Once Keitaro got home, he began to do what he had wanted to do for a while now.
Walking toward a nearby desk, Keitaro took out a purple scroll and slowly opened it, revealing various sealing formulas.
He bit his finger hard enough to draw blood. With his bloody finger, he made a seal, and a bunch of seals appeared all over his body. He did not care, though—this was just a security measure put in place to ensure those fingers never fell into the wrong hands.
Once Keitaro was done with that, he sent cursed energy between intervals for roughly ten seconds... before finally, the Sukuna finger was revealed.
He knew that Sukuna was no ordinary curse; he was a calamity bound to existence itself, a monstrous entity that refused to fade. If he was going to succeed, he had to go beyond simply exorcising a curse—he had to erase it, body and soul.
This was his purpose.
While overseas, Keitaro had spent months analyzing Sukuna's cursed fingers, carefully extracting information on how the soul remained bound to them.
Unlike regular spirits, whose souls were directly tied to their bodies and dissipated upon death, Sukuna's soul had been fragmented yet preserved within each severed finger. This wasn't a simple remnant—if it was, Keitaro would have destroyed it long ago. This was different. It was alive, waiting to be reassembled.
Every time one of these fingers was consumed, Sukuna's essence grew stronger, the pieces of his soul slowly reuniting into a complete whole—like a puzzle.
And after countless journeys, he realized that the key to destroying Sukuna was not in severing the bond between the soul and the fingers—Sukuna's soul had already adapted to that division. Instead, he had to target the soul itself, dismantling it at a fundamental level so that no matter how many fingers remained, the core of Sukuna's existence would crumble.
Basically, erasing him from existence.
Keitaro knew that cursed energy alone wouldn't be enough. And even if it was, it probably wouldn't be that efficient. After all, Sukuna was born from negative emotions, his soul woven from the very fabric of malice and destruction. The only force that seemed to directly counteract and suppress cursed energy was natural energy—a force drawn from the balance of the world itself.
Yes... he was planning to use it.
Now for the testing.
Holding one of Sukuna's fingers between his fingertips, Keitaro channeled his natural energy into it. The reaction was immediate and violent.
The finger twitched as if rejecting the foreign energy before cracks started forming along its surface. Inside, he could feel the soul writhing in pain—natural energy was like poison to it, breaking down its very essence. Though it seemed like Sukuna's soul was resisting.
He didn't care. He would make sure that the finger was destroyed.
Keitaro wasn't content with simply damaging the cursed finger—he needed a method to directly attack Sukuna's soul inside it. Through countless experiments, he discovered that when he applied natural energy in a specific pattern, it acted almost like a corrosive agent, burning away at the soul itself.
Though that method was slow, it was pretty effective.
It took weeks to refine this technique. He meditated for hours at a time, visualizing the structure of the soul, tracing the connections between the physical vessel and the cursed essence within. Slowly, he devised a precise method: a combination of soul pressure manipulation and energy diffusion that would dissolve Sukuna's presence layer by layer.
When he tested it, the results were immediate.
The finger screamed—not in sound, but in sensation. Keitaro felt a jolt run up his arm as if something ancient and furious was trying to claw its way out. The cracks on the finger widened, and for the first time, he saw something inside—a glimpse of Sukuna's fractured soul, twisting and grinning in the void.
The King of Curses knew what Keitaro was doing.
And the second he felt the King of Curses' resistance wane, he quintupled his effort and began to ferociously destroy his soul.
Sukuna did not belong to this era. He never would.
He was supposed to die a long time ago, and Keitaro would not allow such a monster to continue to be a threat to Jujutsu society for much longer.
Crack.
A wide smile appeared on Keitaro's face... Sukuna's soul had been destroyed—fully destroyed. The only thing this finger was now was basically just a cursed energy husk.
A power-up treat, one might say.
"I want it."
That was Akane's eager voice.
"Let me eat it! Fingy! Fingy looks tasty!" His kitsune companion could be seen jumping around, looking at the finger in his hand.
Lowering himself to the kitsune's level, he gently placed the finger in the beast's mouth.
Akane swallowed the finger whole.
Keitaro watched as her cursed energy rose by a considerable amount.
"You like that treat, huh?" he said calmly.
"Yes."
"There are 19 more to go, so sniff them out for me, and when I'm done, they're all yours..."
And just like that, she was super eager to help.
A/N
While writing about Gabriel making some bootleg Arrancar with his technique, this gave me ideas, sorry for slow upload, I am trying.