Nagasaki Soyo sat on the bench and lifted her right leg, pointing her toes toward the opening of the purple tights.
At her age, her legs were naturally smooth—no stray hair, no roughness, nothing but clean, even skin.
She pinched the edge of the stocking with both hands and guided her toes in.
The instant her toes slipped past the cuff and touched the fabric from the inside, Soyo's lips parted in surprise.
By every bit of common sense she'd built up over the past decade, sweaty skin and tight cloth were a terrible combination. The friction would skyrocket. The fabric would cling like glue. Pulling it up even an inch would feel like wrestling a stubborn octopus—risking runs, tearing, and that sharp, pinching pain where the cloth bit into damp skin.
Anyone who had ever tried to yank on tight leggings in winter right after a hot shower—while still not fully dry—knew that misery intimately. The drag, the resistance, the irritation… enough to make you sweat again out of sheer frustration.
Soyo had fully prepared herself for a battle.
But reality did the exact opposite.
There was no resistance at all.
Before she even consciously exerted force, her toes simply slid—smoothly, almost eagerly—all the way to the very tip. The tights settled around her entire right lower leg as if they'd been made for her body alone, with not even the faintest tug on her skin.
Soyo froze for a beat, then bent forward and ran her right hand along the sole of her foot through the purple fabric.
The sticky layer of sweat—along with the damp, sour humidity that came from being trapped inside dress shoes—vanished the moment the cloth covered her.
Not "dried."
Erased.
As if some higher-dimensional force had simply deleted moisture itself.
What her foot felt now was pure dryness. Clean, light, breathable. Even the aching heat that had pooled in her sole from prolonged exertion seemed to drain away with the disappearing sweat.
Her right foot felt like it had been carefully wiped down with a sterile, dry towel.
Soyo drew her hand back and murmured, impressed despite herself.
"So this is the auto-cleaning… That's ridiculous."
With the last of her hesitation gone, she lifted her left leg and slid her other foot in.
The same extreme smoothness. The same instant dryness. The same sweeping-away of that clammy discomfort.
Once both legs were in, Soyo lowered her gaze.
By her feet lay her loafers. The black knee-high socks she'd just removed—soaked through—had been crumpled and stuffed into the openings.
The sweat-heavy cotton looked darker than usual, reflecting a faint, watery sheen under the station's lighting.
And because the subway air was cold while the shoes still held her body heat, thin white steam was visibly drifting out of the shoe mouths.
Just looking at them made it easy to imagine the inside: damp enough to leave footprints in the insoles.
Soyo stared at the steaming shoes for two seconds, then shook her head.
Half a minute ago she'd been wearing them, but now that they were steaming like that… she couldn't bring herself to put her feet back in.
Instead, she planted her feet—still wrapped in the purple tights—directly onto the subway station floor.
The pale tiles were filthy, layered with grime from who knew how many years of neglect.
Normally, Soyo would never let her bare feet touch something like this.
But if the tights would stay perfectly clean no matter what…
Then the floor's filth didn't matter.
She stood, then bent slightly and gripped the waistband.
With a single upward pull, the tights slid into place beneath her pleated skirt—no snagging, no catching, no hesitation. They swept over her thighs, then her hips, sealing around her waist with a neat elastic snap.
No wrinkles. No pinching. No "tight" feeling at all.
Soyo shut her eyes, breathed once, and focused entirely on her feet.
I'm wearing my shoes.
The next moment, her soles, arches, and heels all registered that familiar snug pressure—replacing the direct contact with the floor.
She opened her eyes.
A pair of loafers had appeared on her feet, identical in shape and design to the ones she'd been wearing.
She flexed her toes, rolled her weight from side to side, and frowned slightly.
Whether it was psychological or the tights were genuinely tailoring the fit to her subconscious, the shoes felt better than any standard pair she'd ever worn.
The support under her arch was perfect. No edges rubbed. No tight spots. No empty slop. Every contour of her foot felt cradled.
Tap. Tap.
She lifted her foot and stamped twice.
The weight of the heel on tile, the rebound, the grip—everything was real. No seams. No tells.
Satisfied, she turned, bent down, and hooked her original loafers off the ground with her index and middle finger.
To catch the opening, her fingers inevitably slipped into the narrow gap between the soaked socks and the shoe lining.
Warmth spread across the backs of her fingers—her own heat—mixed with the slick, wet softness of sweat-saturated cotton.
She reached for the spatial storage device, intending to stash them away.
But the moment the shoes neared the device in her left hand, she stopped.
Her arms froze midair for several seconds.
Soyo blinked, her gaze flicking between the shoes and the storage device.
The device could use spatial force to absorb unresisting objects.
So why had she bent down and grabbed them like this in the first place?
Not only was it unnecessary—she'd just gotten her hands clean, and now she'd smeared sweat and odor onto her fingers again.
"…Yeah. Muscle memory from ten-plus years isn't something you rewrite overnight."
She sighed, stopped overthinking, and stored the steaming loafers—along with the wet, crumpled socks—inside the device.
Then she paused again.
She pressed her sweat-damp fingertip to the painted surface.
A basketball-court-sized internal space unfolded in her mind. Inside, her shoes were still slowly evaporating sweat, thin strands of white steam drifting outward and spreading through the enclosed air.
Soyo's brows drew together.
If she let that continue, would everything in the space take on the smell after a few hours?
Without hesitation, she shoved all her other items to the far left side of the storage space, and left the steaming shoes alone—isolated at the far right edge.
The storage device was just a dead-object container. It didn't freeze time or lock states.
Once she was satisfied with the distance, she withdrew from the internal view and put the device away.
Now that the minor fuss was dealt with, Soyo adjusted her breathing, steadied her stance, and finally moved to the actual purpose of all this.
At her will, the purple tights covering her legs and waist shifted. The lower-leg fabric rapidly changed material and color, becoming the black knee-high socks she wore most often.
Ink-dark markings began to spread across her skin—up her neck, across her cheeks.
Her blue eyes turned blood-red, and the skin beneath each eye split into a pair of narrow slits, revealing two additional crimson eyes beneath.
Four eyes.
At this moment, aside from still wearing her Tsukinomori Girls' Academy uniform, Soyo's outward traits matched her Sukuna-possessed form perfectly.
But the black markings and the "extra eyes" weren't cursed energy at all.
They were, in essence, just body paint conjured by the tights.
And the blood-red eyes were nothing more than high-quality colored contacts.
Cosplay.
Nothing more.
Soyo stood still, clenched her fist, then slowly released it, carefully sensing her body.
Nothing changed.
No boost in strength. No rise in stamina. No new reflexes. No enhanced vision. No special perception. No cursed-energy "swell" inside her.
She was still a girl who had never undergone professional physical training.
Then she grew extremely serious and performed the chant and hand motion exactly as taught.
Even though she knew her body was "empty," she still completed every step with perfect discipline.
She pointed two fingers at a rusted light pole five meters away and said, clearly and evenly:
"Dismantle."
The moment the syllable landed—
A screech of metal.
The corroded pole was severed cleanly in half, as if chopped by an invisible blade.
The upper section collapsed with a heavy crash, slamming into the platform and sending a booming echo down the tunnel.
The cut surface was smooth as glass. Even the steel reinforcements inside were sliced cleanly—no tearing, no twisting, no burrs.
The unseen slash didn't stop there. It kept flying forward until it hit the grimy concrete wall of the tunnel with a dull thud—
And vanished.
The wall didn't even gain a scratch.
Soyo stared at the fallen pole with all four crimson eyes, then lifted a finger to her chin, thinking.
A contradiction churned inside her.
From the collective unconscious's perspective, she was now an existence with terrifying power—someone who could casually launch a slash that cut steel.
But from her own perspective, her entire lived experience anchored her in reality.
She knew the markings were paint. She knew the eyes were contacts. She knew she had no cursed energy in her body.
Her physical attributes hadn't changed at all.
Yet to the Impression Space and to Shadows, she could conjure lethal attacks from nothing.
And if something attacked her—because she'd "demonstrated" defense in the Impression Space before—those attacks might not even be able to break through her recognition-based defenses.
Soyo lowered her gaze to her shadow.
She tried to summon the Ten Shadows beasts, even Mahoraga.
No seals. No chants.
Just pure will—an order in her mind.
She stared at the shadow on the tile and waited.
One second.
Three.
Five.
Nothing.
Her shadow stayed still. No boiling ink. No black fluid. No pale hand rising from below.
Summon: failed.
But this, too, seemed expected.
Because she hadn't performed the "standard process," the Impression Space had no way of recognizing that she was attempting a summon at all.
The collective unconscious probably did believe she possessed the Ten Shadows Technique—just like it believed she could launch invisible slashes.
But it didn't know when she was using it.
Her intent alone had no "trigger medium," so the space judged it as: she had done nothing.
That was precisely why she'd done it this way.
She wanted the contrast—to deepen her understanding of how ability solidification worked in this world.
And while she'd been using cursed-energy systems this long, Soyo hadn't been idle.
With Sukuna's battle intellect in her head, ideas had kept surfacing.
For instance: if clothes got damaged in a fight, could Reverse Cursed Technique be used externally to repair them instantly?
But from the information her possibility-self carried, Reverse Cursed Technique was already absurdly difficult—and externalizing it to heal others or repair external things was a skill only a handful of freaks could do.
Even Sakiko's Gojo-variant couldn't.
Which meant: if Sakiko's clothes got shredded in a fight, she couldn't repair them with her own power.
And at their level of combat, clothes didn't stay intact.
This made Soyo suddenly curious about that other world's battles.
Did everyone end up with less and less fabric as fights dragged on?
Did they eventually just… fly around the ruins, beating each other senseless while completely naked?
A ridiculous image rose, uninvited:
Sakiko, proud and poised as always, standing in a smoke-choked battlefield—her uniform blasted to tatters.
Her face bright red, biting her lip, fighting while desperately trying to cover her chest and thighs with the last scraps of cloth—
Soyo snapped a hand over her mouth.
Heat crept up her ears and into her cheeks.
She shook her head hard, forcibly evicting the image from her mind.
No. That probably wouldn't happen.
Because their world's foundational law was that cognition decided reality. Physical phenomena ultimately had to yield to absolute recognition.
And as a modern human trained by over a decade of social conditioning, shame wasn't a preference.
It was an instinct.
Something carved into the bottom layer of the mind.
It might even be deeper than survival itself.
In the subconscious's judgment, you could bleed. You could lose a hand.
But maybe—because of shame alone—clothing's "defense rating" would be elevated to a ridiculous level.
Maybe, even at the center of a nuclear explosion, the "important parts" would remain perfectly covered.
A girl's sense of shame, in the cognition world, might genuinely be the strongest defensive buff there was.
And alongside that thought, something far colder crept up Soyo's spine.
By everything she currently understood, Shadows were aggregates of negative emotion that had drifted free from humanity's collective unconscious.
And cursed energy… was also born from human negative emotion. A negative power.
The roots were uncomfortably similar.
So a question formed—one that made her stomach tighten:
What would happen if you fed pure cursed energy to a wild Shadow?
Would the shared origin cause it to overload and explode?
Or would it trigger some uncontrollable consumption and evolution?
Could it break the established rules of the cognition space and mutate into a sentient existence—something like a special-grade curse?
Could it even begin to contaminate the Impression Space's rules in reverse?
It was a mad idea.
A horrifying one.
And she didn't test it.
Because she understood exactly what kind of door she might open if her guess was even half-right.
A door that couldn't be closed again.
Just then, a message popped up.
Soyo's mind snapped back into place. She opened the group interface immediately.
[Toyokawa Sakiko (Group Leader): Soyo, teleport to me right now.]
Join here to read ahead.
In Star Rail, Ultra-Beast Armored — Have I Caught "Equilibrium"? l (Chapter 80)
Uma Musume, But I Only Have Five Years Left to Live (Chapter 178)
Zenless Zone Zero: I'm a Doctor, Not a Bangboo (Chapter 165)
Ben Tennyson Wants to Join the Justice League ( 126 )
TYPE-MOON: Redemption Beginning with the Holy Grail War (Chapter110)
Yu-Gi-Oh! — Transmigrated into the White Dragon Girl (Chapter220)
"Is this chat group even serious?" (Chapter125)
I, Lord Ravager, Utterly Loyal! (Chapter250)
Can Playing Games Save the World? 65
Crossover Anime Multiverse: The Demon Hunter of an Unnatural World 77
From Junkman to Wasteland 66
Weekly Refresh of Overpowered 31
I'm Grinding Proficiency Like 46
From Kiana, Lord Ravager, Onwa 220
Honkai: Is This Still the Prev 42
Elf: My Starter Pokémon Is Inc 65
Warhammer: My Primarch Is Remi 185
From Demon Slayer to Grand Ass Volume2/20
The Way the Umamusume Look at 68
Uma Musume, but My Cheat Power 248
Naruto: Weaving the Future, Be 65
Zenless Zone Zero, but Kamen R 76
Multiverse Crossover: The Perf 66
My Cyberpsycho Girlfriend 65
Uma Musume: The Dark Trainer 230
Uma Musume: A Calamity Born fr 154
I, a Reincarnation-Loop Player Volume4/40
The Violent Girl Group Is Beat 125
Uma Musume: The Horse Girl Who 67
Uma Musume: From Beginner 145
Becoming a Horse Girl, I Will 85
Uma Musume: I Want All 120
I Can Copy Unique Skills 115
Summoning an Evil God, but the 75
Supernatural Multiverse 110
My Harem Is Indescribable 100
Jujutsu Kaisen: Heroic Spirit 105
"I'm just a Valkyrie passing through." 67
Uma Musume: Today Is Another Romantic Battlefield 105
Still playing traditional Honk 80
The Most Filial Son Under Heav 85
What Should I Do After Switchi - Volume2/3
Reincarnated as a Demon, Skill 78
Hell-Difficulty Dungeon? 55
Transmigrated as Sukuna 80
Checking In in Demon Slayer 85
The Reincarnating Trainer of Tracen Academy 100
I Refuse to Become a Heroic 85
My Best Friend Into a Slime? 80
A Saiyan Stands Above Marvel 90
What Do You Mean by Using a Lab Mod to Be the Hero? 75
Tanya Starts from Re:Zero 80
Why did they assign me to Uma 75
MYGO Beauties 70
DanMachi: Emiya the Giant Hero 70
The Gacha Merchant Who Started 80
Honkai's Otherworld? Wait—Who Are You People?! 80
Emiya Shirou, Determined to Slay Every Curse and Evil Spirit 57
The Uma Musume Who Became 55
I'm Definitely Not the King of 60
After Maxing Out Every Class 45
Naruto: I'm Konoha's Local Men 35
Honkai: World Modulation Mode 34
I, the Elden Sword Saint 27
Dio Brando Is Challenging FGO 24
No One Knows Pokémon Better 18
I, Sakazuki, Won't Go Down Tha 20
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