The heavy workshop door swung shut behind Yaga. His footsteps, fast and light with excitement, faded down the corridor. He was probably already on his way to dig through more notes, maybe even hunt down some supplements for this miraculous little newborn.
That left the huge underground workshop with only two occupants.
Touma.
And the tiny panda sitting obediently on the workbench.
Now that no one else was around, the little act was over. The confusion in those black-and-white eyes disappeared, replaced by something far too deep for a creature that small.
The panda lifted its fuzzy head, looked straight at Touma, and finally spoke.
"Touma... the memories that showed up in my head. What are they?"
To be honest, Touma hadn't done anything as absurd as dragging the soul of the future Panda, the one who had fought beside him through that long simulated war, intact into the present.
What he'd really done was closer to using the core as a container to create a new existence. A different Panda. One carrying fragments from a future that had never happened in this world.
Even Touma wasn't omniscient. He had no way of knowing every single moment that future Panda had lived from birth to adulthood. All he could pass on were the things he himself knew, combat instincts, emotional ties, bits of experience carved into the core through microscopic cursed-energy engravings.
The question was borderline philosophical, but Touma didn't dodge it. He pulled over a chair, sat so they were eye level, and answered plainly.
"Those memories don't belong to this world. Or this timeline. They only exist in my head, leftovers from another Panda who lived through a much crueler future."
He reached out and rubbed the top of the little panda's head, gentle and steady.
"So don't let them weigh on you. You're not him. You're you. A brand-new life, born into this world for the first time. Those memories are just a gift. Extra experience, so you can survive in a dangerous place."
The little panda folded its stubby arms over its chest, looking absurdly serious for something that small.
Parallel worlds.
Yeah, that was a lot for a consciousness that had been awake less than half an hour.
What Panda had right now were fragments. Battle scenes. Emotional impressions. Random bits of knowledge Touma had engraved into the core. There was no continuous memory of growing up, no full childhood under Yaga's care, no neat chain of cause and effect. In a way, it was like a supercomputer loaded with a huge database but no proper operating system yet. The rest would have to be built the slow way, through living, learning, and filling in the gaps one day at a time.
Still, there was one comforting part.
After sorting through those broken memory fragments, Panda felt no resentment at all. No anger over being a replacement. No discomfort over being some kind of receiver for someone else's experiences. For a soul this new and this pure, it honestly didn't matter whether those memories had once been real or where they'd come from.
What mattered was simpler than that.
In those memories, the boy looking at it now and the broad-shouldered man who'd nearly cried from happiness had both poured everything they had into bringing it into the world.
Something close to fathers.
The little panda gave a small nod, half understanding, half not, then slowly uncrossed its arms. Its clear eyes held nothing but trust.
Touma smiled a little. Then his expression turned serious again, and his voice dropped.
"Good. But the extra memories, and the part where you and I fought together in some future, that stays secret. From Yaga-sensei. From everyone at Jujutsu High. There are complications I can't explain right now, and if this gets out, it'll cause real trouble."
He paused, then added:
"And to avoid suspicion, I'm not going to speed up your growth into an adult body with cursed-energy catalysis anytime soon. For now, you need to act like a real newborn Cursed Corpse and get used to being small."
"Mm... got it..."
Panda nodded again.
Then, like that tiny response had used up the last of its strength, its round body tipped backward and flopped onto the velvet-lined little bed Yaga had prepared. Limbs everywhere.
The flood of memory data had gone in successfully, but Panda's mind was still brand new. Its brain was running flat out, trying to sort through fragments full of holes and contradictions. At that point, the newborn nervous system had nothing left to spare for something as basic as controlling its own body.
Touma listened to the small, even snores for a second, then pulled a blanket over the sleeping panda and slipped out of the workshop without making a sound.
In the days after that, he handled Panda's existence very differently from how things had gone in the previous simulation. There was no long period of hiding, no years spent tucked away under Yaga's protection alone.
This time, Touma stepped forward with a cover story that could survive scrutiny.
Officially, Panda was introduced as an advanced puppet-type Cursed Corpse. Yaga had made the body, and Touma was remotely supplying power and operating it with his copied version of Cursed Spirit Manipulation.
It was a clean lie. More importantly, it hid Panda's forbidden status as a fully independent Cursed Corpse.
Whenever outsiders or Assistant Managers were around, Panda played along perfectly. It went stiff, blank-eyed, and moved with all the rigid awkwardness of a real puppet. Nobody suspected a thing.
Around the first-years, though, it loosened up a lot.
It would sprawl on the couch with a bag of chips, watch TV, and occasionally throw out a sarcastic comment.
An obviously intelligent puppet like that wasn't something Satoru Gojo would miss. The Six Eyes only needed one glance to read the strange cursed-energy circulation inside Panda's body.
But to everyone's surprise, the disaster magnet himself didn't dig deeper.
The first time he saw Panda talking, Gojo pushed down his round sunglasses, grinned like he'd just found something hilarious, and said, "Oh-ho, so Yaga and Touma cooked up one hell of a toy."
Then he immediately wandered off to drag Geto into a video game.
That was it.
No questions. No prying.
From there, with those combat memories as a base, Panda's growth under Touma and Yaga's joint guidance was ridiculous. Progress that had taken ages in the simulation got compressed into a fraction of the time. It was fast enough to make no sense.
And just as life at Jujutsu High seemed to be settling down, another development hit.
One big enough to shake the entire Japanese jujutsu world.
And big enough to give Touma a brutal headache.
Satoru Gojo, the so-called divine child, had finally succeeded in combining Blue and Red. He had completely mastered the Gojo Clan's abnormal Hollow Technique:
Purple.
Which would've been bad enough on its own.
Unfortunately, the one who had just unlocked that absurd power was first-year Gojo, arrogant, self-centered, and completely lacking in restraint. Not the somewhat more stable adult he'd one day become after being ground down by the Star Plasma Vessel incident, Geto's defection, and every other piece of garbage life would dump on him later.
The excitement of a guy who had just unlocked the strongest cheat code on the server and desperately wanted to test it on everything in sight...
There really weren't words for it.
For several straight weeks, Satoru Gojo was basically a toddler with a nuclear launch button.
Forget special-grade cursed spirits. If he saw so much as a Grade 4 Flyhead, one of those ugly little wisps clinging to phone poles and feeding on negative emotions, his fingers were already moving into position. Imaginary mass condensed at his fingertips, fully prepared to erase the curse, the pole, and probably the whole block along with it.
That situation was so dangerous Touma had to rearrange his entire schedule.
He became Gojo's designated safety catch, following him on every field mission.
The Assistant Managers were hopeless in comparison. Against a sorcerer who could float through the air, teleport short distances with his technique, and casually threaten to level half a hillside, they couldn't supervise him.
They couldn't even keep up.
After each mission, all they could do was stand at the edge of some fresh crater Purple had blasted into the earth, clutch their heads, and cry while filling out damage reports.
Only Touma had the mobility to stay on top of Gojo. Only Touma could intercept him, stop him, or physically drag him off before he deleted another innocent piece of public infrastructure.
After an extended stretch of what was, in practical terms, babysitting, Touma sat alone on his dorm bed one night, rubbing at his temples, and finally realized something.
He understood why that system mission had stalled.
Why, even after he had taught Gojo and Geto advanced applications of their cursed techniques without holding anything back, the task that required deep recognition still hadn't been marked complete.
"So that's what it was..."
He let out a low, bitter laugh in the dark.
The answer was simple.
Gojo and Geto really did acknowledge Touma's monstrous talent when it came to understanding cursed techniques, analyzing them, and pushing their applications further.
But they did not see him as a true equal in direct combat.
Not as someone who could stand shoulder to shoulder with them at the level of pure overwhelming force.
That was completely different from Shoko Ieiri and Masamichi Yaga.
For Shoko, Touma being able to replicate Reverse Cursed Technique and use it skillfully to heal others was already enough. In her field, that made his value comparable to hers, maybe even above it.
Yaga was similar. Touma's insane talent for constructing Cursed Corpses had not only solved years of frustration for the man, it had also made one thing obvious: this student would eventually reach, and probably surpass, his level in that area.
And once Touma's copied techniques were added on top, his future combat value was guaranteed to exceed that of someone like Yaga, who specialized purely in Cursed Corpses.
So Yaga's recognition had come easily.
Completely.
Gojo and Geto were another story.
Those two were apex predators from birth. Natural monsters sitting right at the top of the food chain.
Somewhere in the back of their minds, they understood Touma's techniques were bizarre and powerful. But they also believed that strength was limited by hardware.
Touma could never truly replace either of them.
No matter how hard he trained, the ceiling imposed by his innate cursed-energy reserves was still there. He would never fight the way Gojo could, abusing the Six Eyes' almost nonexistent energy consumption to maintain that absurd, nearly perpetual combat style.
And he would never do what Geto could either, endlessly building up raw cursed energy through consumption until he could command a special-grade army and unleash something on the scale of the Night Parade of a Hundred Demons.
The more Touma thought about it, the more clearly he could picture the logic running through those two idiots' heads.
They had probably already written off their sparring loss as a fluke. One bad stumble. A freak result.
Deep down, beneath all that sky-high pride, neither of them truly believed that if they dropped every restraint, threw away every limit, and fought to kill, Touma would stand a chance of beating them.
Only by crushing them head-on, with absolute force, right in the middle of the storm, would those beasts ever really lower their heads...
Touma muttered the thought to himself, then shut his eyes and let it pass.
The realization didn't disrupt any of his plans. At most, it meant the tempting mission reward, extra simulator runs, would be delayed for who knew how long.
It wasn't ideal, but it was tolerable.
Next year, the system would refresh automatically and grant him new simulation chances anyway.
His real priority hadn't changed.
Lie low.
Keep gathering every hidden advantage he could.
There was no way he was going to do something as stupid as publicly proving himself to those two, making a big show of his combat ability and attracting attention before the time was right.
Especially not if that attention might reach the eyes of the thing lurking in the dark.
Before long, the Exchange Event arrived.