Yaga heard it clearly.
That quiet little "of course I understand" wasn't some halfhearted reply. The kid meant it.
The knot in his chest finally eased. His shoulders dropped. A long breath left him.
As a teacher, this was the thing he feared most. A student with absurd talent, carrying around this much damage, deciding there was only one road left and sprinting straight down it until he broke.
At least it looked like his words had gotten through.
What the reliable homeroom teacher completely failed to realize was that Touma's "understand" meant the exact opposite of what he wanted it to mean.
It didn't mean I'll calm down. I'll stop pushing so hard.
It meant Touma now understood, perfectly and without any comforting lies, how ugly and impossible the road ahead would be.
And he was going anyway.
Still, seeing that Touma had settled down on the surface, Yaga let the strict-teacher act ease a little.
He opened the bottom drawer of his workbench and carefully took out a wooden box wrapped in layers of cursed talismans. Inside was a core giving off a faint pulse of cursed energy. His latest prototype. The one he'd been building for Panda.
But a fully independent Cursed Corpse was still something the modern jujutsu world had never seen before. Nobody had done it. Nobody had mapped it out. It was dangerous ground.
Even Yaga, who was probably the best Cursed Corpse craftsman alive, was still stumbling around in the dark with this one. Progress had been painfully slow.
His rough fingers brushed over the unfinished core. Behind the sunglasses, his expression tightened. Part obsession, part honesty.
"Touma. You don't have to carry every irreversible consequence by yourself. I've been researching this too. Quietly."
A rare bit of self-mockery crossed his face.
"Honestly, it's embarrassing. I'm supposed to be the teacher here. I'm the one who should be guiding you, keeping you out of trouble. But compared to the core you showed me, this thing I've been sweating over feels crude. Worse, after I studied yours, a few technical problems that had me stuck for months suddenly clicked almost immediately..."
Touma straightened up and waved a hand, cutting him off before he could keep talking like that.
"Yaga-sensei, please don't say that. I can only work with Cursed Corpses at all because you taught me everything. Same with reading those cursed energy circuits. The core I made was luck, that's all. I just hit the right arrangement at the right time and got ahead by a little."
He meant every word.
Yaga, naturally, took it as modesty.
The evidence was sitting right there in front of him, a perfectly functioning core. Facts were facts. Deep down, Yaga had already admitted it. In this area, he'd been overtaken by a boy who had only enrolled a few months ago.
That only made his opinion of Touma even worse in the most ridiculous way possible. The talent was scary enough already, and on top of that the kid wasn't arrogant about it.
What Yaga didn't know was that none of Touma's words were false.
One day, if he ever learned the truth about this world, what kind of face would he make then?
None of Touma's so-called miracles had come from some once-in-a-generation flash of genius. He had learned all of it the hard way, piece by piece, from a future Masamichi Yaga across countless simulated timelines.
It was built on a mountain of failures. Endless repetition. Tedious trial and error that would've driven most people insane. From the outside it looked like a miracle. That was only because nobody could see the wreckage underneath.
Once Touma felt Yaga's resistance had finally dropped, he moved fast.
His eyes lit up as he looked at his teacher.
"Since you've already been researching it too, Yaga-sensei, let me help. Let's build the first true fully independent Cursed Corpse together. The core I made can be used as an auxiliary core to support the main core you've already built. Then we make a second auxiliary core together."
"Auxiliary core? Three... cores?"
Yaga's huge frame jerked.
He looked genuinely lost.
As far as he knew, a Cursed Corpse used one core. One power source. That was the rule. Three cores sounded insane. The cursed energy rejection alone should've torn the body apart on the spot.
Seeing the confusion on his face, Touma took a slow breath.
Deep in his mind, he quietly equipped the Dimensional Reduction Analysis card.
The world behind his eyes changed in an instant. Data, formulas, structural logic, all of it seemed to start moving at once.
He picked up a pen and some paper from the workbench and started explaining the basics of multi-core arrays and cursed energy counterbalance with patient, careful detail.
The roles in the room flipped completely.
Touma stood at the workbench drawing out dense cursed energy circuits, and for that stretch of time he looked less like a student and more like the master of the workshop.
He walked Yaga through the whole process step by step. First he'd tried forcing overload into a single core, and it collapsed. After that he built a simple dual-core system, only for that one to fail too because the polarity repulsion made the cursed energy reject itself. So he refined the precision of each core even further and tried a triangular three-core structure instead. Each core would observe the other two, counterbalance them, and keep the circulation stable. A self-sustaining loop. Autonomous existence.
Yaga listened like he was under a spell.
At some point he'd even pulled out his thick personal notebook and started scribbling furiously, like a student in danger of falling behind the lecture.
He could barely wrap his head around it. In a little over a month, Touma had crawled this far through completely uncharted territory, alone.
And the reason Yaga believed every word, outrageous as it sounded, came down to one thing.
It all felt real.
The bottlenecks Touma described, the failed attempts, the workaround ideas, they were exactly the kind of choices Yaga himself would've made. The feeling was almost creepy. It was like Touma was standing there narrating Yaga's own future research back to him.
It hit somewhere deeper than logic.
By then Yaga understood one thing down to his bones.
Touma wasn't chasing some fantasy.
The researcher inside the stern teacher flared back to life. He wanted to see it. Badly. He wanted to know what this so-called three-core array could produce.
From that day on, Touma's routine got a lot harsher.
Yaga had officially approved the top-secret Fully Independent Cursed Corpse project and even joined it personally, but the ban on staying in the workshop at night didn't change.
His reason was simple.
"Teenagers need sleep."
So Touma's days split cleanly in two.
Daytime meant every scrap of free time between classes went into the workshop with Yaga, carving cores with surgical precision and assembling the Cursed Corpse's body. Late nights and the hours before dawn, the time a normal person would've spent sleeping, went straight into brutal cursed technique training.
That schedule kept going for about four months, right up against the limit of what a human body should be able to handle.
Four months later, deep in Jujutsu High's underground workshop, the moment finally came.
They were going to activate Panda's three-core array for the first time.
Honestly, if Touma had only wanted to recreate the Panda from the previous simulation timeline, the blank-slate version that woke up not knowing anything, he could've done it himself way faster than this.
With Yaga helping, the physical construction should've gone even faster.
The reason it hadn't was buried under a much more dangerous goal.
Touma didn't want the early Panda.
He wanted the one from the end.
The Panda who had made it all the way through that long simulated war and reached the bitter finish line.
Over those four months, Touma had worked in secret using memories carved somewhere deeper than bone. Combat instincts. Personality data. Emotional bonds Panda had built over an entire lifetime in that simulated war. All of it had been engraved into the main core Yaga created, using cursed energy markings so fine they were thinner than hair.
Now the air in the workshop felt heavy enough to crack.
Touma stood over the bench with both hands hovering above the belly of a fuzzy black-and-white panda plush about the size of a small puppy.
He took a slow breath and looked across the table at Yaga.
Yaga's palms were soaked. Behind the dark glasses, his eyes were locked on the Cursed Corpse sitting on the bench. Then he gave a single heavy nod.
No hesitation.
No backing out now.
After that silent exchange, Touma closed his eyes and activated Limitless.
He needed its absolute precision for the last connection. The final thread. There was no room for even the slightest error.
Vast but tightly controlled cursed energy flowed from his fingertips and into Panda's body in a thin, steady stream.
One second passed.
Then another.
Then came a quiet click, like the last gear in some impossible mechanism finally locking into place.
The three hidden cores inside the plushie lit up with a soft glow.
They settled into a perfect triangle. Energy moved through the system in a clean loop, each core observing the other two, counterbalancing, supporting, sustaining. Endless internal circulation.
It looked like a tiny heart starting to beat.
Touma let out a long breath that felt hot in his own throat. Sweat stood out across his forehead. He pulled his hands back from Panda's belly and released Limitless, the mental strain crashing into him all at once.
He'd done everything he could.
The body was flawless. The cursed energy seals were precise. The smuggled memories were buried deep where nobody would notice.
The rest depended on fate.
Compared to the previous simulation, with all its failures and collapses, this was almost absurdly smooth.
Three seconds after the internal cycle stabilized, the little panda on the workbench, which had been as still as any stuffed toy a moment ago, twitched.
Its fuzzy body rose and fell in the faintest imitation of breathing.
It looked a little dizzy at first. Its oversized round head wobbled twice. Then, in a weirdly human gesture, it lifted its stubby little paws and patted its own cheeks like it was trying to wake itself up.
Slowly, uncertainly, it opened its eyes.
They were bright.
The first thing it saw was Touma's face close in front of it. Tired. Familiar.
Its tiny mouth moved.
Something flashed through those newborn eyes that shouldn't have been there at all.
Recognition.
Confusion.
Something much older than a newborn should've had.
In a voice so faint it was barely there, it whispered a single word.
"Touma...?"
The sound was tiny. Too tiny.
It got completely buried under what happened at the same instant.
"It worked!"
Yaga had been holding his breath for so long he probably forgot how to breathe normally. Now he stared at the creature on the workbench, moving on its own, making self-aware gestures with a level of awareness that shouldn't have existed yet.
The realization hit him like a truck.
"It actually... on the first try... it worked?!"
His voice cracked with disbelief and joy.
His hands were shaking. His eyes behind the glasses were wet. He couldn't stop staring at his creation.
But Touma heard every syllable Panda had spoken.
His senses were far too sharp to miss it.
It remembers. It brought the simulation's soul back with it.
He reacted instantly.
Before Yaga could notice anything strange, anything that might create a butterfly effect neither of them could control, Touma snatched the tiny panda off the bench and hugged it to his chest.
As he turned his back to Yaga, one hand naturally covered Panda's mouth.
He lowered his head. His voice came out barely above a whisper, soft and warm and carrying a kind of ache that had nowhere else to go.
"Long time no see... but not now. Stay quiet."
Wrapped in that familiar warmth, Panda's confusion settled almost at once.
With a cleverness no newborn should've had, it went still and said nothing else. It only looked up at Touma with those black-and-white eyes for one long moment, quiet and knowing.
That was enough.
Touma turned back around and gently placed the calm little panda into Masamichi Yaga's outstretched hands. Yaga was still shaking from the sheer joy of it.
A smile spread across Touma's face.
This time it wasn't forced. It wasn't guarded either.
It was simple relief, all the way down.
He looked at his teacher and said quietly,
"Yes, Yaga-sensei. We did it."
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next target 2400ps :)