Natsume's Spirit Investigation Office now officially had two off-the-record members.
Aside from occasionally surprising Yui and Eriri when they dropped by, this change caused barely a ripple at school.
Days slipped by. Summer break was just around the corner.
During this time, Natsume's life remained as quiet as ever. Classes during the day, afternoons spent in the clubroom drinking tea and reading, and now and then explaining to Yashiro some of the basic theory behind the nature of cursed energy.
Yashiro's ability to learn was nothing short of terrifying. She absorbed everything Natsume taught her at an astonishing pace, knowledge that far surpassed the modern Jujutsu world's understanding. In just a few weeks, her use of cursed energy had already shifted from simple "going by feel" toward something far more precise and controlled.
However, theory was still just theory.
"Talking on paper will only take you so far."
One ordinary afternoon in the clubroom, Natsume closed the light novel in his hand and let his gaze sweep over the Hōzuki sisters, who were in the middle of their spiritual sensitivity training.
"Summer vacation is almost here. It is about time we had a proper club activity," he announced calmly. "We can treat it as... a real-world test for the new employees."
At the word "real-world," Eiko's shoulders stiffened on instinct. Beside her, Yashiro's black eyes lit up with sudden interest.
"Teacher, do you already have a target?" she asked. She called him "Teacher" openly now, a title that carried genuine respect and recognition.
"I do have a suitable test site in mind," Natsume said with a small smile. "But since this is your entry test, you can provide the location. Any place you could not handle on your own, or that you think is worth dealing with?"
Eiko was still racking her brain when Yashiro, without a moment's hesitation, pulled a hand-drawn map covered in dense symbols out of her little backpack.
"I do."
She raised a small, pale finger and pointed to a spot on the outskirts of Chiba.
"Asakusa Shrine."
"This used to be a shrine dedicated to a mother-and-child deity. Thirty years ago, it was shut down after a fire," Yashiro explained, her tone calm and professional in a way completely out of step with her age. "But the mother-and-child statue, which the believers had all chipped in to commission, was not destroyed."
"After that, that statue gradually became the gathering point for the grudges of all aborted, stillborn, or abandoned infants in the area. Over time, the entire shrine was polluted by that resentment and turned into a huge breeding ground for cursed spirits, attracting countless low-level curses related to infants."
She lifted her head and met Natsume's gaze head-on.
"That place is beyond what my sister and I can handle. So I have always kept it in reserve, as my offering to you, Teacher... my proof of loyalty."
"A cursed spirit nest, hm..." Natsume's lips curved with genuine interest. "That does sound like a good test site."
...
The next day, Saturday.
The three of them took a train out toward the suburbs marked on the map.
The air there was heavy with the damp scents of earth and greenery. Far from the city's noise, everything was still and quiet. However, as they followed a long-abandoned mountain path toward Asakusa Shrine, a chill, sticky resentment that could not be seen with the naked eye surged toward them like a thick fog.
Eiko shivered before she could stop herself, her face turning pale. The lingering filth of cursed energy here was thicker and more malevolent than any "haunted spot" she had visited before.
What appeared before them was a crumbling torii gate. The vermilion paint had long since peeled away, exposing the rotten wood beneath. Beyond the gate ran a long stone stairway, the approach to the shrine, now overgrown with weeds and moss. On either side of the path, hundreds of Jizo statues of all sizes stood in dense rows.
These statues were originally symbols of compassion and guardianship for children. Now, each stone face seemed frozen in a strange expression, somewhere between a smile and a sob, eerie enough to send a chill down the spine.
"This is it," Yashiro said quietly, stopping in place. Her expression turned solemn.
Natsume opened Six Eyes.
In his vision, the entire sky above the shrine was blanketed in a vast mass of black cursed energy, roiling like a storm cloud. Inside every Jizo statue, he could see weak, flickering cursed embryos curled up in the stone, so numerous it made even him feel a faint prickle along his scalp.
"Are you ready?" he asked, turning his head slightly.
Yashiro nodded hard. Eiko swallowed nervously.
Natsume said nothing more. He took the first step forward and set foot on the cursed ground.
The moment his toes touched the earth...
Crack... crack, crack...
A sharp sound like glass shattering rang out from every direction at once.
All along the path, the bodies of the hundreds of Jizo statues, without any warning at all, split open with countless spiderweb cracks.
The next moment, every statue exploded.
"Waaah... waaah..."
"Mommy... Mommy..."
Piercing cries, the shrieks of infants that seemed to claw directly at the heart, suddenly filled the whole mountainside.
Fist-sized cursed spirits, black from head to toe with twisted little limbs, burst madly out of the shattered statues like a dam breaking. Infant spirits, by the hundreds, by the thousands.
They merged into a roiling black tide, a flood made of pure resentment and despair, surging toward the three of them, blotting out the sky.
This was no longer just a cluster of cursed spirits. It was a curse-tide born from the convergence of several thousand, perhaps tens of thousands, of infant spirits, enough to completely pollute the entire surrounding area.
"Kyahhh!"
Eiko had witnessed plenty of frightening things before, but faced with this tableau straight out of a painting of hell, terror seized her completely. Her face went white as paper, and she screamed.
Even calm, composed Yashiro had a grave look on her face. She quickly pulled from her back that massive crowbar that did not match her small frame at all and took up a defensive stance.
However, Natsume, standing at the very front, did not show the slightest change in expression.
Even with a tide of curses crashing toward him that would have given any top-grade sorcerer a headache, he merely lifted his right hand in a slow, unhurried motion.
"Cursed Technique Lapsel... Blue."
He spoke softly, as if stating a simple fact.
At the sound of the words, a tiny singularity of gravity, glowing with a faint ghostly blue, appeared above the center of the black curse tide, without fanfare.
At first, it was only the size of a marble, barely noticeable.
In the next instant, a terrifying gravitational force erupted from that tiny point, warping space, devouring light, a pull strong enough to drag all things into nothingness.
The world lost its sound.
The infants' shrill cries, the rustling of leaves in the wind, all of it vanished, swallowed by that absolute gravity.
The sisters felt their eardrums buzz. In front of them, the black tsunami of infant curses let out a silent, desperate howl as they were dragged, stretched, and twisted toward the blue "sun" in the sky.
And not just the curses.
The fragments of shattered Jizo statues, the weeds and soil on the ground, even the rotten beams of the shrine itself... everything was torn away from the earth and pulled toward the warped center, powerless before that godlike force.
Space itself seemed to groan.
Everything that crossed the boundary, matter and cursed energy alike, was compressed tighter and tighter as it neared the singularity, until it became an invisible point... and then it simply ceased to exist.
The entire process took no more than three seconds.
When the blue singularity quietly faded, the world fell silent once more.
The scene before them had completely changed.
The ruined shrine, the rows of statues, the overwhelming tide of cursed spirits... all of it had vanished without a trace.
In their place was a massive bowl-shaped crater, more than fifty meters across, its inner surface smooth and gleaming, as if it had been polished.
It was as though Asakusa Shrine had never existed.
As though some god had gently wiped a stain off the surface of the world with a fingertip.
Natsume slowly lowered his hand, brushed nonexistent dust from his sleeve, and turned back to the sisters, who had been shocked into speechlessness.
"All right, the test is over," he said calmly. "It seems your real-world skills still need work."
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