"Some things aren't meant to be remembered. But if you take enough away, all that's left… is nothing."
---
Jujutsu High — Training Grounds
The air was heavy that morning, thick with an almost metallic taste.
Students sparred in the main courtyard, the sound of fists, cursed techniques, and splintering wood filling the air.
Sora stood at the edge of the field, watching but not joining in.
Not because he didn't want to… but because when he tried to call up his cursed energy earlier, nothing happened.
Not a flicker.
Not a spark.
It wasn't suppression.
It was absence.
---
"Not good," Rei muttered under her breath as she stepped up beside him. "You're leaking… nothing."
Sora blinked. "Leaking nothing?"
"Yeah. It's like—" She paused, scanning the field, then dropped her voice. "Like your energy's being eaten from the inside."
She said it like she'd seen it before.
Sora noticed… and filed that away.
If he could still remember it later.
---
Elsewhere — Inside the Abandoned Moon Shrine
The cloaked figure from before knelt before the cracked altar. The charm in his hand pulsed faintly, its wax seal breaking apart into ash.
From the shadows above, a voice like sand sliding through bone whispered:
> "The boy resists. He carries the null. Bury him beneath the moon before the month wanes."
The figure bowed low.
"I've prepared the burial."
---
That Night — Tokyo Streets
Gojo walked down a dimly lit alley, humming to himself, paper bag of skewers in one hand.
Halfway through a chicken skewer, he stopped.
The alley's shadows… shifted.
Gojo's blindfold lifted just enough to reveal a glint of blue.
"I was wondering when you'd crawl out," he said.
A woman emerged—black robes, hair silver and unbound, carrying a wooden box the size of a coffin lid.
"No cursed energy," Gojo murmured. "That's new."
She smiled thinly. "That's the point."
---
Back at Jujutsu High — Midnight
Sora woke to silence.
No crickets. No wind.
Just the faint scrape of something being dragged outside his dorm window.
He slid out of bed, feet barely touching the floorboards, and peered outside.
At first, he thought it was a person.
Then he realized… it was himself.
His own face. His own movements. But wrong—slower, hollow-eyed, as if someone had built him from memory scraps.
The copy stopped moving. Its head snapped upward, meeting his gaze through the window.
Then it smiled.
And whispered something he couldn't hear—
before the ground split open beneath it and swallowed it whole.
---
Rei burst into his room without knocking.
"We have to go. Now."
"Why?"
"They've started the Moon Burial."
---