Yuta hadn't eaten in over a day.
His mouth was dry.
His body sluggish.
Even his cursed energy, what little he could still call his own, felt thick like oil in his veins.
He kept walking, not out of hope, but because stopping felt too much like giving up.
The world around him was rotting.
Buildings bent inward like they were being devoured by the sky.
Black crystal growths tore through streets like bone erupting from flesh.
The terrain was warping, not geographically, but spiritually.
This place didn't just kill.
It assimilated.
He passed under a collapsed bridge, the air colder there.
Wet. Wrong.
And then, for the second time since arriving in Terra, he felt it.
He wasn't alone.
He crouched behind a chunk of collapsed building and focused.
Even his dull senses could feel the cursed energy, barely visible threads flickering through the air.
But it wasn't his.
It wasn't even cursed energy in the Jujutsu sense.
It was something mimicking it.
Like a beast trying to walk upright.
Then it spoke.
A voice, half-gargled, came from the shadows.
"...Stop..."
Yuta froze.
The voice was inhuman, too many layers, broken in the middle like cracked glass, but it was unmistakable.
Inumaki.
Or something that remembered him.
"...Don't move..."
Yuta's breath caught in his throat.
Every cell in his body screamed to obey.
Not from fear.
From reflex.
The voice carried cursed weight.
But it wasn't right.
There was no control.
No precision.
The syllables were guttural, stretched thin like meat across rusted metal.
But they hit him just enough to sting.
To slow.
A figure limped into view.
At first, it looked like a man.
Then it didn't.
Its mouth was a mass of overlapping jaws, each one branded with sigils eerily similar to Inumaki's cursed marks.
Coincident?
Its throat pulsed like a heart, cords of black Originium woven around something that once had been human.
Cursed words spilled from it like static.
"Fall... Fall... Crumble..."
Yuta ducked as the ground beside him detonated.
Not an explosion, but forced collapse, as if the words themselves unraveled matter.
He rolled and reinforced his body mid-motion, teeth clenched against the pain in his side.
His arm was still weak.
Broken, partially healed by cursed energy, but unreliable.
The creature turned to face him fully.
Its body trembled.
Its jaw dislocated and slammed back into place.
Then it screamed.
"Rot!"
The air warped.
Yuta didn't think. He remembered.
The instinct wasn't mental, it was soul-deep.
His own mouth opened, and he roared a counterphrase.
"Don't move!"
His cursed energy flared, raw and unstable, lashing out in a half-broken pattern.
His voice cracked, blood spattered from his nose, and the creature staggered.
Only for a moment.
But it worked.
Yuta blinked.
His hand trembled.
The mark of the Inumaki clan wasn't on his tongue, but the technique had answered him.
Barely.
Fragments.
The mimic screeched in protest, and its cursed throat pulsed again.
"Break—Stop—Cut—"
Yuta didn't try to block.
He jumped.
Cursed energy surged in his legs, the only part of him still strong enough to obey.
He launched into the air and brought both knees down hard onto the creature's chest.
Bone, or something like it, cracked.
The mimic flailed.
Black bile splattered across the stones.
Yuta slammed his hand onto its mouth and growled.
"Shut up."
The cursed energy was gone in a heartbeat.
The mimic's throat exploded.
Not in gore, but in silence, the sudden violent collapse of something that should never have spoken.
It spasmed once.
Then died.
Yuta collapsed beside it, gasping.
His voice was hoarse. His cursed energy nearly depleted. But something inside him was awake now.
A memory.
Not of power.
But of connection.
Inumaki's voice.
Rika's laugh.
Maki's fury.
Panda's warmth.
He remembered why he had become strong in the first place.
Not to win.
Not to destroy.
To protect.
He looked at the corpse beside him.
A creature twisted by Terra, maybe by Originium, maybe by his own bleeding memories.
A warped echo of something he loved.
And it had tried to kill him.
He looked at his hand. It was shaking.
But not from fear.
From clarity.
He needed to recover.
He needed to survive.
And one day, he would remember everything.
...
The corpse didn't decay.
Yuta waited for it to collapse into the black soil, to be reclaimed by this cursed world.
But hours passed, and it remained, twitching occasionally like some parasitic afterbirth was still trying to use it.
He left it behind.
The path forward was unclear.
There were no signs, no trails, no rivers to follow.
Just ruins, miles and miles of them, broken cities collapsed into the earth like the world had tried to erase its own memory.
He could feel Originium in the ground now.
Not as energy, but as pressure.
A slow crawl beneath his skin, like tiny needles working their way inward.
It hated cursed energy.
Or maybe it hungered for it.
Either way, it made movement harder.
Reinforcing his body required more cursed energy than before.
And he had less of it by the hour.
He needed shelter.
Not just from the monsters. From the world itself.
He walked until the sky shifted.
Not from day to night, this place didn't obey that rhythm.
But the clouds above twisted into a cold red hue.
And ahead, in the distance, stood the shape of a tower half-sunken into the ground.
Its upper floors were angled like a snapped neck.
Metal vines curled through its lower windows.
A broken place.
But empty.
Yuta approached carefully.
Every step was deliberate.
He reinforced his legs lightly, enough to keep pace, but saved what little energy he had left.
A second fight would kill him now.
The door to the tower's first floor had collapsed inward.
The air inside was cold. Dead.
But not corrupted.
No cursed presence.
No Originium growth.
Just dust and forgotten time.
He stepped in.
Inside, the building groaned.
Debris littered the floor, cracked tile, twisted rebar, and shattered data-screens whose last flickers had burned long ago.
There was a stairwell still intact.
He took it slowly, ascending until he found a room with a broken window and a view of the decaying skyline.
He sat.
And for the first time since awakening, he breathed.
He placed one hand on his stomach and the other over his cursed core.
His breathing slowed.
His eyes shut.
Meditation had once come easily.
Back in Tokyo, at Jujutsu High, Gojo had taught them how to center themselves.
To clear the noise, to listen inward, to find the threads of cursed energy that defined their identity.
But now, when Yuta looked inward, he found something fractured.
His cursed core was dim.
But deeper than that... it was screaming.
Not in fear.
Not in agony.
It screamed like something buried alive, clawing at the inside of his soul.
He gritted his teeth and forced his mind to go deeper.
There were shadows there.
Shapes. Memories.
Pieces of techniques he once held.
One looked like a pair of stitched lips.
Another, a jagged, flickering blade.
A third, too large to see, hung in the far dark, wrapped in chains.
They were pieces of himself. Powers he had once wielded with precision.
With meaning.
Now they were locked, distorted, or forgotten.
But one shard pulsed faintly.
Not Rika. Not cursed speech.
Something older.
Reverse Cursed Technique.
Not fully intact. But flickering.
His body still remembered how to heal. It didn't trust him to do it.
He breathed deeper, letting his cursed energy crawl toward the damage in his side.
He had a broken rib.
Torn skin at the shoulder. Fractured fingers. Nothing life-threatening.
But even minor injuries bled faster in this world.
He focused. Gritted his teeth.
Whispered the old chant in his mind, not for effect, but for rhythm. A heartbeat to pace himself.
The cursed energy sparked, then recoiled.
The first attempt failed.
He tried again.
This time, the energy slipped through his skin like needles under glass.
A tearing sensation, unnatural, but healing.
His shoulder knit together slightly.
The swelling in his fingers eased.
He gasped, nearly blacked out.
But it worked.
Only a little.
Enough to survive one more day.
He leaned back against the wall, staring out through the cracked window at the blood-red sky.
His body throbbed. His cursed energy was a candle in a storm.
But he wasn't dead.
And now, one more piece of himself had returned.
...
Yuta walked for days.
He didn't keep track.
Time had no rhythm in this world.
The sky never stayed the same color.
The sun never rose from the same direction.
But he moved forward, when his legs allowed it, when cursed energy could push through the weight pressing against his lungs.
There was no map.
Only the broken edges of civilization.
He saw his first town half-swallowed by Originium.
What had once been streets were now rivers of black crystal, writhing like veins.
Buildings sagged inward under their own infected weight.
At first glance, it looked abandoned.
It wasn't.
They lived here.
People.
Sort of.
Yuta stood on a rooftop and watched them from a distance.
Figures hunched beneath heavy coats and torn breathing masks.
Children with pale, gray-slick skin played in puddles that hissed and steamed.
A woman carved food from the side of a contaminated truck and fed it to something that might have once been a dog.
No one spoke.
Their faces were hollow.
Not frightened. Not angry.
Just numb.
Like hope had died so long ago it no longer had a name.
He moved on.
Further west, if direction still meant anything, he passed through the husks of cities flattened by conflict.
Not earthquakes. Not even curses.
This was organized destruction. Places where war had happened and stayed.
Gunfire patterns still marked walls.
Tank treads gouged through pavement.
And then, further still, he found craters where Originium had erupted like tumors from the earth.
He passed camps.
Some guarded.
Some burned.
Not everyone was numb.
Some had turned savage.
Once, he saw a man nailed to a fence, still twitching, his eyes carved out and mouth stitched with Originium threads.
Around him, the ground pulsed.
Another time, he watched a group of infected choke one of their own in a ditch.
When they finished, they didn't bury the body.
They just sat beside it.
Silent.
Yuta didn't interfere.
He had nothing to give.
His cursed energy was thin. His voice too weak.
The moment he revealed himself, someone would come to take everything he had left.
Or worse, someone would beg him to be a hero again.
And he couldn't.
Not now.
Not when he couldn't even remember what being a sorcerer felt like.
He passed a village half-consumed by black ash, where people walked in slow spirals, whispering prayers into dead radios.
He passed a broken checkpoint with flags from factions he didn't recognize, symbols burned, repainted, burned again.
He saw Infected.
Real ones.
Marked by Originum's curse, bodies glassed and cracking at the seams, but alive.
One woman looked him in the eye from across a river of molten stone.
She smiled with blood on her teeth and said nothing.
Yuta didn't ask questions.
He just watched.
He began to understand, little by little, what Terra was.
Not a world.
A wound.
The kind that festered instead of healing.
Where magic had been carved open and spread like poison.
The kind of place where the strong stopped pretending they were good, and the weak stopped pretending they were people.
And yet.
They lived.
They survived.
And that, more than anything, unsettled him.
They had no cursed energy.
No jujutsu.
No Gojo.
And still they clung to existence with bloodied fingers and shattered teeth.
How?
He didn't know.
He just walked.
Through it all.
A ghost.
Watching the world rot without dying.
Just like him.