Jujutsu Kaisen: Tragedy Life Simulator-Chapter 114 - A Miracle, Ahead of Schedule

The whole thing moved way faster than Hayase had expected.

Maybe that was what Special Grade really meant.

About a month in, Geto was already done.

His instincts were ridiculous, and his cursed energy control was even more absurd. Once he understood the logic behind Maximum: Uzumaki, Hayase no longer had to keep draining himself every day just to swallow spirits and run live demos for him. At that point, all Geto needed was more spirits. He could take exorcism jobs, build up his stockpile, and spend the downtime practicing the finer points of compression on his own.

Gojo kept pace too, which was honestly offensive in its own way.

In that same short month, the Six Eyes had let him absorb Reverse Cursed Technique and Cursed Technique Reversal: Red almost completely. By the end of it, he could use either one in the middle of a fight without even thinking. Even Hollow Technique: Purple was down to the last stage, with Gojo personally testing output balance and trajectory control.

When it came to the tiny details of a technique, how much cursed energy to pour in, how fast, how precisely, a Six Eyes user and a guy brute-forcing things through repeated simulation were playing different games. Once a monster like Gojo had the right instructions, the rest was just cleanup.

So Hayase was finally free.

The life of a full-time sparring coach loosened its grip, and for the first time in a while, he had real chunks of time to himself. Which was good, because a pile of other work had been waiting for him this whole time.

First up was Cursed Corpse fabrication.

That was the whole reason he’d specifically asked to study under Yaga in the first place.

The problem was that over the last month, Hayase had spent almost all of his time, and most of his already pitiful cursed energy reserves, helping Gojo and Geto train. He never held anything back. Yaga, as his homeroom teacher, never said much about it, but he saw every bit of it.

So even though Hayase had produced basically nothing in Cursed Corpse studies during that stretch, Yaga never criticized him. In Yaga’s eyes, there was a limit to what a person could give. Hayase had already pushed well past his own. Falling behind in one area because of that was understandable.

Then one morning, Yaga woke up for no reason at all.

It was five in the morning. Still dark enough outside to feel wrong. The sky was a heavy slab of blue-black, and even the bugs and birds around campus hadn’t started up yet.

He threw a jacket over his shoulders and went for a walk.

That was when he noticed something off.

His personal Cursed Corpse workshop, a place that should have been shut tight and completely dark at this hour, had light leaking through the shutters.

Yaga slowed, a bad feeling crawling up his spine.

He approached without making a sound. When he looked through the window and saw the familiar figure bent over the workbench inside, the eyes behind his sunglasses widened on the spot.

Hayase.

The same kid Yaga had watched get wrung dry yesterday on the training grounds, running nonstop between Gojo and Geto, guiding high-intensity sparring until even his last scraps of cursed energy had been squeezed clean.

And now, at five in the morning, there he was again. Sitting alone on a cold wooden stool, holding a precision carving knife, doing incredibly delicate finishing work on a Cursed Corpse core.

The first thing Yaga felt wasn’t admiration.

It was horror.

He wasn’t horrified by the work ethic. He was horrified for Hayase’s body.

The boy had spent all day fighting, teaching, and burning through cursed energy, then apparently slept less than four hours before dragging himself back here to do work that demanded total focus and absurdly fine control.

Insane.

The word hit Yaga so hard it practically echoed in his skull.

Even monsters with advanced Reverse Cursed Technique, people who could patch their bodies back together on the fly, couldn’t live like this forever. Reverse Cursed Technique could deal with physical damage. It did absolutely nothing for a worn-out mind.

From the point of view of an adult, of a teacher, Hayase had already gone way past hardworking. Past dedicated. Past tireless.

This wasn’t discipline anymore.

This was self-destruction.

No normal teenager lived like this.

Anger and heartache twisted together in Yaga’s chest so fast it nearly made him sick. The moment he understood what he was looking at, he stopped hesitating.

He strode forward and slammed the workshop door open with one hard shove.

BANG.

The door crashed against the wall, the sound ripping through the predawn quiet like a gunshot.

Hayase didn’t react at all.

Not even a shoulder twitch.

He didn’t turn around. He didn’t pause. Under the effect of Divided Attention, his hands stayed steady as ever while the carving knife continued tracing its path over the core. Then he spoke in the same mild tone a person might use over breakfast.

"Yaga-sensei? You’re up early."

Yaga didn’t answer.

He crossed the room in two strides and planted himself in front of the workbench, his presence pressing down like a wall.

His gaze dropped to the half-finished core pulsing faintly in Hayase’s hands, then to the neatly organized tools, then to the thick pile of blueprints and discarded drafts spread across the table. One look was enough. This wasn’t something Hayase had started ten minutes ago.

Yaga took one heavy breath. When he finally spoke, his voice came out lower than Hayase had ever heard it.

"Fine. Then what about you? Why are you still here at this hour?"

Hayase kept polishing the core without missing a beat.

"Me? Mostly because once Satoru and Suguru wake up, they take over my whole day whether I want them to or not. So I checked the schedule. Early mornings and late nights are the only real gaps left while they’re asleep. I can’t let the Cursed Corpse work fall behind."

Behind the sunglasses, Yaga’s face went even harder.

Hayase had said it casually, but the meaning landed like a punch.

Early mornings and late nights.

So this wasn’t some one-time burst of inspiration. This had probably been the routine for the entire month. Every day. Every night. The kid had been living like a machine.

He’s lost it.

That was the only thought Yaga had left.

He’d always thought Gojo and Geto were the real problem children, the two disasters most likely to punch a hole in the sky and drag him into the paperwork afterward. But looking at Hayase now, sitting quietly under the desk lamp with that dead-steady posture and eerie breathing, Yaga realized this one had gone too far in the opposite direction.

Hayase was too composed. Way too composed.

Not for a first-year. Not for a teenager. Hell, not for most adults.

He didn’t look sixteen or seventeen. He looked like some monk who’d already spent a lifetime carrying something ugly and had long since stopped expecting rest.

And because Yaga could see that so clearly, the fear in his chest only got worse.

He was scared this kid was grinding himself down until there’d be nothing left. No room to breathe. No room to rest. No room to enjoy being alive, even a little.

For the first time since becoming a homeroom teacher, Yaga found himself sincerely wishing Hayase would act a bit more like Gojo and Geto.

A little reckless.

A little stupid.

If the boy caused some petty trouble around campus once in a while, Yaga would probably be relieved.

At least that would mean he was still living like a human teenager instead of some carefully maintained tool.

Yaga had never pried, but over the last few weeks he’d pieced together enough to feel the shape of it. Hayase was chasing something big. Or maybe carrying something so heavy it would’ve crushed anyone else flat.

Even so, this was too much.

"Enough!"

Yaga couldn’t take the atmosphere anymore. He shot a hand out and grabbed the wrist guiding the carving knife, fingers closing hard enough to send pain straight up Hayase’s arm.

"Stop, Hayase. Put it down." His voice shook at the edges despite the authority in it. "You’re going back to the dorm right now. What you need is sleep, not another hour of burning your own life away."

Hayase didn’t resist.

He calmly set the tools aside, turned on the stool, and looked up at Yaga through the glare of the desk lamp. Then he smiled, bright and harmless in a way that honestly made it worse.

"I’m fine, Yaga-sensei. Look at my eyes."

He even tilted his head left and right like he was showing off for inspection.

"See? No dark circles. My complexion’s fine too. Do I really look like someone on the verge of a breakdown?" He sounded almost playful. "And sensei, you’re the expert here. If I were actually exhausted to the limit, would I still be able to do work this precise?"

While speaking, he lifted the core he’d just finished polishing through one full phase and held it out.

The core was the heart of a Cursed Corpse.

Without one, dead materials like wool, leather, or wood were just shells. Yes, someone like Yaga could still move the shell around by externally feeding it cursed energy through Puppet Manipulation, but that meant splitting attention in combat and micromanaging every action. It was clumsy. Inefficient.

The quality of the core decided everything.

Over the past month, Yaga had watched Hayase show no visible results and naturally assumed the reason was simple. Learning Puppet Manipulation itself was one thing, but physically crafting a core was just manual work. It had nothing to do with Innate Techniques. Phantom Night Parade’s cheat-like replication couldn’t help here, so of course Hayase’s progress would drop to the level of an ordinary student.

That was what Yaga had believed.

Then, almost on reflex, he took the small sphere from Hayase’s hand.

It was only about half the size of a fist.

Yaga looked down.

And his brain nearly stopped.

His eyes sharpened instantly. Decades of experience in Cursed Corpse craftsmanship kicked in as he studied the surface, where impossibly fine cursed script circuitry had been engraved so densely it was hard to process at a glance.

His pupils shrank behind the sunglasses.

The hand holding the core started trembling.

What the hell is this?

This was nothing like he’d assumed. Hayase hadn’t been slow because he was bad with his hands.

From the first day he entered this workshop, he’d never been trying to build a basic core for some simple Cursed Corpse that swept floors or threw clumsy punches.

The sphere in Yaga’s palm carried a terrifying amount of information. Layer after layer of cursed energy circuitry had been woven together at a complexity that bordered on madness, and the craftsmanship was so clean it almost didn’t look handmade. There wasn’t a single obvious flaw, not a visible slip of the blade anywhere.

From the perspective of the greatest Cursed Corpse craftsman in the jujutsu world, only two words fit.

Terrifying.

Incomprehensible.

Buried inside that maze of technique logic, Yaga caught glimpses of methods so advanced they brushed against ideas he’d only theorized about in private, conclusions he’d never published, never taught, never even fully finished putting into words.

This wasn’t just a core meant to animate dead material.

It was closer to...

...simulating a soul. Engraving one.