Domain Expansion.
It is the highest form of cursed technique. Within the domain, the caster's jujutsu is granted the property of a guaranteed hit.
Take Sukuna's domain: Malevolent Shrine.
As Hanami's cursed energy spread, the world remade itself. The yellowed, dead, lifeless trees all around them came back—bursting into new leaves, unfolding flowers, the wind stirring the leaves into a soft, lapping whisper. Nature, murmuring. Ten thousand trees grew in the breeze. Green rolled out across the whole world.
"Domain Expansion. Shimmering Forest of Myriad Phenomena."
Nanami Kira stripped the watch from his wrist and pocketed it. He pulled his necktie free and wound it, turn by turn, around his right hand.
"I've got ten minutes of overtime left. Survive those ten minutes and you win, cursed spirit."
Boom.
He vanished from where he stood. Black cursed energy flashed briefly in the air behind him, and every branch along the path he took was sliced clean through. Kira spun through several turns in midair—right leg whipping high.
Hanami couldn't dodge. She threw up her forearm to block. At a single precise point on that arm, all of Kira's cursed energy detonated at once, shearing the limb neatly into two halves.
In the next instant, Killer Queen was right up against Hanami's face, its hand reaching for her cheek.
Vines whipped up and coiled around Killer Queen's arm. Fists flickered through afterimages—explosions bloomed, smoke rolled outward. Hanami staggered back several steps. On her left arm, a deep-red flower opened, petal by petal.
Nested inside it, a brown, unblinking eye. Cursed energy began to gather there—immense, horrifying cursed energy drawn from the life of an entire forest.
"Flower Offering!"
A torrent of cursed energy poured out, a silver waterfall hurled straight down, bearing down on Killer Queen.
But the moment before impact, the torrent turned—as cleanly as a stream folding around a stone in a creek bed. It curved in midair, grazed the tip of Killer Queen's nose, and slammed instead into the body standing just behind it.
Into Nanami Kira.
Inside the domain, every technique was guaranteed to land. Hanami's target had never been Killer Queen—it had been the user standing right behind it all along.
Tch. Kira clicked his tongue. You couldn't dodge inside a domain. He called all the cursed energy in his body into his palm, pulled it back, locked his eyes onto a single point along the torrent—
"Collapse."
Black fire erupted along his hand.
Black Flash. Fourfold.
The torrent of cursed energy was split down the middle, cleaved apart—as clean as a blade cutting water. Even halved, it didn't lose its force; the two halves bored through the forest behind him, carving twin trenches with a full two-meter radius through the treeline.
Dust and flame surged into the air. When the smoke cleared and the fire died, Kira's entire arm was ruined, the bone inside it ground to splinters by the cursed energy, the muscle and vessels pulped.
He didn't seem to notice.
Reverse Cursed Technique.
Black cursed energy welled up, temporarily clamping down on the damage in his left arm, suppressing the chaotic energy rioting inside the tissue.
Kira looked at Hanami, his face still level.
"Eight minutes."
And his figure blinked out of the spot.
Hanami flung up her good arm. From the ground, one enormous vine after another boiled upward—twisting, coiling, like green serpents the size of old-growth timbers. They laced together in front of her, a living wall.
Boom.
At the tip of the topmost vine, a faint pink flicker. The explosion began to spread down from that single point, one segment at a time, and each terrible vine burst apart from the top, splitting into shards, the pink light boring down through them from crown to root—shattering every inch of its path.
Like a lightning bolt driven out of the sky into the ground. Unstoppable. Impossible to underestimate. It struck like a hawk, a meteor, an executioner's axe—and slammed down onto Hanami's shoulder.
The trail of pink light, held back along the way—exploded.
Transparent droplets of rain. Green of the branches. Yellow of the earth. Red of the blood—as if a fireworks festival had been set off in the middle of a rainstorm. Colors mixed mid-air, hurled outward by the blast.
And weaving through every color, the signature of black cursed energy. Black Flash. The trailing afterimage of Kira's fingertips.
Down across Hanami's shoulder, across her chest—half her left shoulder came away. The black light turned, swept across her arm—her left arm pinwheeled into the sky, the Flower Offering scattering with it. Then her left leg. Right arm. Shoulder blade. Hunk after hunk of flesh drifting on the wind.
Kira angled his body, left foot withdrawing, pulled every last drop of cursed energy in him into the one good arm, squeezed it into a fist, let out a soft breath.
Hoo—
And buried the fist into Hanami's chest.
Every color, every drop of rain—everything stopped. Time seemed to reverse. The world fell down to black and white again.
Boom. Boom. Boom.
Hanami was hurled backward, blood unfolding across her whole body, like a shell coming out of a gun barrel—tearing up shockwaves, tearing up sonic booms, punching clean through one great tree, then another.
"Six minutes."
Kira stepped over her trail of blood, his ruined arm hanging slack, and walked out through the hole in the last tree.
Hanami tilted her head up from where she lay on the ground and looked at him.
"You are the one who won't survive six minutes."
Kira's pupils trembled. He glanced, with something like surprise, down at his own left arm. The Reverse Cursed Technique wasn't holding. However much cursed energy he poured into the wound, the wound swallowed it—bottomless, greedy, eating up every drop of cursed energy in his body.
"My domain, Shimmering Forest of Myriad Phenomena—its rule is that every living thing covered by the domain is, conceptually, reclassified as a plant."
"Or put another way: every life inside this domain becomes, in the broader sense, a part of this single great tree—Shimmering Forest of Myriad Phenomena."
Hanami staggered to her feet. The wounds across her body were closing, slowly. The flesh at her shoulder was regrowing. A fresh red bud was pushing up through the meat.
Monstrous cursed energy began to gather again—gathering at that bud at her shoulder. Black cursed energy, this time.
Kira's cursed energy.
"And my technique can absorb the cursed energy and lifeforce inside any plant. As you can see."
Domain revealed. Effect amplified.
Kira's whole body was withering.
Every thread of lifeforce in him ran down his left arm and poured into Hanami, pooling in the flower opening on her shoulder. The horrifying torrent re-materialized. And within the domain, he had no room to dodge.
"Nanami Kira. You could have stood at the summit of all cursed spirits. You could have led an age. After death, you could have become a sage."
Hanami's voice rasped through his skull.
"Perhaps even surpassed Sukuna. Such a shame."
"If you mean that ugly thing, I've already won. Cursed spirit."
"Five minutes."
Kira planted his good hand flat on the ground. A pink afterimage flickered, and was gone.
Crack.
The earth split, fissures lancing outward in every direction. Thick taproots erupted and burst apart one after another.
Kira wasn't trying to blow up the planet from a handstand. He was destroying the network of roots Hanami had quietly crept through the soil under his feet.
Cursed energy doesn't appear out of nowhere. It wasn't materializing on Hanami's body from thin air. There had to be a medium.
By the principles of jujutsu, the form of a living thing was usually tied to the meaning of its cursed technique.
In a plant, roots and stems shuttled nutrients and oxygen. They carried the circulation.
And the roots of the forest beneath this whole plot of land—those were the instruments stealing his cursed energy.
The moment his feet touched the earth, his cursed energy leaked out, flowed into the roots, ran through them up into Hanami.
This was the same reason Hanami had pressed her hand to the ground the first time she drained the forest—just as Kira had done now.
The cursed-energy boost gathering at Hanami's shoulder began to drop off. She felt the wrongness of it at once, a sudden pressing urgency. No time left to stockpile more. She hurled everything she had at Kira in a single roaring blast.
"You made the same mistake as that ugly thing. You only dragged me into the domain."
A crater opened in Hanami's shoulder. Along with the arm shredded to pieces, the open flower went with it.
In the next instant Kira was in front of her. Black Flash was gathering in his palm—he pressed it to her face.
Boom.
Hanami's head popped like a crushed fruit.
Kira flicked the blood from his hand and looked down at the body slumped against the dirt. Blood was spreading in a wide pool.
Eight minutes.
"Become a sage in death."
"Humans are stupid. They'll wreck nature until the end of time. But their hands are beautiful. So—let's not destroy humanity."
The domain fractured and came apart. Piece by piece. And the rain came pouring down on Kira's shoulders.
He fished the watch out of his shirt lining and checked it. Two minutes remaining. He'd estimated right.
Not far away, Hoshino Ei was pushing herself upright. The wound where the Arrow had pierced her was no longer bleeding. She lifted her face, looking up at him.
Kira looked down at her.
The rain hung in a curtain between them, fine and thin.
Her lips parted. She began to speak, softly.