"What? Your acquaintance? Don't tell me you actually like playing with things like this? Yeah, it's my fault. I should've taught you better." Toji grinned, teasing at first, then put one hand on his face, pretending to regret letting his younger brother walk down a path of no return.
"This thing is called the Inventory Curse. To be exact, it should be considered something you'll be familiar with in the future." Mukuro ignored the mocking and crouched down. He held out his hand, letting the caterpillar crawl onto his palm.
"Ma… ma…"
Sensing the cursed spirits behind Mukuro and their respect toward him, the creature grew excited. It climbed along his arm, wrapping around half his body, finally resting its head on his shoulder.
"Hm?" Toji saw that his brother wasn't joking. Remembering the strange behavior of the creature earlier, a thought came to him.
Mukuro confirmed it.
"Swallow it." He lifted his trident and looked at the creature on his shoulder.
The curse understood speech. It opened its mouth and began swallowing the trident bit by bit, the same way it had eaten the Fly Head curses before.
Amazingly, even a weapon capable of piercing a special-grade curse caused it no harm. In its mouth, the trident felt like a blunt stick without any edges.
The small body swallowed the nearly one-meter-long trident, yet nothing changed. No puncture wounds, no swelling, as if nothing had happened. Its belly was like a bottomless pit.
"Spit it out." Mukuro stretched his hand out confidently in front of its mouth.
Buzz…
What came out was a Fly Head.
"I said the weapon. The thing you just swallowed!" He tossed the curse aside, his eyes twitching as he repeated the command.
"Weapon…" Inventory Curse tilted its head, confused. After a pause, it opened its mouth and pushed out the trident with its tongue. There was no saliva, no slime, not even a smell. It came out exactly as it had gone in.
"A curse that can store items… Even in the whole jujutsu world, that's rare. But…" Toji's gaze changed as he looked at cursed spirit.
With this thing, he basically had a moving armory. But carrying a cursed spirit around wasn't much different from walking around with a big sword. And there was another problem: the creature didn't seem very smart.
"Inventory Curse probably has the intelligence of a child. To control it properly, we'll need a contract." Mukuro grabbed the caterpillar from his shoulder and threw it into Toji's hands.
"A child, huh…" Toji glanced at his brother, saying, "Do you even hear yourself? How old are you?"
Still, he held up the Inventory Curse and curved his scarred lips into what he thought was a friendly smile.
"Inventory Curse, right? Let's form a contract. How about I become your master?"
"Ma… ma…" It shivered, sensing malice. Nervously, it turned toward Mukuro, begging for help.
"Behave," Mukuro spoke lightly. The curses behind him stepped forward, scaring the Inventory Curse enough to shrink back into Toji's chest.
Perhaps because of this special curse's unique ability, without any ritual, Toji suddenly felt a request for a mental link reaching into his mind. When he accepted, his consciousness slipped into a pitch-black space where he could not even see his hand.
"Is this a contract space?"
Stories about this existed in the jujutsu world, but cursed creatures this rare meant no one truly understood the process.
Relying on his sharpened senses, Toji still felt the presence of the little creature wriggling toward him in the dark.
"Con… tract…"
As the Inventory Curse's voice echoed, the void lit up. A glow spilled across them, pulling their figures out of the blackness.
They were only a step apart now.
The worm struggled to lift its heavy eyelids, trying to carve Toji's image into its memory.
"Inventory Curse will willingly become your cursed spirit pet. It will never betray you, but you must also never harm it." (Unless you die, then the contract ends.)
Its mouth moved, words halting and unclear, but when they reached Toji's ears, they turned into clear sentences.
"I agree." He crouched down and extended his right hand.
Inventory Curse twisted its body with all its might and crawled onto his palm
Then a flash as bright as daylight swept over everything.
Once Toji opened his eyes again, reality had returned. The cursed spirit was already coiled around him, just as it had done with Mukuro previously, its head resting obediently on his shoulder.
"Can you really eat anything?"
Now that the contract was sealed, he realized he could communicate with it freely, without even opening his mouth.
"Yes…" It answered dumbly.
"Then eat yourself. Leave just a bit." The idea popped into his head, and he said it aloud.
Surprisingly, it obeyed. Starting from its tail, it swallowed its body bit by bit. Its form shrank smaller and smaller until only a piece the size of a dice remained, no more could go in.
"That's pretty handy. Let's move." Toji slipped the tiny creature into his pocket. With a single sweep of his hand, the last of the lingering curses were cut to pieces.
The brothers walked toward the hospital exit.
* * *
"You two actually…"
The wounded sorcerer from earlier had woken, his face pale. His wide eyes locked on the pair who walked out unharmed, struggling to believe what he saw.
"Before you pass out from blood loss again, hurry up and reach the assistant manager outside. Tell him to drop the barrier." Mukuro nudged the man with his foot, casually spinning the cursed finger between his hands.
"My comrades… Can they still be found?" The sorcerer struggled to stand up and pressed a hand against the barrier, sending cursed energy outward to attract attention. He hesitated before he asked the question he feared the most.
He hadn't realized his tone shook. It was his companions who had given him the chance to survive. Now all he could hope for was to at least recover their bodies.
"Better let someone else go in and check." Toji spoke up. He didn't answer directly, but his words were enough to tell the truth.
"I see… I understand…" The man whispered under his breath. He didn't say anything else.
But his back, turned toward the brothers, shivered with faint tremors.
On the face they couldn't see, tears had already blurred everything.
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