Megumi woke up slowly.
Staring up at the dull, cracked ceiling of his bedroom, a long, heavy sigh escaped his small lips.
"Back in reality..." he muttered, sitting up and swinging his legs over the edge of the bed.
He closed his eyes and immediately conducted an internal scan of his cursed energy pool. A second later, his eyes snapped open in genuine shock.
"Holy shit..."
His cursed energy reserves had nearly doubled.
Rei—that lazy, couch-potato slacker from the Naruto world—actually had an absurd amount of spiritual energy sitting dormant in his body. The mysterious white void room had automatically converted Rei's massive chakra reserves into Jujutsu-style cursed energy during the soul sync.
Megumi cracked his knuckles, a faint smirk tugging at his mouth. "Alright, fine. Maybe that guy isn't completely worthless after all."
"Brother! Wake up! It's time for school!"
BAM!
The bedroom door burst open, and a girl his exact age stomped inside. It was Tsumiki, her hair slightly messy as she glared at him with her hands on her hips.
Megumi rubbed his temples, feeling an instant headache coming on. "Tsumiki... how many times do I have to tell you to knock before entering? Why don't you ever listen?"
Without paying a single shred of attention to his complaint, Tsumiki marched right over, grabbed his arm, and began yank him toward the hallway. "Come on! Stop talking and move! We're going to be late!"
On any normal day, Megumi would complain incessantly under his breath, but ultimately, he would yield and obediently follow her to school. Today, however, was not a normal day.
Tsumiki pulled with all her small weight, expecting him to slide forward. Instead, it felt like she was trying to drag a solid steel anvil welded to the floorboards. No matter how hard she yanked, Megumi didn't budge a single millimeter.
She stopped, turning around with a frustrated frown. "Megumi!"
"I have things to take care of today," Megumi said smoothly, brushing off his sleeves. "Go to school by yourself."
Tsumiki crossed her arms, growing even more annoyed. "You? What could a six-year-old kid possibly have to take care of?! Stop being lazy and come with me right now!"
"Tsumiki."
Megumi's voice dropped. It wasn't loud, nor was it angry. It was unusually, unnervingly calm. His dark eyes locked onto hers with an icy, unreadable intensity.
Tsumiki instantly froze. The words caught in her throat.
Most of the time, Megumi was quiet and relatively gentle around her. She had never seen him look at anyone like this. For a split second, the cold, dangerous aura radiating off him reminded her vividly of her deadbeat step-father, Toji Fushiguro.
"I'll be going somewhere for a week," Megumi stated, his tone leaving zero room for argument. "Don't worry about me. Just go to school."
He didn't wait for her response. He simply grabbed his small jacket and walked past her out the front door.
Tsumiki stood in the hallway in silence, too shaken by his glare to try and stop him again.
Walking down the quiet street, Megumi let out another breath.
Logically speaking, since both of their parents were currently missing—Toji having walked out to buy milk and never coming back, and Tsumiki's mother disappearing right after—Child Protective Services should have swept in to dump them into the foster care system.
The only reason that hadn't happened yet was the looming shadow of Toji Fushiguro.
In the grand hierarchy of the world, jujutsu sorcerers looked miserable and stressed out whenever they fought high-level cursed spirits. But in front of normal, non-sorcerer humans? Sorcerers were basically untouchable gods.
While they couldn't go around committing open mass murder like people in the Hunter x Hunter universe, covering up a couple of missing persons or manipulating local municipal records was a piece of cake for the Three Major Clans, who practically ran Japan from behind the curtain.
Toji had left them a bank account, wiring a modest amount of money every month to cover their basic living expenses. But Megumi knew that stream of income wouldn't last forever. He was six years old now. The timer was ticking.
He refused to sit around waiting for his fate to be decided by a bunch of old bastards in traditional robes. He was not going to live at anyone's mercy.
And as for saving Toji from his eventual death at Gojo's hands in the future?
Don't make me laugh, Megumi thought bitterly. If I had enough power right now, I'd track that bastard down myself and beat him within an inch of his life every single day.
Megumi pulled a cheap flip phone out of his jacket pocket.
Opening the screen, he checked his messages. A new encrypted text had just popped up:
[The goods have been delivered to the agreed location. Wire the rest of the payment to account: 98634289512.]
Megumi deleted the text, stashed the phone back into his pocket, and changed his walking direction toward the industrial district.
Ten minutes later, he arrived at a deserted factory zone on the outskirts of town. He stopped in front of a giant, rusted warehouse and pushed open the heavy sliding metal door with a bit of extra physical strength.
Parked right in the middle of the empty concrete floor was a sleek, matte-black utility helicopter.
"Money really makes the world go round," Megumi mused to himself, shaking his head.
How did a six-year-old child buy a black-market helicopter?
Simple. Kevin Levin might only be 12 in his world, but the guy was an absolute engineering genius who could reverse-engineer alien starships. Armed with Kevin's absurd IQ and computer knowledge, Megumi had spent the last few nights writing automated trading bots, cracking offshore crypto wallets, and manipulating penny stocks.
Earning a few million yen was an absolute walk in the park.
Megumi climbed into the pilot seat. Thanks to Kevin's memories, operating complex machinery was second nature to him. He flipped the ignition switches, brought the rotors to life with a deafening thrum, and lifted off into the morning sky.
Over the next two hours, he made several stops at different abandoned factories and storage yards across the region, picking up high-grade tungsten, heavy metal plating, precision wiring, and military-grade plasma explosive components.
Finally, with his heavy payload secured, he set his flight path far out over the ocean, landing on a remote, uncharted island.
The island was tiny, miles away from any shipping lanes or inhabited landmasses. It was covered in dense, untouched virgin forest—the absolute perfect sandbox for a dangerous experiment.
Megumi stepped out of the helicopter, shielding his eyes as he looked at the thick treeline.
"If I didn't have any cheats, I'd obediently follow the anime plot, lie low, and pray I don't die," Megumi muttered to himself. "But things are different now."
He possessed the greatest cheat in the Jujutsu Kaisen universe—the Ten Shadows Technique—and now he had the actual brainpower to exploit it.
According to the ancestral information burned into his mind upon awakening the technique, the subjugation ritual had very specific rules:
You must personally kill the shadow beast for it to be subjugated into your shadow pool.
No outside sorcerers can interfere in the ritual, or the subjugation becomes completely void.
Cursed tools carrying foreign cursed energy are strictly forbidden during the ritual.
However...
The ancient rules said absolutely nothing about non-cursed, modern technology.
When the Ten Shadows technique was created centuries ago during the Heian era, the ancestral sorcerers couldn't possibly comprehend things like military explosives, high-density titanium alloys, or focused plasma implosions. Weapons of mass destruction didn't carry a single drop of Cursed Energy! As far as the ritual's automatic system was concerned, a high-tech bomb was no different than a heavy rock falling off a cliff!
Why hadn't any previous Ten Shadows user tried this before?
The answer was simple: the last known Ten Shadows user died over a hundred years ago, long before World War I and modern weapons technology even existed!
"They were stuck in the past," Megumi sneered. "I'm not."
A standard bomb couldn't eliminate Mahoraga. The damn monster could regenerate from a single drop of blood. That was why Megumi needed extreme preparations—he needed a localized heat blast so intense that it would instantly vaporize every single molecule of Mahoraga's existence before its adaptation wheel could even spin once.
Megumi walked up to the side of the helicopter and pressed his bare palm flat against the metallic hull.
Activating Kevin's Osmosian absorption trait, a dark, metallic sheen rippled across Megumi's skin. In seconds, his body absorbed the molecular structure of the helicopter's heavy Titanium alloy, hardening his skin, muscles, and bones to ridiculous levels.
Feeling the immense physical durability coursing through his small frame, Megumi walked to the back of the cargo bay, effortlessly picked up a massive, multi-hundred-pound metal box containing his explosive components, and turned toward the dark forest.
"Time to set the trap."
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