The railing was cold, though that probably shouldn't have been the thing he noticed.
Two hundred feet of empty air beneath his shoes, black water at the bottom reflecting the city's lights like scattered coins on dark cloth, wind pulling at his jacket hard enough to make the zipper rattle against his chest, and what registered, what his brain decided to catalogue in this particular moment, was the temperature of the metal under his fingers. Cold. November cold, the kind that seeped through skin and settled into the bone and stayed there like it had always belonged.
Shin Kuro stood on the wrong side of the Koyo Bridge railing at 2:47 in the morning and thought about cold metal.
The bridge was empty. He'd checked three times over the past hour, walking its full length and back, making sure no late-night joggers or restless insomniacs or patrol cars were going to complicate this. Not because he was worried about being stopped, he wasn't worried about anything, hadn't been for a while now, but because he didn't want some stranger to have to carry the image of a man going over a railing for the rest of their life. That felt like an unreasonable thing to do to someone. He was removing himself from the world, not trying to leave a stain on it.
The river below was the Sumida. He knew this because he'd grown up four blocks from its eastern bank, knew its moods and colors the way you know the face of someone you've lived with for too long, and tonight it was black and slow and patient in a way that almost looked deliberate, like it knew he was coming and had decided not to rush.
He'd left nothing behind. No note, because who would read it. No arrangements, because there was nothing to arrange. The apartment lease was month-to-month. The job at the warehouse had ended six weeks ago when they'd automated his section, and he hadn't bothered looking for another one because looking for things required wanting them, and wanting things required a kind of energy he couldn't remember how to generate. His parents were dead, three years apart, his mother to cancer and his father to the kind of slow alcoholic decline that technically gets listed as liver failure on the paperwork but is really just grief wearing a medical costume. No siblings. No close friends, not anymore, the last ones had drifted away during the years when he'd stopped returning calls and they'd eventually stopped making them.
Twenty-four years old, and he'd managed to arrange his life so that his absence from it would inconvenience precisely no one.
That wasn't self-pity. It was logistics.
He let go of the railing with his right hand and held it out over the void, palm down, fingers spread. The wind pushed between them. He watched his hand and waited to see if it would shake.
It didn't.
"Boring sky for a last sky," he said, because the clouds were a flat orange-grey, featureless, reflecting the city's light pollution back down like a low ceiling, and it seemed worth noting even if no one was listening.
He let go with his left hand.
The fall was not what he expected. He'd assumed it would feel like falling, which sounded obvious but turned out to be wrong, because what it actually felt like was the world rising. The bridge shot upward, the lights of the city climbed, the sky receded, and the water came toward him not like a surface he was approaching but like a dark mouth opening underneath him, unhurried, inevitable. His jacket ballooned with trapped air and his hair whipped across his eyes and his body did everything biology demanded, adrenaline and panic and every survival mechanism evolution had spent millions of years perfecting screaming at him to do something, flail, twist, reach for something, anything.
His mind stayed quiet.
It had been quiet for a long time.
The water rushed up. He closed his eyes.
---
He did not hit the water.
The fall stopped. Not the way falling stops when you hit something, not with impact, not with the catastrophic deceleration of a body meeting a surface it was never designed to meet at that speed. It just stopped, the way a video pauses when you press the button, one frame in motion and the next perfectly, impossibly still, and then even the stillness dissolved into something else entirely because there was nothing left to be still in.
No wind. No sound. No cold, no warmth, no weight, no direction. Nothing.
Shin opened his eyes, though he wasn't sure he still had them.
White.
Not a white room, not a white landscape, not white anything. Just white, in every direction, without edge or boundary or depth, a blank so total and absolute that his eyes couldn't find a single point to focus on and his brain, deprived of spatial reference, started producing a faint dizziness that had nowhere to go.
He was standing, which implied a floor, but when he looked down there was nothing beneath his feet that he could distinguish from the nothing that surrounded him. He was simply upright, existing in a directionless void, wearing the same clothes he'd been wearing on the bridge: black jacket, grey shirt, jeans, the sneakers with the separating sole on the left foot.
His heart was beating. He checked, two fingers against the side of his neck, and found a pulse, steady and calm, which seemed like a contradiction given that his heart should have stopped working approximately three seconds after hitting the river.
He put his hands in his pockets and waited, because when reality stops making sense the only rational response is to stop trying to make it make sense and see what happens next.
What happened next was text.
[SYSTEM INITIALIZING]
The words appeared in front of him, not projected on a surface because there was no surface, just hanging in the white like someone had typed them into the air itself, black and sharp and perfectly legible.
[HOST DETECTED: SHIN KURO]
[STATUS: DEAD]
"Yeah," Shin said. His voice made no echo. The sound left his mouth and was swallowed immediately, absorbed by the white the way a sponge absorbs water. "I know."
[CAUSE OF DEATH: SUICIDE — BRIDGE FALL / IMPACT WITH WATER]
[REVIEWING HOST PROFILE...]
A pause. The text vanished, replaced by new text that appeared line by line with a deliberate, almost theatrical pacing.
[AGE: 24]
[OCCUPATION: NONE]
[FAMILY: NONE LIVING]
[SOCIAL CONNECTIONS: MINIMAL]
[AMBITIONS: NONE]
[WILL TO LIVE: 0]
Shin read each line with the same expression he'd worn on the bridge, which was no expression at all. The inventory of his emptiness, rendered in floating text in a white void. He'd have laughed if laughing was something he still did.
[HOST QUALIFIES FOR SYSTEM INTEGRATION.]
[SYSTEM: INFINITE WORLDS]
[FUNCTION: HOST WILL BE GRANTED ACCESS TO FICTIONAL UNIVERSES ACROSS ALL KNOWN MEDIA. UPON ENTRY, HOST WILL RECEIVE ABILITIES, TECHNIQUES, AND ITEMS NATIVE TO THE SELECTED WORLD. ALL ACQUISITIONS ARE PERMANENT AND CARRY ACROSS WORLDS. HOST MAY ENTER A WORLD AT THE BEGINNING OF ITS CANONICAL TIMELINE AND DEPART AT WILL ONCE THE PRIMARY MISSION IS COMPLETE.]
He read it. Read it again. Let the words sit.
A system. World-hopping. Fictional universes. Power accumulation across infinite realities. He recognized the shape of it immediately, the way anyone who'd spent years consuming manga and web novels and light novels would recognize it, the way a chess player recognizes an opening they've studied a hundred times. It was the fantasy, the one that lived in the back of every reader's mind, the daydream you entertained during the boring parts of your life and dismissed as childish when you were feeling honest with yourself.
He'd never expected it to be real, but then again, he'd never expected to be dead either, and here he was doing that just fine.
"What if I say no?"
[THEN YOU DIE. FULLY AND PERMANENTLY. THE RIVER COMPLETES WHAT IT STARTED. THERE IS NO AFTERLIFE. THERE IS NOTHING.]
"That was the plan."
[WE ARE AWARE.]
"So why offer me a choice?"
[BECAUSE THE SYSTEM REQUIRES WILLING HOSTS. A HOST WHO DOES NOT CHOOSE TO PARTICIPATE CANNOT BE INTEGRATED. THIS IS NOT A RESCUE. THIS IS A TRANSACTION.]
He considered this. The white void waited, patient, indifferent, offering neither persuasion nor pressure.
"What's in it for you?"
[THAT INFORMATION IS NOT AVAILABLE AT YOUR CURRENT CLEARANCE LEVEL.]
"Of course it isn't."
He stood there for a while longer, hands in his pockets, thinking about nothing in particular, which was appropriate given that he was standing in nothing in particular. The void didn't rush him. It had, he suspected, all the time in the world, or at least all the time outside of it.
He thought about the river. The cold. The falling. The quiet in his mind that had been there for years and had finally, on that bridge, become loud enough to drown out everything else.
He thought about the apartment with the month-to-month lease and the kitchen he never cooked in and the phone that never rang and the ceiling he stared at every night for hours before sleep came, if it came, and the mornings that arrived without anything to fill them.
He thought about what "nothing" actually meant, the real nothing, the permanent nothing the system was offering as his alternative, and found that it didn't scare him, because you can't fear the absence of experience when experience itself has already stopped meaning anything to you.
But.
There was a but, and it surprised him, because he'd been so certain there wouldn't be one.
But he was curious.
Not excited. Not hopeful. Not motivated or inspired or any of the things a protagonist was supposed to feel when offered the keys to infinity. Just curious, the way a man with nothing left to lose is curious about a door that appears in an otherwise blank wall. Not because he expects something good behind it, but because it's a door, and he's never seen one there before, and what else is he going to do.
"Fine," he said. "I'll go."
[FIRST WORLD SELECTED.]
The text changed, faster now, lines appearing in rapid succession.
[DESTINATION: JUJUTSU KAISEN]
[TIMELINE: MARCH, 2018. HOST WILL BE INSERTED APPROXIMATELY ONE MONTH BEFORE THE CANONICAL BEGINNING OF EVENTS — SPECIFICALLY, THE CURSED OBJECT INCIDENT AT SUGISAWA MUNICIPAL HIGH SCHOOL IN SENDAI CITY, MIYAGI PREFECTURE.]
[GENERATING HOST BODY... COMPLETE.]
[GENERATING HOST IDENTITY...
COMPLETE.]
[CALIBRATING CURSED ENERGY RESERVES... COMPLETE.]
[INNATE CURSED ENERGY LEVEL: SPECIAL GRADE]
[INNATE CURSED TECHNIQUE: UNDEFINED — WILL MANIFEST BASED ON HOST'S INTRINSIC NATURE.]
[SKILL SHOP: LOCKED. WILL UNLOCK UPON COMPLETION OF FIRST MISSION.]
[FIRST MISSION: SURVIVE THE SUGISAWA INCIDENT. MAKE CONTACT WITH THE JUJUTSU WORLD.]
[TIME LIMIT: 31 DAYS FROM INSERTION.]
[GOOD LUCK, HOST. YOU WILL NEED IT.]
"Doubt it," Shin said, but the white was already gone.
---
The transition wasn't gradual. There was no dissolving, no fading, no cinematic wipe between scenes. One instant he was standing in the void, the next he was standing on a street, and the shift was so abrupt and total that his body lurched forward half a step before his balance caught up with the sudden reappearance of gravity.
Night. Real night, not the blank white absence of it, textured and layered with the kind of sensory detail that the void had been completely stripped of. The air was cold, genuinely cold, carrying the sharp bite of a Japanese March that hadn't quite decided to become spring yet, and it tasted like rain and exhaust fumes and the faint, mineral smell of wet concrete.
Buildings rose on both sides of the street, narrow and crowded together the way buildings are in Japanese cities where space costs more than the structures occupying it, their facades a patchwork of concrete and tile and illuminated signage that cast overlapping pools of color on the wet pavement. Vending machines hummed in alcoves. A traffic light cycled through its colors at an empty intersection, green to yellow to red, obedient and pointless with no cars to direct.
Sendai.
Not Tokyo, he realized, which made sense because the system had said Sugisawa High, and Sugisawa was in Sendai, Miyagi Prefecture, and whatever synthetic body the system had generated for him had been placed here rather than the capital. He recognized nothing specific about the street he was standing on, but the general character of it, the scale and density and aesthetic, was unmistakably regional Japanese city, smaller than Tokyo, quieter, the kind of place where three in the morning actually meant silence rather than just a lower volume of noise.
A new element appeared at the edge of his vision, translucent and unobtrusive, like a HUD in a video game that had been designed by someone with actual taste.
[SYSTEM ACTIVE]
[LOCATION: SENDAI, MIYAGI PREFECTURE, JAPAN]
[DATE: MARCH 1, 2018]
[DAYS UNTIL SUGISAWA INCIDENT: 31]
He dismissed it with a thought, and it folded away cleanly, retreating to whatever corner of his consciousness the system had made its home.
He stood on the wet street and breathed.
The air filled lungs that weren't the lungs he'd been born with, passed through a throat that wasn't his, moved a chest that belonged to a body the system had fabricated from nothing. He raised his hands and looked at them, the way you look at a new pair of gloves you're trying on for the first time. They were his hands, in the sense that they responded to his commands and felt like extensions of his will, but they were also a stranger's hands, a little different from the ones he remembered, the fingers slightly longer, the skin a shade or two lighter.
He put them back in his pockets. The jacket was the same one he'd worn on the bridge, which was either a thoughtful detail or the system being lazy, and he didn't care enough to determine which.
His stomach growled.
Apparently, even bodies conjured from nothing by interdimensional systems needed to eat.
He started walking, because walking was simple and purposeful and gave his mind something to do while it processed the fact that he was dead, and alive, and standing in a fictional city in a fictional world where monsters made of human misery walked the streets and a man with a blindfold could warp space with a thought.
He found a convenience store three blocks down.