Near-death.
For an ordinary person, it was the awakening method with the highest return on investment.
As long as it was kept within a "safe" margin, it cost nothing and required no proximity to actual cursed spirits.
Asou Akiya was no masochistic Dazai Osamu who romanticized suicide; he admitted he feared pain. What he sought was maximum efficiency and maximum payoff. Thus he analyzed, from a god-like vantage, exactly why ordinary humans could awaken in the moment of nearing death.
1. The spirit receives an overwhelming shock.
2. The soul secretes an explosive surge of negative emotion.
3. At the precipice of life and death, the body shatters its own "self-preservation principle" and, in its desperate bid to survive, finally "sees" the cursed spirits.
Under normal circumstances, being unable to see them was precisely what kept ordinary people safe. Low-grade cursed spirits rarely attacked humans unprovoked; at most they clung instinctively, feeding slowly on negative emotion like barnacles.
Evolution had produced two branches of humanity: those who could not see cursed spirits, and those who could.
The ancient sorcerer clans almost never birthed descendants completely blind to curses.
Those born with zero cursed energy (the so-called Heavenly Restriction) were rare mutants and could be set aside for now.
Asou Akiya sat at the little desk, flipped open a notebook, and clicked the top of a ballpoint pen.
[Extreme sports: bungee jumping, skydiving, pendulum rides, roller-coasters.]
First line: methods to jolt the mind.
[Haunted houses, graveyards, morgues, horror films, crash footage, death documentaries.]
Second line: methods to flood the soul with negativity.
[This one's tricky…]
The pen hovered above the third line and refused to move. He could think of no safe, reliable way to force the body into crisis using actual cursed spirits or objects. Without being able to see them, he could not gauge their grade; that path was pure Russian roulette.
The very next morning, Asou Akiya began running at dawn. He trained his body with ferocious discipline, laying the foundation for whatever came next.
He adjusted his behavior inside the welfare institution with meticulous care.
One month later, every feasible item on the list had been checked off.
He became a regular at Yokohama's amusement parks. Yokohama Cemetery turned into his personal pilgrimage site. His phone history was a gallery of horrors that would make most adults flinch. No matter how violently his stomach churned, the moment he remembered that all of this might make him a sorcerer, he swallowed the fear and pressed play again.
Plans, however, never survive contact with reality.
The lure of supernatural power was simply too intoxicating. His body shook, but his soul sang.
He had even considered slitting his wrists (controlling the blood loss precisely would still grant the authentic terror of approaching death), but before resorting to blades he tried the safer option: deliberate drowning. He swam into the deep end of public pools, deliberately past the point where his toes could touch bottom, and waited for panic to set in.
Yet the brain registered no crisis at all. Only cold, indifferent emptiness. The body seemed to mock the overly cautious soul inhabiting it:
You think this childish game can kill you?
When the lifeguard hauled him coughing onto the tiles, Asou Akiya hacked up water and started laughing between spasms.
"What a spectacular failure."
How could the spirit ever tighten like a drawn bow when a way out was always visible?
How could negative emotion flood forth when the heart brimmed with hope and daydreams of tomorrow?
True brushes with death were no joking matter.
Once he grasped this truth, no matter how bitterly it stung, he had to accept it: he lacked the necessary sense of crisis.
To etch the despair of powerlessness deep into his bones, Asou Akiya informed the director, boarded a train, and headed for Shibuya, Tokyo.
Inside Shibuya Station (an artery clogged with humanity, eight directions converging into chaos), he experienced firsthand why the Japanese called their rush-hour trains "sardine cans." He let the crowd carry him, drifting from platform to platform, tasting his own insignificance.
He descended to Basement 5, found the exact spot where, fourteen years from now, Kenjaku would seal Gojo Satoru, and stood there imagining an invisible hand shoving him onto the tracks.
The despair would be absolute.
The instant of falling would hurt. Crisis would flood the brain.
As an ordinary person caught in the Shibuya Incident, life and death would no longer belong to him. Unable to see cursed spirits, unable to evade them, he would only watch a white-haired man fight alone to save everyone.
If he never awakened cursed energy, he would flee far away, leave Japanese soil before 7 p.m. on October 31, 2018.
At most, out of lingering conscience, he might anonymously mail a letter to Gojo Satoru at Tokyo Jujutsu High:
Your friend Geto Suguru's corpse has been stolen by the thousand-year-old bastard Kenjaku. When trouble comes, prioritize killing special-grade cursed spirits. Whatever you do, do not fall for the trap called "Prison Realm."
Suddenly, Asou Akiya halted.
Memory of the anime guided his feet to the precise place where twenty-eight-year-old Gojo Satoru had once stood alone.
The frame of "Prison Realm, open" played vividly before his eyes.
"Prison Realm… gate open."
His whisper vanished, frail and unheard, into the river of commuters. No one noticed the boy unconsciously prophesying.
He stood rooted to the spot and slowly turned.
as though he could already see—
A white-haired man standing right behind him. The black teacher's uniform seemed perpetually immune to grime; the jacket fell to his hips, legs endlessly long. Only that eternally youthful face, unchanged in a decade, was now spattered with blood. In each hand he carried the severed head of a transfigured human.
"He" radiated an unspeakable weariness; the muscles in his calves trembled.
"He" was breathing hard, great heaving gasps that somehow sounded intoxicating.
"He" appeared invincible, having slaughtered a thousand transfigured humans in two hundred and ninety-nine seconds: cold, yet merciful.
"He"… regarded the trap laid for him with lowered lashes, arrogance and disdain woven together.
Asou Akiya gazed quietly at the hallucination, palm cupped beside his ear as though to catch those ragged breaths.
[So beautiful.]
The strongest sorcerer of the modern age, invincible in his era, had fought to save the ordinary people trapped in Shibuya Station. His enemies had calculated perfectly; he could not unleash his full power. In his most exhausted moment, they sealed him inside the special-grade cursed object, Prison Realm.
Ordinary people knew nothing of sorcerers. Ordinary people would never thank Gojo Satoru.
They would only bewilderment, only rage, screaming as their lives hung by a thread: "Where is Gojo Satoru? Bring him here!"
A hollow gentleness rose in Asou Akiya's eyes.
He did not like ordinary people; their world was a cage of limitations. He did not like the weak; their fates were written in the ink of drifting with the tide.
He understood, bone-deep, that human life held no intrinsic value. Close your eyes and the world was void. What bestowed meaning was the act of living: every encounter, every person, every tremor that brushed the soul along the way.
Gojo Satoru had saved ordinary people.
Who, then, would save Gojo Satoru?
Facing the imagined twenty-eight-year-old Gojo Satoru, Asou Akiya submerged himself in the Halloween eve fourteen years hence. He searched for the tremor in his heart, for the courage to stand against the Shibuya Incident, for the reason, the blazing reason, to throw himself into the jujutsu world and give everything.
Are you worth it?
For one fleeting instant, the black-haired boy's smile thinned to ice, contempt equally distributed across every life in the world.
Yet a transmigrator who had glimpsed the future from on high was no god.
He still had a heart of flesh. It could riot for a soul it desired. It could ache and exult beneath a beloved gaze.
In his previous life, he had reached twenty-nine without ever falling in love with a single real person. Love had always felt impossibly distant. All his romance, all his capacity for devotion, he had poured into books and anime.
His standards for love were cruelly, impossibly high; no one in reality had ever come close.
And he craved a passion that scorched to the marrow.
He had gone far too long without setting himself ablaze. More than the fate of a moth, he feared the wasteland inside his own chest.
The twenty-eight-year-old "Gojo Satoru" undoubtedly possessed the power to make his heart stumble.
Within the worldview of Jujutsu Kaisen, "Gojo Satoru" was the most perfect human being imaginable. Even the flaws he wore so proudly were, to Asou Akiya, not flaws at all, but intoxicating allure. The second dimension overflowed with beautiful, powerful characters. When he first watched season one, he had not even liked Gojo Satoru; he had thought the title of "strongest" watered down, a man bound on every side could not truly deserve it.
Then, slowly, understanding bloomed. Beauty fades. Strength wanes. An eternal, unchanging god lacks the gravity to pull mortals close. What remains forever beautiful is the unyielding human heart.
Gojo Satoru's core (powerful, yet steady) was, in Asou Akiya's eyes, a flower that would never wilt.
He took half a step toward the solitary "Gojo Satoru," rose onto his toes; the height difference was absurd.
Their foreheads seemed almost to touch.
He whispered, like a secret shared between conspirators.
Deep beneath Shibuya, on Basement 5, Asou Akiya allowed himself to become a delighted madman and, just this once, indulged in a tiny, spoiled whine:
"Dangling me over death without letting me fall is so hard… If you smile at me just once, I'll gamble this life to come find you. Yes, the fifteen-year-old you."
Passersby waiting for the subway were already casting strange glances his way.
Their eyes met.
And "Gojo Satoru" lifted the corners of his mouth in a smile.
The boundary between the mundane and the extraordinary blurred. Amid the clamor of the world, a thread of silence wove itself in. Asou Akiya felt he was witnessing the most beautiful snowfall of his life: pure, cold, and utterly silent, yet it seized the heart without mercy.
This, this was what he wanted to reach out and touch: to shatter every rule, to dance with death itself.
Having received an answer, Asou Akiya drew a deep breath, turned without hesitation, and strode toward a youth he would never regret.
So be it: sever every retreat.
Only by conquering the ordinary with no path backward could he earn the right to walk the road of a sorcerer.
Asou Akiya no longer spared a thought for consequences. He withdrew every last yen of his savings and, eyes gleaming with wicked delight, sought out a horse-racing parlor in Tokyo. Just before he could place a single bet, however, the staff chased him out with stern faces: minors were forbidden from gambling on horses. No matter; places to burn money were everywhere. He found a pachinko parlor next, studied the floor for a long while, only to discover that Japan categorically banned minors from all forms of gambling.
After being ejected again and again, Asou Akiya did not grow angry. On the contrary, he threw his head back and laughed until his sides hurt.
"Fine," he said, wiping tears of mirth from his eyes. "Then I'll squander it all in a different way."
Using Tokyo Metropolitan Jujutsu Technical College as his center point on the map, he devoured his way through every famous dessert shop in the vicinity. He signed up for VIP cards with abandon and, in one glorious binge, poured every yen that should have paid for university tuition straight into prepaid dessert credits.
Seated in the quiet corner of a sweets café, Asou Akiya had nearly reduced himself to a pauper.
Money: almost gone.
Tuition: no longer covered.
None of it mattered. These were worthy expenditures. Trading cash for power was the most rational transaction imaginable.
His expression was one of utter contentment as he licked cream from a spoon. Even if he ended up penniless and sleeping under a bridge, he would not care. He asked the shop for a pen and several sheets of letter paper. Bathed in the slanting sunlight from the window and the soft laughter of girls at the next table, he began to write beneath a faintly contemplative brow.
[Title: A Love Triangle That Began at Jujutsu High: Gojo Satoru's White Moonlight and Cinnabar Mole]
[Pairing: Asou Akiya × Gojo Satoru × Geto Suguru (Kenjaku)]
[Author: Spectator]
To the world of Jujutsu Kaisen, he had always been nothing more than an unrestrained spectator in front of the screen, applauding whenever the drama pulled him under.
Judging only by the title, the story seemed utterly mediocre. Apart from Gojo Satoru's resounding fame in the jujutsu world, every other name was a nobody.
Asou Akiya cherished the burst of inspiration. For a fleeting moment he wrote like a man possessed, deliriously happy. He crafted romance scenes designed to offend everyone to death, then stitched massive, blatant spoilers for Jujutsu Kaisen into the most outrageous plot turns imaginable.
In this way, a short story involving two future special-grade sorcerers and a millennium-spanning conspiracy took shape.
It took him two full days to finish his debut work of over ten thousand characters.
He proofread the draft without the slightest blush of shame, only regretting that the timeline was too early and the word limit too strict to also sew Ryomen Sukuna and Toji Fushiguro into the love polygon. After all, if you truly loved someone, you had to torment them properly. In the entire Jujutsu Kaisen world, his personal top three favorites were Gojo Satoru, Ryomen Sukuna, and Toji Fushiguro.
"Perfect," he murmured. "Now all that's left is to mail it."
"As long as either Gojo Satoru or Kenjaku lays eyes on it, I'm as good as dead."
Penniless, unable to flee the country, having severed every path of retreat, Asou Akiya cheerfully pronounced his own death sentence.
He went to the local post office, filled out the form at the counter, and scheduled a letter for his future, Schrödinger's sorcerer self.
Delivery date: May 1, 2005.
Recipient: First-year student Asou Akiya, Tokyo Metropolitan Jujutsu Technical College.
Best-case scenario: he enrolls next year and receives the letter himself.
Worst-case scenario: the faculty of Tokyo Jujutsu High would open the letter, read it to the end, and immediately deliver it into the hands of the higher-ups.
Either way, the dice were cast.
Gojo Satoru would loathe him for the shameless fabrications.
Geto Suguru would burn with righteous fury at the slander.
Kenjaku, receiving word through the elders, would snatch him off the street the very same day and interrogate him until nothing remained.
He would die without a grave.
He would beg for death and be denied.
He would lose any chance of Gojo Satoru's favor forever, perishing beneath the absurd weight of a story he himself had written.
Not long after stepping out of the post office, the sunlight suddenly lost all warmth. A genuine chill seeped into his bones, colder than a hundred haunted houses or midnight cemeteries combined. An icy presence clung to his skin and refused to leave.
He shoved his hands into his pockets. His fingertips trembled. Only now did true fear creep in, belated but unmistakable.
"Wow," he whispered, voice soft with wonder. "I'm actually scared."
Asou Akiya examined himself with clinical curiosity.
"Not enough."
He forced his legs forward, compelled himself to walk away from the post office, compelled himself to stride toward death.
"Still nowhere near enough to see cursed spirits!"
The black-haired boy lowered his head and walked on. A cold smile curved his lips; he mocked himself. In the shadows that swallowed his face, madness flickered and danced.
"I will make every remaining day of my life a countdown. I will taste the slow, exquisite torture of lingering on the edge of death."
"Come, curse me with all your might, with death itself."
…
Excerpt from
*A Love Triangle That Began at Jujutsu High: Gojo Satoru's White Moonlight and Cinnabar Mole*:
Before he was dragged into the love triangle, Asou Akiya once told Gojo Satoru that he was a lifelong bachelor.
Years later, when something felt off, the twenty-eight-year-old spicy teacher asked, "If you never marry, how will anyone ever know for certain who you love?"
In truth, that had been Asou Akiya's second meaning all along: he would marry only the one he loved with his entire soul. Anyone less than that, and he would rather stay unwed for life.
— Written by: Spectator