By now, Satoru had awakened.
"That wheel..."
His Six Eyes were fixed unwaveringly on the stationary wheel, countless data points and conjectures flashing through his mind in an instant.
"There were never any clues before. What does it do?" He muttered to himself.
An unprecedented chill, colder than death itself, instantly froze his spine.
Sukuna watched the drastic change in Satoru's complexion. A glint of icy satisfaction, the pleasure of a goal finally achieved, flickered in his four crimson eyes.
He did not charge forward again, nor did he employ any complex techniques or slashes. He simply stood in place, raised the arm on his lower right side, fingers held together like a blade, and gave a light flick towards Satoru.
The motion was simple, casual, as if brushing dust from his sleeve. However, the instant he flicked his arm—
There was no earth-shattering aura, no shriek that tore through space.
Only an extremely fine, extremely thin 'line'—seemingly non-existent in this dimension yet clearly reflected in Satoru's Six Eyes perception, distorting the fundamental structure of light and space—extended from Sukuna's fingertip and soundlessly swept past Satoru's waist.
Time seemed infinitely stretched, yet infinitely shortened in that moment.
Satoru's Six Eyes saw it. He saw that the 'line' was not a simple slash. It seemed to ignore the 'infinite' distance concept created by his Infinity, passing directly 'through' that theoretically untouchable defense like a hot knife through butter.
He saw it, but he could not react.
The pale pink light of Falling Blossom Emotion didn't even have time to flare before it too was 'passed through' by the 'line'. It was as if that intricate Cursed Energy counterattack procedure simply didn't exist before the 'line', or was not recognized as an attack requiring a counter.
Then, the 'line' swept past his body.
His waist.
No pain, no resistance.
Only a sudden, absolute sense of separation.
Satoru's field of vision abruptly dropped. He looked down and saw his own lower body, still maintaining a kneeling posture, standing in place. His upper body, however, was slowly, steadily, sliding and toppling sideways.
Blood, like a bursting dam, gushed madly from the smooth, mirror-like cross-section of his severed torso! Instantly dyeing large swaths of the Cutting Board ground crimson.
Cut... in half at the waist.
"Ugh... Ah..."
An unintelligible gasp escaped Satoru's throat.
He tried to mobilize his Cursed Energy, to activate Reverse Cursed Technique, even if just to temporarily reconnect his body and grasp a sliver of hope. Yet, when he focused his will, what he felt was a cold, hollow, dead silence of nothingness.
The core hub of his Cursed Energy circulation and generation had been cleanly, decisively severed by that weird slash, on both the physical and conceptual levels.
Not a simple physical injury. It was the destruction of the core.
His brain might still be able to think, his soul might not yet have dissipated, but the 'engine' that drove his Cursed Energy had stalled, cut in two. Reverse Cursed Technique required Cursed Energy to drive it, and he could no longer generate or mobilize even a wisp of Cursed Energy.
Deprived of Cursed Energy support, his overclocked Six Eyes instantly dimmed. The pain of overload receded like a tide, replaced by the rapidly draining temperature, strength, and vitality of his body. His vision began to blur, to darken.
Thud.
Satoru's upper body fell onto the cold ground. He could smell the pungent scent of blood and his own internal organs.
From his remaining peripheral vision, he saw a pair of feet covered in black curse markings slowly walk up to him.
Sukuna crouched down. His four crimson eyes calmly regarded the dying Satoru, like looking at a piece of artwork nearing completion, or a fine dish about to be savored.
"Don't you understand?"
Sukuna's voice rang out, calmly explaining as if imparting knowledge. "This wheel is Mahoraga's wheel. I obtained its adaptation trait."
"While you attacked me again and again, while you used your Limitless to oppose me..."
Sukuna said slowly, each word like a cold nail hammered into Satoru's gradually fading consciousness, "I was adapting. Adapting to the structure of your Cursed Technique, adapting to your defensive patterns, adapting to the principles of your Cursed Energy operation."
"And the ultimate manifestation of Mahoraga's adaptation is finding the method of neutralization."
A faint, almost imperceptible spatial distortion gathered once more at Sukuna's fingertip. "Your Infinity, in essence, creates 'infinite' distance. It's exquisite. But after adapting to the fundamental nature of its rules, the method of neutralizing it is also simple."
He paused, then spoke the words that decided the victor and declared the end of an era, "Expand the target of the Cursed Technique from you to the space you occupy."
"If the 'you' beyond infinite distance cannot be reached, then, along with you and 'the space surrounding you'... sever it."
"This is World-Cutting Slash."
Sukuna stood up, looking down at Satoru, whose eyes were already beginning to lose focus in the pool of blood.
"You did well, Satoru. You forced me to use this move."
"As the strongest of this era... you lived up to the name."
"Now, rest in peace."
Sukuna raised his foot and slowly brought it down towards Satoru's lifeless head.
Satoru's consciousness sank as if into the deepest, warmest seabed, falling towards that hazy, tranquil halo constructed from memories and regrets.
And then, he was 'standing' there.
Not in ruins, not on a battlefield, but in a place so familiar it evoked nostalgia, yet so distant it felt like a lifetime ago—the edge of the training grounds of the Tokyo Metropolitan Curse Technical College.
Afternoon sunlight filtered through leaves, casting dappled spots of light, carrying the scent of grass and earth.
No curses, no slaughter, only the languor and tranquility of a summer afternoon.
He was wearing a slightly loose, but cleanly washed Tokyo Jujutsu High uniform. His trademark small round sunglasses rested on the bridge of his nose. His condition was astonishingly good—no injuries, no fatigue, his Cursed Energy so full it seemed inexhaustible.
"Yo, Satoru, what are you spacing out for?"
A voice, extremely familiar and carrying a hint of a teasing smile, drifted from his side.
Satoru's body gave a nearly imperceptible shudder. He didn't turn his head immediately. Instead, his gaze behind the sunglasses seemed to peer more deeply into the empty training ground ahead.
This voice... he hadn't heard it for a long, long time. So long that he almost thought he had forgotten that complex feeling—the mixture of relief and the urge to cause mischief—that naturally welled up in his heart upon hearing it.
"What are you looking at?" Satoru finally turned his head, his tone carrying the usual flippant impatience from over a decade ago.
"That face of yours is looking quite impolite right now."
Standing beside him was a young man also wearing a Jujutsu High uniform, his black hair tied in a half-bun at the back, with a signature strand of bangs hanging over his forehead—Geto Suguru.
His face bore the gentle smile most common in Satoru's memories—one that seemed to see through everything while maintaining a slight sense of detachment—and his narrow eyes were slightly curved.
It was exactly as he remembered. It was how he looked when he personally "sent him off" at the end, yet it was strangely stripped of that heavy exhaustion and paranoid gloom. All that remained was the pure sense of being two halves of a whole, standing side-by-side in their youth.
"Impolite?" Suguru raised an eyebrow, his smile unchanging.
"To make such a demand of a dead man, you're the one being rather impolite, Satoru."
The conversation flowed naturally, as if the heavy years of defection, slaughter, ideological rifts, and life-or-death duels that lay between them had never existed.
Satoru curled his lip and turned back toward the training ground.
After a moment of silence, he suddenly spoke, his voice slightly lower than before and lacking some of the intentional flippancy, "Suguru."
"Hmm?"
"Humans... in the end, we all have to die after all." Satoru spoke as if stating an objective fact that had nothing to do with him.
"And it seems we always have to die alone. It's quite dull."
Suguru glanced sideways at his best friend's profile, his expression mostly hidden by sunglasses, revealing little emotion.
He gave a soft laugh, his tone flat. "Yeah. Born alone, die alone. That is the fate of humanity, or perhaps... a curse?"
He paused, his voice taking on a faint, almost imperceptible softness. "However, like this, after dying, at least I'm here to talk to you. You aren't... too lonely, right?"
Satoru didn't reply immediately. He raised his hand as if to adjust his sunglasses, but stopped halfway and lowered it. He looked down at his open palm—clean, uninjured, and well-defined. These hands had just delivered a blow powerful enough to shake even Sukuna, yet here, they seemed so ordinary.