The thing about chronic pain is that nobody tells you about the boredom.
Zenin Chiyo had been awake for forty-three minutes. She knew this because she'd been counting the gaps between the drip of condensation from the pipe that ran along the ceiling above her futon, and the drip came roughly every eleven seconds, and she'd counted two hundred and thirty-four of them since opening her eyes. Before that there was nothing, just the usual dreamless black, which she preferred. Dreams required a brain relaxed enough to produce them, and relaxation required a baseline absence of pain that Chiyo's body had never once provided.
She lay on her back because she couldn't lie on her side. The curvature of her spine made lateral positioning feel like someone had jammed a fist between her vertebrae and was slowly twisting, which was worse than the default sensation of lying supine, which was merely that someone had filled her skin with ground glass and sealed it shut. Her left arm ended three inches below the elbow in a tapered, rounded nub of scar tissue that the compound's physician had wrapped in clean linen yesterday. The linen was already damp. Everything Chiyo touched became damp, because her body ran hot, because her circulatory system was working overtime to keep her catastrophically underdeveloped musculature oxygenated, because the Heavenly Restriction that had given her the cursed energy output of a mid-tier semi-grade 1 sorcerer had taken virtually everything else in return.
Two hundred and thirty-five.
She closed her eyes. Opened them. The ceiling was the same. Wooden slats, old but well-maintained, because the Zenin compound was ancient and the branch family quarters were ancient within it, but the clan employed enough servants that even the neglected wings stayed functional. Her room was ten tatami mats. Generous, for a child of a branch family nobody. Suspicious, actually, if you thought about it, which Chiyo did constantly. The room was large because the room needed to be large. Chiyo's futon was surrounded by medical equipment: an IV stand that the physician hung fluid bags on three times a week, a wooden frame with pulleys and cloth slings that allowed the servants to move her without touching her skin directly (touching her skin directly made her scream, and screaming bothered the neighbors, and the neighbors were Zenin sorcerers who solved problems that bothered them with casual violence), and a low table covered in jars of salve that did functionally nothing but which the physician applied with grim diligence because the alternative was admitting there was nothing to be done.
Chiyo was five years old. She'd been five years old for about seven months. Before that she'd been four, and before that three, and before that two, and before that an infant, and before that she'd been a forty-one-year-old corporate M&A attorney named Marcus Webb who had died of a pulmonary embolism in the business class lounge at O'Hare International Airport while reviewing a draft merger agreement for a client he didn't particularly like.
The memory of dying was crisp. Sharper than most of his memories from that life, actually, which had already begun to soften at the edges in the way that old photographs yellow. He'd been reading clause 4.2(b), the representation regarding outstanding litigation, and he'd felt a sudden pressure in his chest that he'd mistaken for heartburn from the complimentary soup, and then he was on the floor looking at the underside of a table, and then there was a period of blackness, and then there was a white room and a figure he couldn't focus on and a conversation he remembered with perfect clarity because the terms of the deal were etched into whatever passed for his soul.
Three wishes. Standard package. He'd been pleased, in the detached way of a man who'd just died and was being offered a fantasy cliche by an entity that existed outside the boundaries of rational thought, because the structure was familiar. Three wishes was a contract. Contracts were what Marcus Webb did.
He'd asked for the right things. He was sure of that. He'd been smart about it. Wish one: reincarnation into the world of Jujutsu Kaisen, a manga series he'd followed religiously for years because it was the only fiction that understood his profession's particular brand of cynicism. Wish two: full and perfect knowledge of the JJK timeline, from beginning to end, retained after reincarnation. Wish three: birth into a sorcerer clan, for the resources and connections necessary to survive.
Clean. Specific. Airtight.
Except it wasn't, because Marcus Webb had spent twenty years drafting contracts and he'd still walked into the biggest negotiation of his existence without reading the counterparty's terms. He hadn't asked about the body. He hadn't specified which clan. He hadn't put a floor on his starting conditions. He'd drafted the wish list of a man who assumed good faith from the universe, which was the kind of rookie mistake that got first-year associates fired.
Two hundred and thirty-six.
The door to her room slid open.
Chiyo didn't turn her head. Turning her head required engaging the muscles along the right side of her neck, which pulled on the trapezius, which connected to the spine, which was curved, which meant any rotation above fifteen degrees sent a cascade of nerve signals that her brain interpreted as being stabbed repeatedly in the shoulder blade. Instead she tracked the sound. Soft footsteps, sock feet on tatami. The faint rustle of a cotton kosode. A woman, probably. One of the branch family servants.
"Chiyo-sama." The honorific was perfunctory. You called branch family children -sama the way you called a stray cat by a name: to impose a structure of interaction, not out of respect. "The physician will attend to you after the noon meal."
"Thank you," Chiyo said. Her voice was thin and dry. Five-year-old vocal cords, chronically dehydrated because drinking water required someone to hold the cup to her lips and tilt it at precisely the right angle, and the servants assigned to her rotated weekly and the new ones always got the angle wrong and she'd choke and coughing with a curved spine was its own special hell.
The servant lingered. Chiyo could hear her breathing.
"Is there something else?"
"Naobito-sama has called a gathering of the family heads this evening. The branch families are not invited, but…" A pause. "There's been talk. About the assessment."
Chiyo let the silence stretch. This was a technique she'd perfected in her previous life. In depositions, in negotiations, in conference rooms overlooking Lake Michigan. Let the silence do the work. People filled silence the way water filled cracks.
"They say he's going to formalize the process," the servant continued. "Any child under twelve with a manifested technique gets evaluated by the Hei. Even branch family."
"Even branch family," Chiyo repeated.
"I thought you should know."
The door closed. The footsteps retreated.
Chiyo stared at the ceiling and did math.
She'd been in this world for five years and she'd spent most of that time in pain and the rest of it thinking. Thinking was the one activity her body permitted without penalty. Her brain worked fine. Better than fine, if she was being honest, because whatever mechanism governed the Heavenly Restriction seemed to have left her cognitive faculties untouched, and the adult mind that had spent two decades parsing securities regulations and antitrust law was still in there, still sharp, still obsessively cataloging information.
Here was what she knew.
The year was 2003. She knew this because she'd overheard a servant mention the date three years ago, when she was two and already fully conscious and already in agony and already aware that she'd been reborn into a nightmare with a cheat sheet she couldn't use because she was a paralyzed toddler. She'd done the math from there. Gojo Satoru and Geto Suguru were currently students at Tokyo Jujutsu High, probably in their first year or approaching it. The Star Plasma Vessel escort mission, the event that would shatter Geto's worldview and set the entire plot in motion, was roughly three years away. Toji Fushiguro's assassination of Riko Amanai, Gojo's near-death and subsequent awakening of Reverse Cursed Technique, Geto's descent into genocidal nihilism: all of it was sitting on the horizon like weather you could see from a long way off but couldn't outrun.
And Toji was here. Or near here. Or adjacent to here in a way that mattered.
That was the part that made Chiyo's stomach clench, which was its own unique flavor of pain because her abdominal muscles were atrophied and clenching them pulled on the curved spine and the curved spine pulled on everything else. Toji Zenin, who would become Toji Fushiguro, who was the single most dangerous non-sorcerer in the history of the jujutsu world, was at this moment still technically connected to the Zenin clan. He'd been ostracized, humiliated, stripped of any status within the family because he'd been born with zero cursed energy. The Heavenly Restriction that had given him a body capable of killing Special Grade sorcerers had taken every drop of CE in return, and the Zenin clan, which valued cursed techniques above all else, had treated him like garbage for it.
Chiyo understood the irony. She was Toji's mirror image. Where his Heavenly Restriction had taken his cursed energy and given him a perfect body, hers had taken her body and given her cursed energy she could project across a range that she hadn't fully tested yet but suspected was enormous. Kokichi Muta, the canonical bearer of a similar restriction, had been able to operate puppets across all of Japan. Chiyo wasn't Kokichi, and her technique wasn't Puppet Manipulation, but the engine was the same. The Heavenly Restriction was the battery. The technique was the device it powered.
And her technique was Terms and Conditions.
She'd felt it for the first time when she was three. She'd been lying in this same room, in this same futon, and a servant had dropped a tray of medical supplies and one of the jars had shattered and a shard of ceramic had skidded across the tatami toward her and she'd panicked, because even a small cut on her hypersensitive skin would have been excruciating, and she'd felt something reach out from inside her chest. Not physically. Not like an arm or a limb. More like a thought that had weight. A sentence that landed on the world and pressed down. She'd felt the air thicken around the shard, felt it slow, felt a pressure that was almost linguistic. Like a clause being read into record.
She hadn't understood it then. She understood it now.
Terms and Conditions allowed her to impose rules on reality. Unilateral clauses, projected through her cursed energy, declared aloud, and enforced within her technique's range. The catch, the consideration requirement, was baked into the technique at a structural level that went deeper than strategy or choice. Every clause she imposed on a target required her to accept a restriction on herself of equal or greater weight. The technique knew when she was faking. It was, in the most literal possible sense, a contract carved into her soul, and it had a built-in fraud detection system that would blow back on her if she tried to game the consideration.
She'd tested it exactly twice.
The first time, she was four. A beetle had gotten into her room through a crack in the wall, and she'd projected her cursed energy toward it and said, aloud, in the quiet of her sickroom: "Clause: this insect cannot move for five seconds. Consideration: I cannot use my cursed energy for ten seconds." And the beetle had stopped. Frozen mid-step, legs locked, antennae still. Five seconds of perfect immobility. And Chiyo had felt her own cursed energy seal itself away, like a door slamming shut inside her chest, and for ten seconds she'd been just a broken girl in a futon with no power at all.
The second time was three months ago. A young Zenin man from the Kukuru Unit, one of the clansmen without innate techniques who trained in hand-to-hand combat, had come into her room drunk and mean. Branch family quarters were not well-patrolled. He'd stood over her futon and said something about how it was pathetic that the clan wasted resources on a crippled girl who'd never hold a sword, and he'd kicked the edge of her futon, jostling her body, and the jolt of pain had been so severe that she'd bitten through her lip and tasted blood.
She'd filed a clause. She hadn't planned to. The words came out of her like a reflex, born from pain and fury and twenty years of professional instinct for leveraging rules against people who thought they were above them.
"Clause: you cannot take another step toward me for one minute. Consideration: I cannot speak for five minutes."
The man's leg had locked mid-stride. He'd looked down at his own body with an expression Chiyo recognized from her previous life. She'd seen it on the faces of executives who'd just been served with an injunction. The dawning, incredulous realization that a piece of paper, an abstraction, a rule, had reached into the physical world and seized them by the throat.
He'd stumbled backward when the minute expired. He'd left without another word. He hadn't come back.
Chiyo had lain in the dark for five minutes unable to speak, her lip bleeding onto the pillow, and she'd felt something she hadn't felt since Marcus Webb died in the business class lounge at O'Hare. She'd felt professional satisfaction.
The servant's news about the assessment changed things.
Chiyo had been planning to stay invisible. Invisible was safe. Invisible was sustainable. The Zenin clan was a hierarchy built on combat power and inherited techniques, and a bedridden branch family girl with no visible value was beneath the notice of the people who mattered, which meant she was beneath their cruelty, which meant she survived. The plan, such as it was, had been to lie low until she was old enough to start making moves. Gather information. Map the political landscape. Wait for the right moment to reveal what she could do, and reveal it to the right people, on her terms, with contractual protections in place.
But an assessment changed the calculus.
If Naobito was formalizing evaluations of manifested techniques, that meant someone would come to test her. They'd sense her cursed energy. They might have already sensed it. Chiyo had been suppressing her output as much as she could, but a Heavenly Restriction like hers generated CE the way a river generated current. You could dam it, but people downstream noticed when the water stopped flowing. Someone in the Hei, maybe Naobito himself, maybe Ogi, maybe one of the others, had probably already flagged the anomalous readings coming from the branch family wing.
She ran the scenarios.
Scenario one: the assessment reveals her technique and her cursed energy output, and the clan decides she's an asset. They invest in her. Medical care improves. She gains access to training, information, political proximity. This was the best case, but it came with strings. The Zenin clan didn't invest in people. It invested in weapons. An asset was something you deployed, and deploying a bedridden girl meant finding a use for her that justified the cost, and the uses the Zenin clan found for people tended to be violent and short-lived.
Scenario two: the assessment reveals her technique, and the clan decides she's a threat. A branch family girl with enormous CE output and a technique that could impose restrictions on others? In a compound full of ambitious men jockeying for position under an aging clan head? She'd be killed. Quietly, probably. An unfortunate decline in the health of an already sickly child.
Scenario three: she sandbagged. Showed them enough to justify continued existence but not enough to attract serious attention. Filed a small clause, something trivial, with a visibly disproportionate consideration. Made herself look weak. Bought time.
The problem with scenario three was that it required her to trust that the evaluators were stupid enough to miss the obvious. And the Zenin clan's upper echelon were many things, but they weren't stupid. Naobito was a drunk, but he was the fastest sorcerer in Japan outside of Gojo Satoru. Ogi was bitter and resentful, but he was a Special Grade 1 with the sword skills to back it up. Jinichi had a cursed technique Chiyo hadn't seen in action but which the branch family gossip network described as formidable. These were people who'd spent their entire lives evaluating the combat potential of sorcerers. They'd look at Chiyo's cursed energy output, look at her ruined body, and they'd see Kokichi Muta. They'd see the trade. They'd know.
Which left scenario four. The lawyer's option. The one Marcus Webb would have chosen if he'd been advising a client in Chiyo's position.
Control the narrative. Go into the assessment with a strategy. Show them something they couldn't ignore but frame it so that the value proposition benefited her. Make them think keeping her alive and comfortable was the smart play. Make the contract work for you.
The condensation dripped. Two hundred and fifty-one.
Chiyo closed her eyes and started drafting.
-
The physician came after lunch, as promised. His name was Zenin Eizo, a branch family man in his sixties who had enough cursed energy to see curses but not enough to fight them, which had shunted him into the medical track the way corporate law firms shunted mediocre litigators into compliance. He was competent, thorough, and completely indifferent to Chiyo as a human being. She appreciated all three qualities.
"Pain level," he said, unwrapping the linen from her left arm's stump.
"Seven," Chiyo said.
"Higher or lower than last week?"
"The same."
He grunted. He always grunted. He examined the stump with the practiced disinterest of a man who'd been looking at the same wound for three years and had exhausted his repertoire of reactions. The skin was healthy, as such things went. No infection, no necrosis. The Heavenly Restriction kept her alive with the same obstinate efficiency that it kept her in pain. The trade demanded a living body to generate the cursed energy, so the body lived, but the trade also demanded suffering as consideration, so the body suffered. It was, Chiyo had to admit, an elegant piece of contractual design. Whoever or whatever had written the Heavenly Restriction clause understood consideration.
"The assessment," she said while he applied salve to the juncture of her stump.
Eizo paused. "You heard about that."
"I hear about everything. I'm bedridden, not deaf."
He resumed his work. "It's not my place to discuss family politics with patients."
"You're not discussing politics. I'm asking whether I'll be evaluated. That's a medical question. Will the evaluation require physical activity that my body can't perform?"
The framing was deliberate. Medical question. Not political. Not strategic. A sick child worried about being hurt by a test she didn't understand. Eizo was a physician. Physicians responded to medical framing.
"The evaluation is for manifested techniques," Eizo said carefully. "It requires a demonstration of one's cursed energy or innate ability. Physical activity would depend on the nature of the technique."
"And if the child being evaluated can't stand?"
He looked at her. Really looked at her, for maybe the third time since she'd been assigned to his care. "Then accommodations would be made. Presumably."
"Has the branch family been formally notified?"
"Not yet. The announcement will come from Naobito-sama's office within the week."
Chiyo filed this away. Within the week meant she had days, not hours. Enough time to prepare but not enough time to stall.
"One more question."
Eizo was already packing up his kit. "What."
"Who conducts the evaluations? The Hei directly, or does Naobito-sama delegate?"
The physician's hands stopped. He looked at her again, and this time his expression shifted from indifference to something more cautious. Calculating. The look of a man reassessing a variable he'd previously written off.
"You're five," he said.
"I'm aware."
"Five-year-olds don't ask about delegation hierarchies."
"Five-year-olds in the Zenin clan learn to ask the right questions or they learn what happens to people who don't. Which category would you prefer I fall into?"
He stared at her for a long time. The drip from the ceiling pipe counted four beats.
"Jinichi conducts the initial assessments," he said. "Results go to Naobito-sama for final determination. The Hei observe but don't participate unless the technique warrants extended evaluation."
"Thank you, Eizo-sensei."
He left. The door slid shut.
Chiyo spent the next two hours reviewing what she knew about the clan's current factional alignment. Not from the manga. The manga skipped ahead to 2018 and showed the Zenin clan at the end of its arc, already calcified into the shape that Maki would eventually shatter. What Chiyo needed was the 2003 version, the living organism, and for that she relied on five years of overheard conversations, servant gossip, the indiscretions of men who drank too much and talked too loudly within earshot of a room they'd forgotten contained a conscious occupant.
The Zenin clan in 2003 operated on a three-faction model that would have been instantly recognizable to anyone who'd ever reviewed the governance structure of a Japanese keiretsu.
Faction one: Naobito and his direct line. Naobito held the clan head position and wielded it with the casual authority of a man who'd been in charge long enough to stop worrying about challenges. His son Naoya was being groomed as successor, already demonstrating Projection Sorcery at twelve or thirteen with a fluency that the elders described as prodigious. The Naobito faction controlled the Hei, the clan's elite combat unit, which meant they controlled the assignments, the grading recommendations to Jujutsu Headquarters, and the flow of information between the clan and the broader jujutsu world. Jinichi was Naobito's primary lieutenant in this structure: a loyalist, a capable fighter, and the kind of subordinate who executed orders without questioning them because questioning orders wasn't in his professional interest.
Faction two: Ogi and the discontented. Ogi had been passed over for clan head because his children were unimpressive. That was the official reason, anyway. The branch family gossip suggested a more complicated truth: that Naobito had been appointed by the previous head because Naobito's Projection Sorcery was a flashier, more marketable inherited technique than whatever Ogi wielded, and the Zenin clan's relationship with Jujutsu Headquarters depended on presenting the most impressive public face possible. Ogi's resentment was structural, not personal. He didn't just resent Naobito. He resented the system that had evaluated him and found him wanting, and he projected that resentment downward onto everyone beneath him, which included his eventual daughters and, by extension, anyone in the branch families who reminded him of his own inadequacy. Ogi's faction was smaller and quieter, composed mostly of elders who shared his traditionalist views but lacked the ambition or the technique rank to challenge Naobito directly. They were waiting. For what, Chiyo wasn't sure. Perhaps for Naobito to grow old enough to weaken. Perhaps for Naoya to do something disqualifying. Perhaps just for a shift in the political winds that would let them reframe the succession question.
Faction three: the silent majority. The branch families, the Kukuru Unit, the Akashi members who had techniques but not impressive enough ones to earn seats at the table. These were the people who lived in the compound and trained and fought and bled for the Zenin name and received in return the privilege of being Zenin, which in practice meant the privilege of being governed by people who despised them. The branch families didn't have a leader. They didn't have a platform. They had inertia and numbers and the kind of quiet, systemic misery that expressed itself not in rebellion but in alcoholism, domestic violence, and the occasional unexplained disappearance of a member who'd pushed back too hard against the wrong elder.
Chiyo belonged to faction three. A branch family girl. Daughter of a man whose name she'd never learned and a woman who'd died in childbirth, leaving Chiyo to the compound's institutional care, which was to say, minimal medical support and a room at the end of a hallway that nobody walked down unless they had to. She had no patron, no protector, no advocate. She had cursed energy she couldn't openly use and knowledge she couldn't openly share and a body that couldn't move from this futon without screaming.
The assessment was her entry point. The one door the system was offering. And she needed to walk through it, metaphorically speaking, because she'd never walk through anything else.
She lay in the dark and thought about Jinichi.
Jinichi Zenin was Naobito's man. A member of the Hei, which meant semi-grade 1 at minimum, with a cursed technique that Chiyo's intelligence network (which was to say, the gossip of servants and the indiscretions of drunk clansmen overheard through thin walls) described as something involving manipulation of inorganic matter. Stone, possibly. Earth. She'd heard a story about him crushing a rival's hand by collapsing a decorative garden wall onto it during what was supposed to be a sparring match.
He was loyal to Naobito. That was the critical variable. In the Zenin clan's internal politics, loyalty wasn't sentiment. It was investment. Jinichi was loyal to Naobito because Naobito was the head of the clan and the head of the clan controlled the resources and the assignments and the access to jujutsu headquarters that determined a sorcerer's career. If Naobito fell, Jinichi's loyalty would transfer to whoever replaced him, with the smooth efficiency of a creditor moving to the next viable debtor.
The question was: what would Jinichi report? And what would Naobito do with the report?
Naobito was the 26th head of the Zenin clan. He was a drunk, a traditionalist, and the original user of Projection Sorcery, which he'd passed down to his son Naoya. He'd been appointed over his brother Ogi because Naobito's potential heirs were considered superior, a fact that Ogi had internalized as a permanent, festering grievance. Naobito disliked the Gojo clan on principle. He valued inherited techniques above everything. He kept his position through a combination of genuine combat ability, political acumen, and the simple inertia of power: once you were the head, removing you was harder than tolerating you.
Chiyo needed Naobito to see her as useful. Not dangerous, not pathetic, not charity. Useful. A tool that justified its maintenance cost. In corporate terms, she needed to present a positive ROI on continued investment in her care. The pitch had to be precise. Too much ambition and Naobito would see a threat to be managed. Too little and he'd see a cost to be cut.
She thought about Ogi.
Ogi Zenin. Naobito's brother. Special Grade 1 sorcerer. Wielder of a flame-based cursed technique. Father, eventually, of Maki and Mai, though those two wouldn't be born until January of this year. If they hadn't been born already. Chiyo didn't know the exact month she was in, only the year, and the thought that Maki and Mai might already exist somewhere in the compound, days or weeks old, a pair of infant girls who would grow up despised by their father because their cursed energy split between them made neither one impressive enough to redeem Ogi's reputation, made something cold settle in her chest that had nothing to do with her Heavenly Restriction.
She knew what Ogi would become. She knew he'd leave his daughters to die in a storage room, that he'd cut Maki down with his own sword, that he'd weep not for their suffering but for the shame of having produced them. She knew that Maki would eventually kill him. That Mai would die to make it possible. That the Zenin clan's rot wasn't a disease that could be cured but a structural feature of the institution itself, a load-bearing wall of cruelty that kept the ceiling from coming down.
And she was inside it. A five-year-old girl with a broken body and an adult's understanding of exactly how bad things were going to get.
Chiyo let out a breath. It hurt. Breathing always hurt. The intercostal muscles between her ribs were weak, and expanding her chest cavity tugged on the curved spine, and the spine sent its usual complaint to the brain, and the brain dutifully produced the sensation of being slowly impaled.
She breathed again anyway.
Here was the thing Marcus Webb had learned in twenty years of corporate law: you couldn't fix a system from outside it. You could sue a company, regulate it, protest it, boycott it, and the company would absorb the damage the way a body absorbed a bruise and keep doing what it had always done. The only way to change a system was to get inside it, get your hands on the levers, and start rewriting the operating documents.
The Zenin clan was a corporation. The ugliest, most dysfunctional, most viciously hierarchical corporation imaginable, but a corporation nonetheless. It had a CEO (Naobito), a board of directors (the Hei), middle management (the Akashi and the senior branch families), rank-and-file employees (the Kukuru Unit), and a mission statement (power above all else) that everyone from the top to the bottom had internalized so completely that questioning it was treated as a kind of insanity.
Chiyo couldn't fight these people. Her body couldn't hold a sword or throw a punch or walk across a room. But she didn't need to fight them. She needed to draft terms they'd sign.
-
The compound grew louder in the evening.
Chiyo could track the rhythms of the Zenin household by sound alone. Mornings were quiet: the Hei trained at dawn in the eastern courtyard, and the Kukuru Unit drilled in the western grounds, and the servants moved through the halls with the practiced silence of people who'd learned that being noticed was dangerous. Afternoons were sporadic: meetings in the main hall, the crack of wooden swords from the training yard, occasional raised voices from the elders' wing where Ogi and Naobito's ongoing cold war generated the kind of controlled hostility that everyone pretended not to notice.
Evenings were different. Evenings meant drinking. Naobito drank openly, because he was the clan head and nobody could tell him otherwise. The Hei drank because the Hei emulated their leader. The Kukuru Unit drank because they were men without innate techniques in a clan that worshipped innate techniques, and alcohol was cheaper than therapy and more available than self-respect.
Through her walls, Chiyo could hear the gathering that the servant had mentioned. Distant voices, muffled by wood and paper but not silenced. She focused her cursed energy, letting it seep out from her body in a thin, controlled extrusion. Not a technique. Just basic CE manipulation, the sorcerer equivalent of straining your ears. She pushed it out like a needle, threading it along the wooden beams of the compound's structure, riding the grain of the timber the way electricity followed a wire.
She couldn't hear words. Not at this distance. But she could feel presences. The cursed energy of other sorcerers registered like heat signatures against the thin filament of her own CE. She counted them. Naobito was unmistakable: a dense, rapid-cycling output that felt like a film projector, frames of energy flickering at twenty-four per second even at rest. Projection Sorcery colored everything about him, even his ambient CE signature. Near him, another presence with a similar quality but younger, sharper, less controlled. Naoya. He'd be twelve or thirteen now, already manifesting the technique he'd inherited from his father, already being groomed as the heir apparent.
She felt Ogi. His energy burned at a low, constant temperature, a banked fire. Angry even when it was still. Beside him, Jinichi: heavier, denser, like river stone.
There were others she couldn't identify. More members of the Hei, probably. Branch family heads who'd been summoned to observe without participating, the way shareholders attended board meetings they couldn't vote in.
And then, at the edge of her range, she felt something else. Or rather, she felt the absence of something.
There was a void in the compound's cursed energy landscape. A human-shaped hole where a person should have been radiating CE but wasn't. A negative space, like a word redacted from a document. Every other person in the compound, from the strongest Hei member to the weakest servant, leaked at least a trace of cursed energy. This void leaked nothing. It moved through the compound's periphery with a fluid, predatory ease that Chiyo could only track because of the way it displaced the ambient CE around it, the way a fish could be tracked not by seeing the fish but by watching the water bend around it.
Toji.
Chiyo's heart rate spiked, and the spike translated into pain, because her cardiovascular system was fragile and tachycardia stressed the already-strained muscles of her chest wall. She forced herself to breathe. In. Out. Controlled.
Toji Zenin was in the compound. Not in the gathering, not in the main hall, but present. Lurking. She couldn't feel his intent because he had no cursed energy to read intent from, but she could feel the shape of his absence, and the shape was moving along the compound's outer corridor, parallel to the main hall, close enough to hear whatever was being discussed but far enough to leave without being noticed.
He was eavesdropping.
Of course he was. Toji was, as of 2003, still technically a member of the Zenin clan even if the clan had effectively disowned him. He'd been born here, raised here, brutalized here. The compound was his childhood home and his prison and the place that had taught him, through systematic dehumanization, that he was worth nothing without cursed energy. He hadn't left yet. He hadn't taken the Fushiguro name yet. He was still Toji Zenin, and he was still here, and he was still the most dangerous person in the building by an order of magnitude that nobody in the building appreciated because they couldn't sense him.
Chiyo could sense him. Sort of. She could sense the absence of him, which was close enough.
She withdrew her cursed energy, pulling the filament back into her body like reeling in a line. The exertion had cost her. Not much, in absolute terms, because her reserves were vast, but the act of fine manipulation required concentration, and concentration required energy, and energy was a finite resource in a body that burned through its caloric intake just keeping the basic systems running.
She lay in the dark and thought about Toji Fushiguro.
In three years, give or take, Toji would accept a contract from the Time Vessel Association to assassinate the Star Plasma Vessel, Riko Amanai. He'd spend thirty million yen of the association's money posting a bounty on a dark website to attract cannon-fodder curse users, wearing down Gojo and Geto's stamina through attrition before moving in himself for the kill. He'd defeat Gojo Satoru. He'd murder a fourteen-year-old girl. He'd do it all with zero cursed energy, a collection of cursed tools he stored inside an inventory curse, and the kind of tactical intelligence that came from spending a lifetime fighting opponents who underestimated him because they couldn't see him.
And then Gojo would come back. And Toji would die.
And years after that, during the Shibuya Incident, a woman named Ogami would resurrect Toji's body through her seance technique, and his body would overwrite the host's personality and rampage through Dagon's domain, and he'd kill Dagon, and then he'd turn on his own son Megumi without recognizing him, and in the single moment of recognition that followed he'd kill himself rather than hurt the child he'd abandoned.
Chiyo knew all of this. She knew it the way she knew contract law: completely, instinctively, with the kind of comprehensive fluency that came from obsessive study. The JJK timeline was filed in her head like case law, organized by arc and cross-referenced by character and theme.
The problem was that knowing the future didn't make the present less dangerous.
Toji was here now. Toji was unpredictable now. The Toji that Chiyo knew from the manga was a narrative construct, a character whose actions made sense in retrospect because the author had designed them to. The Toji who was currently moving through the Zenin compound was a real person with real impulses and real violence, and the gap between knowing what a character would do in a story and predicting what a person would do in reality was the gap between reading a contract and litigating one.
She needed to stay out of his way. That was the first rule. The most important rule. Toji Zenin was a hurricane. You didn't negotiate with hurricanes. You found a room without windows and you waited for them to pass.
The second rule was harder.
Chiyo needed to use the assessment to establish herself within the clan's power structure. She needed to demonstrate enough value to secure better medical care, better information access, and eventually enough political leverage to start making moves. But she needed to do it without attracting the kind of attention that got people killed, and in the Zenin clan, the line between valuable and threatening was drawn by men whose definition of value was calibrated entirely around combat utility.
She had one advantage. One card that nobody else in this compound held and nobody else could hold because nobody else had spent two decades in the profession that her innate technique was literally built from.
Chiyo was a lawyer. And her cursed technique was a contract.
The Zenin clan understood power. They understood speed and strength and destructive output. They understood Projection Sorcery and Ten Shadows and the inherited techniques that they'd spent generations curating and breeding for. What they didn't understand, had never needed to understand, was regulatory capture. They didn't understand how a carefully drafted clause, deployed at the right time and in the right context, could accomplish more than any sword. They didn't understand binding arbitration, or force majeure, or the quiet, bloodless violence of terms imposed on people who didn't read what they were signing.
They would learn.
But not yet. Not tonight. Tonight, Chiyo lay in the dark and listened to the compound settle around her, the distant sounds of the clan gathering fading as the alcohol flowed and the conversations turned from policy to posturing. She tracked Toji's void as it moved along the perimeter and eventually faded beyond her range. She counted condensation drops. She breathed through the pain.
She had maybe a week before the assessment. A week to figure out how to demonstrate her technique to Jinichi in a way that made Naobito want to keep her alive. A week to draft the most important pitch of either of her lives.
Marcus Webb had once closed a hostile takeover in nine days flat, working on four hours of sleep and a diet of vending machine coffee, drafting seventeen separate filings while opposing counsel threw up procedural roadblocks that would have buried a lesser attorney. He'd done it because the client needed it done, and because the work was the work, and because the only thing more painful than doing impossible things under impossible conditions was admitting that they couldn't be done.
Chiyo was five years old. She was missing part of an arm. She couldn't walk, couldn't stand, couldn't hold a pen. She lived in a compound full of killers who regarded her as waste. She had perfect knowledge of a future that would drown the jujutsu world in blood, and no ability to change any of it without first changing the conditions of her own imprisonment.
She would start with the assessment. She would show Jinichi something he hadn't seen before. She would file a clause so precisely calibrated to the Zenin clan's value system that Naobito would look at a crippled branch family girl and see something worth feeding.
The clause she had in mind was simple. Elegant. The kind of provision that looked innocuous on its face but carried implications that would unfold over time, the way a boilerplate non-compete clause looked like two paragraphs of nothing until the day you tried to leave and discovered it owned your career for the next eighteen months.
She needed a volunteer. Or, more accurately, she needed someone who wouldn't volunteer but whom Jinichi would instruct to participate. A Kukuru Unit member, probably. Someone strong enough that the restriction she imposed on them would be visibly impressive, but low-status enough that nobody would object to their being used as a demonstration dummy. The Zenin clan was full of men like that. Men whose bodies were their only value and whose only purpose was to be deployed and spent.
Chiyo would impose a clause on the volunteer. Something physical, something visible, something that demonstrated control rather than destruction. And she would accept a consideration so severe, so visibly punishing, that even the most skeptical evaluator would recognize the weight of the exchange. The Zenin clan understood sacrifice. They understood pain as currency. They worshipped at the altar of binding vows and heavenly restrictions and the fundamental jujutsu principle that power was purchased with suffering.
Chiyo had suffering to spare. She'd show them the receipt.
The condensation dripped.
Chiyo began to draft.