Chapter 82: The Higher Ups' Conspiracy, the Sea of Ten Thousand Cursed Corpses
"We're here, Mr. Yami."
Ijichi's voice trembled slightly.
He did not even dare look directly at the young man beside him.
Outside the car window stood the abandoned nuclear power plant.
It had been sealed off for years after the disaster, left to decay in silence while rust, dust, and time consumed what remained of human order. But the oppressive weight hanging over the place had nothing to do with radiation alone.
It was something deeper.
Something that pressed against the nerves and sank into the marrow.
Even someone like Ijichi, who was not a frontline combatant, could feel it clearly.
This was no ordinary Grade 1 mission.
Not even close.
Yami pushed open the car door and stepped out onto the cracked concrete.
Dust stirred beneath his feet.
The air was foul.
Not just stale, but rotten. Dense with cursed residue, bloodlike malice, and the lingering stench of too many things that should never have existed in one place.
Ijichi swallowed hard.
His instincts were screaming at him to stop this before it began.
"Mr. Yami… this place feels wrong."
He forced the words out.
"Why don't we fall back first and wait for Gojo san to return—"
Yami raised one hand slightly.
That was enough to stop him.
The swordsman stood there in silence, red eyes fixed on the heart of the plant. His expression did not change. He looked almost calm, as though what waited inside were not cursed spirits, but animals penned up for slaughter.
"No need," he said.
His tone was quiet.
"If they've gone to the trouble of preparing something for me, I should at least have the courtesy to accept it."
Then he started walking.
Straight toward the rusted gate.
Each step was unhurried.
Steady.
Like the sound of a blade being drawn a little farther from its sheath.
Ijichi clenched his teeth.
There was no turning back now.
He raised his hands and began the incantation.
"Curtain, descend."
"Born of darkness, darker than darkness."
"Purify that which is impure."
A black veil dropped over the nuclear power plant.
But the moment it formed, something changed.
The Curtain shuddered.
Then another force crashed into it from within, overriding it completely.
What should have been a standard concealment barrier twisted into something far more sinister. Dark veins, red as raw flesh, spread across the surface like blood vessels crawling beneath skin.
Ijichi's face went white.
"This—!"
He stumbled back, staring upward.
It was no longer his Curtain.
It had been hijacked and reinforced into a targeted lockdown barrier.
A prison.
A sealed hunting ground.
"This is impossible…"
Even many Grade 1 sorcerers could not erect something at this level. An Assistant Supervisor like him had no chance of interfering once it was in place.
Yami looked up at the crimson veined sky and gave a faint, mocking smile.
"So that's how worried they were about me running."
He had expected this much.
If the higher ups had dared move now, after everything he had shown, then of course they would not settle for a simple ambush. They would prepare thoroughly. Ruthlessly.
The barrier's purpose was obvious.
Lock the field.
Seal the exits.
Prevent retreat.
This was a place one entered and never left.
"Mr. Yami!"
Ijichi lunged forward on instinct, only to be thrown back when the barrier repelled him. He hit the ground hard and looked up in panic, helplessly watching as Yami's figure disappeared into the gaping darkness of the plant entrance.
Inside, the nuclear power plant no longer resembled any structure built by human hands.
It had become a nest.
A warped labyrinth of concrete, rusted steel, and living filth.
Veins of flesh pulsed along the walls. Green slime spread across the floors in gleaming trails. Tumorous growths bulged from old piping, breathing faintly like diseased organs.
Radiation and cursed energy had fermented together here for years.
The result was grotesque.
"ROOOAR!"
The howl came from every direction at once.
Then the dark lit up.
Eyes.
Countless scarlet eyes blinked open in the shadows, packed so densely that for one sickening moment they looked like a second night sky.
Only each of those "stars" belonged to a curse.
Grade 1.
Semi Grade 1.
Mutated aberrations swollen by years of accumulated malice.
There were too many to count.
Hundreds.
No—
Thousands.
No—
Ten thousand at least.
That was the first dish the higher ups had prepared for him.
An army.
A tide of flesh meant to grind down his stamina through sheer numbers.
They had made a simple calculation.
Yami possessed terrifying lethality in direct combat. His swordsmanship could overwhelm Special Grades. His Breathing Techniques were monstrous. But he was still human. He had no cursed energy to reinforce himself endlessly, no reserve he could cycle through the way ordinary sorcerers did.
So all they had to do was drown him.
Wear him down.
Make him bleed.
Turn brilliance into exhaustion.
Turn exhaustion into death.
It would have been a good plan.
If that had been all.
But it wasn't.
The moment Yami's hand came to Shiranui, three other presences descended.
The air grew heavier.
The building groaned.
Three crushing auras pressed down from different directions like mountains lowering onto his shoulders.
Special Grade.
All three of them.
To his left, a mass of flesh and tentacles dragged itself into view, the air warping around it as if space itself were being folded and crushed against its body.
A mutated curse with spatial distortion.
To his right, something enormous and stony stepped through a collapsed section of the plant, every footfall cracking the ground beneath it.
A gravity type curse.
And ahead, beyond the sea of lesser monsters, towered a grotesque mother body riddled with mouths. From every opening, small black curses spilled out endlessly, screeching as they hit the floor and rushed forward.
An infinite proliferation type.
Three Special Grades.
Ten thousand lesser curses.
A sealed battlefield.
This was no mission.
It was an execution order disguised as one.
Far away, inside a monitoring room isolated from the combat zone, several old men in formal robes watched the live feed with thin, satisfied smiles.
One of them lifted a teacup.
"Hmph."
"So this is the so called Sword Saint."
Another sneered.
"No cursed energy. No support. No escape."
"A monkey is still a monkey in the end."
Their laughter was low and smug.
"As long as we grind him down here, even if Gojo Satoru comes back, he will only find a corpse."
"And if questions are asked?"
The oldest of them took a sip of tea.
"Mission accident."
"A Special Grade outbreak."
"Tragic, but unavoidable."
The others nodded.
Perfect.
Clean.
Reasonable on paper.
Not one of them imagined, even for a second, that things could go wrong.
Then Yami moved.
Not with panic.
Not with anger.
He did not even frown.
He simply lowered his center of gravity, set one foot slightly back, and raised Shiranui into a quiet opening stance.
It was a posture that had once beheaded demons by the thousands in another age.
A stance born to cut through despair itself.
"Interesting," Yami murmured.
His voice was soft, yet somehow carried clearly through the howls of the curses.
"If you're all this eager…"
His fingers tightened around the hilt.
"Then I should respond properly."
His breathing deepened.
The rhythm changed.
The air around him changed with it.
[Total Concentration Breathing.]
Hum—
Power surged through his body in a single, seamless wave.
The calm in his red eyes ignited.
Not metaphorically.
It truly looked as if golden fire had begun burning behind his pupils.
The lesser curses hesitated.
Some recoiled on instinct.
Then Yami swung.
[Sun Breathing, First Form: Dance.]
A golden ring of flame burst outward.
Not a line.
Not a slash.
A full circular arc of solar fire exploded from the blade and tore through the front ranks of the horde.
There was no resistance.
No scream.
The first several hundred curses simply ceased to exist, evaporated into ash before they could even understand death had reached them.
The shockwave of heat rolled onward, setting the surrounding filth ablaze.
In the monitoring room, teacups crashed to the floor.
"What—?!"
One of the elders staggered back.
"That kind of output…!"
Another's face twisted.
"I was told he had no large scale destructive techniques!"
But there was no time to dwell on it.
Because the true killing blow of their trap arrived in the next instant.
All three Special Grades screamed together.
Then, with horrifying synchronicity, they formed the gestures for expansion.
[Domain Expansion.]
The space around Yami shattered.
Three Domains bloomed at once, then fused into a single malformed hell.
The result crashed down like the sea.
[Sea of Ten Thousand Cursed Corpses.]
Space locked.
Gravity multiplied.
The horde became infinite.
The very world turned hostile.
Every direction was now death.
Every breath was oppression.
This was no ordinary Domain. It was a layered execution field born from three separate cores, each compensating for the others. Distorted space prevented escape. Crushing gravity pinned the body. Endless proliferation drowned the victim in a tide of regenerating curses.
Any Grade 1 sorcerer would have died the moment it formed.
Even a Special Grade would have been dragged into a brutal struggle.
In the monitoring room, the elders laughed again.
"Now die."
"For the order of the Jujutsu world."
At the center of that sea of corpses, Yami's figure looked small.
Almost fragile.
But the sword in his hand remained utterly still.
He closed his eyes.
Not in surrender.
In focus.
"Is this your final answer?" he asked softly.
The roar of the Domain crashed around him from all sides.
He ignored it.
All he heard was breathing.
His own breathing.
Steady.
Deep.
Absolute.
And when his eyes opened again—
The whole world would turn red.
.....
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