Robb Stark was a kind boy, with honest eyes and an open heart, but to Gojo’s gaze, he radiated something deeper — a faint, steady pulse of cursed energy. Not just Robb. All of the Stark bloodline carried it, like an echo of what could have been a powerful sorcerer clan. In his old life, Gojo had known what that meant: an inherited technique, generations of discipline, bloodlines woven for strength and legacy. But here… no one knew how to use it. The cursed energy bled out into the air like smoke from a dying fire, wasted, untapped, dispersing into the earth and sky.

  It made no sense.

  Even more illogical — no cursed spirits. In his world, even the smallest fragments of cursed energy could birth something grotesque. Here, with how saturated Winterfell was, spirits should have swarmed this place like maggots to rot. But there was nothing. The oppressive air was thick with old curses and stagnant power, but no shape, no will, no manifestation.

  Gojo’s thoughts kept circling back to the weirwood.

  The pale tree, its face forever carved in sorrow, bled cursed energy like a wound that would never close. And when Ned Stark passed judgement on deserters, the blood that ran from their necks fed the roots, soaking into the earth with a quiet, hungry pulse. Gojo could feel it — blood carried cursed energy. Sir Arthur Dayne’s death, deliberate and purposeful, had been no different. That blood had given him life.

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  The North called the weirwoods sacred, binding themselves to it with prayers and ancient oaths. But Gojo had seen this before. In Japan’s darkest ages, cursed objects and spirits were worshipped as gods. They promised protection, demanded loyalty — and sacrifice. Sukuna, too, had been a god once, a king of curses crowned in blood and fear.

  But the weirwood gave nothing in return.

  No miracles, no boons, no blessings. Only an unseen hunger that drank the blood of the condemned. Gojo suspected it was no god, but something older, a relic of a darker time when people bartered with monsters. The way the cursed energy gathered in the tree and seeped into the earth but never to the people — it was deliberate. The tree wasn’t a vessel of faith. It was a glutton.

  Then one day, Gojo felt it.

  A ripple.

  A flicker of awareness through the cursed energy network surrounding Winterfell. As though something was watching — through the tree. Not the tree itself, but something that reached through it like a hand inside a puppet. The fluctuation was subtle, but unmistakable. Gojo had spent a lifetime reading the flow of cursed energy, and this was surveillance, not worship.

  It wasn’t hard to guess its purpose. Blood sacrifice, public execution, regular feedings. A network of trees connected like a living, breathing system of eyes, stretching from the Wall to the South, old as the First Men.

  Gojo realized then that burning it wouldn’t just be an act of destruction. It would be an act of war.

  The North’s old gods, their sacred rituals — this tree was a keystone in a larger, older system of control. It would need to be dealt with discreetly, without drawing the ire of men bound by faith and fear.

  Gojo resolved, in that moment of flickering cursed light, to find a way to sever its root — not just the tree, but what lay behind it.