In the recorded history of jujutsu society, cursed energy readings at birth have served as the single most reliable predictor of a sorcerer's ceiling. The Zenin clan, more than any other, understood this.
On that day, within the sterile, windowless nursery reserved for offspring of the main and branch houses alike, the monitoring instruments embedded with residual cursed energy, tools refined over four hundred years of selective breeding produced a reading that, by all known metrics, should not have existed.
The highest latent cursed energy ever documented in a newborn.
With one exception. But that exception was not human, not entirely and had lived over a thousand years ago. His name does not need to be spoken here.
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The baby had a round, chubby face and eyes that didn't fuss or wander the way an infant's should. They simply sat there still, unbothered, like a lake with no wind. But those eyes. Amber-gold, deep and luminous, catching the nursery light the way a harvest moon catches the dark. A single streak of white hair fell from the crown of his head like a brush stroke that didn't belong.
Then, a tremor ran through the small body. A pair of streak-like lines etched themselves beneath his eyes, faint as cracks in porcelain.
His pupils jerked. Snapped left. Snapped right. His tiny fingers curled against the crib sheets.
'What is going on?'
A single coherent thought cut through a mind that should have known nothing but warmth and hunger.
The baby's breathing hitched. His limbs kicked against the blanket, small chest rising and falling too fast. 'T-this is... what?'
Then the kicking stopped. The amber eyes went wide, not with the confusion of a newborn, but with the slow, crushing clarity of someone who had just been handed an answer they didn't ask for.
'Hah... so I reincarnated.'
He was or had been a youth of eighteen. Unremarkable grades. An admission letter to some no-name college that felt more like a participation trophy. The kind of quiet depression that doesn't announce itself, it just dims the volume on everything. The crosswalk signal he didn't check. The truck he never saw.
Death on impact. And now a crib.
'Wait.' The thought arrived with urgency. 'If a baby doesn't cry when it's born... wouldn't that raise questions?'
He scrunched his face, heaving air through lungs that didn't know the rhythm yet.
"Waaah— waah—"
A miserable attempt. It sounded small and tinny in the open air. Teeth clenched or where teeth should be, he sucked in a jagged breath and tried to tear the silence apart.
A heavy tread rattled the floorboards, too solid and slow to be a nurse. He pushed his voice to a jagged edge, screaming at the ceiling.
The door slid open.
The first man to step through was tall and elderly, and every line on his face bent upward. His lips parted, baring teeth in a grin that had nothing warm in it only appetite. The kind of expression a man makes when he finds treasure in a place he wasn't looking. Naobito Zenin. Twenty-sixth head of the Zenin clan.
Behind him came another elderly figure, hair pulled back into a severe ponytail, black eyes already narrowed before they'd even settled on the crib. His upper lip twitched. His jaw tightened. He looked at the baby the way one looks at a stain on an heirloom.
Ogi Zenin.
"I didn't expect a maid's child to bear such powerful cursed energy," Ogi said, the word maid leaving his mouth like something he'd scraped off his shoe.
His arms stayed folded. His fingers dug into his own sleeves.
A child. A maid's child. Outputting more cursed energy than him.
Naobito, by contrast, hadn't stopped grinning. He leaned over the crib the way a gambler leans over a winning hand. "She said his name was Yami. Before she died."
He said it the same way one might note the weather without a pause or shift in tone. His eyes never left the cursed energy radiating off the infant , that was the only thing in this room worth his attention.
The baby, now Yami — stared up at the two faces looming above him. His crying had gone quiet. Something cold prickled at the base of his skull.
These faces. He had never seen them before. And yet his mind kept reaching for something, a flicker of recognition that wouldn't fully form. Their words were still mostly noise to his undeveloped ears, but the shapes of their features, the clan symbols, the way they carried themselves...
'They look like... Jujutsu Kaisen characters. How weird.'
A beat of silence in his own head.
Then the cold prickle became a flood.
'Oh... shit. Did he say juryoku?'
'I'm fucked. Send me back. Goddamn it, send me back—'
Three years passed.
In the world of Jujutsu, talent is not a gift.
A three-year-old Yami stood across from his instructor in the clan's private training hall. His amber eyes, sharper now, fixed on the man without blinking. The instructor returned the gaze with all the warmth of a stone wall.
Yami's talent had made itself known obscenely early. At two months old, he had begun unconsciously channeling cursed energy, an unprecedented milestone within the Zenin clan. In the wider jujutsu world, only one child had surpassed him: Satoru Gojo, heiress of the Gojo clan, who had wielded cursed energy from the moment she drew her first breath.
"Proper control over one's emotions is key to mastering Jujutsu," the instructor began, his voice flat as poured concrete.
"Master Yami already demonstrates a strong grasp of emotional regulation. However, that much is mandatory for a true Zenin heir, not praiseworthy. What you have mastered thus far is simply cursed energy flow. Now, we apply cursed energy directly to the body." His eyes didn't soften. His posture didn't shift. He looked at Yami the way one looks at equipment.
"First, channel cursed energy into your fists."
Yami nodded.
He didn't complain. He didn't ask how. He simply closed his eyes and turned inward not toward the lesson, but toward the thing that lived in his chest every single day since he'd opened his eyes in that crib.
'I'm not dying to Sukuna.'
The image surfaced unbidden , a mouth splitting open across a face that shouldn't have one. Four arms. A laugh that made the sky itself flinch.
'For that, I need to be strong enough to at least escape. Even Kusakabe survived the Shinjuku Showdown.'
Fear, real, primal, useful fear bloomed in his gut. And cursed energy answered it. It surged through his small frame like a current finding its circuit, pooling into his fists until the knuckles hummed.
The instructor's expression didn't change.
"The Gojo clan heiress was able to accomplish this on her own," he said, glancing down at Yami. "Despite being a woman."
Yami exhaled through his nose.
'Not a single day. Not one single day without being compared to the female Strongest.'
When he had first learned , through overheard conversations and offhand remarks that the infamous Satoru Gojo was a woman in this world, he had choked on his own spit so hard a maid had come running. But three years of daily comparisons had sanded away the shock. He'd never even seen her face, and yet she was the measuring stick held against everything he did.
He unclenched his fists. The cursed energy dissipated.
He said nothing.
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Naobito sat behind his desk, sake cup already half-empty, watching the instructor who had been assigned to Yami. The man stood before him, and something was... different. The stone-wall composure had cracked. A thin sheen of sweat caught the lantern light along his temple. His hands, clasped behind his back, trembled at the knuckles.
"He's a complete monster." The instructor's voice came out too quickly and raw. "I can say with absolute certainty, he will reach at least Special Grade."
What Yami didn't know, what he had no way of knowing at three years old was that his cursed energy carried a weight to it. A pressure.
The instructor standing before Naobito possessed no innate cursed technique. He was, by the Zenin clan's ruthless metric, talentless. And even with cursed energy reinforcement running through his body, standing in the same room as that child had made his teeth ache and his hands shake.
Naobito swirled his cup. "Interesting. I just hope he awakens a suitable cursed technique. Then he'd be a fine asset to the clan."
The instructor swallowed. "It's not... it's not just combat aptitude." He paused, searching for the words.
"It's his demeanor. He trains as though nothing else exists. When he looks at me, it's-" He stopped again. His brow furrowed.
"It's like being looked through. He has never once asked about his mother. Not about you. Not about anyone. It's as if everything beyond his own training is simply... meaningless to him."
Naobito's grin returned, slow, crooked, familiar.
"Go focus on your work instead of yapping."
[A/N: Writing this to see if I have talent in writing or not, so please criticize even if its harsh,]