A Thousand Years Past

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The blood moon hung above the main hall.

Beneath it were faces gone blank.

White Zetsu quietly walked into the shadows, heading deeper into the hall to search for whatever treasures might be hidden there.

Kenjaku's memories did not matter to him.

In the end, Kenjaku was only another crawler.

A purple halo lit in Itsuki's right eye as he carefully observed the fluctuations of Kenjaku's soul.

Beside Kenjaku, visible only to Itsuki, scenes from a thousand years ago began to surface one after another.

Treacherous memories from an age buried in blood.

...

A desolate valley.

The setting sun was red as fresh blood.

Across the scarlet earth, ravines crossed like wounds, and human remains carpeted the ground.

There were samurai.

There were sorcerers.

There were even ordinary people dressed in fine robes.

Crows circled overhead and feasted among piles of severed limbs and torn flesh.

Atop one heap of corpses, a boy of six or seven sat chewing on a dark-red piece of meat from some unknown source.

Blood covered him.

His expression was numb as he ate.

Clink.

Clink.

A monk in robes and a bamboo hat walked through the valley, the staff in his hand giving off a faint Buddhist light beneath the sunset.

The monk's reaction to the horrifying scene was strangely calm.

As if such sights were ordinary in this era, he simply bowed.

The fatal wounds on the corpses clearly showed traces left by cursed spirits.

In this age, hell existed everywhere.

The monk took the numb boy away and adopted him into an esoteric Buddhist temple.

The sect the monk belonged to seemed to hold considerable status.

From time to time, powerful people in fine clothing came to visit and pay respects.

The highest-ranking among them was a young woman dressed in imperial robes.

Everyone who arrived bowed to her with respect written across their faces.

Itsuki watched from a third-person perspective and could not hear the figures within the memory.

He could only barely read the woman's lips when she addressed the monk.

Master Genshin.

The scene shifted.

Several years passed.

The boy who had once been six or seven was now over ten.

One day, Master Genshin looked at a letter in his hand and hurried out of the temple.

That very night, he brought the same young woman back with him.

Her fine robes were torn, and several bloody gashes remained on her forearm.

It seemed her family had met with disaster.

From then on, the girl lived in the temple.

Her old name was abandoned.

Master Genshin gave the boy and the girl new Dharma names.

Itsuki read the two words from the movement of their lips.

Tengen.

Kenjaku.

The sorcerers of this age were far stronger than those of the modern era.

Through the boy's perspective, Itsuki saw many thousand-year-old sorcerers display terrifying strength.

Master Genshin's awakened technique was called Barrier.

With it, he could seal countless cursed spirits and powerful curses of that era into physical bodies.

The boy and the girl grew older and became Genshin's disciples, both wearing monk robes.

Because neither of their techniques had direct offensive use, they lacked the means to protect themselves in that brutal age.

Genshin broke down everything he understood about barrier techniques and taught them both without reservation.

The boy's talent seemed greater than the girl's. Before long, he grasped the essence of barrier techniques.

The girl was less gifted, but her mind was calm, and she continued studying without distraction.

The boy's thoughts were more chaotic.

His curiosity always wandered toward strange texts.

Rituals.

Cursed spirits.

And humans.

...

Following Kenjaku's perspective, Itsuki also glimpsed the ruler of that era from afar.

A demon god with two faces and four arms.

The King of Curses fighting alone against countless enemies.

The scenes flashed rapidly as time passed.

Some fragments were caught by Itsuki.

Others slipped by in a blur.

Several more years passed.

For some unknown reason, the strongest being of the age suddenly attacked the temple.

Genshin could not defeat him head-on and was forced into defense.

In the end, Genshin made a binding vow that he would never leave the temple.

With that vow, he unlocked the maximum power of his barrier technique and created an absolute defense that covered the entire temple.

The King of Curses returned empty-handed.

Afterward, Kenjaku, now grown into a young man, was locked away by Genshin.

It seemed Sukuna's attack had been connected to something Kenjaku had done.

The scene shifted again.

Because of the hidden injuries left by the King of Curses years earlier, and because of his advanced age, Genshin visibly declined despite never leaving the temple.

At last, he died seated in meditation.

Tengen grieved.

Kenjaku was lost.

What did the life of a fragile human being even mean?

In a single night, Genshin's corpse transformed into a strange cursed object.

The Prison Realm was stolen from the temple by Kenjaku.

Kenjaku forcibly took the physical remains away.

But the binding vow Genshin had placed upon himself prevented his soul from leaving.

That remaining piece transformed into the back of the Prison Realm and fell into Tengen's hands.

The scenes continued flashing.

Kenjaku changed bodies.

A stitched scar appeared across his forehead.

The more powerful a technique was, the more likely it was to contain a forced binding vow.

Satoru Gojo's Six Eyes were one example.

They captured and poured countless streams of information into his brain. The bandages and sunglasses he wore were partly meant to reduce the burden.

Tengen's immortality was another.

Every five hundred years, Tengen needed to merge with a Star Plasma Vessel to maintain a human body and a human mind.

Kenjaku's body swapping was the same.

The stitches across his forehead were a binding vow imposed on himself.

They could not be hidden.

Through Kenjaku's perspective, Itsuki traveled to many places across the world of a thousand years ago.

He also witnessed Kenjaku perform terrifying experiments again and again, using cursed spirits and humans.

Kenjaku tempted powerful people who had felt unsatisfied in life and bound them with contracts.

The most special among them was the strongest of a thousand years ago.

...

In the real world, ten minutes had passed.

A full ten minutes.

In the end, Tengen used the advantage of his home field to barely destroy Itsuki's open-barrier domain.

Or perhaps Itsuki had released it on his own.

Some missing fragments in Kenjaku's memories were indeed connected to Tengen's interference.

The blood moon fell.

The dazed sorcerers snapped back to themselves.

"What did you do?!"

Kenjaku stared at Itsuki in terror.

He could faintly feel the traces left behind after his soul had been searched.

"Stop pretending," Itsuki said. "We still have another chance to meet, don't we?"

At those words, Kenjaku's surface-level fear stopped being an act.

The calm he had cultivated across a thousand years shattered completely.

Blue veins bulged. Kenjaku stared at Itsuki with a hoarse voice.

"You..."

"What exactly did you learn?"

Seeing Kenjaku in such panic, Itsuki's mouth curved into a faint smile.

"The one who inherits the will..."

His tone was soft.

"Relax, Kenjaku. I will leave you a chance to meet me again."

As Itsuki's ambiguous words fell, the purple halo in his right eye flickered.

The effects of technique burnout lasted only a fraction of a second.

The moment the domain broke, his technique activated.

Kenjaku's twisted expression froze.

His entire body exploded into dust, leaving not even a trace behind.

Points of blood-red mist drifted slowly through the air.

The sorcerers from Jujutsu High could not understand the conversation between the two at all.

They did not even have time to think.

They were still trapped in the fact that Kenjaku had just died completely before their eyes.

Then the faint killing intent that surfaced in Itsuki's blood-red eyes plunged every one of them into ice.

"You..."

Itsuki looked at them calmly.

"Do not seem useful anymore."

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