"It's fine. In a situation like that, there wasn't really a choice... and you can't shove every problem off onto someone else. I'm a sorcerer. Other people might die full of regret, but I won't.
If you keep blaming yourself like that, aren't you stealing the spotlight from my life? I'm completely free, after all."
Kaede said it with a faint smile.
The fingers tangled in Yuji Itadori's pink hair slowly loosened.
The cold metal surface of the autopsy table pressed through his skin. He sat there bare-chested, his eyes fixed on the hospital bed beside him.
That hoarse line, completely free, and I won't die with regrets, echoed through the empty underground room.
The boy who had just walked to the edge of death felt his chest, which had been rising violently with panic and guilt, gradually steady itself beneath those casually spoken words.
He lowered his gaze to his own intact left chest, then slowly clenched both hands, the knuckles paling under the fluorescent light.
"Completely... free, huh."
Yuji repeated it under his breath, sounding a little less lost.
Then he looked up sharply, and that animal-bright determination gathered again in his brown eyes. Water dripped from his jaw onto the steel table.
"I get it now. If this is the result you bought with your life, then I'm absolutely not going to die that easily!"
"Sensei, then what about Yuji's situation? Are we reporting it?" Kaede turned his head slightly and asked Gojo.
Gojo let out a quiet laugh. The toe of his shoe tapped idly against the tile twice.
He pulled both hands from his pockets and stretched lazily overhead, his joints cracking softly.
"Report it? Why would we do that?"
He walked on long legs around the autopsy table where Yuji sat, his tall body casting a slanted shadow across the polished floor.
The face behind the black blindfold turned unerringly toward the bed, and the smile at his mouth widened with a calculation chilling enough to send a shiver down the spine.
"The old fossils upstairs just got their little plan to kill him by proxy to work. Right about now they're probably hiding in some dark basement congratulating themselves.
If we report that 'Sukuna's vessel revived' right now, they'll just arrange an even more blatant execution next."
Gojo stopped walking, and the stray cursed residue moving through the room seemed to freeze with him for a second.
"So until the Kyoto Sister-School Exchange Event starts, Yuji is, in every official record, a real corpse.
I'm going to hide him and train him during that time until his cursed energy control becomes instinctive."
He bent slightly at the waist, both hands braced on the metal frame at the edge of Kaede's bed.
"And as for you, your position is even more delicate than Yuji's right now.
The reason those rotten old men tagged you as semi-Grade 1 is so they can increase surveillance authority in a perfectly official way. They're going to try every trick they can think of to probe the limits of your technique."
Gojo straightened and snapped his fingers.
"But as long as I'm here, the strongest teacher around, all those annoying flies can be swatted away before they get close.
Your only job right now is to stay in this bed until every last organ has finished growing back."
Off to the side, Shoko Ieiri bent over and picked up the pen she had dropped into the tray.
She wiped the tip casually on the hem of her white coat and pulled out a chair to sit back down.
"As long as you don't turn my medical room into a war council, I don't care.
And one more thing. Your freshly reformed vocal tissue is still extremely fragile."
Her gaze flicked to the heart monitor, and her tone carried the cold authority of a clinical doctor.
"If you keep wasting words and tear the wound open again, I can't promise saline alone will be enough to put you back together intact."
"I see... Earlier you said my body was built purely out of water and cursed energy, but this time something different happened.
Sukuna's attack really did hit my physical body..." Kaede asked after thinking it through.
At the hoarse question from the bed, Shoko's hand, which had been reaching for a vial, paused in midair for half a second.
She turned around, and under the cold hospital light, those always-tired eyes narrowed slightly.
She stepped back to the bedside and hooked a finger beneath the edge of the thick bandage covering his chest.
As dried blood slowly peeled loose, a small sound rose in the silence, like cloth tearing away from skin.
What should have been smooth, flowing, transparent water-formed cursed matter now showed a strange exhausted dryness around the wound.
The surfaces cut by Cleave were not smooth liquid breaks. They had turned into a seared, shriveled texture of flesh, unable to close on their own, as if in that instant the part of the body built from cursed energy had been forcibly "defined" by some higher law into weak human meat.
"...This is definitely strange."
Shoko frowned and leaned closer over the wound, her cold breath brushing across it.
"Your Heavenly Restriction-like constitution should convert all physical damage into cursed energy loss and avoid structural collapse through liquefaction. But the edges of these wounds clearly bear a special kind of damage.
Even under saline stimulation, cellular reconstruction is running at only one-third the expected speed.
This doesn't feel like the flesh was merely cut. It feels more like the very 'existence' of that part was denied by Sukuna."
Gojo remained sprawled backward over the stool, but the lazy air around him vanished completely.
The gaze hidden behind the black blindfold seemed to pierce through bandages and flesh, following the erratic movement of cursed energy deep inside.
He raised his right hand and held it a few inches above the wound.
Because of Infinity, he never touched the skin, but the faint scorched sensation lingering in the air there made his fingers twitch slightly.
"That guy isn't just a monster of raw power. Sukuna is one of the ultimate readers of cursed law itself.
Yuji, when you faced him inside the innate domain, did you notice anything unusual about the flow of cursed energy when he cut?"
Yuji Itadori, sitting on the autopsy table, pressed his lips together tightly.
He lowered his gaze to his callused hands, and in his eyes there was a trace of struggle and delayed horror.
"At that moment... it felt like he had 'gripped' the space around us. It wasn't just cutting. It was more like he'd seen through what Kaede really was.
He said... 'Once you understand the rhythm of the flow, water is just another shape of flesh.'"
Yuji looked up, his eyes fixed anxiously on the weakened figure on the bed, his voice trembling faintly.
"Sorry. He was specifically adjusting his technique to target the properties of 'water.'
The instant he swung, he used cursed energy to forcibly disrupt your liquefaction frequency, so your body was forced into a solid state during the microsecond of impact.
He was playing with the limits of your Heavenly Restriction-like body."
Gojo lowered his hand, and the smile on his mouth turned cold enough to cut.
He rose to his full height, his long frame throwing a huge shadow against the wall.
"So he parsed the frequency... exactly what you'd expect from a thousand-year-old demon. Kaede, your 'water body' isn't invulnerable.
To him, if he learns the pattern of your cursed energy fluctuations, then he can bypass your defensive mechanism and cut directly at the soul itself."
Gojo walked to the window and stood with his back to the room, making his voice sound oddly distant in the open space.
"That also explains why your wounds are healing so slowly. That portion of 'water' remembers the fear of being killed. It's rejecting the idea of flowing again.
For a while, your job isn't just to recover. You'll also have to learn how to protect that fragile core even after your opponent has already 'seen through' you."
Shoko rewrapped the bandages with brisk motions, all the efficient cruelty of a practiced doctor in her hands.
"You heard him. If you don't want to become a pool of dead water next time, then until your cursed energy circulation is fully smooth again, you're not moving so much as a finger.
I'll double your fluid intake. As for the pain in your soul, you'll just have to endure that yourself."
That made sense.
Kaede remembered that in the future, Sukuna had done something similar to Mahito by striking directly at the soul.
Because he existed in a possessed body, Sukuna could easily touch the boundary of the soul itself.
And Yuji could do the same.
That was exactly why it was not strange that Sukuna had managed to damage Kaede's soul directly.
"Sensei, I want to learn reverse cursed technique."
Kaede remained lying flat on the bed, his eyes fixed without moving on the stained concrete ceiling overhead.
Because of the damage to his throat, the words I want to learn reverse cursed technique came out with a harsh, sanded texture, scraping through the room and leaving a faint echo behind.
Gojo, who had just been about to move over and check on Yuji again, stopped in place.
He slowly straightened, and the teasing curve that usually lingered on that face, elegant enough to seem almost unreal, faded away piece by piece.
Behind the black blindfold, his hidden eyes seemed to be studying the body on the bed wrapped in layers of bandages with absolute intensity.
"Reverse cursed technique."
Gojo rolled the words slowly in his mouth, and for once there was real weight in his voice.
He walked to the head of the bed, and his tall shadow blotted out most of the light, covering Kaede completely in a pressure so heavy it almost became physical.
"Kaede, do you understand what you're actually asking for? That's a miracle even among sorcerers, one in ten thousand.
Turning the negative energy of cursed energy into positive energy through multiplication... that's not just a matter of talent. It's a kind of warped comprehension of the foundational laws of the world."
He stretched out a hand and traced the air above the bloodstained bandages without touching them, his voice cool and analytical.
"Normally, the only people who grasp it are either people like me, who tear themselves apart on the edge of death, or people like Shoko, who were simply born with some indescribable instinct for it.
For someone whose body depends on a Heavenly Restriction-like constitution and pure cursed-energy-formed water, trying to forcibly produce positive energy could very easily collapse the unstable balance that keeps you together and leave you as nothing more than a dead puddle."
Yuji, perched on the autopsy table, listened with a blank look on his face. He still did not fully understand what reverse cursed technique even was, but the unusual seriousness in Gojo's tone made the danger obvious.
He instinctively edged forward a little, eyes full of plain alarm.
"Huh? That sounds seriously dangerous.
But if Kaede learned it, wouldn't all those injuries just go whoosh and heal right up?"
Shoko let out a short laugh edged with mockery.
She spun the pen in her hand, and beneath the dark circles under her eyes there was a faint flicker of sharpness through the haze of smoke and fatigue.
"Yuji, it's not that simple. Even I'd have a hard time clearly explaining what it really is."
She stood, the hem of her white coat tracing a tired arc through the air.
Then she came around to the other side of the bed and looked down at those dark red eyes, her voice cool and clinical again.
"Listen carefully. Negative plus negative becomes positive. You forcibly twist cursed energy, something born from negativity, back on itself.
It feels like shorting out a circuit with a snap, then catching the spark that bursts out in that instant, then forcing that spark into dead cells.
Are you really sure that in your current mental state, with your soul still burning from being cut by Sukuna, you can perform a cursed energy conversion ten thousand times more delicate than precision surgery?"
Gojo leaned back against the wall again, long fingers tapping rhythmically against his thigh.
He did not reject the nearly insane request outright. Instead, there was a detached anticipation in him, like he was observing the evolution of some rare lifeform.
"If you're asking for it, then fine, we'll try. But fair warning, my teaching style is brutal.
You won't learn Shoko's 'feel it out' approach, and my own 'genius method' is all about creating something from absolute nothing."
Gojo lowered his head slightly, a pale lock of hair shifting at the edge of the blindfold.
"Until you're well enough to leave the hospital, I'll keep you every day in that near-death sensation of being cut apart.
Only if you truly feel the critical point where cursed energy collapses will you have any chance of seeing the 'light' of reversal inside that darkness.
So, are you ready for that? Because it'll hurt a lot more than taking one hit from Sukuna."