Nobody saw it coming.
The Mahoraga incident wasn't a war. It was one moment, a divine general summoning itself out of nowhere and going on a rampage, killing everyone in Tokyo. No warning. No buildup. Just destruction on a scale that made every prior record look like a footnote.
By the time anyone moved to stop it, Tokyo was already gone.
Then the cursed energy spread.
It didn't dissipate like it was supposed to. It didn't settle. It moved like something alive, something hungry, sweeping through Jujutsu High in hours and taking out the clans in days. Old bloodlines that had stood for centuries. Ancient techniques passed down through generations. Gone, swallowed whole by something that didn't care about pedigree or power or history.
Then it hit the rest of the world.
Some called it a curse bloom. Others called it the awakening. The ones who survived long enough to write anything down just called it madness. Cursed spirits bleeding through every wall, every quiet street, every place people had spent years convincing themselves was safe.
There was no safe anymore.
Years passed. The ones who adapted, survived. The ones who didn't were memories now, names carved into walls that were still standing.
The hard truth every surviving nation had to swallow was simple. Nukes couldn't kill what couldn't be hit. Missiles were useless against something that fed off negative emotion and multiplied in the dark. Governments fell trying to fight back with weapons built for a different kind of war.
The only thing standing between humanity and total annihilation was cursed energy, and the people who could use it.
So the world changed.
Fortresses rose from the rubble of what used to be cities. Massive walled structures built at the edges of wasteland, humanity packed inside, sorcerers working the perimeter day and night. They called them havens. Safe houses against an unending flood that showed no signs of stopping.
Inside the walls, people tried to live normally. Outside them, things that wore human shapes wandered and waited.
And in the training yards, the next generation bled.
Because the most valuable thing in the world wasn't oil anymore. Wasn't money, wasn't political power. It was a human being who could look a cursed spirit in the eye and not die. Every haven poured everything they had into finding them, training them, pushing them until something either broke or hardened.
Most broke.
"Good morning fourth grades, how was your night?"
Instructor Daichi stood atop the outer wall with his gavel resting on his shoulder, looking down at fifteen students with the smile of a man who had slept eight full hours and eaten a warm breakfast.
Not one of the fifteen shared that experience.
Silence answered him. The loaded kind, fifteen bodies running on no sleep and pure resentment deciding together not to say anything they'd get punished for.
Night. Did they have a night. This man had personally made sure they didn't, running them through footwork drills on gravel from two in the morning until sunrise, and now he was standing up there with that smile asking how their night was.
Three of them had thrown up before dawn. One had passed out against the eastern wall and had to be shaken back to standing.
"Hehe, toughen up." Daichi didn't even pretend. "Look at Yuno, he's up and bright. You should all be like him."
He pointed to the side.
They looked, and a few of them quietly hated what they saw.
The young man standing apart from the group wasn't swaying. Wasn't staring at the ground trying to stay conscious. He stood straight, shoulders back, eyes forward and sharp, looking like he'd woken up twenty minutes ago after a full night of rest.
He hadn't. He'd been out there with the rest of them.
Most of the students had something to trace their presence here back to. A sorcerer uncle, a clan name, a family that had noticed something different about them early and pointed them in the right direction. They had roots in this world. Context. Someone who had explained what they were before it was explained to them by a stranger with a clipboard.
Yuno had none of that.
No family in the craft. No legacy, no name that opened doors, no one waiting on his progress reports. Just a boy who had been tested one afternoon and handed a number and told to show up the next morning.
One of the unfortunate ones, people said. Born with cursed energy control and no roadmap for it.
He never corrected them.
A cold pulse behind his eyes, quiet and precise. Same as every morning.
[Welcome to the Infinite Curse System]
[New Task: Kill one low-level cursed spirit]
[Reward: Reverse Cursed Technique unlocked]
[Secondary Task: Check in at the barracks captain's desk]
[Reward: Cursed Tool assignment]
[Name: Yuno Yuji
Rank: Grade 4 Sorcerer
Technique: Locked, reach Grade 3 to unlock
Domain Expansion: ???]
The display faded clean. No sound, no trace, nothing anyone else could see.
Around him his classmates muttered under their breath and traded exhausted looks, some still glaring at the instructor's back.
Yuno didn't join in. He had a cursed spirit to kill before noon.