The main hall of the Kamo clan compound was not a place for children. It was a tomb for ambitions, a courtroom where bloodlines were weighed and found wanting. The air, stale and motionless, was thick with the scent of centuries-old hinoki wood, the cloying sweetness of sandalwood incense, and a deeper, more metallic tang—the latent odor of the clan's hereditary technique, Blood Manipulation. It was a smell that seemed to seep from the very walls, from the portraits of stern ancestors, from the polished floorboards themselves, as if the legacy was less a power and more a pervasive, rusty mildew.
Kizaki Kamo, twelve years old, knelt on the cold, reed-tough tatami, his posture a perfect, unfeeling sculpture. He did not look at the man seated on the raised dais, framed by a scroll depicting the clan's crest—interlocking rings of blood and water. The man was his father in name, in genetics, but in no other meaningful sense. Lord Akihito Kamo was a monument to fading authority, his face a mask of rigid disappointment. Kizaki's gaze was fixed instead on a single, hairline crack in the floorboard before him, a flaw in the otherwise impeccable surface. He traced its path with his mind, a silent, private metaphor. A fracture in the foundation, he thought, his mind a chamber of cold, clear ice despite the frantic, hammering rhythm of his heart against his ribs. How fitting.
The council of elders flanked the dais, a semicircle of wizened faces and sharp eyes. They were vultures in silk, waiting to pick the bones of a dead succession. Kizaki knew each of their motivations. Elder Sato, whose branch family would gain influence if the main line was disrupted. Elder Mori, a dogmatic traditionalist who saw a technique-less heir as a curse from the heavens. And at his father's right hand, virtually glowing with subdued triumph, sat Lady Saeko. Her presence was a recent poison, a second wife brought in after Kizaki's mother—a woman from a minor branch with no notable technique—had died under circumstances no one cared to investigate. By her side knelt her daughter, Hina, a girl of ten whose fingers subtly twisted droplets of her own blood into intricate, miniature roses—a parlor trick, but one that screamed of a potent, awakened lineage.
"Kizaki." His father's voice finally cut the thick silence, echoing in the cavernous hall. It was a sound devoid of warmth, of paternal inflection. It was the voice of a clan head delivering a verdict. "The clan council has convened and reached its unanimous verdict. You have reached the age of awakening, yet no innate technique has manifested. Not the Blood Manipulation of our noble line, nor any other aberrant technique. A sorcerer without a technique is a blade without an edge, a vessel without purpose. You are, by the ancient laws and the practical necessities of our survival, incapable of inheriting the title of clan head or holding any position of note within this family."
Kizaki had known this was coming. He had felt it in the way the servants' eyes no longer met his, in the way his training scrolls had "gone missing," in the pointed conversations about "purity" and "legacy" that always ceased when he entered a room. The official reason was his barren soul. The truth was a blunt, political purge. Lady Saeko wanted the succession for her own blood, and a technically-barren heir from a dead mother was the perfect, irrefutable excuse to remove the obstacle. His father, weak and obsessed with the clan's perceived decline, was all too willing to make the sacrifice.
"You are hereby expelled from the Kamo clan," Lord Akihito continued, the words falling like stones. "You will relinquish all claim to the Kamo name, its assets, and its legacy. The name 'Kamo' is no longer yours to bear. You are to leave the compound by nightfall. You are forbidden from seeking aid, shelter, or recognition from any clan affiliate, on pain of execution. Your existence, as far as the jujutsu world is concerned, is to become a non-factor."
A non-factor. Kizaki let the phrase sit in his mind. He observed the elders. A few shifted, the rustle of silk loud in the quiet. Elder Sato's face was a careful blank. Elder Mori gave a slight, satisfied nod. Lady Saeko's lips were pressed into a thin, merciful smile. Her daughter, Hina, looked at him with wide, curious eyes, still playing with her blood rose. She doesn't even understand the theater she's starring in, Kizaki thought. She's just a prop with a powerful technique.
"I understand," Kizaki said, his voice not wavering. It was a flat, acceptant tone. He bowed from his kneeling position, his forehead touching the tatami, the motion so precise it was an act of contempt. He felt no screaming rage, no hot tears of betrayal. Those had been burned away in the private forge of the last two years, replaced by a glacial, planning certainty. He had prepared for this. The clan, in its arrogant decay, had underestimated what a "non-factor" could see, could plan, could steal.
His preparations had begun the moment Lady Saeko's pregnancy was announced. A trusted aide—Old Man Yamato, a retainer whose loyalty had been to his mother, a man with kind eyes and a mind like a vault—had become his co-conspirator. The Kamo clan's finances were a sprawling, mismanaged relic, leaking yen from a thousand rusty pipes. No one monitored the petty cash flows, the minor estate maintenance funds, the dividends from forgotten investments. Together, they had become ghosts in the accounting machine, siphoning off fractions of percentages, redirecting automated payments, creating false invoices for cursed tool "maintenance." It was death by a thousand cuts, each cut too small to notice, but in aggregate, a hemorrhage.
The total now sat in a numbered account in Switzerland, accessible only through a biometric key etched into the unique fluctuation of his own cursed energy signature: 1,586,115,000 yen. Roughly ten million American dollars. A fortune to vanish with. A war chest for a ghost.
He rose from his bow, his movements economical. He did not look at his father, at his step-mother, at his half-sister. He turned and walked towards the great oak doors of the hall, his footsteps silent on the tatami. The weight of centuries of expectation, of a doomed legacy, slid from his shoulders. It was replaced by the lighter, sharper, more dangerous weight of absolute freedom.
---
He left the compound as the sun began to dip below the high walls, casting long, accusing shadows. He carried only a single, worn leather bag containing a few changes of clothes, a first-aid kit, a forged identity card naming him 'Sora Izumi', and a sealed data chip holding the coordinates and access protocols for his assets. He did not look back at the imposing gate, at the family crest carved into its stone. His destination was a small, unassuming 2LDK apartment in Adachi Ward, Tokyo, a place purchased nine months ago through a nested series of shell corporations in Singapore and the Cayman Islands. It was his bolt-hole, stocked with non-perishable food, medical supplies, unmarked clothing, and a secure laptop.
But first, there was one final transaction to perform. A private branch of a major international bank in Ginza, a place accustomed to discreet clients. In a soundproofed booth lined with lead and subtle barrier techniques to ward off electronic and metaphysical eavesdropping, he personally initiated the final, dispersing transfer. He watched on the screen as the colossal sum fractured, flowing into a dozen different accounts in Luxembourg, Cyprus, and the British Virgin Islands, before being automatically converted into a mix of currency, gold-backed digital assets, and untraceable bearer bonds. The money ceased to be a number in a Kamo account and became a cloud of financial mist, awaiting his call.
As he stepped out into the late afternoon gloom of Tokyo, the late autumn wind biting at his neck, he felt a peculiar emptiness. The clan was gone. The plan was in motion. He was alone.
He chose a shortcut back to Adachi, a labyrinth of narrow alleys and deserted service roads that ran parallel to the Sumida River. It was a place forgotten by the gleaming city, where the negative emotions of urban life—the frustration of crowded trains, the despair of debt, the simmering rage of poverty—coalesced into lingering, low-grade curses. It was also, he judged, the fastest route. A miscalculation.
The air grew cold, a deep, unnatural chill that had nothing to do with the season. The scant light from distant streetlights seemed to dim, swallowed by a gathering gloom. From a pool of shadow beneath a rusted fire escape, a shape pulsated into being. It was a grotesque mass of distorted, twitching limbs and weeping eyes—a Grade 2 curse, a thing of pure, mindless malice. From a leaking pipe overhead, a second form condensed: more focused, humanoid, with a permanent, silent scream etched into its featureless face and long, blade-like fingers. A Grade 1. They were drawn to him like sharks to blood. Not to his physical body, but to the vast, turbulent sea of cursed energy he carried—a bottomless, churning reservoir that had failed to produce a technique, but which made him a brilliant, agonizing beacon to such creatures.
Kizaki did not panic. A cold, analytical calm settled over him. He dropped his bag against a wall and settled into a low, balanced stance, feet shoulder-width apart, knees slightly bent. He had no inherited technique to announce, no family legacy to wield. But he was far from helpless. The standard Jujutsu High curriculum, which he had studied voraciously from stolen and purchased texts, had given him theory. The clandestine, midnight lessons from a disgraced, drunken master of the New Shadow Style—a man the clan had cast out for his "unorthodox" ideas—had given him practical, brutal form.
"Simple Domain," he whispered, the words a release valve.
A barrier, faintly shimmering with a blue, geometric light, erupted in a two-meter radius around his feet. It was not a Domain Expansion—the pinnacle of jujutsu that required an innate technique to shape a personal reality. This was a "domain for the weak," a counter-measure born in the strife of the Heian era. Its purpose was singular: to neutralize the "sure-hit" effect of a true Domain Expansion by imposing a small, neutral territory where the attacker's absolute rules held no sway. Against mere curses, without domains of their own, it served a simpler purpose: a perfect defensive arena. Within it, his senses were heightened, his movements subtly guided, and the curses' innate, chaotic abilities were slightly dampened, forced to conform to basic physicality.
The Grade 2 curse lunged first, a limb elongating like a rubbery spear aimed at his chest. Kizaki didn't retreat. He stepped inside its reach, the Simple Domain subtly bending the attack's trajectory by a crucial centimeter. His right fist, sheathed in a dense, vibrating layer of cursed energy, drove upwards into the curse's central mass.
The principle was fundamental: Reinforcement. By flooding his muscles, sinews, and bones with cursed energy, he could achieve superhuman strength, speed, and durability. For most sorcerers, output was a limiting factor; they had to ration their energy, fear burnout. For Kizaki, with his monstrous, technique-less reserves, it was like breathing. He could reinforce himself near-constantly at a level that would exhaust a Grade 2 sorcerer in minutes.
The punch connected with a wet crunch. The curse shrieked, its form destabilizing. Kizaki followed with a whip-fast series of elbow strikes and low kicks, each movement economical, each blow amplified. The New Shadow Style emphasized efficiency, using an opponent's momentum against them, striking at joints and points of balance. Within his Simple Domain, he was the center, and he dictated the flow. The Grade 2 curse dissolved into a foul-smelling mist under the relentless assault.
The Grade 1 was smarter. It hovered at the very edge of his blue-tinged barrier, respecting it. Instead of closing, it pointed a blade-finger. Projectiles of condensed negativity, like black icicles, shot towards Kizaki. He couldn't fully dodge in the confined space. He let the Simple Domain do its work. The sure-hit property of the projectiles—the innate curse that would make them seek his heart—was neutralized. They became simple, if powerful, physical objects. He twisted, letting one graze his arm, a line of fire spreading from the cut. He closed the distance in a burst of reinforced speed.
The fight was strenuous. A Grade 1 curse was a serious threat, requiring a Grade 1 sorcerer to exorcise. Kizaki had the power and the skill, but not the specialized weapon of a technique. It was a battle of attrition. He took a glancing blow to the ribs that cracked bone, but his reinforcement and the domain's damping field lessened the impact. He retaliated, his palm striking the curse's screaming face, flooding the point of contact with a surge of raw cursed energy. The curse recoiled, its form flickering. He pressed the advantage, a final, CE-imbued axe kick slamming down on its head, shattering it into dissipating smoke.
He let out a sharp breath, the Simple Domain flickering out. Sweat and blood—his own—trickled down his temple. His ribs ached. Manageable, he thought, turning to retrieve his bag. But noisy. I need to move.
The attack came not from the spectral, but from the profoundly human.
A figure dropped from the rooftop above, landing without a sound on the alley's cracked asphalt between Kizaki and his bag. A man in his late twenties, lean and sharp-faced, wearing a dark jacket with the subtle, embroidered crest of the Kamo clan just visible over his heart. Kizaki knew him: Kaito, one of Lady Saeko's personal retainers, a noted Grade 1 sorcerer with a recorded kill count. His presence here meant the purge was to be absolute.
"The young master is surprisingly robust for a technique-less failure," Kaito said, his voice a low, amused rasp. He cracked his neck, a smirk playing on his lips. "I watched you handle those curses. Good form. Wasted effort. The lady was thorough. She anticipated you might survive the… natural hazards. My orders are to ensure the river claims your body. A tragic accident for a disowned boy, drowning his sorrows."
Kizaki's mind, already operating at combat clarity, accelerated. A Grade 1 sorcerer. With a known, blood-based technique. This was a different order of threat entirely. Flight was the optimal strategy, but Kaito blocked the only exit.
"Blood Rage," Kaito announced, raising his right hand, fingers splayed. The air around him visibly warped, growing hot and humid, like the breath of a slaughterhouse. Kizaki felt a peculiar, disturbing thrum in his own veins, a faint, aggressive pull, as if his blood was being lightly stirred by an invisible spoon. So, not pure Blood Manipulation, but an offshoot. A mutation focused on agitation and heat.
Kaito didn't give him time for further analysis. He moved, a blur enhanced by cursed energy, faster than the curses. Kizaki reinforced his body and met the charge head-on, not out of bravado, but because yielding ground in the narrow alley meant death. Fist met fist in a concussive crack of clashing energies.
The impact was staggering, vibrating up Kizaki's arm. Kaito's physical power was augmented by his technique; every blow carried a seeping, heated energy that pulsed into Kizaki's flesh, trying to incite a riot in his bloodstream. Kizaki fought back with pure, overwhelming cursed energy output and the refined, circular motions of the New Shadow Style, deflecting and redirecting force.
He saw an opening, a slight overextension in Kaito's lunge. He pivoted and drove a reinforced kick into the sorcerer's ribs. He felt bone give way with a satisfying crunch. But Kaito only grinned wider, a trickle of blood—his own—escaping the corner of his lips. Instead of wiping it away, he exhaled sharply. The droplet boiled in mid-air, shimmering with heat, and shot forward like a crimson, high-caliber needle.
Kizaki twisted his upper body. The projectile grazed his cheek, leaving a burning line. He can weaponize his own blood, Kizaki catalogued, the pain a sharp data point. And the 'Rage' aspect induces a boiling,狂暴 state in the target's blood. A close-range, debilitating technique. He'll want to get in close, to build up the effect.
"You're strong, boy," Kaito admitted, circling again, his breathing slightly labored from the broken rib. "A testament to the Kamo blood, I suppose. But strength without a technique is just a big, slow target. A mountain to be worn down. Let's end this farce. Domain Expansion: Cauldron of Seething Blood."
The world dissolved.
The grimy alley, the distant city sounds, the very air—it all melted away, replaced by a vast, cavernous, organic nightmare. The walls were pulsating, veined flesh. The floor was a spongy, living membrane. The air was thick, coppery, and unbearably hot, burning Kizaki's lungs with each breath. Above, a domed ceiling dripped constant droplets of steaming fluid. At the center of the domain hung a giant, grotesque, beating heart the size of a car, from which rivers of boiling, viscous blood cascaded down into a churning, lake-sized pool below. The sure-hit effect of this domain was immediate and visceral: Kizaki's blood began to heat up from the inside. It felt like a fever igniting in his marrow, spreading through his veins. His skin flushed. His vision swam.
A Domain Expansion. The ultimate expression of a jujutsu sorcerer's power, a battlefield where their technique's rules became absolute law. Against this, a Simple Domain was a temporary shelter, a small room in a burning house. It would be overwhelmed quickly by the environment and the sure-hit. Kizaki had one other, more advanced option, a secret art passed down among the great clans as a last resort.
"Falling Blossom Emotion," he gasped through the building agony.
He focused his cursed energy, not outward to create a space, but inward to create a shroud. A dense, shimmering cocoon of pale blue energy enveloped him, clinging to his skin like a second aura. Unlike Simple Domain, which created a neutral territory, Falling Blossom Emotion was a purely reactive defense. It did not stop the sure-hit effect. Instead, the moment the domain's guaranteed attack—in this case, the boiling of his blood—made contact with this shroud, it would automatically counter with an equal and opposite force of cursed energy, nullifying the attack at the point of contact. It was like wearing a suit of reactive armor. But it had a critical weakness: it was poor against sustained environmental effects and direct physical strikes. It reacted to the sure-hit, not to the sorcerer himself.
Kaito knew this. He didn't just rely on his domain to do the work. He lunged through his own hellscape, his body sheathed in a corona of boiling blood, the heat distorting the air around him. He aimed not a cursed technique, but a simple, massively reinforced physical punch, straight for Kizaki's head.
Kizaki's mind, operating on the knife-edge of survival, made three rapid, desperate calculations. He needed more power, specific power, and he had the ultimate currency to buy it: a Binding Vow.
A Binding Vow was a contract made with the very fabric of jujutsu, a sacrifice of a condition for a temporary boon. The riskier, more precise, and more limiting the condition, the greater the reward. He formed the vows in his mind, the concepts crystalizing with the speed of instinct.
First Vow: "In exchange for lowering my overall cursed energy output ceiling by 40% for the next seventy-two hours, my efficiency and output in the Reverse Cursed Technique will increase by 200% for the next twenty minutes." A trade of general, brute-force power for an extreme, short-term surge in healing capability.
Second Vow: "In exchange for reducing the effective radius of any Simple Domain I cast to a maximum of one meter for the next three days, the defensive density, stability, and power-within-radius of said domain will double for the duration of this confrontation." A focused defense, turning a small shield into an impregnable wall.
Third Vow: Building on the first. "In exchange for binding myself to use cursed energy at or below this newly reduced output threshold for the next five days, I amplify the reactive counter-force of my Falling Blossom Emotion by 150%."
The vows snapped into place, etched into his soul with the finality of a law of nature. He felt it immediately—a profound drain, a ceiling slamming down on the vast ocean of his reserves. It was like trying to breathe through a straw. But in return, three specific, targeted wells of power surged within him, bright and potent.
He didn't just use Falling Blossom Emotion. He layered it. As Kaito charged, Kizaki activated a modified, ultra-compact Simple Domain not around him, but atop his skin, directly beneath the Falling Blossom Emotion shroud. It was a mad, theoretical technique he and his disgraced teacher had only discussed—a "Barrier Skin." It used the principles of a Simple Domain to create a microscopic, personal barrier field that augmented durability and, crucially, could interface with other defensive techniques. The two techniques stacked, interweaving.
Kaito's punch, wrapped in boiling blood, landed.
The boiling blood aura, part of the domain's sure-hit, met the amplified Falling Blossom Emotion. A spectacular, sizzling discharge of energy erupted at the point of contact, scalding both of them. Kaito screamed as the reactive force flash-boiled the blood sheathing his fist, cooking his hand and forearm. Kizaki's layered defense held against the metaphysical attack, but the raw physical force of the punch, transmitted through the Barrier Skin, still transferred. It felt like being hit by a truck. A rib cracked audibly, and he was hurled back, skidding across the spongy floor of the domain.
They broke apart, both wounded. The domain's sure-hit effect was being nullified by his layered defense, but the environmental heat was sapping his strength, drying his eyes, and Kaito's direct attacks were a relentless battering ram. Kizaki was bleeding from multiple cuts now, his own blood hissing and steaming as it left his body, vaporized by the oppressive heat.
End this. Now. Before the vows' conditions cripple you after the fight.
He pushed forward, a desperate gambit. He had to reach the heart, the likely barrier core of the domain. Destroying it might collapse the space. He feinted left, then charged straight for the monstrous, beating center.
Kaito, clutching his ruined arm, intercepted him with a snarl. With his good hand, he formed a blade not of aura, but of hardened, crystallized blood, jagged and cruel. He thrust, not at Kizaki's center, but at a perceived gap in his defense—the moment the Falling Blossom Emotion shroud flickered slightly as it reacted to a fresh wave of the boiling sure-hit.
The blade pierced through the Barrier Skin, through the reactive shroud, and sank deep into Kizaki's left shoulder, grating against bone.
Agony, white and pure. But worse was the technique that rode the blade into his body. A concentrated, focused burst of Blood Rage flooded directly into his circulatory system. It wasn't a general heating anymore. It was a detonation. Blood vessels throughout his torso and arm burst under the pressure, blooming as purple-black bruises under his skin. He coughed, and a spray of foaming, boiling blood erupted from his mouth. His vision tunneled. The pain was beyond anything he had imagined.
Now! He triggered the boosted Reverse Cursed Technique.
RCT was the pinnacle of healing, the art of converting negative cursed energy into positive, life-giving energy. It was notoriously difficult, requiring immense focus, innate talent, and catastrophic energy output. Most could only use it on others, not themselves. With his vow-active, 200%-boosted output, the positive energy flooded his system like a tsunami of cool, clear water. Burst vessels sealed shut. The boiling, raging blood was cooled, calmed, neutralized. The torn muscle and grated bone in his shoulder knit itself together in a matter of seconds, pushing the crystallized blood blade out with a sickening pop. He was healing through catastrophic damage in real-time.
Kaito's eyes, wide with pain and fury, now bulged with sheer, incomprehensible shock. "Reverse Cursed Technique?!" he roared, his voice cracking. "On yourself?! Impossible! You have no technique! You can't—!"
The shock broke Kaito's concentration. His control over his domain, already strained by the damage to his body and the constant, failed sure-hit attacks, wavered. For a fraction of a second, the giant heart stuttered in its rhythm. The cascading rivers of blood faltered. And in that moment of instability, the entire Cauldron of Seething Blood shuddered violently. The fleshy walls convulsed. With a sound like a sighing corpse, the domain crumbled in on itself.
The cold, dank air of the Sumida river alley rushed back in, a shocking relief. The stink of garbage and stagnant water replaced the coppery heat. Both sorcerers stood panting in the sudden, deafening silence, illuminated by a single, flickering streetlight. Kaito leaned against a wall, his right arm a ruined, blistered mess, his face pale with pain and rage. Kizaki, though healed, felt the draining weight of his Binding Vows and the massive RCT expenditure like an anchor tied to his soul. His cursed energy reserves, even his bottomless pit, were now perilously low, constrained to a trickle.
Instinct screamed at him. Run. Now. He's wounded. Get to the river, lose him in the water, use the current. He turned, his body screaming in protest, and stumbled towards the railing overlooking the black, rushing water.
He never made it.
Three more figures emerged from the shadows of a nearby warehouse doorway—Kamo clansmen, lower grade sorcerers or maybe just curse-user mercenaries in the clan's employ. They had been waiting outside the domain, a final, insurance policy. Their faces were grim, professional. They held cursed tools: a spear with a warding-wood shaft, a chain with hooked links, a compact crossbow.
As Kizaki spun to face this new threat, the man with the crossbow fired. Not at Kizaki, but at the ground near his feet. A diversion. From his blind spot, the spearman lunged. The spear, tipped with a material that disrupted cursed energy reinforcement, took him cleanly through the back, its point erupting from the center of his chest in a spray of blood.
Kizaki gasped, a wet, choking sound. His body jerked. His RCT, its boosted duration not yet expired, flared automatically, a desperate fire trying to put itself out. It began repairing the catastrophic heart and lung damage, the positive energy weaving muscle and vessel back together around the foreign object.
But then the man with the chain was there, the hooked links wrapping around his throat, yanking him off balance. And the third man calmly aimed a second, smaller device—a tube that fired a thin, needle-like cursed tool, designed to pierce barriers. It took Kizaki in the back of the skull, just below the occipital bone, burying itself deep into his brainstem.
White. Not pain, but a cessation. A systems failure. His body went rigid, then limp. His RCT, still active, struggled furiously. The heart wound was closing. The neck wound was sealing. But the brain injury… it was complex, sluggish. The positive energy worked, rerouting, repairing, but it was like trying to re-solder a microchip with a blowtorch. Consciousness was a distant, flickering star.
Through a haze, he felt hands on him. Lifting him. The rasp of the chain being unwound from his neck. A muttered curse. Then, a swinging motion, and the sensation of weightlessness.
The cold of the Sumida River was a profound, absolute shock, swallowing him whole. The current, strong and mindless, grabbed him and pulled him under. Darkness. Pressure. His RCT, that stubborn, dying star, worked its final miracles. The heart wound sealed completely. The neck wound closed. The foreign object in his brain was slowly, agonizingly pushed out as new tissue regenerated around it, the cursed needle floating away into the black water.
He broke the surface half a kilometer downstream, gasping in a huge, ragged breath that was half river water. He coughed, vomited, flailed. Somehow, by pure animal instinct, he dragged himself onto a steep, muddy bank under a concrete bridge, amidst plastic debris and rusting bicycles. He lay on his back, shivering violently, staring up at the grimy underside of the bridge, at the hazy orange glow of the city lights reflecting off the low clouds. He had survived. He was whole. He was…
A sudden, new pain lanced through his head. Not the injury—that was healed. This was deeper, behind his eyes, in a place that had always held a faint, constant pressure, a silent, benign companion he'd never had a name for. It was the psychic scar tissue, the congenital anomaly that had sat like a cork in the bottle of his soul. The final remnants of the brain injury, the violent expulsion of the cursed tool, and the overwhelming surge of positive energy from the RCT had shattered it completely.
In that moment, as he lay in the mud, history recorded an event it had never before witnessed. A sorcerer's innate technique, suppressed since birth not by a seal, not by a vow, but by a mere quirk of biology—a tiny malformation in the jujutsu center of the brain—finally awoke.
The knowledge flooded Kizaki's mind, not as learned information, but as instinct, as fundamental as breathing. Its name: Bloodline Incarnation.
His technique was not about manipulating his own blood, as the Kamo did. It was about incarnating the legacy carried in the blood of others. It required a medium, a permanent shikigami born from and bound to his own cursed energy, a vessel for this theft of legacy.
As the understanding crystallized, his shadow on the muddy bank—cast by the distant city glow—began to bubble and writhe. From it, a form began to rise, pulling itself into being with a sound like tearing velvet and cracking ice.
It was massive, the size of an elephant, yet it moved with a terrifying, silent grace. Its body was that of an emaciated, six-armed wendigo, its skin pulled taut over a skeletal frame, covered in a shimmering layer of metaphysical hoarfrost that drank the light. Six tattered, shadowy wings, like those of a fallen angel, unfurled from its back, not for flight, but to cast a dome of absolute stillness. Its head was grotesquely incongruous: not a beast's, but the perfectly preserved, severed head of a humble servant, eyes meticulously sewn shut with golden thread, mouth gagged with a strip of black silk. From the base of its spine emerged a tail that was a constantly coiling, uncoiling skeletal serpent, its hollow eye sockets smoldering with pale blue fire.
This was the Arbiter of Origin. Its name and purpose were imprinted on Kizaki's soul.
Its purpose was twofold.
In its standard mode—Imprint—after consuming a portion of blood and flesh from a being possessing a Cursed Technique (a arm,leg,major organ), it could, at Kizaki's will, imprint a facsimile of that technique onto Kizaki himself, allowing him to wield it, or onto a designated object, creating a cursed tool. The process could be done immediately or years later; the consumed sample was cataloged within the Arbiter, a genetic memory with no expiration date unless during this time the shikigami is destroyed then unimpressed cursed techniques are lost
The shikigami could also fight alongside him, a terrifying physical and metaphysical combatant. If destroyed, it could be reformed with a substantial investment of cursed energy and time.
But its second mode was its true, terrifying potential: Investigator. In this state, after consuming a more significant amount of blood and flesh (not necessarily requiring the target's death), the Arbiter could reach back through the target's lineage. It could trace the river of their blood upstream and, with effort and cost, acquire the technique of any ancestor in their direct bloodline, no matter how distant, how dormant, or even how supposedly lost to history.
Kizaki stared, breathless, at the silent, monstrous apparition that stood over him, its sewn-shut eyes seeming to gaze down at his soul. It radiated an aura of ancient, judgmental cold. The truth, vast and terrifying, crashed down upon him with the weight of the river that had nearly killed him.
He was not technique-less.
He had never been.
The Kamo clan, in their myopic rush for purity, in their political panic, had thrown out not a dud, not a failure, but a locked vault. And in their attempt to murder him, they had shattered the lock. Inside was not just a technique, but a power that could, in time, rewrite the very concept of inherited techniques, of clan legacy, of jujutsu itself.
The Arbiter of Origin tilted its servant's head, a silent question. Then, without a sound, it dissolved, flowing back into his shadow, a waiting promise, a cold fire now burning in the depths of his being.
Kizaki pushed himself up onto his elbows, then to his feet. His clothes were torn, soaked, filthy. He was shivering, not just from cold, but from the seismic shift within. He looked down at his hands—ordinary hands that had just reinforced themselves to fight curses, that had just woven Reverse Cursed Technique. Now, they were the hands that would call forth a god of stolen legacy.
[He had no clan. He had no name. He was a ghost with a fortune, a safe house, and a shikigami that could consume the history of bloodlines. The quiet, anonymous life of 'Sora Izumi' he had meticulously planned was already ashes, burned away in the Cauldron of Seething Blood and the cold waters of the Sumida.]
[Somewhere in the gilded cages of Kyoto, the Gojo clan, now the sole remaining "great clan" after the Zenin dissolution, wrestled with the burden of being the last pillar, their power both a shield and a gilded cage. The Zenin were gone, their famed Ten Shadows and other techniques scattered, absorbed by marriage or force into other lines. The Okkotsu grandchildren, Yuka and Tsurugi, names heavy with the legacy of a beloved hero, were reportedly puppets dancing to the tunes of conservative elders, their potential stifled by tradition. And the Kamo clan, his former family, slept soundly tonight, believing their problem solved, his body food for river carp, their decay continuing unchecked.]
[Kizaki Kamo, age twelve, expelled, disowned, and reborn in river mud, stood fully upright. Water dripped from his hair. His eyes, which had once fixed on a crack in a floorboard, now looked toward the glittering, cursed sprawl of Tokyo in the year 2086—a city where sorcerers were weaker, traditions were brittle, alien threats whispered at the edges of human understanding, and old clans schemed in their decaying mansions, guarding treasures they no longer understood]
A faint, cold smile, the first true expression of the day, touched his chapped lips. It held no warmth, no joy. It was the smile of a mathematician who has just solved an impossible equation, one that changes all the rules.
His old life was over, drowned and discarded.
His new one had just begun, here in the mud and the shadows. And he knew, with a certainty that chilled him deeper than the river, that it would be anything but quiet. The Arbiter waited in his shadow. The world, unaware, slept on. He took his first step away from the river, toward the city, toward a future he would now write in blood not his own.