Kenjaku didn't leave the rail yard right away. The night air was still, unnaturally so.
No trace of cursed energy. No trace of the finger. No trace of it.
He looked down at the gravel beneath his feet, one hand resting loosely at his side.
In all his centuries of schemes and battles, he had never seen something hide cursed energy so completely. Not suppressed — erased. The weight of Sukuna's finger had been undeniable, yet in an instant it was gone, erased so perfectly that even the space it occupied felt untouched.
Kenjaku knew what that meant. It could be carrying more.
'It's been active longer than I thought.'
The idea wasn't new — he'd been tracking sightings and disappearances for decades — but now… now it felt older. Far older. Perhaps as old as Sukuna himself.
He turned from the empty yard, but his thoughts stayed locked on the thing's words and actions. The way it had shown him the finger wasn't an empty boast. It was a message.
A reminder that it was not a piece to be moved on his board. It was a player in its own right.
And if it had been moving unseen for this long, then perhaps the scattered whispers and rumors he'd dismissed before deserved a second look.
Over the next few days, he began to dig deeper.
There were no direct accounts — no records with names, no descriptions that could be verified. Only fragments. Sightings wrapped in superstition. Places where strong sorcerers vanished without a fight. Entire districts that went quiet overnight, leaving no witnesses behind.
The oldest stories weren't even about a curse. They were warnings passed between villages centuries ago, then between clans, then among sorcerers themselves.
Never concrete. Never provable.
Meanwhile, on the outskirts of Tokyo, the disappearances began to stack up. More frequent. Closer together.
Someone in the higher ranks finally noticed the pattern.
And when the names of the missing began to include promising Grade 1 sorcerers, the elders stopped treating the rumors as idle talk.
It wasn't time to call it a crisis — not yet. But it was time to send someone who could settle the matter quickly, before the story spread any further.
And there was only one name they trusted for that job.