A week had passed since Kagami Rei's disappearance. Rumors of his apparent death spread quickly among neighbors and classmates. In the hallways of the school where he had studied, it was the hottest topic of the moment.
"My dad says he went crazy and burned down his own apartment," said a girl walking with her group of friends. One of the boys commented with some discomfort: "I know he was in our class, but... did anyone ever actually talk to him?" The group fell silent.
Kagami Rei had been an extremely introverted person. People had started to distance themselves from him ever since his father was institutionalized — some because of the rumors that the madness was hereditary, others simply because they had their own things going on and didn't care enough. Kagami Rei was just one more person in a world that moved on without him.
Elsewhere in Tokyo, a report reached Yaga Masamichi's office. An apartment had burned down in the city and there were traces of cursed energy at the scene. It was unclear whether a curse had caused the fire — there was nothing salvageable in the small apartment — but the threat was estimated to be approaching first grade.
The mission was assigned to Fushiguro Megumi. Although he was barely a second-grade sorcerer, his enormous potential made him a candidate for special grade, with a technique that rivaled even the strongest. Gojo Satoru would accompany him as a supervisor in case anything went wrong. It was nothing more than a field test for the boy.
It was on one of the quietest nights of the year that Rei made his way to an abandoned hospital on the outskirts of the city.
Since the incident with his father, he had been busy. Not in the way normal people are busy — no job, no school, no place to report to — but in a more specific and considerably more dangerous way.
He needed to know what was real. His father's books described a complete system: cursed energy, curses, sorcerers, techniques, hierarchies. Rei had spent the past few days verifying every point on that list as though it were a school assignment, with the same methodical and slightly obsessive energy he put into anything that mattered to him.
Cursed energy was real — he already knew that beyond any doubt. Curses too. He had been hunting them through the streets of Tokyo, starting with the weakest ones, mentally noting every detail that matched what he had read. So far the percentage was uncomfortably high.
He had gotten rid of the books. He couldn't risk keeping them — with beings like Kenjaku roaming freely, storing information about the sorcery world on paper was an invitation to trouble.
One thing remained to be verified: whether he could deploy a curtain.
Standing in front of the hospital entrance, before climbing over the fence, Rei raised his hand and recited quietly: "Emerge from the darkness, blacker than darkness itself. Purify that which is impure."
The sky turned black.
"Huh." Rei looked up with a satisfied expression. "It works." He mentally crossed another point off the list and climbed over the fence.
The abandoned hospital was well known in the area for the legends surrounding it — ghost patients, nocturnal crying, the kind of things normal people attribute to the imagination and that Rei now knew perfectly well were not. The concentration of cursed energy in the place was the highest he had felt so far, dense and heavy like humidity before a storm.
The curses appeared almost immediately. Three grade-three ones, crawling out of the shadows on the first floor with that vague and unpleasant shape that Rei still hadn't quite gotten used to seeing.
"Seriously," he muttered to no one, looking at them with an expression somewhere between disgust and resignation. "Can't you be a little less ugly?"
He scratched his cheek. "Just a little."
The curses, as expected, did not respond.
Rei sighed. He reinforced his body with cursed energy, took a step forward — and simply wasn't there. Maybe disappear wasn't the right word. It was more accurate to say that Rei had never been where the curses expected him to be.
He appeared beside the largest one in the group. His fist, imbued with cursed energy, hit it like a truck, sending it crashing into the wall where it shattered and died. The other two didn't fare much better.
"I guess that girl with the glasses was right," Rei commented quietly, remembering Maki from his father's books. Weak curses always traveled in groups. Verified.
The night continued like that. The curses were numerous but irrelevant — Rei dispatched them floor by floor with the same calm, slightly distracted energy he might have used to tidy his room. He reinforced his body with more energy than he probably needed, making up for his lack of technique with sheer quantity, and somewhere around the third floor he started making quiet comments to the curses before exorcising them.
"Why do you have to be so ugly?" he said to a particularly large one in the fourth floor hallway. The curse didn't survive long enough to respond.
The fourth floor was empty. Nothing. Rei looked around for a moment, mildly disappointed, and the curtain dissolved.
To his disappointment, the concentration of cursed energy in the place was due to accumulation rather than the power of the curses. Interesting from an academic standpoint. Irrelevant from any other. He was about to leave when a voice resonated behind him.
"Hey, hey, hey." It sounded genuinely impressed, like a kid who had just seen a magic trick. "Did you seriously clear this whole hospital by yourself?"
Rei spun around immediately. There was no one there.
"Over here."
He appeared at his side out of nowhere — tall, white hair, a blindfold over his eyes, and a bag of candy in his hand as though he had just walked out of a convenience store. Rei instinctively took a step back.
"Whoa, whoa." Gojo raised his free hand in a gesture of peace, though the smile on his face had nothing peaceful about it. He reached into the bag and pulled out a piece of candy without taking his attention off Rei, chewing with complete calm.
Rei said nothing. He looked at him. Really looked — the white hair, the blindfold, that posture of someone who had never in his life seriously considered the possibility of losing. His brain was processing several things at once and none of them were coming out in order.
Gojo Satoru. He said it to himself mentally, as though putting a name to it would make it more manageable. It didn't work. If Gojo Satoru was real — if he was standing in front of him in an abandoned hospital eating candy at midnight — then everything else was real too. The books. The curses. Kenjaku. Sukuna. All of it.
His father had never been mad.
Gojo, for his part, stayed quiet for a moment. Rei's energy was insane — he probably hadn't seen anyone with that much energy since Yuta, and whether consciously or unconsciously Rei was constantly releasing it, uncontrolled, like a tap someone had left running and never thought to close.
He looked him up and down with more attention than his casual expression suggested. No registration. No clan. No apparent training. And yet he had cleared an entire hospital alone, deployed a curtain without anyone teaching him, and was standing in front of him without running away.
Interesting. Very interesting.
"Hey." Gojo gave the bag of candy a small shake in front of Rei. "You want one?"
Rei blinked. Of all the things he had expected Gojo Satoru to say, that wasn't on the list. "No."
"Good, I wasn't going to give you one anyway." He pulled out another without missing a beat. "How long have you been doing this alone?"
Rei took a moment to answer. Not because he didn't know — but because he wasn't sure how much he wanted to say. "A week."
Gojo looked at him. "A week." It wasn't a question.
"Approximately."
Silence. Gojo chewed his candy with a thoughtful expression, looking at Rei with an attention that was uncomfortable precisely because it looked like no attention at all. Then he smiled — that specific smile that Rei already didn't like, though he couldn't have explained why.
"Do you know what Tokyo Jujutsu High is?"
Rei looked at him. "No." He lied without missing a beat. At that moment he had no way to explain how he knew what he knew — whether because Gojo didn't care or because Rei was genuinely good at lying, Gojo didn't question it.
"It's a school." Gojo said it as though it were the most obvious thing in the world, tucking the candy into his cheek. "For sorcerers. We train people with cursed energy so they don't die doing exactly what you just did." A pause. "Or at least so they take longer to die."
Rei processed that. "Ah."
"You should come."
Silence.
Rei looked at him. Gojo looked back, with that smile that suggested he already knew exactly how this conversation was going to end. And the truth was that Rei didn't have much of an argument against it — he had no apartment, no family, no school, and had spent a week hunting curses alone in Tokyo without really knowing what he was doing. The list of reasons to say no was considerably shorter than the list of reasons to say yes.
"When do I start?" asked Rei.
Gojo's smile widened. "Right now."
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Note: This chapter might be a little cliché — turns out someone had no idea how to include their character in Jujutsu High and ended up doing the same thing as most stories. (That someone is me.) ('''' •᷄ ᴗ •᷅ )