(Wow, so we're done with the prologue, phew. Alright, let's keep going)
Three years.
Three years since he bled out in a world not his own.
Since he watched his final gamble fail, Gojo's voice vanishing into silence, Sukuna's shadow rising in the aftermath, and Yuta's consciousness slipping like smoke from one body into another.
He had expected death. Longed for it, even.
But instead, he opened his eyes to gray skies and foreign air.
Terra.
This world had no jujutsu.
No curses, not truly. But it had pain.
It had grief. It had something far worse than a curse:
hopelessness. It was raw.
The kind of suffering that didn't scream, but sat there quietly and grew like mold on the soul.
Not even his reversed cursed technique worked.
He was just a man with weightless limbs and a heart that didn't want to beat.
He spent the first year scavenging.
Avoiding others.
Not out of fear, but guilt.
A silent, all-consuming guilt.
He should have died.
He did die.
But the universe, in its cruelty, decided to keep him breathing.
A small abandoned house became his grave with a roof.
Tucked far beyond the border of any patrol route, it rotted with the same quiet stubbornness he did.
He repaired it slowly.
Not out of hope, out of habit.
He patched the roof.
Dug a trench for runoff.
Fixed the chimney with cracked bricks and broken nails.
He didn't speak to anyone.
Not for months.
Only when a small family, Ayane and her child, Kuro, stumbled into his orbit, did he begin to feel human again. Briefly.
It ended, as things do in Terra, in loss.
Crystalized lungs. Infected smiles. A mother asking to die with her child.
He had buried them behind the house. With a blade, not a shovel.
The ground had frozen too hard.
That was when something in him changed.
He no longer flinched at blood. No longer hesitated.
When a bandit once stumbled onto his land and tried to take his coat, Yuta slit his throat with a stone shard.
When another tried to steal water, Yuta broke his leg, tied him to a tree, and let the crows handle the rest. He didn't do it out of malice.
He did it because this world taught him mercy meant nothing.
If you want to live, you kill.
If you want to protect the memory of the dead, you make sure the living regret trespassing.
By year two, his reversed cursed technique returned.
Slowly. It had taken months of meditation, prayer, and sheer will. His cursed speech followed, not perfect at first, but responsive.
A whisper that could still command.
That time, it wasn't just muscle memory that brought it back, it was desperation, clawing survival, and Inumaki's voice echoing in his mind.
He trained every night under a cracked moon, blade in hand, carving forms into the silence. His strength came back. His speed. His instinct.
But not his Domain.
Not Rika.
And every night, when he sat alone by a dying fire, he could still hear Ayane's last words.
"Let me go with him, Yuta."
He never said no. He just cried.
He just swung his blade.
...
Three years.
That morning, the firewood was low.
He'd returned from a quiet hunt with dried meat and a few faded books from a half-sunken outpost.
There were no signs of travelers. No tracks.
So when he smelled smoke, not his own, but something stale, unfamiliar, his hand went straight to the katana by the doorframe.
It wasn't the smell of firewood.
It was the smell of people.
Foreign oil. Bad breath. Gunpowder.
He opened the door slowly.
A group of them, Reunion soldiers.
Laughing. Looting. One had already broken a ceramic bowl.
Another had his muddy boot on the bed.
Yuta's bed.
He didn't need to think. The cursed energy flared around him like a breath taken underwater. Dense.
Suffocating. It leaked through the floorboards.
Through the broken window. Through the walls.
And she stood just outside the porch.
W.
Their eyes met for the first time.
To her credit, she recognized it immediately. Not the face. But the feeling.
Something is emerging from him, it's... negative.
She didn't say a word. Not at first.
And then Yuta stepped forward, katana low, blade already humming.
"You're trespassing" he said, voice calm.
The soldiers inside didn't hear him. Or if they did, they didn't listen.
But W did.
She raised her hand to call them out, but it was too late.
One of them cracked open the storage box near the hearth.
Inside was a pair of old boots, Kuro's. Just a memory. But one Yuta had kept sealed.
The world slowed.
He moved.
The katana cut upward, from pelvis to clavicle.
One clean stroke. The body folded in half, still gasping, before crumpling backwards with a wet sound.
Another soldier turned, panic blooming. Yuta's heel struck his chest, launching him into the hallway. The cursed energy laced every motion, precise, merciless.
A third tried to run.
"Stop" Yuta whispered, barely audible.
Cursed Speech.
The man's legs locked.
He toppled over screaming as Yuta's blade slid between vertebrae with the smooth finality of a practiced hand.
Outside, W didn't raise her weapon.
Not out of fear.
But because she knew this was no negotiation.
This wasn't revenge.
This was maintenance.
The house had been broken into.
The penalty was death.
When the last survivor crawled out, soaked in blood and piss, Yuta turned his gaze to her.
"You brought them here," he said.
"I didn't send them inside," she replied coolly.
Silence.
Then a gust of wind passed between them.
"You have one chance to leave," Yuta said, voice flat. "Take it."
W stared for a long moment. Then, she gave him a small, humorless smile.
"....Noted."
She whistled. The remaining men, those still breathing, stumbled behind her.
As she left, she didn't look back.
And Yuta closed the door.
Inside, alone, he sat back on the floor, surrounded by blood and cracked wood.
The books he brought in were ruined now. The bed was stained. The fire still hadn't been lit.
He stared at the flame in the hearth, unlit, unmoving.
...
The morning air bit with a dry chill, brushing over the high ridges of rusted metal and cracked stone that surrounded the house.
Yuta Okkotsu moved through silence, his bare feet crunching over cold gravel as he stepped outside.
The air in Terra always carried something sharp, too dry in the lungs, like it had never fully learned how to be air.
It didn't feel natural, not like home. But after three years, he no longer flinched at the difference.
He exhaled and began.
Push-ups. Slowly.
One after another, cursed energy faintly coiled through his muscles, reinforcing joints and sinew.
But he didn't push hard, not anymore.
Not unless he had to.
His strength was returning, but his control had to be rebuilt the hard way.
With patience. Repetition. Quiet.
His breath fogged in the still air as the sun crawled its way up the fractured horizon, slicing light across a world that always seemed half-dying.
He shifted into slow stretches, then into shadow sparring, his katana unsheathed, moving like water.
The blade sang through the air, but there was no joy in it.
Not anymore.
His movements were sharp, exact, no flourish, no waste.
Cursed energy surged to his limbs on command now, not like before, when he first arrived, when everything inside him felt like broken wires, like echoes of a power that had once been whole. Now he could focus it.
Strengthen himself. Cut with it. Kill with it.
But the techniques were still missing.
Copy remained locked.
Domain, distant.
Even Rika... her voice was silent. Only a vague warmth at the edges of his soul.
Like a dream of her clinging to him, watching from far away.
Yuta's body paused in mid-swing.
He stood still. Blade held forward. Breathing calm.
He remembered the way Rika used to surge to his side in an instant.
The way his techniques had once flowed like second nature.
He remembered fighting on battlefields filled with monsters, sorcerers, legends, and standing tall among them.
Now, he lived in a world where cursed energy was only just beginning to bleed into the land because of him.
And still, he hadn't recovered all that he lost.
He sheathed the katana and sat down beneath the dry tree out back, its branches black and brittle against the sky. He brought his hands together.
Cursed energy flowed into his core.
Meditation was harder here.
Everything in Terra felt...wrong.
The curse energy in the atmosphere wasn't natural. It was angry.
He could feel it moving through the land, through the infected, through ruins drenched in fear and desperation.
It was like trying to find peace while sitting in the middle of a battlefield. But he kept at it.
Every day.
Again and again.
Sometimes, the memories came.
Gojo, laughing under the summer sun.
Inumaki, biting back pain as he lent Yuta his final words and power.
Maki, standing tall even when the weight of death was on her shoulders.
Yuta tightened his fists.
He didn't cry anymore.
There were no tears left.
Only the silence of Terra.
The distant howling of wind across ruins. The soft hum of Originium dust settling on metal.
When the sun reached its peak, he stood again and returned inside. Not a word spoken. He made tea with water he'd boiled that morning.
Sparse food. Basic shelter. It was enough.
Outside, somewhere past the dead hills, rumors of his existence had begun to spread.
He'd heard faint whispers when traveling, villagers speaking of a blade-wielding ghost who killed bandits and cursed things alike, a man wrapped in grief and hatred, whose eyes could kill before his blade even moved.
He didn't deny it.
But neither did he confirm it.
He simply continued his day, repairing his gear, maintaining the katana, etching sigils into scrap parchment, experimenting with cursed speech phrases under his breath.
Collapse.
The word rang faintly in the walls of the house, but nothing broke. Not yet. He needed more control.
Crumble.
The stone cracked slightly, a jagged fracture across its face.
Yuta's eyes narrowed.
Better.
He looked at his reflection in the blade.
The boy from Shinjuku was long gone.
What remained was something harder, quieter, carved down by failure and loss.
Not emotionless.
Just...
emptied.
...
That night, the wind howled through the broken valley like a dirge.
Yuta lay on the creaking wooden floor of his home, wrapped in threadbare blankets that did little to warm him.
Outside, the stars flickered faintly behind a smear of clouds and Originium dust.
The quiet was thick, as if the land itself held its breath.
Sleep came to him not with peace, but with weight.
And in the dark, the memories returned.
The sky was blue again. Bright, wide, untainted.
He was a child once more, short, skinny, smiling in a way he hadn't in years.
The world around him was a neighborhood park, the swings rusting slightly but still catching the wind.
The kind of place that carried laughter on warm days and the soft scent of grass after rain.
She was there.
Rika.
Her hair fell wild across her shoulders, and her smile could've lit the sun.
She wore a black sundress.
There was a box of juice in one hand and something small clenched in the other, a ring.
"This is my promise," she said, eyes shimmering with joy. "When we grow up, let's get married, Yuta-kun!"
His younger self turned red, flustered and bashful, but held out his hand all the same.
And she slipped the ring onto his finger.
It didn't fit right, of course.
It was too big, plastic, probably from a candy machine.
But to them, it was sacred.
That was their vow.
The dream shifted.
A screeching of tires.
Screaming.
The world spun.
Then...
crunch.
Blood. Crushed bone. A mangled shape that had once been her.
He never saw her die in person. But the dream always made him.
Always.
His adult self ran into frame, desperate, too late.
Falling to his knees beside her body, screaming into his hands as the light left her eyes.
"Rika..."
And then she rose. Not as the girl he knew. Not as the promise of love.
But as the curse.
Towering. Monstrous. Unrecognizable.
Bound to him by chains of grief and guilt, her voice twisted, her power overwhelming.
He had killed with her. Protected with her. Fought with her.
They stood together against curses, sorcerers, even Geto himself.
The dream twisted again, pulling him through flashes of memory like pages torn from a book.
Gojo's sunglasses gleaming in the sun.
Panda's fist crashing through debris.
Maki yelling at him to move faster.
Toge bleeding from the mouth as cursed speech shook the air.
And Geto, standing with his arm half-destroyed, yet smiling even in death. "You're strong, Yuta Okkotsu."
The cursed energy had nearly ripped the sky apart.
Yuta remembered holding her, Rika, after it all ended. His heart shattering with each word.
"Thank you for loving me."
And just like that, she had faded.
I let her go.
But now, now he was alone.
The dreams faded into gray.
And Yuta woke in silence.
He sat up, breath shallow.
Sweat clung to his neck, and the air in the house felt colder than it had before. His fingers trembled slightly.
He stared at them, calloused, cracked, the remnants of three years of survival. There was no ring. Just skin.
His bare feet hit the cold floor. He walked slowly to the bathroom, just a few steps, but each one dragged with a weight heavier than any curse. He didn't bother turning on the light.
The darkness felt fitting.
Yuta splashed water on his face. Let the cold bite in. Tried to will the lingering ache from his chest.
Then, he felt it.
Arms.
Around his neck.
Soft. Familiar. Warm.
He looked up at the mirror.
There she was.
Floating just behind him, head resting against his, her arms draped lazily over his shoulders.
Her face nuzzled into the side of his hair, as if she'd never left him.
Her expression was playful, affectionate, those same dark eyes now holding an impossible calm.
Rika.
Older.
No longer the twisted specter she had once become in death.
Her form was different, still ethereal, glowing faintly, but solid. She looked more like the girl she would have grown into. Her hair flowed freely behind her, longer, more elegant.
Her body had matured, clad in something flowing and soft like spirit silk.
But her smile, her voice.
"10/10" she whispered beside his ear, grinning. "Even with the eyebags."
Yuta froze. His mouth opened, but no sound came out.
His cursed energy flared involuntarily.
He couldn't tell if it was from shock or something far more primal.
She giggled.
"I can touch you now" she whispered, swaying against him. "It's weird. But I like it."
He staggered back from the sink, spinning around, heart pounding. She floated midair, arms crossed now, smiling innocently, amused at his panicked state.
"You..." His voice cracked. "You're... you're here. But you're... why are you... how?"
Rika tilted her head. "Originium. This place... it's full of something like cursed energy, but it's twisted. I don't know exactly. But it let me out. It let me come back. Although it took a lot of time for that"
Yuta stared, throat dry, hands trembling.
"...Are you real?" he asked finally.
She floated closer again, cupping his face in both hands. They were warm.
"You always ask that," she murmured. "I was always real. You just didn't believe you deserved to see me again."
His knees buckled.
He sank down to the floor, back against the cold stone.
She followed, hovering beside him.
Not saying anything. Just staying. Just being.
Something inside him cracked open.
A part long sealed shut.
He could feel his cursed energy shifting, reorganizing.
The sensation of his technique, Copy, stirring awake like a muscle healed and whole again.
The cost of her presence... was that?
Or was this his reward?
"Rika," he whispered, voice thin. "I missed you."
"I know," she replied, gently placing her forehead against his. "I missed you too."
And in the silence of that broken night, Yuta wept.
Not from sadness, but from the quiet, unbearable relief of not being alone anymore.
.
.
.
(Yes, this is the real Rika, not the cheap ahh version of her that only last 5 minutes(...That came out wrong))