My world was cold. And dark. And silent.
This was the second time I had died. The first had been a crescendo of noise and panic—a gunshot, a scream, the fading fluorescent hum of a Walmart. This was different. This was a decrescendo into absolute nothingness. The memory of the pain, of the cold steel of the Inverted Spear of Heaven violating my small body, was already a distant echo. All that remained was a profound, encroaching cold and a gentle but insistent pull towards a final, silent oblivion.
My consciousness was a guttering candle flame in an infinite, starless night. I could feel myself thinning, my sense of self—both the man I was and the girl I had become—dissolving like salt in water.
But then, a single, defiant pinprick of warmth bloomed in the center of the void.
It was the spark I had created in that last, desperate moment of consciousness. It was impossibly small, a single mote of golden light in an ocean of freezing darkness. It was the result of a paradoxical equation, a defiance of the natural order of Cursed Energy. It was positive energy. It was life. And it was all I had left.
The void pressed in, trying to snuff it out. The lingering curse of the Inverted Spear was a tangible nullification effect, a patch of metaphysical anti-reality stitched into my very soul, actively trying to negate my existence.
A crimson screen, the familiar interface of my System, flickered before my fading mind. It was no longer a cool, analytical blue, but a frantic, emergency red.
[FATAL WOUND DETECTED. VITALITY AT 1%. CESSATION IMMINENT.]
[SURVIVAL PROTOCOL ACTIVE. REVERSE CURSED TECHNIQUE IS UNSTABLE.]
[Cursed Tool Effect: [Inverted Spear of Heaven] is actively negating positive energy application at the wound site.]
The spark of warmth I had created pulsed, then dimmed under the assault. The cold surged back. So, healing the wound directly was impossible. The spear's effect was absolute. I couldn't patch the hole. The hole was actively unmaking the patch.
It was a checkmate. A fundamental contradiction.
No.
The thought was not mine, not Bob's, not Aki's. It was the primal, undiluted will to live, the one thing that had carried my soul across worlds. I would not die again. Not here. Not like this.
Memories, unbidden, flooded the darkness. Riko's face, bright with laughter, then her quiet confession on the beach: "I think I want to live a little longer." Geto's gentle, patient voice explaining the ethics of jujutsu. Satoru's infuriating, brilliant grin, and the look of utter, soul-shattering horror on his face as the blade pierced me. He had failed. They had all failed. And I had failed them. My foreknowledge had been useless.
Unless… unless this was the moment it was for. Not to prevent the tragedy, but to survive it.
If I can't patch the hole, I will rebuild the wall.
The System flickered again, as if responding to my new resolve.
[New approach detected. Bypass negation by targeting macro-cellular regeneration directly. Rebuild from foundational cell structure outward. Efficiency will be critically low. Success rate: 0.03%.]
A near-impossible task. I wasn't just healing. I was trying to perform microscopic surgery on myself from the inside out, using a power I had discovered only seconds ago, while fighting a curse that negated that very power.
I focused on the tiny spark of positive energy. I didn't try to make it bigger. I tried to make it smarter. I pushed it away from the wound, away from the annihilating effect of the cursed tool. I guided it through my own circulatory system, a tiny golden submersible navigating the rivers of my dying body. I found a single, undamaged cell far from the wound.
[TASK: Infuse cell with positive energy. Induce rapid, controlled mitosis.]
I poured my will into the task. The spark dimmed as I expended its energy, infusing the single cell. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the cell divided. And again. And again. A microscopic island of new life in a sea of death. It was agonizingly slow. It was like trying to build a fortress one grain of sand at a time. I had to constantly generate more positive energy, folding the negative upon itself again and again, each time a desperate struggle against oblivion.
The cold fought back. The darkness pressed in. But now, I had an anchor. A single point of life to defend. The battle for my soul had begun.
Shoko Ieiri felt the lights go out.
She was in the infirmary, sterilizing equipment, when two of the most powerful Cursed Energy signatures she had ever known—signatures she knew as well as her own heartbeat—vanished from her perception. It wasn't a fade. It was a snip. Like two brilliant, raging stars being simultaneously and instantly extinguished.
Her blood ran cold. The tray of scalpels she was holding crashed to the floor.
"No…" she breathed. Impossible. It was impossible. Satoru and Suguru. The Strongest.
She didn't hesitate. She ran. Out of the infirmary, down the long, empty hallways of Jujutsu High, following the lingering, fading trail of their energy towards the main courtyard. The air was thick with the coppery scent of blood long before she arrived.
The first person she saw was Geto. He was slumped against the base of a stone lantern, his uniform torn and bloodied, his body broken. But he was alive. His gaze was fixed on something in the distance, his eyes, usually so calm and intelligent, were hollowed out, vacant with a trauma so profound it seemed to have carved out his soul. Shoko followed his gaze.
Her breath hitched. She saw Riko Amanai's body lying near the entrance to the Tombs, a small, neat hole in her forehead. Beside her, Misato Kuroi was sobbing, a hysterical, keening sound that seemed to be the only noise in the dead-silent night.
Then she saw them.
Lying in a massive, dark pool of their own mixed blood were Satoru and Aki.
Shoko's clinical detachment, her shield against the horrors of her profession, shattered. These weren't just classmates. They were her friends. Her family.
She rushed to their side, her medical training taking over. Her hands flew, checking for a pulse, for breath, for any sign of life. Satoru first. His skin was cold. A catastrophic series of wounds covered his body, the worst being a vicious, gaping injury in his throat. There was no Cursed Energy, no heartbeat, no breath. Nothing.
Satoru Gojo was dead.
A wave of nausea and grief threatened to overwhelm her, but she forced it down. There was still Aki. She turned to the small, frail body beside him. The child was impaled by the same wound that had likely killed Satoru, a devastating piercing wound through her torso. She was just as cold, just as still.
But as Shoko's fingers pressed against the side of Aki's neck, searching for a pulse she knew she wouldn't find, she felt it.
A flicker.
It was so faint it was almost imperceptible. A tiny, rhythmic hum of energy that was not the negative, deathly chill of Cursed Energy. It was warm. Positive. It was the signature of Reverse Cursed Technique. It was impossibly weak, a whisper in a hurricane, but it was there. Coming from a six-year-old girl who should have been dead ten times over.
"What in the…?" Shoko breathed, her mind struggling to comprehend what she was sensing.
Satoru Gojo was adrift in a sea of failure.
His afterlife was not a peaceful void. It was a chaotic, raging tempest of his own final moments. The shock of his Infinity failing. The cold agony of the Inverted Spear. The searing pain of the Soul-Split Katana. And worst of all, the image of Aki's horrified, pain-filled eyes as the blade tore through her, played on a loop.
He had failed. He, the Honored One, the pinnacle of the jujutsu world, had been dissected like a frog in a lab. He had failed his mission. He had failed his best friend. He had failed his little sister. He had gotten her killed. The thought was a poison more potent than any curse.
But beneath the rage and humiliation, his mind, even on the brink of death, was still working. It was analyzing, calculating. How? How did he bypass Infinity? How did he kill me?
The answer wasn't in power levels or energy outputs. It was more fundamental. Reverse Cursed Technique. The ability to create, not destroy. He knew the theory, of course. Negative x Negative = Positive. A simple equation he had never been able to solve.
As his consciousness began to fade for the final time, something shifted. The desperation, the rage, the humiliation, his colossal ego, and his peerless genius all collided in one, singular, transcendent moment of clarity.
He stopped thinking of Cursed Energy as a river to be directed. He saw it for what it was: the raw, chaotic source code of reality itself. And he, with his Six Eyes, was the only one with the clearance to rewrite it. Multiplying two negatives wasn't a brute force calculation. It was about defining an origin point, a zero, and simply inverting the entire axis.
In the final moment before his brain was about to shut down, Satoru Gojo finally, truly, understood the core of the world.
And he smiled.
On the cold stone path, his body, which had been certifiably dead moments before, jerked. A torrent of brilliant, golden positive energy erupted from him. Wounds sealed. Bones snapped back into place. Torn flesh and severed nerves knitted themselves back together in seconds.
He sat up, then slowly rose to his feet. He was drenched in his own blood, a gruesome sight, but he was pristine. Unharmed. More than unharmed. He felt… transcendent. The flow of Cursed Energy, the very texture of reality, was clearer than ever before. He felt reborn.
He looked over at the scene of devastation. He saw Shoko kneeling beside his own body—or where it had been. He saw Geto, hollowed out and broken. And he saw Aki, small and still.
"Yo," Satoru said, his voice strangely light, almost giddy. He was high on his own resurrection, buzzing with a manic energy that bordered on godhood.
Shoko and Geto spun around. Their faces were a mask of pure shock.
"S-Satoru?" Geto stammered, his voice cracking. He looked between the bloody spot on the ground and the perfectly whole boy standing before him. "Are you... Gojo Satoru?"
Satoru grinned, a wide, sharp, terrifyingly confident smile. "Yeah. I'm feeling great. My mind is clearer than it's ever been." He took a step forward, his gaze falling on Aki's still form. "Is she...?"
"She's gone, Satoru," Shoko said, her voice heavy with a grief that now felt premature and foolish. "There was no pulse. But there was… something. A flicker of RCT."
Satoru's Six Eyes focused on Aki, and he saw it too. The tiny, stubborn flame of positive energy fighting a losing war against the cursed wound. His own newfound mastery of RCT allowed him to perceive hers. It was amateurish, inefficient, but it was undeniably there. A six-year-old, running on pure instinct, was doing the impossible.
A surge of pride, fierce and protective, cut through his power-drunk haze. He took another step, intending to flood her with his own positive energy, to finish the job for her.
But as he reached out a hand, the tiny flame within Aki erupted.
Fueled by her unbreakable will and a final, desperate push, her own Reverse Cursed Technique cascaded through her body. The horrific wound in her chest stitched itself shut from the inside out with impossible speed. Color returned to her pale skin. With a sharp gasp, her eyes snapped open, her crimson irises glowing with a faint, residual golden light.
She sat up, breathing heavily, and looked around at the scene with wide, horrified eyes.
There was a moment of stunned silence. The three teenagers—one broken, one reborn, one a medical anomaly—stared at the impossible sight before them. Two sorcerers, returned from the dead by their own hands, side by side.
Satoru started to laugh. It was a wild, unhinged sound, full of power and grief and a terrible, newfound clarity. "Looks like you're full of surprises too, little sis."
He turned his gaze towards the Tombs of the Star. His smile was gone, replaced by an expression of cold, absolute purpose. Geto saw the look on his face and knew. This wasn't the Satoru who had left on this mission. This was someone new. Someone further away than ever before.
"I'm going to kill him," Satoru said, his voice soft, but carrying the weight of an earthquake.
He looked down at me, the impossible child who had clawed her way back from death's door alongside him. The Honored One was no longer alone in his transcendence. And that fact, for better or for worse, had changed everything.