The results of the experiment filled Mahiko with quiet delight.
She sat with her eyes closed, attuned to the shifts rippling through her own soul.
The idea had first come to her while she was treating Mechamaru — which was why she'd made a point of looking carefully back then, memorizing the exact pattern of the Heavenly Restriction etched into his soul. Now, working from memory, she was tracing that same pattern onto herself.
The precision of her copy was somewhere around fifty or sixty percent. This was only an experiment, after all. But even at fifty or sixty percent similarity, the effects were remarkably pronounced.
Her range of Cursed Energy manipulation had expanded.
Expanded by a lot.
"Hm?" Kenjaku seemed to detect something anomalous. He slid her a sideways glance. "What are you doing?"
"I'm bored," Mahiko said with a shrug. "Just running a little experiment to pass the time."
She pinched off a small fragment of her own soul, rolled it between her palms, shaping it — and squeezed it into a palm-sized sprite: blue hair, butterfly wings, delicate little figure.
Like a flower fairy. Genuinely cute.
She opened her hand, and the sprite beat its wings and took flight.
It drifted through the night sky, growing smaller and smaller, farther and farther away. One block, two blocks, three, four, five... until it vanished entirely from sight, slipping past the boundaries of Sendai's streets and disappearing into the distant dark.
That was a considerable distance.
And yet Mahiko could still sense its location with perfect clarity. She could still direct its movements with effortless ease.
Holy shit.
That's insane.
Originally, her control range for her extensions had hard limits. After leaving Mechamaru's hidden chamber back in Kyoto and traveling with Kenjaku all the way to Sendai, the distance had grown too great — she'd lost all contact with the extension she'd left behind on Mechamaru's finger. She'd been reduced to passively waiting for Mechamaru to reach out to her first.
But now, with the Heavenly Restriction pattern traced onto her soul — even at only fifty to sixty percent accuracy — her operational range had expanded several times over.
Mahiko ran the numbers in her head.
At fifty to sixty percent right now. If she put in a bit more effort, refined the pattern with greater precision, she could probably push it to eighty or even ninety percent.
If she could hit eighty or ninety percent...
Controlling an extension left behind in Kyoto from all the way in Tokyo should be no problem at all.
Which meant she could reach the extension on Mechamaru's body anytime, anywhere — no more sitting around waiting for him to make contact first.
But...
Mahiko frowned.
She had noticed a problem.
As the Heavenly Restriction pattern carved itself deeper into her soul, her Cursed Energy range expanded — but at the same time, she could feel her main body's defensive capacity and combat power declining. Her body felt slightly weaker. Her reactions had slowed by half a beat.
This was the price of the Heavenly Restriction.
Mechamaru had traded his physical body for an enormous Cursed Energy range. Tracing that pattern onto her own soul meant she had to bear the same corresponding penalties.
The more accurate the copy, the greater the range bonus — but the weaker her main body became. If she ever pushed it to one hundred percent accuracy, she'd probably end up completely paralyzed on the spot, utterly helpless.
Just like Mechamaru.
At that point, what was even the benefit? One slap and she'd be dead. How humiliating.
So there had to be a balance point. Not too close to the original, not too far from it. Somewhere around seventy to eighty percent was probably the sweet spot — though it would likely need to be calibrated case by case. In different situations, she'd probably need to tune her Heavenly Restriction to different configurations: enough of a range bonus to be useful, but not so much that her main body became too weak to fight.
And if she ever wanted to push toward higher accuracy — say, one hundred percent — she'd probably need to visit Mechamaru again. See him up close and re-examine the pattern on his soul in careful detail.
Memory alone had its limits.
Mahiko recalled the flower fairy extension, drew it back to herself, and let it dissolve back into her body. Then she erased the Heavenly Restriction pattern she'd traced onto her soul and restored herself to her original state.
The sense of physical weakness vanished immediately.
Good. The process was reversible — carve it on, wipe it off, whenever she liked. Convenient.
Then her thoughts drifted to something else.
Mechamaru wasn't the only impressive Heavenly Restriction in the original story.
There was another kind — more extreme, more terrifying. The person who bore it was known as the "Heavenly Tyrant."
The prime example of a Heavenly Tyrant was Toji Fushiguro — born of the Zenin Clan, biological father of Fushiguro Maki. His Heavenly Restriction was the exact inverse of Mechamaru's: where Mechamaru had sacrificed his body for Cursed Energy range, Toji had sacrificed all of his Cursed Energy for a body pushed to the absolute peak of human capability.
In the world of Jujutsu Kaisen, every ordinary person carries at least some trace of Cursed Energy — even non-sorcerers.
Toji Fushiguro had none. Not a single drop. In exchange, he had attained what was arguably the most optimized human body in existence — and because he registered as zero Cursed Energy, jujutsu sorcerers could not detect him through their Cursed Energy sense at all. He could walk in and out of Jujutsu High's barriers without triggering a single alarm, moving like a ghost, leaving no trace.
By any measure, he was one of the absolute ceilings for physical combat in all of Jujutsu Kaisen.
So...
Mahiko rubbed her chin and began to think.
She could copy Mechamaru's Heavenly Restriction. What about the Heavenly Tyrant's?
If she inscribed a pattern of "zero Cursed Energy in exchange for a supreme physical body" onto her soul...
Hm...
That probably wouldn't work... right?
She was a cursed spirit. A cursed spirit's very existence was Cursed Energy — no physical body, just Cursed Energy all the way down. Making a cursed spirit "zero Cursed Energy" was equivalent to making her cease to exist. Without Cursed Energy, a cursed spirit simply stopped being.
Hm... well... unless she could create a genuine physical body first.
With a real body as her vessel, attempting the zero-Cursed-Energy Heavenly Restriction might become possible. But she had no way to do that right now.
And she had no opportunity to study the Heavenly Tyrant's soul pattern up close, either. Toji Fushiguro was already dead, and Maki Zenin had yet to awaken.
But... that didn't mean the opportunity would never come.
During the Shibuya Incident, someone in the original story had summoned Toji Fushiguro's spirit through a ritual. If she could get close enough then...
And after that — once Maki Zenin awakened her own Heavenly Tyrant nature, she'd be another subject to observe.
No rush.
Something to revisit when the time came.
Mahiko set the idea aside for now.
She looked down — and her eyes lit up faintly.
Two figures had appeared at the school gate.
A boy with pink hair and a girl with long black hair, running side by side, sprinting through the entrance at full speed.
Yuji Itadori and Fushiguro Maki were back.
Mahiko swept her gaze toward the school.
The Cursed Energy fluctuations pulsing from inside the building had grown dense — dense enough that she could feel them clearly from this distance. Obviously, the two troublemakers from the occult research club had already broken the seal on Sukuna's finger.
Cursed spirits were being drawn in.
The plot of the original story had officially begun.
Mahiko propped her chin in her hand and watched Fushiguro Maki charge into the school building, the distant sounds of combat drifting back faintly.
"By the way——" She turned her head toward Kenjaku. "How can you be so sure your plan will actually work? Will that Yuji really go ahead and eat the finger?"
Before their trip to find Mechamaru, Kenjaku had already given her a little orientation on the basics of the jujutsu world. Among other things — that Satoru Gojo was the strongest, and under absolutely no circumstances was she to provoke him. And also that one part of Kenjaku's plan involved getting Yuji Itadori, Sukuna's designated vessel, to swallow the very first of Sukuna's fingers.
"Because the moment that child sees someone in danger, he will always take the risk to save them — without fail." Kenjaku smiled pleasantly. "To protect his classmates, he'll swallow that finger without a moment's hesitation."
As he spoke, Kenjaku raised a hand and made a casual gesture. Several misshapen cursed spirits rose up from the depths of his shadow, bubbling out of the darkness like gas from a tar pit.
"If one cursed spirit isn't enough to push them to the brink, I'll simply release a few more."
Mahiko looked at the cursed spirits pouring out of his shadow and let out a low, crooked smile.
Ah. So that's how it is.
No wonder the original Megumi got absolutely wrecked here. Kenjaku was pulling the strings behind the scenes the whole time.
With a thousand-year-old monster orchestrating the cursed spirits from the shadows, the fact that the original Megumi had been strung up and spun around like a top made complete sense. Mahiko wasn't even slightly surprised.
____
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