polite one."
"I'm the responsible one," Geto corrected. "He's the loud one."
Gojo didn't argue with this. "So, Haru. What are you doing out here growing rice in a dead field by yourself?"
Haru looked down at his dirt-covered hands. The hair-buns on his head were still drooping, almost flat against the top of his skull now, pressed down like a dog with its ears back.
"Farming," he said simply. "It's... what I do."
"With cursed energy."
"I don't-" Haru's brow furrowed. The wheat stalk bobbed again. "I know what cursed energy is. I know what it's called. But I don't think of it like that. I just... touch the soil and things grow. They've always grown. I've never used it to hurt anything."
Geto studied the boy carefully. There was no deception in his body language that he could detect, no tension suggesting a prepared lie, no darting eyes looking for an escape route. Just a hunched kid sitting in the dirt with soil under his fingernails and a chewed piece of grain in his mouth, looking at two strangers in dark uniforms like they were the most alarming thing that had happened to him in a long time.
"How old are you?" Geto asked.
Haru's mouth opened. Closed. The hair-buns twitched, one going slightly more upright than the other. His face did something complicated.
"That's... hard to answer," he said.
Gojo and Geto exchanged a glance.
"Try," Gojo said.
"I look, I mean, my body is, seventeen? Eighteen? Around there." Haru pulled his scarf up higher, almost hiding his chin. "But I've been... this... for a while."
"How long is a while?"
Haru didn't answer. He looked at the ground between his knees, at the small green shoots he'd coaxed up minutes ago, and said nothing.
The breeze moved through the old trees. Somewhere far off, a bird called.
Gojo turned to Geto with his eyebrows raised above his sunglasses. The look said what his mouth didn't: This isn't a cursed object.
Geto gave a slight nod. The look he returned said: I know. We need to call Yaga.
"Haru," Geto said, keeping his voice level. "We're not here to arrest you or hurt you. We were just sent to figure out what was causing the energy readings. But I think we need to bring you to someone who can help figure out your situation. Our teacher, the one who sent us. Would you be willing to come with us?"
Haru's eyes went wide. Not scared, exactly. More like overwhelmed. The hair-buns lifted slightly, trembling at the tips, somewhere between wanting to stand up and wanting to stay flat.
"Come with you," he repeated. "To... the school?"
"To meet our teacher," Geto said. "You'd be safe there."
"You don't have to make it sound like a sales pitch, Suguru," Gojo said. "Hey, Haru. Can you make food with that technique of yours? Like, actual food?"
Haru blinked. "I, yes? I can grow vegetables. Grain, too, if the soil is-"
"Can you make melon bread?"
"I don't know what that is."
Gojo stared at him. Then he turned to Geto with an expression of genuine horror, as if this was the most troubling piece of information they'd uncovered so far.
"Suguru. He doesn't know what melon bread is."
"I heard."
"We have to bring him back. This is an emergency."
"That's not why we're bringing him back."
"It's one of the reasons." Gojo looked at Haru again, pushing his sunglasses back up with one finger. A grin pulled at the corner of his mouth, not unkind, just the easy, unearned confidence of someone who had never met a problem he couldn't handle. "Come on. You've been sitting in the dirt out here by yourself for, however long. Least we can do is get you some actual food and a roof."
Haru looked between them. Two boys his age, or the age he appeared to be, standing in a dead field in matching dark uniforms, one grinning, one watching with calm, steady eyes. They were from the world he'd spent so long avoiding. The world of sorcerers and curses and things that fought in the dark. Everything he'd ever heard about it had told him to stay away.
But they weren't fighting anything right now. They were just standing there, waiting, with the afternoon light slanting across the old paddies and the breeze moving through the grass.
The hair-buns on top of Haru's head slowly straightened. Not all the way, they stayed slightly tilted, uncertain, but they lifted off his skull and pointed roughly upward again.
"Okay," Haru said quietly. He pulled the wheat stalk from his mouth, looked at it, and put it back. "Okay. I'll come."
He stood up. He was short, noticeably shorter than both of them, his head barely reaching Geto's shoulder. His straw hat wobbled as he straightened, and he reached up to hold it in place. Dirt fell from his tunic in small clumps.
"Do you have anything you need to bring?" Geto asked.
Haru patted himself down. Tunic, trousers, scarf, hat. He looked back at the field, the green paddy, the neat rows, the life he'd coaxed out of dead soil with his bare hands.
"No," he said. "Just me."
...
Geto called Yaga from the train platform while Gojo tried to explain the concept of melon bread to Haru, who listened with the wide-eyed intensity of someone being told about a foreign country.
"It's bread," Gojo was saying, "but the top part is like a cookie. A sweet cookie crust. And it's shaped like a melon."
"Does it taste like melon?"
"No."
"Then why is it called-"
"Because it looks like a melon."
"But it's bread."
"With a cookie on top. Yes."
Haru's hair-buns tilted in opposite directions. "That sounds very confusing."
"It's delicious."
The phone rang twice before Yaga picked up. "Report."
"It's not a curse," Geto said, turning away from the melon bread seminar. "It's not a cursed object either. It's a person. A boy. He appears to be our age, possibly older, his situation is unclear. He has an innate technique that accelerates plant growth. Extremely low cursed energy output, no combat ability that we could detect, no hostile intent. He's been living alone in abandoned fields for what he implies is a very long time."
Silence on the other end.
"How long?" Yaga asked.
"He wouldn't say exactly. But his speech patterns are slightly archaic, his clothing isn't modern, and he didn't know what melon bread was."
More silence. Geto could practically hear Yaga processing.
"Is he registered?"
"No. No affiliation with any jujutsu institution that he's aware of. He knows about curses and the schools, but only from secondhand information. He's never had direct contact with the sorcerer community."
"And you believe him?"
Geto looked over his shoulder. Haru was standing next to Gojo on the platform, holding his straw hat against the wind from a passing local train, the wheat stalk in his mouth bent sideways. His hair-buns were pressed flat from the gust. He looked like he'd never seen a train move that fast before, and based on everything they'd observed, that might actually be true.
"Yes," Geto said. "I believe him."
"Bring him in," Yaga said after a pause. "I want to see him myself. Don't let Gojo do anything stupid."
"That's a broad instruction."
"Do your best."
Yaga hung up. Geto put his phone away and walked back to the others.
"Yaga wants us to bring him to campus," he said to Gojo.
"Obviously. I already told him he's coming."
"You told him about melon bread."
"First things first, Suguru."
The train arrived. Haru stood at the edge of the platform and watched the doors slide open with the expression of someone witnessing a small miracle. He clutched the strap of his scarf and didn't move until Geto put a hand on his shoulder, gently, barely any pressure, and guided him forward.
"It's just a train," Geto said.
"I know what a train is," Haru said, sounding slightly defensive for the first time. His hair-buns bristled upward. "I've seen them. I've just never... been on one."
"Never?"
"I walked most places."
Gojo was already inside, sprawled across a seat. "From where?"
Haru sat down on the opposite bench, perching on the edge of the seat like he might need to leave at any moment. He placed his hands on his knees. The train started moving and he flinched, grabbing the edge of the seat.
"Everywhere," he said. "Nowhere specific. I moved around a lot."
The countryside blurred past outside the window. Haru watched it with wide eyes, the wheat stalk in his mouth forgotten, his hat sitting in his lap now. The hair-buns on his head were fully upright, trembling slightly with the vibration of the train.
Geto sat down next to Gojo and leaned back. He was already composing the full report in his head, the details Yaga would need, the questions that still needed answering, the logistical reality of what to do with an unregistered sorcerer of unclear age and negligible combat ability who had been living in fields for an unknown period of time.
But that was for later. Right now, the train rocked gently on the tracks, Gojo was already dozing off with his head tilted back against the seat, and Haru sat across from them watching the world go by faster than he'd ever seen it move, and for a few minutes, it was just a train ride.
The light outside the window turned gold as the sun started its long slide toward evening. Haru's reflection ghosted across the glass, a small, dirt-smudged figure with ridiculous hair, holding a straw hat in his lap like a shield.
"Geto-san," Haru said, still looking out the window.
"Hm?"
"The school. Is it..." He paused. Chose his words. "Is it a kind place?"
Geto considered the question. He thought about Yaga's entrance exams, about the sewer missions, about the grade assignments and the politics and the higher-ups who sat behind their doors and made decisions about people they'd never met. He thought about Shoko pulling all-nighters in the infirmary, and Gojo picking fights with teachers, and the first-years, Nanami and Haibara, heading out on their own mission today because that was the job and nobody got to opt out of it.
"It's complicated," Geto said honestly. "But the people in it try."
Haru nodded slowly. His hair-buns swayed with the motion.
"Okay," he said again, soft and mostly to himself. "Okay."
Gojo snored.