Among the ruins, Kaede's heavy footsteps sounded through the standing water.
With the fine hiss of rain washing through mud, the deep blue uniform on his body looked almost unsteady in the storm.
Each step shattered the dark reflection of the sky on the flooded ground. One by one, he walked toward the broken load-bearing pillar ahead.
There, where the shadow of the pillar mixed with mud and rainwater, the pink-haired boy lay on his back.
The black markings on his face, the symbols of the King of Curses' cruelty and arrogance, were already fading like dirty snow under sunlight.
The second pair of eyes beneath his own had long since closed and vanished, sinking fully back into the texture of normal skin.
Control of the body had changed hands again.
But the icy rain kept pouring mercilessly into the huge cavity in the left side of his chest.
It was empty.
The heart that should have been beating there had already been ripped out and discarded.
Pale blood vessels and torn muscle were exposed to the air. Around the wound there was none of the telltale glow of reverse cursed technique, no sign of life or reconstruction.
Before giving the body back, the King of Curses had left no mercy behind.
"So I failed... damn it, is this really still following the original route?
If only I knew reverse cursed technique..." Kaede bit his lip as the thought struck him, his body trembling faintly from sheer strain.
He had already fought once before coming here.
And just now, his opponent had been the King of Curses himself.
"Itadori!"
Not far away, near the edge of the domain, Megumi's hoarse voice ripped through the steady curtain of rain.
Ignoring his depleted cursed energy and the pain running through his whole body, he stumbled forward in a desperate sprint.
But the moment he saw the fatal emptiness in the pink-haired boy's chest, he froze several yards away, his pupils contracting from the shock.
Cold rain dripped from Megumi's jaw without stopping.
He clenched his teeth so hard his jaw shook, his mind spinning wildly as he tried to find even the faintest thread of hope in an impossible situation.
But one iron law of jujutsu society lay against his throat like a blade. For anyone who could not use reverse cursed technique, losing the heart was an absolutely irreversible death sentence.
The pink-haired boy in the mud twitched one finger.
Yuji Itadori slowly opened the brown eyes that had once been bright, but now the pupils were already losing focus.
Rain hammered down on his pale face. He parted his lips and coughed up a dark red mouthful of blood mixed with fragments from his lungs.
"Ah... it's you, Fushiguro..."
Yuji's voice was so weak it nearly vanished beneath the rain, his throat producing a thin, breathy rasp.
He barely managed to tug the corners of his mouth upward, and even soaked in rain, that smile still carried a little relief.
"Nobara... she's okay, right?"
Megumi dropped hard to his knees beside him, both hands hovering uselessly in the air, trembling, too afraid to touch the ruined body.
His voice came out dry and warped.
"She's okay... she got out safely. You idiot, why..."
"That's good..."
Yuji's gaze drifted past Megumi, unfocused, toward the thick clouds turning overhead and the endless rain pouring down.
In the edge of his vision, the deep blue figure standing off to one side was blurred and indistinct. The flame of life was burning out quickly in the middle of the storm.
"Sorry, Fushiguro... from here on, you guys will have to live long lives on your own."
The pink-haired boy's head tilted weakly to one side, and his eyelids slid shut.
The hand he had been trying to lift lost its final strength and fell heavily back into the muddy water, sending out a tiny ring of ripples.
Then there was nothing.
The rain seemed heavier after that.
The remnant cursed filth left behind by the King of Curses was slowly being broken down by the continuing downpour, while a deathly silence circled above the ruins.
"I..." Kaede tried to say something, but in the next second his body pitched forward and collapsed to the ground, unconscious.
Cold fluorescent light spilled across a stainless steel autopsy table.
An exhaust fan hummed in a dull, monotonous rhythm, blending the harsh smell of disinfectant with a faint trace of tobacco.
Gojo Satoru's tall frame leaned against the cold tiled wall.
The black blindfold covered most of his face, but the usual teasing, almost flippant air around him had dropped below absolute zero.
The Six Eyes were still receiving information without pause. At the center of the room, on the metal table, lay a body beneath a glaring white sheet.
That was Yuji Itadori.
A cold corpse with no heart and no trace of cursed energy left.
The higher-ups, those rotten old men, had used the sudden appearance of a special-grade curse as a knife to erase Sukuna's vessel. Their intention was obvious now.
Gojo's jaw was drawn tight, and both hands in his pockets were already clenched.
More than useless anger, that abyss-like mind of his was carrying out an entirely rational calculation.
Shoko Ieiri leaned against a nearby machine, a cigarette half-burned between her long fingers.
She let out a thin stream of white smoke. The dark circles under her eyes were heavy, and her gaze passed over Yuji's body before landing on the other medical bed in the room.
A body lay there quietly, wrapped in thick medical bandages.
Cold saline flowed steadily through several IV lines into the pale vein of one arm.
The fatal wound that had nearly split his chest apart was now covered by a thin layer of newly formed skin.
"This is practically a miracle in both medicine and jujutsu history."
Shoko flicked ash from her cigarette, her voice carrying the calm exhaustion of a doctor who had seen too much.
"A Heavenly Restriction-like body sustained entirely by cursed energy and liquid.
If I hadn't cut off all conventional emergency treatment in the ambulance the moment they brought him back, and switched to the highest concentration saline drip possible, his cardiopulmonary function would have fully collapsed before the moisture in him ran dry.
What an absurd body."
Gojo said nothing.
His head tilted slightly, his gaze behind the blindfold fixed on the medical bed.
The Six Eyes had already picked up the signal of cursed energy circulation restarting within the body.
As a few tiny bubbles rose through the IV tubing, the white bedsheet gave off the faintest rustle.
Kaede's eyes slowly opened.
Gojo watched those dark red eyes reveal themselves under the merciless fluorescent light.
The body on the bed was stiff, weak from massive injury and total cursed energy exhaustion, but that unique cursed energy, deep and fluid like dark water, had undeniably begun to circulate again.
"Well, look at that. Sleeping Beauty finally decided to end his hibernation."
Gojo pushed off the wall, the heels of his shoes clicking lightly against the polished floor.
He walked to the side of the bed and looked down at the patient who had just regained consciousness.
His tone was as easygoing as ever, but the suffocating pressure in the room had not lessened in the slightest.
"Welcome back to the world of the living.
Judging by how you looked when Ijichi dragged you into the car, like you were about to evaporate on the spot, Shoko had already prepared the second scalpel."
Shoko crushed out the cigarette and stepped forward.
By habit, she glanced once at the heart monitor, now showing a steady rhythm, then slipped both hands into the pockets of her white coat and spoke in a flat clinical tone.
"Your vital signs are stabilizing again. The saline provided the physical medium your body needed to reconstruct itself, but the cursed energy you burned through has to recover on its own.
Until that happens, I strongly recommend you stay flat on your back and avoid tearing open the organs that only just fused back together."
Gojo pulled over a rolling stool and sat down astride it, folding both arms across the backrest.
His chin rested on his hands, the blindfold pointed straight at those newly opened dark red eyes.
He did not look toward Yuji's body on the other table. That was how he was forcibly suppressing the urge to tear the whole upper structure of jujutsu society apart.
As the strongest, he had to strip absolute reason out of the whirlpool of emotion.
"Megumi already reported everything that happened inside the juvenile detention center.
You forcibly deployed your domain to neutralize the cursed energy of a special-grade curse, and even engineered things to drag the King of Curses into point-blank blade combat..."
Gojo's voice gradually lowered, taking on a tone of judgment and dissection.
"As an unrecorded 'exception' in jujutsu society, you turned in a battle report like a madman's, and you did save Megumi and those civilians in the middle of a hopeless situation."
He paused.
The air in the room seemed to grow heavier with the silence.
"But what happened after that? From the moment Yuji, that kid, took back control of his body until the moment he collapsed, what exactly did Sukuna leave behind?
I want to hear your judgment, from the only person who was there and actually fought him head-on."