Early that morning, Naoya Zenin was already training at Jujutsu High's practice grounds.
Lately, all sorts of miscellaneous matters had more or less eaten into the ti he could spend improving himself.
It couldn't be helped.
After all, you could not have it both ways. As the saying goes, if you hold the sword, you cannot hold her. If you put down the sword, you cannot protect her.
Burying himself in training was not as useful as pulling a few more allies onto his side.
Young girls like Momo Nishimiya and Kasumi Miwa were the sort of simple won you could handle by throwing around a bit of money. And right now, the one thing he lacked least was money. If he could win them over, then sooner or later he would be able to win over Mai Zenin too. There was no downside to that for him.
And with other students at Jujutsu High already receiving sponsorship money as cover, it would not seem nearly so strange when Mai Zenin and Maki Zenin received sponsorships of 100 million yen.
Naoya Zenin was not afraid that those two cousins would resent him.
What he feared most was that the sponsorship money would be rejected.
After all, this was his final life-saving trump card for the future. If he failed to settle the internal struggle within the Zenin Clan and Ogi Zenin stirred up trouble, then when faced with "Toji"'s butcher knife, this sponsorship money would be proof that he had turned over a new leaf.
Your most hated enemy turning out to be the secret benefactor who supported you the most.
If a tearjerking twist like that still failed to win over those ultra-aggressive cousins, then Maki Zenin really would have no heart at all.
Surely it would not end in so lifelong-regret kind of ending, right?
Naoya Zenin shook his head and forced that terrible thought away.
That probably would not happen.
Compared to Kenjaku, who was cunning to an almost monstrous degree, that old man Ogi Zenin was basically a mindless NPC. And the darkness within the Zenin Clan was not quite as dark as people imagined. As the legitimate heir, as long as he could keep his strength up, then even if Naobito Zenin suddenly dropped dead, nothing should go wrong.
Right now, the key issue was still Kenjaku's next move.
What exactly was he planning?
If he really intended to co personally and steal Suguru Geto's corpse, then who in the Zenin Clan could possibly stand against ten-finger Sukuna?
Wouldn't they just have to raise their hands and surrender?
Probably only Satoru Gojo could guarantee that. Only this magic shield of a man could be trusted not to fumble against ten-finger Sukuna.
The good news was that Gojo was kind of a corpse-obsessed guy too.
If he used Suguru Geto's corpse as a bargaining chip, then the odds of Satoru Gojo coming to help were actually pretty high.
The bad news was that the Zenin Clan and the Gojo Clan were sworn enemies.
If Satoru Gojo really entered the Zenin Clan's forbidden storehouse, it would basically be an act of betraying his ancestors. No matter how high Naoya's standing in the Zenin Clan was, everyone else would definitely oppose it.
And with that much commotion, Kenjaku was not an idiot. He would definitely stay put and wait things out.
How many days could Satoru Gojo stay inside the forbidden storehouse?
As the jujutsu world's ultimate workhorse, if he took even a single day off, the whole system might start falling apart.
Naoya Zenin let out a long sigh.
He had no idea whether Yuki Tsukumo had actually been shaken awake by his scolding.
If that Special Grade Jujutsu Sorcerer could start doing her job properly, then through her he might be able to get in touch with Tengen.
Tengen and Kenjaku went way back. If he could provide Tengen with Kenjaku's plans, there was no way Tengen would just sit by and do nothing.
And with Tengen's barrier techniques, it might not even be impossible to wipe Kenjaku out in one fell swoop.
Still, he could not pin all his hopes on other people.
He still had to strengthen himself.
The transmigrator began taking stock of his own trump cards.
[Projection Sorcery] (Can be kept running for 30 seconds, as long as his brain does not get damaged.)
[Falling Blossom Emotion] (A survival skill that would keep him from getting instantly killed by a Domain Expansion.)
[Binding Vow] (A god-tier loan-shark cheat skill that let him hack his way through things with bullshit.)
Those were the only three cards he really had on the table.
[Binding Vow] hardly needed explanation.
It was his only real trump card for fighting the strong, a last-resort killer move for dragging soone down with him in a one-for-one trade when backed into a corner.
Its one weakness was that if he got instantly killed, then he would not even get the chance to take out that loan and cheat.
And [Falling Blossom Emotion] happened to cover that weakness very well.
Because only the sure-hit, sure-kill effect of a Domain Expansion could instantly kill him when he had [Projection Sorcery].
You could say that no matter who he ran into, even the King of Curses [Ryon Sukuna], he would at least have one turn to play the ga.
But the weakness was also glaringly obvious.
Even if he had one turn to play with, he still had no way to score a higher-level solo kill.
Because he had not mastered a single offensive technique.
Even if he took out a loan through [Binding Vow], [Projection Sorcery] would only go from scraping for damage to scraping like crazy.
It was not like Gojo, where everyone said that if he could really leverage that kind of loan trick, he might be able to beat [Ryon Sukuna] with an instant-cast [Hollow Technique. Purple].
Naoya Zenin did not have that kind of devastating firepower.
Reverse Cursed Technique, Cursed Technique Reversal, Maximum, Domain Expansion...
Naoya Zenin had not mastered a single one of them.
He had not even pushed his proficiency with [Projection Sorcery] to the absolute peak yet.
He was just too weak.
And this sort of weakness was not sothing that hard work alone could fix.
It was diocrity at the level of natural talent.
Naoya Zenin was not, as outsiders claid, so prodigy capable of standing shoulder to shoulder with Satoru Gojo.
On the contrary, he was a tragic case of wasted early promise.
He had neither inherited the Zenin Clan's [Ten Shadows Technique], nor entered Jujutsu High to receive a modern education. From childhood to adulthood, he had stayed within the Zenin Clan, and under that traditional, rigid noble upbringing, he had ultimately beco nothing more than an ordinary Jujutsu Sorcerer, hopelessly behind the tis.
No matter how astonishing his talent had been as a child, he was now already in his twenties. He had missed too many golden years for learning, and as a Jujutsu Sorcerer, his mind had already stiffened into old habits. There was basically very little room left for growth.
If he were not a transmigrator ard with all this information, then pitiful as it was to say, the original owner's ceiling in this life would already have been fixed in place.
But he himself was not much better.
There was an unquestionable truth in the jujutsu world.
All sorcerers were crazy.
The more unhinged and deranged a sorcerer was, the stronger they beca.
They might not have been as terrifying as the maniacs in Sea Tiger, but in the world of jujutsu, a sorcerer's strength was shaped in large part by sheer ntality.
Kasumi Miwa was the best example of that.
As the most normal ordinary person in Jujutsu Kaisen, this idiot girl also had the lowest combat power.
By the sa logic, as a transmigrator, he too could never reach that kind of mad, ecstatic state.
He was just too normal.
Those negative emotions born from extre repression, surging like a berserk dragon on the run, were sothing he simply could not imagine no matter how hard he tried.
It was like the reason Kyubey only chose magical girls and not magical boys.
After all, making adolescent boys who were right in the middle of their chuuni phase, and then really did gain special powers that could change the world, fall into complete despair was no easy task.
[Once a witch, always a witch! I don't care about any of that. Kan Rider, Henshin!]
[You've fallen, haven't you... Senpai, I'm here to kill you!!]
[Heaven gives birth to all things to nourish man, yet man has nothing with which to repay heaven. Kill kill kill kill kill!!!]
[Sorry. Before, I had no choice. Now I just want to be a magical boy.]
Anyway, the point was that it was very hard for him to empathize with that sort of extre negative emotion.
He could hardly spend every day like gumi Fushiguro, singing that it didn't matter anymore, it didn't matter anymore, that he no longer had the slightest will to live.
So even though he already knew that Reverse Cursed Technique worked by multiplying negatives into a positive, reversing originally negative Cursed Energy into positive energy and using it to heal himself, he still could not grasp this advanced jujutsu technique no matter what he did.
It felt like running in a dream. The exit was clearly right in front of him, yet his legs felt as heavy as lead. No matter what he did, he could not make himself go any faster, as if his body had been left far behind.
At first, the transmigrator had thought that as long as he received guidance from a sorcerer who possessed Reverse Cursed Technique, it would be like the clouds parting and everything becoming clear at once.
But now that he thought about it carefully, maybe this was the sort of thing that, like Gojo, he could only truly awaken to after going through a life-and-death battle.
Of course, he could not just get discouraged over his diocre talent and collapse into self-pity.
What Naoya Zenin was thinking now was simple. He needed to raise his offensive power as much as possible.
He wanted to further develop [Projection Sorcery].
By adding a weapon.
The reason [Projection Sorcery] could only be used for scratch damage through punches was that once you added a weapon, the amount of calculation required increased geotrically, causing the technique itself to collapse.
Even Naobito Zenin, an old veteran who had mastered [Projection Sorcery] to an extraordinary degree, had never combined Cursed Tools with the technique.
Because in his view, weapons only dragged [Projection Sorcery] down.
Most enemies could be dealt with through the godlike speed of [Projection Sorcery]. And if he really ran into an enemy speed alone could not handle, then a weapon would not make any difference anyway.
You could not exactly say that way of thinking was wrong.
It was just too passive. Naobito Zenin had chosen to sacrifice the upper limit in order to preserve the lower limit. He had never really confronted the problem head-on, and had instead left the ss for later generations.
But only this transmigrator knew one thing.
Only by further developing the upper limit of a technique could you enter the ranks of the strong.
An innate technique stayed with a sorcerer for life.
Sa as always.
There was no weakest technique. Only the weakest sorcerer.
So people awakened a technique as broken as [Ten Shadows Technique], yet still gave up on thinking for themselves and spent all day ready to blow themselves up with others, as if self-detonation were the only correct answer.
But when Sukuna mastered [Ten Shadows Technique], the result was completely different.
The King of Curses not only used the various shikigami with great skill, he fused them into chiric beasts, and in the end even awakened the space-cutting slash through Mahoraga's adaptability and bisected Gojo.
You could say Sukuna was cheating, but you could not deny how terrifyingly professional he was as a Jujutsu Sorcerer.
Because when you got right down to it, Sukuna's technique was nothing more than ordinary slashing.
There was no special chanic to it.
And yet with nothing but that slashing technique, cut by cut, he had beco the strongest Jujutsu Sorcerer in history.
He too had to learn from Sukuna and push the upper limit of his own technique as far as possible.
So Naoya Zenin reached into his clothes and pulled out a dagger.
It was not a Cursed Tool.
Just an ordinary little knife.
Then his figure began to blur and overlap.
[Projection Sorcery], activate!!!
In a single second, the instant before his eyes was broken down into twenty-four fras.
Then the young man slashed the dagger at the wooden post in front of him.
Under normal circumstances, the technique would collapse instantly the mont this happened.
Because once the knife bit into the wooden post, it would inevitably slow down.
Whether it was recoil, deformation, or elasticity, all of it was impossible to predict.
However, Naoya Zenin had to keep accelerating, and once that acceleration started, he could not stop it. Like a car on the highway with failed brakes, he could only continue accelerating until the twenty-four fras were over.
He had to calculate the weapon's trajectory and make sure his own next movent stayed in sync with it. The mont his calculation failed, he would suffer backlash from [Projection Sorcery] and freeze in place for one second.
With a computational burden that terrifying, it was no wonder Naobito Zenin had chosen to give up.
It really was a case of sacrificing the root for the branches.
But things were different now.
Because just before Naoya Zenin's knife struck the wooden post, he chose to let go and throw it.
It was a very strange sight.
The knife was clearly still hanging in midair, and yet, as though ti had entered bullet ti, Naoya Zenin himself was still able to keep moving.
When he saw that he had not suffered any backlash from the technique, he imdiately pulled another dagger from his clothes, and in the next instant aid at the wooden post and sent that one flying too.
And so, within those brief twenty-four fras, four or five throwing knives had all locked onto the wooden post at once.
To an outside observer, it would look as though in the blink of an eye several throwing knives had suddenly appeared out of nowhere, all aid at them and all flying at them at the sa ti.
And Naoya Zenin's figure would vanish in an instant, only to appear behind them in the very next mont.
Flying knives in front. Enemy behind.
In the space of a single second, he had created a deadly, unavoidable kill setup.
If they defended against the knives, they would have to face Naoya Zenin's iron fist.
If they defended against the fist, they would have to deal with the cold gleam of the knives.
This move was a straight-up death question.
After all, even the invincible Jotaro Kujo would have a hard ti dealing with sothing this dirty.
Naoya Zenin had not originally planned to be this underhanded.
But the mont he thought about using this dirty trick on Kenjaku, he stopped caring.
That said, carrying extra weapons on his body would greatly increase the difficulty of using [Projection Sorcery].
But if he wanted to improve his offensive power, this was the only option.
And a small knife was not his ideal weapon anyway.
Sorcerers in this world were nothing like fragile Stand Users. Because innate techniques were engraved into the body, every sorcerer's physical toughness far surpassed that of an ordinary person. Otherwise people would not call this Sorcery Fight.
The kind of scene you saw in JoJo, where a thrown knife could end things with a single strike to the throat, simply was not enough in this world.
If you wanted to kill a sorcerer, you had to use a Cursed Tool.
Even if you killed an enemy with a knife, all that would do was trigger round two and turn the enemy into a Cursed Spirit.
And the killing power of the Cursed Tool had to be raised as well.
At minimum, it needed to be so kind of thrown weapon like a Black Key.
If possible, the best option would be to forge a Cursed Tool like a lightsaber.
The blade could be condensed from Cursed Energy. That way, even if he held it in his hand and swung it, there would be no collision governed by physical law, which would make it perfectly suited to the rules of [Projection Sorcery].
Like Hiromi Higuruma's Executioner's Sword.
But Cursed Tools were already incredibly rare in the jujutsu world. The ones still passed down in the modern era were basically all treasures from ancient tis.
And sorcerers capable of forging Cursed Tools were even rarer, prodigies who appeared maybe once in a century.
But right now, Naoya Zenin happened to have exactly such a person at his side, soone who could custom-make a personal Cursed Tool for him.
And she was also the cousin he was preparing to win over.
Mai Zenin.
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