Chapter 106: Chapter 106 - You Died
[You died.]
[This simulation has ended.]
[Cause of death: Loss of bodily functions under extre gravitational amplification.]
[Killed by: ’Suguru Geto’]
[Evaluation: While steadily advancing your plans and attempting to reshape the jujutsu world’s order, you once again brushed against the hidden currents churning beneath the surface of distortion.]
[Calculating rewards...]
[Congratulations. You have received the following inheritance:]
[1. You have obtained all mories from this simulation.]
[2. Acquired experience in cursed energy manipulation, Cursed Corpse crafting, jujutsu deploynt, and barrier techniques.]
[3. Cursed energy has been enhanced. Your base cursed energy will receive a multiplier based on simulation count. Current cursed energy: 25 (5x5).]
[4. Acquired: Divided Attention [R], Natural [R], Masochist [R], Docunt Maniac [N], Corporate Slave [N], Ultimate Energy-Saving Mode [N], Dinsional Reduction Analysis [R], Dynamic Speed Reading [N], Absolute Temperature Control System [N], Ballistic Intuition [R], Extre Overload Control [SR], Voiceprint Analysis and Mimicry [R], Absolute Center of Gravity [N].]
[Rewards distributed!]
The system’s cold little chi faded out, and then the mories hit.
Years and years from inside the Simulator ca crashing back into Touma Hayase’s head all at once, like a black flood bursting through a broken gate. The exhaustion from fighting to rewrite one tragedy after another. The numbness of killing Curse Users with his own hands. The rage that ca with finally learning the truth. And at the very end, that cetery, that insane gravity grinding his organs into paste.
Every mory forced itself into his brain at once, bright ones, ugly ones, all of them, cramming into every corner hard enough to make his skull feel ready to split.
Hayase let out a rough, strangled groan and clamped both hands over his forehead.
It felt like soone had poured a concentrated shot of Unlimited Void straight into his head.
At the sa ti, the twenty-five percent boost to his base cursed energy fed back into his real body and started remaking it from the inside. His reserves climbed higher and higher, pushing past anything he’d ever had before.
By the ti the pressure in his head eased enough for him to think straight, he was bent forward in his chair, breathing hard. His eyes were bloodshot. Locked on one line from the settlent screen.
His stare bored into it.
[Killed by: ’Suguru Geto’]
Those quotation marks.
Just two tiny marks around a na, but they told him everything.
Hayase trusted one thing about the system more than anything else. It never lied.
So if the system had put Geto’s na in quotes, then that ant the thing that killed him in the cetery was not normal. It was not the real Suguru Geto.
But it was close enough to the real thing to be terrifying.
If the body, cursed energy, and soul residue hadn’t all been tied to Geto sohow, the system wouldn’t have labeled it as ’Suguru Geto’. It would have given him so other identity. An unknown true na. Sothing cleaner.
And his own Phantom Night Parade had confird it too. In the instant they passed each other, it had identified the host body’s base technique as Geto’s Cursed Spirit Manipulation.
That ant the shell was real.
The actual body of Suguru Geto.
And if he followed that logic a step further, the answer only got worse. That sa body also carried two more unknown Innate Techniques.
One of them had to be the gravity-type ability, or maybe so kind of telekinetic technique, the one that had flattened him at the end.
Which ant the secret behind Geto’s so-called resurrection most likely rested in the third technique, the one that never showed its hand.
Hayase sat perfectly still, his mind spinning flat-out.
No, this wasn’t sothing simple like Puppet Manipulation. Not a seance. Not so cheap remote-control setup where a sorcerer sat sowhere else and steered a corpse around from a distance.
The logic didn’t hold.
A remotely controlled body, cut off from its real owner, shouldn’t have been able to hold and run three separate Innate Techniques at once. More importantly, a corpse was still a corpse. Reverse Cursed Technique needed a living brain to turn negative cursed energy into positive energy. A dead body being puppeted around couldn’t do that.
Once you stripped away every impossible answer, the one left standing, no matter how absurd, had to be the truth.
That thing was inside the body for real.
Inside the skull.
He shut his eyes and dug back through the simulation’s mories, combing through every tiny detail from that cetery fight. Every fra. Every movent. Every look from that fake Geto.
Then it clicked.
He had seen sothing off back then. He just hadn’t fully caught it in ti.
At the start of the fight, the impostor had casually used Reverse Cursed Technique to heal the scratch Hayase left on his throat. In that instant, Hayase had caught a glimpse of the thing’s forehead.
There had been a suture there.
A crude horizontal seam running across the skull. Fresh stitches. The thread still looked raw, still faintly red, like the wound hadn’t been there for long.
A new incision.
And that was exactly where the logic started breaking apart.
The impostor’s Reverse Cursed Technique was absurdly refined. It had restored Geto’s chest after Hollow Purple. It had regenerated the left arm Hayase himself cut off during the Night Parade.
So why leave the suture?
Why let the forehead stay visibly stitched, like sobody had opened the top of the skull and just closed it back up in a hurry? If it could heal everything else perfectly, why not that?
His thoughts jumped to the final blow.
Domain Expansion: Womb Profusion.
That Domain had nothing to do with Cursed Spirit Manipulation. Not even remotely.
Hayase had personally copied and used Cursed Spirit Manipulation before through Phantom Night Parade, and now that he replayed both techniques in his mind, comparing the flow of cursed energy, the answer was obvious. They weren’t related at all.
This wasn’t like forcing his way toward the Maximum output, where he could at least feel the sa root structure buried underneath the difference in output and mastery.
Womb Profusion was different from the ground up.
Completely separate. Completely incompatible.
And while replaying that last mont, Hayase caught sothing else too. Sothing worse.
When that fake Geto expanded his Domain, the cetery itself hadn’t changed.
No enclosed space.
No sealed shell.
No transford environnt.
Every Domain Expansion Hayase knew, Unlimited Void, Idle Death Gamble, all of them, required a barrier in the opening mont. That barrier created a closed pocket of space and trapped the target inside it.
But Womb Profusion hadn’t done that.
It had stamped the Innate Domain directly onto reality itself, without building a barrier first. Like painting on thin air.
He’d died almost instantly under the sure-hit gravity, but he was certain of what he’d seen.
"Hold on... the stitches on the forehead... a Domain without a closed barrier..."
Sothing surfaced from the pile of old mories.
He’d heard about this before.
Years earlier, during the simulation, on the night he infiltrated the Zenin compound to take gumi Fushiguro away, i i had passed along a piece of intelligence she’d gathered.
Buried in the verbal reports from her sources was ntion of a strange woman with visible stitches across her forehead.
The Star Religious Group.
That had been their base.
And later, it had beco Geto’s territory.
If sothing with forehead stitches had already been moving around inside the Star Religious Group years before the Night Parade, then there was a very ugly possibility here. Geto’s fall, every ugly step of it, might not have been entirely his own.
Sobody may have been nudging things from the shadows the whole ti.
The problem was, i i’s intel had only been verbal. No photos. No physical evidence. Nothing concrete enough to lock the two together for sure.
But there was more.
Sothing else about the whole thing made Hayase’s spine go cold.
The thing inside Geto’s body hadn’t just been lurking in the dark and watching. It had known, with freakish precision, about his secret arrangent with the higher-ups, the one where he’d secured the right to execute Yuta Okkotsu.
Even after the deal was done, so of the senior officials closest to the Gojo Clan still hadn’t shown the slightest sign of knowing about it.
So how had that thing known?
Hayase started sorting through the possibilities.
Given its likely long-term foothold inside the Star Religious Group, there were only two serious answers.
First, it could have ties to so faction among the higher-ups.
Second, it could be connected to either the Zenin Clan or the Kamo Clan.
Instinct and logic both leaned toward the second option. Still, without evidence, he couldn’t rule the first one out. Right now, if he had to put numbers on it, the odds felt about seventy-thirty.
As for Geto’s actual death, Hayase replayed the whole Night Parade in his head again.
Nothing there suggested outside interference.
That road had been paved by Geto’s own choices years in advance. One mistake leading to the next, one ugly consequence rolling cleanly into another, until the ending beca almost inevitable.
But the monster wearing his body had absolutely taken advantage of the timing.
And more importantly, it hadn’t moved until Gojo was gone.
It waited until Gojo took his people to Kyoto for the Exchange Event, and only then did it dare slip into the cetery and claim the corpse.
That timing mattered.
It exposed a weakness.
Even with a Domain like that, even wearing Geto’s body, even carrying whatever grotesque third technique made all this possible, the thing still feared Satoru Gojo.
Feared him badly.
If it ever had to face the strongest head-on, maybe it wouldn’t stand a chance.
But before killing him, that thing had said sothing.
That lazy, amused voice slipped back into his mory, disgusting and clear.
"You know, the two of us might get along."
Hayase’s expression darkened.
What the hell did it want?
It had a Special Grade body.
It had Cursed Spirit Manipulation.
It was hiding in the shadows and moving pieces around without anyone noticing.
Was it trying to remake the order of the world?
Trying to end jujutsu entirely?
Trying to build sothing worse?
Hayase slowly drew in a breath of cold air.
And felt his thoughts knot tighter than ever.
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