Jujutsu Kaisen: Tragedy Life Simulator-Chapter 111 - A Long, Long Nightmare [bonus]
Hayase took Gojo’s half-pissed, half-deflated jab about handing over the prodigy title without reacting at all. He just gave a small shrug and answered.
"Phantom Night Parade lets me force-copy this stuff, sure. But reality’s not that kind. Without your Six Eyes to handle the processing, my brain can’t keep up. And my body doesn’t have enough cursed energy to support that kind of stupid combat in a real fight. That small Purple just now was basically my ceiling."
To Geto, it sounded like theory.
To Gojo, still trying to come down from the shock, it landed more like a sedative.
Because the Six Eyes were telling him Hayase wasn’t lying.
After forcing out Hollow Technique: Purple, Hayase’s cursed energy had almost bottomed out. Even the residual cursed energy bleeding off him had gone thin and weak.
So that was the price.
If you brute-forced somebody else’s technique way past your own specs, it chewed you up for it.
That was enough for Gojo’s bruised ego to get back on its feet.
Tch. So what if you’ve seen the blueprint? Without these eyes, you’re just some guy holding a design with no factory to build the damn thing.
Now that the prickly white cat had calmed down a little, Hayase turned to Geto, who was standing there with a thoughtful crease between his brows.
"Geto, can I borrow two cursed spirits? Nothing strong. Grade 4 Flyheads are fine."
Geto’s eyes narrowed.
He looked at Hayase’s face, read the calm there, and immediately got a bad feeling about where this was going. Logic said the next few minutes were about to get ridiculous. Curiosity stepped on logic’s throat. Hayase clearly wanted to demonstrate something related to Cursed Spirit Manipulation, and Geto wanted to see it more than he wanted to be careful.
So he didn’t hesitate.
He raised a hand. A strand of dark cursed energy spilled from his fingertip, and two ugly Grade 4 Flyheads appeared with those low, grating shrieks. The moment they manifested, Geto cut the technique link and released them from his control.
Hayase took a slow breath.
Inside him, Phantom Night Parade shifted gears smoothly, locking onto the structure of Cursed Spirit Manipulation and spinning up a copy.
With both Special Grades watching, he raised one palm.
An all-too-familiar pull burst out of it.
The two Flyheads, barely free and still buzzing around at random, got yanked in at once. The force crushed them together, kneading and compressing them until they turned into a single black sphere of cursed spirit matter, radiating a sickening aura.
Hayase’s expression didn’t change. He tossed the sphere into his mouth and swallowed.
His throat bobbed once.
Yep. Same awful taste. Like licking a rag somebody used to wipe up vomit.
He kept that complaint to himself.
Gojo and Geto both understood what they’d just seen. It was spirit absorption, plain and simple.
But while Hayase swallowed, something weird happened to Gojo’s face.
The Six Eyes had connected a few dots nobody should ever want connected.
Those two spirits had already been absorbed once by Geto, using the exact same swallowing method. Then Geto spat them back out into the world. Now Hayase had balled them up and swallowed them again.
So what was that, exactly?
An indirect kiss?
Or worse, eating something somebody else had already... thrown back up?
The image hit Gojo right in the gut. His whole tall frame twitched, then shuddered hard, one full-body recoil after another. His face twisted in naked disgust.
Hayase ignored whatever cursed movie was playing inside Gojo’s head.
After absorbing the spirits, he released them again above his open palm.
The next second made both of them focus.
The two low-grade spirits didn’t attack. They didn’t drift there either.
A tiny vortex of cursed energy, too small for normal eyes to catch, formed above Hayase’s palm and locked onto them. The Flyheads screamed. Their twisted little bodies stretched under the pull, warped, and thinned out like black taffy. Then they spun together like twin currents of filthy water, fusing into a fast-turning sphere of pitch-dark energy. It pulsed with such dense cursed energy that the surrounding air visibly distorted.
They were Grade 4 trash.
The weakest of the weak.
And yet the cursed energy at the center of that vortex had no business being that refined.
Hayase held the unstable balance in his palm and looked up.
"I know neither of you really bought the dream explanation. But the proof’s right here. Put simply, because my technique analyzes things absolutely, at this point... I may understand and have mastered your Innate Techniques more deeply than either of you has."
Geto stared at the spinning black vortex in Hayase’s hand.
The easy smile he wore by habit was gone. What replaced it was sharp enough to feel almost grim.
As the only person alive with Cursed Spirit Manipulation, he knew exactly what he was seeing.
This wasn’t basic spirit control.
This was destroying a cursed spirit’s original form, grinding it down, purifying it, and forcing it into a new whole. A grotesque, advanced application that was so close to destructive alchemy it barely sounded real.
"What... what technique is that?!" he asked, and the words came out rough with shock.
Hayase looked at the shifting vortex in his hand and answered in that same flat, steady voice.
"It’s the ultimate expression of Cursed Spirit Manipulation. A prototype of Maximum: Uzumaki. Merge all absorbed spirits into one mass, extract ultra-high-density cursed energy, then fire it straight at the target."
He let out a small sigh and closed his fist. The miniature vortex shattered instantly.
"But like I told Gojo, I can’t hold Cursed Spirit Manipulation forever. It’s a technique built on years of collecting spirits through constant absorption. And Limitless isn’t my road either. Even if I can use it, I don’t have the Six Eyes."
His gaze flicked to the system interface only he could see, where Dimensional Reduction Analysis was already loaded.
"So here’s what I’m proposing. The advanced knowledge and development paths for your techniques, the stuff I’m carrying around in my head right now, things that are way beyond where either of you stands at the moment... I’ll hand all of it over. No holding back. To the people who actually need it and can push it the farthest."
The wind over the training field seemed to still.
Gojo and Geto both went quiet, staring at the dark-haired boy in front of them with unreadable expressions.
On paper, the offer sounded ridiculous.
The weak one. The kid they’d casually sorted into the "needs protection" category. That guy was going to teach the two monsters everyone called the strongest of their generation?
But that same weak one had just spent fifteen straight minutes smashing their pride to pieces on their own turf, and he had receipts for every bit of it.
Neither of them was stupid enough to let ego blind them completely.
Under all that talent and arrogance, both their minds were already sprinting ahead.
If they accepted, if somebody could stand in front of them and show perfect execution like a living answer sheet, how much faster would they improve?
They both reached the same answer.
At the bare minimum, twice as fast.
Geto was quicker to let go of pride than Gojo, who was still busy wrestling his prodigy complex into submission. So Geto asked the real question first, locking eyes with Hayase.
"This is basically a gift dropped in our laps. But... why? What do you get out of it?"
Why, huh...
Hayase tipped his head back a little and repeated the word under his breath. Then his eyes drifted up to the blazing noon sun.
The light stabbed into his retinas hard enough to draw a sting to the corners of his eyes, but he didn’t look away.
Under that harsh brightness, memories from the simulation flickered through his mind like old film.
When he finally spoke, the words came slowly.
"I had a nightmare. A long... long nightmare."
His voice dropped until it was barely more than a whisper, but the weight in it didn’t belong to a teenager. He could’ve been answering Geto. He could’ve just been talking to himself.
"I thought... if I could make you both stronger sooner... maybe that nightmare won’t happen again."
At least if they start growing now, the Star Plasma Vessel incident won’t end the same way. Geto won’t break after Riko Amanai dies.
And even without this, I still have plans for Toji Zenin. One way or another, history’s not repeating itself.
Geto caught it immediately.
That tone, that exhaustion buried deep in Hayase’s voice, it belonged to somebody decades older than the boy standing there.
Under the sun, Hayase looked unfamiliar. Like there was an ancient, worn-out soul crammed inside a young body. Like he’d watched too many people die and gotten ground down by it all. Nothing about him matched the quiet transfer student who’d been sitting in class two days ago.
Those eyes of his, reddened slightly by the glare but still steady, tugged at something in Geto’s chest.
For the first time, he seriously reconsidered the dream story.
That sadness, that feeling of somebody carrying the world’s weight on his back, it didn’t look fake.
Geto drew in a long breath, let the last of his guard down, and accepted.
From any angle, this deal was all upside for him.
Gojo, meanwhile, had frozen up like somebody pulled the plug on him.
He didn’t say a word for a long time. Just stood there staring at the ground, face unreadable.
Hayase watched him stew for a bit, then turned slightly and added one last line, a trace of mischief sneaking into his voice.
"Oh, right, Gojo. For the record, I do have complete information on your Domain Expansion, Unlimited Void. But unfortunately, without your Six Eyes, that’s the one thing I can’t demonstrate for you in person."
Whatever knot had been holding Gojo in place snapped instantly.
His head jerked up. His sunglasses had slid halfway down his nose at some point and he’d forgotten to fix them. His pale blue eyes went wide as he repeated the words under his breath.
"Domain Expansion... Unlimited Void...?!"
It hit him like a truck.
A concept so heavy, so packed with meaning, that he, the rightful owner of that future technique, had never once thought of it. Never even heard the phrase.
His brain stalled out on the spot.
Fifteen full seconds passed with him just staring blankly before the meaning finally clicked.
My Domain. He’s talking about my Domain.
Gojo broke.
He grabbed his head with both hands and raked his fingers through his white hair until it looked like a bird had tried nesting in it. Hayase had dropped one revelation after another on him so fast that his nervous system had basically gone numb.
After a long, painful silence, he managed to lift one shaking finger toward Hayase.
"You... you bastard..."
He didn’t get to finish.
A voice full of pure authority and absolute fury exploded out from the main building dozens of meters away.
"GO... JO... SA... TO... RU!!!"
Masamichi Yaga’s huge frame filled the corridor. His black sunglasses gleamed. One thick arm jabbed toward the sky behind the school, where the violet scar left by Purple still hadn’t fully faded.
"You lawless little degenerate! How many times have I told you? No testing dangerous techniques on campus grounds! Are you trying to blow the barrier and my office into orbit?!"
The roar hit Gojo like ice water straight to the spine.
All that shock inside him curdled instantly into injured outrage.
He spun around, flung one arm out, and pointed at the picture of innocence standing next to him with absolutely zero hesitation.
"The hell?! Yaga-sensei, are you blind?! It wasn’t me this time! It was Hayase! This bastard, Touma Hayase, did it!"
Even from this distance, Gojo could see it clearly.
The slow, monumental eye-roll happening behind Yaga’s dark glasses.
It practically radiated across the field.
The meaning couldn’t have been clearer.
Do I look stupid to you? Who else in this school could possibly cause that kind of damage besides you?
