"You think we're facing each other," I told him, flexing my fingers slowly while watching the way his cursed energy rolled off his shoulders in thick, dramatic waves, "but we're not even standing on the same ground."
He scoffed the way older sorcerers always do when they see someone younger with too much power and assume that must mean stupidity comes included. His cursed energy flared higher, visibly, deliberately, as if the extra noise would somehow make him more dangerous. It didn't. It just made him loud.
I've never liked loud fighters. Loud usually means they don't notice the details.
Still, maybe I should explain how I got here before this turns into something you can't follow.
My name is Ren Aoyama.
At least, that's who I am now.
I wasn't always.
In my last life, I was just a middle school kid. Not tragic. Not gifted. Not secretly exceptional. I wasn't bullied, I wasn't popular, I wasn't anything worth writing about. I did my homework, showed up on time most days, and forgot my gym uniform more often than I should have. If you met me back then, you probably wouldn't remember it.
The day I died wasn't dramatic either. I was walking to school, half awake, scrolling on my phone while waiting to cross the street. I remember thinking about a math test I hadn't studied enough for. I remember hearing an engine rev louder than it should have been.
Then I remember turning my head.
After that, nothing.
There wasn't a god waiting for me in some white void. There wasn't a voice offering power in exchange for anything. No glowing interface. No explanation.
Just darkness that didn't feel peaceful or scary. It was just… empty.
And then suddenly there was light.
The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes again was a woman with messy dark brown hair falling into her face while she leaned over me. She looked exhausted in a way that felt real, not dramatic. Not crying. Not hysterical. Just watching me with this quiet, steady focus, like she was trying to memorize the shape of my face.
It took me a long time to understand that look.
Now I think she was trying to figure out what kind of person she had just brought into the world.
The first time something inside me truly broke loose, I was six.
I didn't know what cursed energy was. I didn't know curses existed. I just knew that sometimes the air around certain places felt wrong, like something invisible had been misaligned by a few inches and the world hadn't bothered to fix it yet.
That day it happened at a construction site near our house. I liked going there because my dad worked similar jobs, and watching the machinery made me feel grounded in a way I couldn't explain. Everything had weight. Structure. Purpose.
Except that afternoon the air near the scaffolding felt tight, warped in a way that pressed against my skin.
It irritated me.
I remember standing there longer than I should have, staring at empty space while workers moved around me, laughing, talking, unaware that something thin and ugly was forming near the beams.
I didn't know I was releasing cursed energy.
I just remember getting angry at the feeling and pushing back against it without thinking.
The world folded.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
The air compressed inward as if someone had grabbed the entire space and crushed it in their fist. Glass shattered. Concrete cracked in branching lines. Tools were ripped from hands. Someone screamed.
And I stood in the center of it with cursed energy pouring out of me in such volume that I couldn't even feel where my body ended and it began.
That was how they found me.
Not because I was precise.
Because I was impossible to ignore.
Apparently, I was born with an absurd amount of cursed energy. More than most special grades. More than people thought was reasonable for someone who couldn't even control it.
The problem was simple.
I had the ocean.
I didn't know how to swim.
Back to now.
The sorcerer in front of me lunged first, his movement confident and practiced, the kind of forward pressure that comes from years of training under people who reward aggression. His cursed energy sharpened around his arm as he closed the distance, clearly expecting me to retreat.
I didn't.
Instead of stepping back, I shifted forward just enough to disrupt the rhythm he had already committed to. It wasn't flashy. There was no explosion. But the distance between us shortened in a way that didn't quite match his expectation.
His fist passed my jaw by inches.
Close enough that I felt the air move.
Not close enough to land.
He frowned.
That small crease in his brow was more satisfying than it should have been.
I released cursed energy instinctively in response, pushing it outward in a wave that cracked the ground beneath us and bent nearby scaffolding like it had been made of soft metal. The distortion rolled unevenly, folding space and snapping it back too violently, too wide.
Too much.
It was always too much.
He recovered quickly, adjusting for the environmental damage, and countered with an elbow that slammed into my ribs hard enough to knock the air from my lungs. Pain flared bright and immediate, and I tasted iron.
Good.
Pain sharpens you.
I twisted space sideways this time instead of forward, trying to redirect momentum instead of overpowering it, but my control slipped at the worst possible moment. The fold rebounded toward me instead of away, compressing the air around my chest so tightly that my knees hit the ground before I realized I was losing balance.
The curse he'd summoned reformed in the warped pressure, its shape stabilizing under the chaotic distortion I'd created instead of dissolving like it should have.
It lunged.
I tried to correct the fold, tried to compress more precisely—
And everything stopped.
Not slowed.
Stopped.
The pressure vanished so suddenly it felt like someone had cut a wire inside reality.
"Well," a familiar voice said lightly from somewhere above me, "that's not how you're supposed to do it."
I didn't need to look up to know who it was.
Gojo.
He stood there like the entire situation had been mildly inconvenient instead of seconds away from fatal, one hand resting casually on the curse's head as if it were a pet that had misbehaved.
He flicked his fingers.
The curse disappeared instantly, erased with a level of precision I couldn't even conceptualize yet.
I forced myself to stand despite the pain radiating through my ribs.
"I had it," I said, because admitting otherwise would have meant accepting how close I'd been to dying.
He tilted his head slightly, blindfold still covering his eyes, but I could feel the weight of his evaluation regardless.
"No," he replied calmly. "You really didn't."
That irritated me more than the hit had.
"You release cursed energy like you're trying to drown the battlefield," he continued, straightening up. "It works against weaker opponents. Against something real, it'll just get you killed."
"I'm still standing."
"Barely."
He crouched slightly, lowering his voice so only I could hear.
"The higher-ups already think you're unstable," he said, tone almost conversational. "And they don't like unstable things with that much output."
I knew that.
Ever since the construction incident, I'd felt eyes on me. Evaluation. Calculation.
"The world's shifting," he added after a brief pause, his voice losing a fraction of its usual playfulness. "When it does, we won't be able to afford waste."
Waste.
That's what I would've been today.
He stood again.
"You're coming to Jujutsu High," he said simply, as if it had already been decided.
I didn't ask if I had a choice.
I just nodded.