Chapter 23

  According to the clan servants, my sisters had had their throats slit, and then tossed in a crematorium furnace made of clay. They had then been fired and cremated, their remains tossed into the gorge.

  True story.

  Long story short: I couldn’t recover their bodies. They were as gone as gone could be, which…

  Somehow, that knowledge made my stay inside the kodoku jar even more unbearable.

  Just knowing that I had been the sole survivor of a pack of infants had disturbed me for a very long time. On a deep, albeit abstract level. Mostly, my feelings revolved around how evil the Hibana were. That was my reaction to this fact.

  Having met these sisters of mine on what looked like the precipice between this world and the hereafter—which was still such a mindboggling concept to consider that I could do nothing but refuse to consider it for fear that it would distract me—made this pain far, far worse.

  I could put faces and ‘names’ to the girls that had been killed.

  And they weren’t even real names. They named themselves after numbers.

  All they knew was borne from what they had experienced through me.

  My heart hurt worse than the poison, and I hugged Michiko for dear life as I fought to compose myself for what was to come.

  I needed to speak with them again.

  000

  “This is dangerous, little sister!” One said to me. “If you keep meeting us here, you’ll stay here forever!”

  “I know,” I said to them all. “So let’s make it quick. You said you needed your bodies. Because?”

  “Bodies and souls are… kinda the same,” One said, tilting her head. I didn’t wait for her to explain herself. I understood. And I largely knew that to be true. The body and the soul were two sides of the same coin.

  “So you have five bodies!” Four laughed. “Hahah! Five has Five bodies!”

  Three hit Four softly on her arm. “It’s not funny.”

  “But your bodies are gone,” I said. “So how—“

  “Leave, little sister,” One urged me. “And don’t ever come back!”

  “Ever? Won’t that make her immortal?” Two whispered.

  “I’m fine with that,” Three said. “Become immortal, little sister. That’s really cool.”

  “As long as you don’t die of old age, I’m fine,” Four said. “Because that’s super lame and boring. And we look like you every time you age, so you need to make sure to die while you’re still pretty, or I’ll kill you again.”

  “Go!” One roared.

  Michiko was the one to draw me back from the brink.

  Yes, Michiko, who had learned to somehow grab hold of my spirit—the vessel for my cursed energy, not my soul. Those were two different things. The spirit consisted of the core of cursed energy and all the passages around the body, while the soul was the physical body. That, too, had a bridge to the spirit. They were connected, though not the same.

  Somehow, in some way that I didn’t know how to replicate, I had learned to make room for her inside of me, creating an alcove in which she could reside. Not just reside, but also interact with the rest of me. Like urging me to hold onto life during my tightrope walks between life and death.

  I suspected that Michiko had done the heavy lifting to achieve this connection. Her desire to never let me down had allowed her to perform a feat of jujutsu that I had never even heard of.

  Love could conquer anything.

  My mind went back to what my sisters had told me.

  Five bodies.

  Four was right.

  I had five bodies, perfectly overlapping, down to every last cell.

  This was the answer. All along!

  Five bodies! Five times the capacity for cursed energy! Five times the potential!

  That was only assuming that it was additive. What if it was exponential?

  This was groundbreaking.

  My only problem, however, was the matter of how I even manipulated this extra soul.

  000

  As many women throughout history often found when it came to a variety of situations, poison was the answer.

  It took me three months until I managed to change the concentration of cursed poison in my jar to optimal levels, moving away from a substance that degraded the physical, to a substance that… softened the spiritual.

  The soul.

  It was, by far, the single most reckless thing I had ever done to myself since I put myself in the Bath. I could heal a damaged soul.

  What I couldn’t heal was a soul twisted into a pretzel, or a soul melted into a puddle. That would become my de-facto body in its prime state.

  I used cursed energy, and my cursed technique, Arthropodal Aspect, in order to guide my soul along an optimal path. My control was excellent, but I was unused to dealing with my own soul in this capacity.

  Therefore, I worked with painstaking slowness. I measured five-thousand times just to cut once, and then moved on.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Each time, I made sure to keep my eye on the prize: a transcendently powerful body, perfectly suited for cursed energy, and jujutsu.

  000

  Agony.

  Upon first entering the Bath, I thought that was the true meaning of agony.

  It turns out that it was… for an organism built to my specifications.

  But what if I tweaked those specifications? What if I altered the blueprint of nature in such a way that I could feel more pain?

  But what would be the benefit of that?

  Why would anyone do such a thing to themselves?

  I couldn’t think of a single reason why anyone would do such a thing to themselves… on purpose, of course.

  A fraction of a fraction of my rapidly fraying psyche was all that was left of a sane mind. That fraction was enough to still pilot my Juchū, and keep myself on track.

  The rest of me, however?

  Hell itself would have been a relief.

  I had to admit, however, that this was… progress. Failure was progress.

  It turned out that when you put yourself to the task of doing something as all-encompassingly complex as changing your own soul, you were bound to fuck up on your first try. I had known that this day would come. And I had dreaded it. Run from it.

  But now it was time to learn from my mistake.

  And hope, beyond hope, that I could reverse this mistake.

  000

  “Hahah, you look ugly!”

  Four pointed at me and laughed.

  “You can’t keep visiting us, sister,” One said. Always the responsible one, One was.

  “You know I’m not from this world, right?” I asked. “I… I’m an adult woman. From another world.”

  “Yeah, that makes sense,” Four said.

  “I always knew you were old,” Three muttered. “You talk and act old.”

  “Honestly, it’s good that you lived,” Two said. “We wouldn’t have lasted very long. The whole place is awful. I’m glad you killed them all. Also glad daddy died.”

  “Yeah!” Four shouted, jumping up and down. “And we’ll still go to heaven! Isn’t that so cool?!”

  “But Five will have to die first,” Two said. “That’s not cool.”

  “You need to leave,” One said to me. “But I want you to know that we love you. All the time. And we’re happy you killed them. That was fun to watch. Thanks. But leave, okay?”

  It wasn’t fair. “It’s not fair that I have to do this alone,” I said.

  “But you’re not alone,” One said to me. “You have our souls.”

  “Onion soul!” Four giggled.

  “But if it ever feels difficult,” Two said. “Then you need to remember that we’re always watching and always cheering you on.”

  Always watching.

  “Are there times where you… can’t watch?”

  “No time for questions!” One shouted.

  No. No. I held up a hand. “I need to know, actually.”

  “We only watch when we don’t ‘feel’ like you’re doing something private,” Four said. “When you are, we can’t see. Okay, now, go.”

  For my own sanity, I just had to believe that to be true.

  000

  I had learned how to disable my pain receptors mere months into my Bath. Rather, I had learned how to keep my pain receptors unhealed and therefore incapable of transmitting agony into me. It didn’t take care of all of my agony. My antennae basically made up for the numbness of the rest of my body, and to disable it would require disabling vital parts of my brain.

  So really, escaping the agony was never an option!

  In fact, even if I managed to escape the physical agony, I would still have to contend with the spiritual agony!

  It was Agony Tuesday and every day was Agony Tuesday!

  Every day was Halloween!

  And in Halloween, ladies and gentlemen from beyond the veil—and my esteemed sisters watching from on high, cheering me on like a pack of bloodlusted gremlins who wanted nothing more than for me to act as their vessel for revenge against the mortal coil that so quickly rejected them—the pain was of the ghost!

  The unholy ghost!

  Sh, sh, sh, sh… hush, child. Suffer for their sins.

  Take to the skies. Take to the seas. Take to the earth and scour the land of sins. Eat the sins. Subsist off the sins.

  Curse that damned soul!

  Cram all the layers of that accursed onion soul into a ball and curse it.

  And then put it inside somewhere.

  Then it can pop in and out. In! Whoa! Out! Whoa! Shake it all about!

  I can be a little monstrous. As a treat.

  “Clan head…!” Iemon looked at me aghast through one of my sensory tendrils—one of my ambassador Juchū.

  I tilted my head at him. “What?”

  “You were… muttering,” Iemon said.

  “Ah. That would be from… what I’m doing,” I explained. “Something.”

  “Jujutsu Society has reached the end of their patience, Teira-sama. You must meet with them personally,” he said. “They’ve made their demand. If we cannot satisfy it, then our relationship will be doomed. Are you… are you capable?”

  “One month,” I said. Also, he looked different. He had way more gray in his hair than usual. Had time passed? “Also, how old am I? And… have I not been doing work? Have I been inactive? Remiss in my duties?”

  “What? No. Just… more difficult to communicate with than usual,” he explained. “I haven’t been able to have a coherent conversation with you in months, Teira-sama. This is… what are you doing?”

  “Something. To myself. But I’m… getting there. To it. The point. My age?”

  “Teira-sama…” he looked aghast. Then he winced. “Twelve. You turned twelve four months ago.”

  Ah. That was good. Then I wasn’t too big. I thought I had made myself too big too quickly, but I still looked twelve, when my soul was in ‘fist’ shape and not ‘hand’ shape. That was good.

  “Okay, one month,” I said. “Still gotta iron out the kinks. You’ll love it. Promise.”

  “Teira-sama…?”

  “Goodbye! And always remember…”

  “Remember what?”

  “Agony Tuesday. And every day is Halloween!”

  000

  For four long years, Hibana Teira had been entombed inside of her room. Iemon had, over time, discovered that one of the largest kodoku jars had gone missing since then.

  He hadn’t connected the dots until several more points of evidence had connected.

  A year ago, a pair of emissaries from the Jujutsu Society had insisted on visiting the Hibana compound. Teira had numbed their senses and transported them herself, but not before discarding their tracking devices, both Jujutsu-based and electronic.

  Then, they had tried to sneak past the many Juchū guarding Teira during her entombment, forcing her to have to physically harm them ‘for their own good’. Though it had rocked their relationship with Jujutsu Society, she had provided evidence that the place was extremely poisonous.

  Which…

  Iemon still couldn’t quite wrap his head around what all this implied. He had a theory, but it was idiotic enough that each time he considered it, he quirked his lips into a grin.

  Still, he waited in the clan court. For many years, this court had been overseen by a Juchū. Now, for the first time in many years, they would see her once again, in the flesh.

  Tap, tap, tap. The sound of her steps were the only thing that filled the air. Every servant, every newly trained curse expert, held their breaths as they watched her walk in, wearing a white kimono.

  The first few steps looked like she was just now learning how to walk.

  The subsequent steps were surer.

  The ones she took just as she came to a stop before Iemon gave her back the aura of surety that Hibana Teira had always possessed. Physically, at least.

  Spiritually? Her aura was almost overwhelming. Iemon didn’t even want to touch her. She prickled at his senses with an acerbic, irritating feeling akin to vinegar.

  No. Poison.

  And looking at her now, Iemon could only come to one accursed conclusion. “You were… in a kodoku jar?”

  “All this time,” she said. “It… took me a while to remember my actions. I’m glad I didn’t do something crazy. I slipped up quite a few times. I’m glad that didn’t cost anyone their lives or general wellbeing.”

  Iemon could barely think.

  …except to thank the heavens that she was at least coherent now. That was a good change from the recent past. She had barely been able to lead classes for a while now, necessitating that the most advanced curse experts under her tutelage take the lead.

  Thankfully, over the years, she had made a truly powerful force out of the teenagers. Many of them were Tiger grades as well—the same level that Iemon was, once upon a time.

  Well, they had actually surpassed Iemon. Still, they remained ‘Tiger-grade’ on account of Teira’s own draconic estimation of this power level.

  Still, Iemon’s mind had been wracked with doomsday scenarios should the situation not improve.

  Was… this… an improvement?

  “You… you can’t go like this.”

  She snorted. “I can. And I will. The more I recall, the more indignant I feel about the last few years. We have rescued hundreds of raw sorcerers from their predicaments. We have bribed members of the secret council. And then we bribed them again. And then again just to let them know that we can always bribe them again, that we can always help them, should they help us. And this is how they treat us. No. I tire of this charade. I will reveal myself now. I am a Special Grade sorcerer, and the world of Jujutsu will quake at my arrival.”

  “A-and Gojo Satoru?”

  She grinned.

  “What exactly do I have to fear from a twelve-year-old, Iemon-san?”