The orphanage had a rule about fighting.
You weren't supposed to do it. This was explained clearly, repeatedly, and with the kind of emphasis that suggested the rule had been tested many times before I arrived. The staff enforced it with a sliding scale of consequences that ranged from loss of television privileges all the way up to a very serious conversation with the director, who was a small woman named Fujita-san with reading glasses she wore on a chain around her neck and a voice that carried significant moral weight per decibel.
I never fought. Not once. Not because I was afraid of Fujita-san, but because fighting the other kids would have been like a chess grandmaster flipping the board because someone looked at him wrong. Pointless. Undignified. A waste of energy I was saving for things that mattered.
What I did do was watch.
The boy who ran the informal social hierarchy of the eight-to-ten age group was named Kenta. Broad for his age, loud, the kind of kid whose quirk had come in early and impressive enough that he'd decided it was a personality. He could generate small bursts of compressed air from his palms. Nothing that would stop a real threat. Enough to shove smaller kids off balance and feel like a big deal about it.
I watched Kenta for about two weeks after I first noticed him operating and came to the conclusion that he was not genuinely cruel, just undeveloped. A bully in the way that empty people sometimes become bullies, filling the hollow with noise and dominance because they haven't found anything real to put there yet. Not worth my attention. Not worth my energy.
I filed him away and moved on.
What I was actually doing, in the slow accumulation of orphanage days, was training.
Not visibly. Nothing that would make a staff member stop and ask questions. Just the private work of sitting with the energy, moving it, testing the edges of what I could do. Every day. Not for long stretches in the beginning because the body got tired faster than the will did, and I was pragmatic enough to know that exhausting myself served nothing. I treated it like physical conditioning. You don't run until you break down on the first day and expect that to make you faster. You run until you're appropriately tired, then you rest, then you do it again tomorrow, and you are slightly less tired at the same distance, and you do it again.
By nine I could sustain full-body reinforcement for approximately four minutes without the energy scattering or my concentration fraying past usefulness. I know four minutes sounds unimpressive. It was. I was nine and I was working with a system I'd built from observation of animated sequences and manga panels rather than actual instruction. Four minutes of clean, stable reinforcement was not nothing.
I pushed harder.
The thing about growing up in an orphanage with full memories of your previous life is that you are never quite as lonely as the situation suggests you should be.
The other kids moved in their social currents and I moved in mine, which ran parallel to theirs without intersecting very often. I wasn't hostile. I could do friendly easily enough when the occasion called for it. I just had very little to say to eight-year-olds about things eight-year-olds found important, and I wasn't interested in pretending otherwise. People picked up on that. Kids are perceptive about difference even when they can't name what the difference is. They left me mostly alone, which was what I wanted.
What I thought about, when I wasn't training and wasn't doing the mechanical business of being a child in an institution, was the timeline.
I ran it the way you run a to-do list. Not anxiously, just methodically. Here are the events I know are coming. Here is roughly when. Here is what I need to have developed by then. Here is what will happen to me if I haven't.
The USJ attack. The training camp. The Overhaul arc, which would be the one I'd have to think hardest about because it involved children and that was a line I drew clearly inside myself. The war. The final battle. The cascading collapse of hero society that I had watched, from the outside, in animated form, thinking mostly about how the animation quality held up under a bigger budget.
Not the outside now.
I was in the middle of it. Fourteen years away from UA, give or take. Fourteen years to build something that could survive what I knew was coming and come out the other side intact.
I was not afraid, exactly. I want to be accurate about that because accuracy matters. What I felt was something more like the sensation of standing at the base of a mountain you're going to have to climb. Not dread. Just the honest weight of the distance.
I set my jaw and got back to work.
The first real test came when I was nine years and four months old, on a Wednesday afternoon in early autumn.
I had been sitting in the yard, ostensibly reading, actually running a slow current of energy down through my legs and into the ground just to feel what happened when I let it disperse outward instead of holding it tight in the body. It dispersed. Nothing interesting happened. I filed that away and went back to the book.
Kenta was across the yard doing something loud with two of his usual satellites. I wasn't paying attention until the volume changed, and then I was paying attention because a shift in crowd dynamics is worth tracking on general principle.
A younger kid. Maybe six. Small even for six, with a mop of dark hair and the particular expression of someone who has gotten into a situation faster than they understood was possible and is now trying to calculate the exit. Kenta had apparently decided this child's quirk, which from what I could see involved growing small flowers from his fingertips, was extremely funny. The two satellites were agreeing loudly that it was extremely funny. The small kid was not crying yet but was approaching the architectural preconditions for it.
I watched for about ten seconds.
Then I closed my book, stood up, and walked over.
This was not heroism. I want to be clear about that for my own internal record-keeping. I did not feel a swell of righteousness or a pull toward justice. What I felt was mild irritation at the noise, and a colder, more deliberate irritation at Kenta's specific flavor of cruelty, which was the kind that targets things it finds contemptible because it has never had the imagination to be anything other than contemptible itself. I found that boring in a way that was indistinguishable from personal offense.
I stopped a few feet away and said, "Hey."
Kenta turned around. He was bigger than me. Most kids his age were bigger than me; I was built lean and quiet and nothing about my body suggested I was worth redirecting aggression toward. His expression ran through several calculations and landed on dismissive. "What."
"You're being annoying," I said. I kept my voice completely pleasant, the way you'd comment on the weather. "The kid's quirk is fine. Leave him alone."
A pause. The satellites exchanged a look. Kenta's expression recalculated, landing somewhere between surprised and affronted.
"Who asked you."
"Nobody," I agreed. "Leave him alone."
What I had done, very quietly, was push a thin layer of energy into my feet and legs. Not enough to do anything visible. Just enough that I was standing the way Sukuna stood, which was not something I could have articulated as a nine-year-old but that I understood instinctively as a function of what I was carrying. A kind of weight in the presence. A quality of not being someone you wanted to push back against.
Kenta was bigger than me and his quirk was flashier than mine and he had social backing and I had none of those things. But he stared at me for a long moment and something in what he saw made him recalculate one more time, and what he landed on was that this wasn't worth it.
He made a sound that was technically a laugh and technically dismissive and walked away with his satellites.
The small kid with the flower quirk looked at me. I looked back at him.
"You're fine," I said, and went back to my book.
The energy had done something in that moment. Not dramatically. Not visibly. But I had used it, intentionally, for something other than private training, and I sat with that afterward and understood a few things about myself that I'd previously only theorized.
The first thing: it had felt completely natural. Natural in a way that confirmed something I had suspected but wanted evidence for. The energy was not a foreign object I was learning to operate. It was mine, actually mine, in the most fundamental sense of the word. Sukuna's power had passed to me not as a tool but as an inheritance, and it fit the shape of me the way water fits a vessel.
The second thing: I had very deliberately chosen not to escalate. I could have made Kenta afraid in a way that was not subtle, not deniable, and not something he would have easily forgotten. The capability was there. I hadn't used it.
This was important. I catalogued it carefully.
Power that runs away from its owner is just disaster on a timer. Every bad outcome I could imagine for myself in the next fourteen years had at its core the same shape: me doing something irreversible, at the wrong time, in front of the wrong people, because I hadn't kept the capability properly tethered. I was going to become genuinely dangerous. I needed to build the discipline before the danger got too big to discipline.
The third thing: the thing that had smiled back at me, two years earlier, at the bottom of my chest, had been paying attention to the Kenta interaction. I had felt it lean forward slightly when the confrontation started, interested and engaged in a way that was not entirely comfortable to examine. It hadn't pushed. It hadn't tried to influence anything. But it had been there.
I sat with my book in my lap and the autumn light going thin and orange around the edges of the yard wall and thought about what it meant to carry something that wasn't entirely you.
We'll manage, I told it, not out loud.
Nothing answered. Of course nothing answered. I wasn't fracturing into a host-and-tenant situation like Yuji. There was no second voice, no discrete presence, no negotiation required. It was more like a flavor in my personality. A tendency. A shadow that moved when I didn't.
I was aware of it. That would have to be enough.
I opened my book again and read until dinner.