Jujutsu Kaisen: Tragedy Life Simulator-Chapter 115 - I Want to Find a Way to Save Everyone [bonus]
Yaga’s head snapped up.
The rock-solid composure he usually wore shattered cleanly. When he spoke again, his voice came out hoarse and wrong, the voice of a man staring straight at something impossible.
"Hayase... what the hell have you been making in here?"
Hayase met his gaze and smiled, small and calm.
He was making a Cursed Corpse.
But in this timeline, he wasn’t following the path he’d taken in his previous simulation. He wasn’t trying to recreate the combat monster called Wukong.
This time, he meant to skip ahead.
He meant to drag that miracle into the world long before its proper time.
Still holding Yaga’s stare, Hayase answered in a voice so steady it felt like he was reading out a law of nature.
"Sensei. I’m going to create a fully independent cursed corpse, one with a soul of its own."
"A fully independent... cursed corpse?"
Yaga went completely still.
For a second, he honestly thought he’d misheard.
It was the middle of the night. The workshop was quiet except for the faint scrape of tools and the hum of the lamps. And in the middle of all that, this kid had just said those words as casually as if he were asking for coffee.
How was that even possible?
The Fully Independent Cursed Corpse was Yaga’s deepest, most carefully buried line of research. He’d poured who knew how many hours into it and still hadn’t broken past the core bottleneck. The whole thing was stuck at the theoretical stage. No real breakthrough. Nothing he could point to and call progress.
More importantly, he was absolutely sure he’d never told Hayase about it. Not Hayase, not anyone at the school.
Sure, somewhere in the back of his mind, Yaga had planned to bring it up one day, once Hayase got further with Puppet Manipulation. At the right time. Carefully.
But that was supposed to happen months from now.
Not barely a month after the boy enrolled.
So how did he know? How had he jumped straight to the final answer?
Behind his sunglasses, Yaga’s eyes were bloodshot from the force of the shock. When he spoke, his voice came out rough.
"What... what are you talking about?!"
Hayase paused with the carving knife in his hand.
He understood exactly why Yaga was rattled. Turning around slowly, he looked at his teacher with the same calm as always, dark eyes still and deep enough to make people uneasy.
"I know I didn’t discuss it with you first, Yaga-sensei. But once I understood the basic structure of cursed corpses, this was the natural direction for my research."
Yaga’s brain just about short-circuited.
He repeated the words like his thoughts had stopped working.
"Your... research direction?"
Hayase nodded.
"Over the past month here, and while preparing cursed spirits for Geto, I’ve figured out a lot. More than enough to understand what being a jujutsu sorcerer really means. People like Gojo and Geto, sorcerers born with overwhelming advantages, are rare. For most sorcerers, going out on an exorcism mission means living with the constant chance they’ll die."
He paused, then kept going.
"But if I can create a fully independent Cursed Corpse, one that has its own soul, then it wouldn’t need an operator standing in the rear and risking their life to control it. A self-sustaining soul should be able to generate a stable cycle of cursed energy and keep the body moving on its own. In the best case, they could replace human sorcerers entirely. People who keep walking into life-and-death missions wouldn’t have to anymore."
The workshop went dead quiet.
His voice stayed level, almost clinical.
"And even in the worst case, as long as the core isn’t destroyed, the body being torn apart doesn’t matter. There’s no real death. You repair it, replace the damaged parts, and it can operate again. Humans aren’t like that. The school has someone like Shoko, and Reverse Cursed Technique makes her invaluable. But in an actual fight, things change in an instant. Once a cursed spirit lands a fatal blow, most sorcerers are just dead."
Silence.
Yaga stood there like a carved statue, taking in words that somehow sounded cold enough to belong to something far above humanity, yet were soaked through with a compassion so deep it hurt to hear.
It took him a long while to swallow.
"You really thought all of this through... by yourself?"
Hayase didn’t answer the question directly.
His gaze slid toward the window, toward that thick stretch of darkness right before dawn. When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet.
"Yeah. Maybe it’s because I remember how it started for me. Not everyone gets lucky like I did, awakening a technique in the middle of a life-or-death situation and managing to kill the cursed spirit before it killed them. And after I survived, the Windows still had to come inspect the scene. That put them in danger too, with lingering cursed spirits still around. Then the mission gets posted and passed to some sorcerer as a bounty. That’s a third person risking their life over the same incident."
He looked back at Yaga.
"The shortage of sorcerers isn’t exactly a secret, is it? You can tell just by looking at how few first-years there are. The whole profession is drying up. I want to find the answer. The one that fixes it for good and saves everyone."
"You... you..."
Yaga had blown straight past the point where shock still felt like shock. Something invisible seemed to clamp around his heart and squeeze.
He stared at Hayase’s face, at how young he still looked, and searched his expression over and over for some sign that this was teenage posturing. Some desperate idealism. Some rehearsed speech meant to impress a teacher.
He found nothing.
Not one crack.
It wasn’t a rational judgment, and Yaga knew that. But every instinct he’d sharpened over decades as a Grade 1 sorcerer, every lesson beaten into him by a world where reading people wrong got you killed, was screaming the same thing at him.
Hayase meant every word.
And because Yaga believed that completely, a deep, crawling horror started to rise in his chest.
Only now did he finally understand what had been driving Hayase since the beginning, that invisible pressure behind his sleepless, machine-like pace.
This boy was trying to save a world that was already falling apart.
He was trying to do it with one body and one will.
It was so self-destructive it felt twisted. So huge it was honestly terrifying.
Just imagining that burden made Yaga feel like he couldn’t breathe. And Hayase, fully aware of what he was saying, was choosing to carry it anyway.
