Chapter Text
Prologue — Owner of the Void
December 24, 2018 | 21:14 hours
Shinjuku was no longer a place; it was an open wound upon the earth's surface. The prevailing silence wasn't an absence of noise, but a heavy, absolute entity that devoured every trace of what was once life. The skyscrapers—those glass colossi that dared to touch the heavens—had been reduced to a jagged row of broken teeth made of twisted steel and powdered concrete. Nothing remained. No men, no curses, not even the memory of a home. The air was a thick amalgam of ozone, rusted iron, and the grey ash of millions now turned to sediment.
At the center of that nothingness, Ryomen Sukuna sank to one knee. His body was a map of devastation: his flesh, torn into deep furrows, no longer even attempted to knit itself shut. His cursed energy had evaporated, leaving behind only the exhausted husk of a crumbling deity.
Spitting a clot of black blood onto the sterile ground, his lips pulled back into a grotesque sneer. A dry laugh, devoid of any moisture, rasped through his throat. To him, this was the ecstasy of pure form: the exact moment where life collides with extinction. He looked at the shadow before him with the satisfaction of a wolf dying with its jaws full.
"Why the long face, brat?" Sukuna’s voice was a sandpaper whisper. "You did it. You are the master of this void."
Yuji Itadori did not answer with words, but with a rupture in the fabric of reality. A Black Flash—the echo of terminal violence—snapped against Sukuna’s jaw, caving in the bone and shattering the earth beneath his feet. But the King’s smile did not falter. On the contrary, it widened, feeding off the impact. Itadori kept swinging. His fists were pile-drivers, moved by a lethal inertia. Left hook, flash, impact. Each strike illuminated the wasteland with sparks of dark, agonizing energy, revealing for mere milliseconds the disfigured face of a monster reveling in his own destruction.
"That’s it!" Sukuna howled amidst the din of splintering bone. "Curse yourself! Bear the weight of your own incompetence! Look around you, Itadori. You are the king of a graveyard."
Yuji kept his gaze fixed on Sukuna’s eye sockets, but his eyes were dead. The truth was a cold sharper than any ritual technique. The blood mastery, the refinement of the slashing techniques, the awakening of his soul... it had all arrived a minute past the end. He had achieved perfection only when there was nothing left to protect. Gojo was ash; Megumi and Nobara were but echoes in the wind sweeping through the ruins. Sukuna had preserved him with a demiurge’s cruelty, solely so he would be the lone witness to the nothingness.
"Why?" Itadori finally muttered. His voice was barely a thread of air, a whisper immediately lost in the immensity of the grey waste.
"Ha... ha, ha..."
Sukuna’s laughter emerged as a dry rattle, an apathetic exhale that still carried the venom of a fallen god. There was no regret in his gaze, only a superiority that even agony could not erode. As he coughed, a thick mixture of bile and blood splashed onto the dust, yet his eyes remained locked on the boy, delivering a final judgment.
"You are so damn stupid," he hissed, tasting the iron in his mouth. "Do you think this was personal? I am the King of Curses. Absolute power holds no grudges, only hierarchies. Everyone is beneath me. Even you."
He paused, letting the silence of the wasteland underscore his sentence.
"Do you think you could have even grazed me without my own techniques? You’re an experiment, brat. A vessel carved in my image. I could feel it... how you surrendered to the rage, how the hate gave you the shape you needed. It wasn't bad. For moments, I saw fragments of myself in you. I felt that ecstasy that only my sorcery can grant."
A final spark of mockery, sharp and cruel, crossed his eyes as his physical frame began to buckle under the weight of wounds that would never heal.
"Be careful," he decreed with a lingering smile, a posthumous smirk of triumph. "Don't end up becoming me."
"I will never be like you," Itadori replied. His voice lacked any nuance; it was a barren sound, as frigid and stripped of life as the pulverized city surrounding them.
"You're right," Sukuna concluded, closing his eyelids with ceremonial slowness. "You're far too weak to even compare yourself to me."
The silence that followed was absolute, a slab of lead over the ruins of civilization. Beneath a sky choked by the dust of millions of souls, the victor and the vanquished stared at one another—two statues of broken flesh waiting for death to decide which would disintegrate first. Sukuna felt the final tremor then. His soul, splintered by the succession of blows that had fractured his very essence, began to crack like old glass. There would be no return. No fingers, no fragments, no rebirths. Only definitive oblivion.
"What's the matter, brat?" Sukuna hissed, his voice now a barely perceptible trace amidst the bubbling blood in his lungs. "Getting sentimental? Or do you fear the solitude? Do you want me to stay with you?"
The smile that accompanied his words was that of a predator reveling in its own end, savoring one last psychological torture.
"So pathetic. You don’t even have the will to deal me a killing blow. Come on, kill me! Use it!" he shrieked with manic ecstasy, the delirium of one who longs to see the final spark of purity burn away. "Feel the power, Itadori. I know you crave it."
Itadori raised both hands with a slowness that seemed to bring time to a standstill, ignoring the monster’s clamor. At the sight of the finger positions—the mudra of annihilation—Sukuna’s eyes gleamed with final euphoria. This was the moment. The student was surpassing the master, speaking in the executioner’s tongue.
"Yes..." the King of Curses whispered, a thread of a voice carrying the dying breath of an era.
Sukuna refused to close his eyes. He wanted to sear into his memory the exact instant the moral fabric of that "good boy" tore apart forever. He craved to see Yuji Itadori, the vessel of compassion, devour his own humanity to transform into the ultimate executioner. He wanted his death to be the final act of profanation upon his opponent's soul.
"Domain Expansion," Itadori uttered.
His voice didn't belong to the boy who once laughed in a classroom; it was an abyssal sound, a vibration that seemed to crawl out from the very roots of hell.
"Malevolent Shrine."
Reality folded in on itself. Sukuna, the architect of butchery, witnessed the architecture of his own technique manifesting with terrifying purity—but this time, he saw it from the place of sacrifice. The air grew saturated with lethal static; thousands of invisible, precise, and ravenous slashes fragmented space until it was reduced to a whirlwind of atoms. In that heartbeat, Ryomen Sukuna’s consciousness wasn't just destroyed; it was erased from existence by the same violence he had spent millennia perfecting. The King of Curses dissolved into nothingness, stripped even of a final scream.
Itadori felt the collapse of his own being. His nervous system vibrated with unbearable intensity as he channeled the domain; it was as if a black lightning bolt coursed through every vein, charring his humanity from within. His senses, overwhelmed by the ecstasy and horror of the technique, shut down one after another. The Shrine began to fade into the void, leaving behind a silence heavier than the pulverized concrete itself.
Yuji’s vision darkened, and just before unconsciousness claimed him entirely, the weight of solitude tore one last trace of life from him.
"I’m sorry, everyone..." he whispered.
It was a slip of air, a plea directed at the ghosts who were now the only inhabitants of the earth. Tears escaped his eyes, tracing lines of grief through the soot on his face, before the weight of that dead world finally sank him into total darkness.
Itadori opened his eyes. Sunlight, filtered through a thin curtain, pierced his pupils with physical aggression, forcing him to blink with an almost childlike clumsiness.
"Ah..." The sigh left his lungs like a trail of stale air. "So this is death. It feels painfully unreal."
Clarity gained ground, and as his vision focused on his surroundings, his heart tightened in a spasm of disbelief. He was in his room. It wasn't a wasteland of ash, but the familiar chaos of his grandfather's house: the posters of bikini models, the piled-up clothes, the mundane clutter of a life he thought he’d lost on the battlefield. Tears, hot and treacherous, began to well up behind his eyelids. It felt like a mockery of his own psyche—a cruel projection of the purest era of his existence.
He sat up with the slowness of an old man, feeling the brush of the blankets. They smelled clean, of that cheap fabric softener his grandfather bought out of habit, simply because it was the scent his grandmother had liked. It was a detail too specific, too human to be part of a limbo.
Broken, heavy sobs finally filled the room. It couldn't be real; it was a trap, a mirage designed to shatter what little remained of his spirit. In that moment, the silence was broken by the crash of the door swinging open.
"Yuji!" The voice, old and raspy like dry wood, snapped through the room. "What's wrong?"
Itadori froze. Though the weeping didn't stop, his body tensed with the muscle memory of a warrior. He did not trust this. He had seen the dead rise to kill; he knew the malevolence of fate and knew, with a certainty etched in fire, that he was not a man destined for peace.
He looked up with the fear of one expecting to see a monster, but there he was: his grandfather, every wrinkle and every trace of sternness exactly where he remembered them.
Yuji tried to speak, but only managed to stammer incoherent sounds. He was convinced death was playing its most perverse card: letting his grandfather be the one to greet him at the threshold of the afterlife, only to vanish the moment he tried to touch him. The old man, oblivious to the abyss his grandson carried on his shoulders, approached and sat on the edge of the mattress.
"—What’s wrong, Yuji?" The question wasn’t a command, but a trace of genuine concern.
Itadori couldn't hold back any longer. He lunged forward and threw his arms around the old man in a desperate embrace, applying a force that would have crushed an ordinary man, fearing that at any second his fingers would find only smoke. His grandfather tensed at the suddenness of the contact, but after a second of hesitation, he wrapped his thin, strong arms around Yuji.
Yuji wept with a primal intensity, soaking the old man's cotton shirt, clinging to that warmth as if it were the only anchor in a crumbling reality.
"You had a bad dream," his grandfather said with a softness Yuji hadn’t heard in an eternity.
"Yes..." he managed to choke out between gasps. "A very long, very sad dream."
"It’s alright. It was only a dream," the old man declared, breaking the embrace to wipe the trails of salt from his grandson’s cheeks with his rough thumbs. "Let’s have lunch. You can skip school today."
He stood up with a small smile—an expression almost foreign to the sternness Itadori remembered—and left the room. Yuji remained alone for a moment, breathing in the static air of the bedroom before standing. He followed after him with slow, almost ceremonial steps, searing every imperfection into his memory: the cracks in the hallway wood that creaked under his weight, the feel of the worn wallpaper, the light streaming through the windows. Upon reaching the kitchen, the scent of rustic food—a coarse, unpretentious stew, yet steeped in domestic warmth—flooded his senses.
Itadori traced a smile heavy with unbearable melancholy as he watched his grandfather’s ritual among the pots and plates.
"It’s not a bad dream," he thought, watching the steam rise from the table. "Death is cruel. Do I really deserve a farewell this comforting?"
"Come on, eat," the old man ordered, setting the plate before him.
Yuji took a bite. The heat of the food wasn't the fuzzy simulation of a memory; it was an explosion of home-cooked flavors, a physical texture that hit his palate with a perfection his shattered soul couldn't process. It was too real to be a deception.
Later, the living room television hummed with the white noise of everyday life. His grandfather had settled onto the sofa, peeling mandarins with a parsimony that was almost meditative. Itadori sat on the floor at his feet, receiving the clean segments the old man dropped onto a plate. The snap of the peel breaking was the only sound competing with the announcer’s voice.
"Hmph..." his grandfather let out a grunt of disapproval. "Another fire in the city. Those construction companies should be more careful; that’s the third time this month."
Itadori chewed the fruit, feeling the sweet and acidic burst on his tongue. He stared at the screen with absolute indifference, his eyes fixed on the images of rubble and smoke which, compared to the Shinjuku he had just wiped off the map, seemed insignificant. Not even the date in the bottom corner of the news segment—January 11, 2016—managed to rouse him from his emotional lethargy. To him, this was a technical stop on the way to the void, a final gesture of mercy from his conscience before the definitive darkness claimed its place.
"When will we go, Grandpa?" he asked suddenly. His voice was flat, with the cadence of someone who has already accepted the journey is over and is just waiting for the train doors to close.
The old man stopped his gnarled hands over a half-peeled mandarin. He remained silent for a second—a dense silence that seemed to stretch the very walls of the room.
"Later. There’s no need to be so impatient, Yuji," he replied with a firm serenity, an authority that brooked no argument.
Itadori nodded. If death dictated that the final protocol consisted of waiting while eating fruit in silence, he wouldn’t be the one to object. However, a strange urge—a physical need to touch reality one last time—pushed him to his feet. He stepped out of the house, leaving behind the scent of mandarins to lose himself in the streets of his native Sendai.
He walked aimlessly, though his feet, possessing a memory of their own, led him through the veins of his past. The air of Miyagi Prefecture was a different substance: crisp, limpid, stripped of the tainted thickness of the capital that still burned in his lungs. Sendai unfolded before him with a sharpness so aggressive it hurt his pupils. In the distance, the silhouette of Date Masamune kept watch from Mount Aoba; that symbol of resilience, which in his childhood seemed colossal, now felt strangely small—almost fragile—compared to the nightmarish deities he had just reduced to ash.
He stopped on a bridge crossing the Hirose River. The murmur of the water crashing against the pebbles rose with terrifying fidelity; he could feel the damp cold creeping up his ankles, seeping into his skin. Nostalgia wasn't a feeling, but a physical impact: the exact color of the rooftops, the bland design of the vending machines on the corners, even the harsh caw of the crows perched in the zelkova trees lining the avenues. Everything was intact. No scars on the asphalt, no stench of iron and burnt flesh that had become his only language.
It was the "City of Trees," vibrant and blissfully unaware of the existence of curses. Itadori stopped before a small park, watching the erratic dash of a group of children playing without glancing at the shadows. A lone tear traced a path down his cheek as he felt the rough texture of a brick wall, recognizing every crack where he had once hidden his small child's hands. "It’s too real to be a dream," he thought with a pang of agony, "and too beautiful to be true."
He spent an entire hour in a trance-like state near Sendai Station. He stood there, motionless among the crowd, fascinated by the mechanical choreography of a taiyaki vendor wrapping the cakes with hypnotic precision. The sweet, toasted aroma of red bean paste was the perfume of his lost innocence.
Finally, his feet dragged him to the small video rental shop—his old sanctuary. He wandered into the action and horror aisles, stopping in the middle of the shelves. He closed his eyes and simply breathed in the scent of plastic cases and old, dusty carpet. He wasn't looking for a story; he was looking for the weight of normalcy. He stood there in silence, allowing the comfort of that routine to wrap around him like a warm shroud before the world broke once again.
As dusk fell, the Sendai sky was stained with a violet-orange—an amalgam of wounded colors that, in his other life, used to precede tragedy. However, in this world, the light did not herald the deployment of a Veil or the roar of a ritual technique; it only marked the end of the day. He returned home with shuffling steps, finding his grandfather waiting with a silent authority that seemed to anchor reality.
"I left clothes on the bed for you. Get changed," the old man ordered.
He was already wearing a dark wool kimono under a grey haori—an image of ancient dignity that made him look like a thousand-year-old oak, its roots refusing to yield to the passing seasons. Itadori nodded, subdued by that presence, and retreated to his room. Resting on the mattress was a deep blue cotton yukata, decorated with simple geometric patterns and a black obi. He dressed with a clumsiness unbefitting of his agility, feeling the rough, honest texture of the fabric against his skin. It was a weight radically different from that of his sorcerer's uniform—that armor of reinforced cloth that had become his second skin during the carnage.
They walked together, wrapped in a silence that didn't need to be broken, until they reached the Osaki Hachiman Shrine. There, the Dontosai festival throbbed with a vitality that felt both foreign and fascinating to him. The place was alive in a raw way: hundreds of paper lanterns bathed the faces of families in a warm amber, while the echo of flutes and the rhythmic heartbeat of drums floated in the frigid night air. At the heart of the shrine, the great ceremonial bonfire—the Hadaka-mairi—roared with a telluric force, spitting sparks that ascended like shooting stars into the black void of the sky.
Itadori walked beside his grandfather, mesmerized by the column of smoke rising steadily. For the first time in an eternity, his eyes did not scan the shadows searching for a threat or a trace of cursed energy; he allowed himself, simply, to exist under the heat of the fire and the company of the only man who had loved him unconditionally.
They left the bustle behind, ascending a slight hill that led them to the top of the lookout. There, far from the din of the flutes, they found a wooden bench weathered by the elements. Sendai stretched out before them like a mantle of twinkling lights, a jewel of civilization embedded in the winter darkness. His grandfather let out a deep groan—the lament of tired bones finally finding rest—and sank into the seat with the heaviness of one who has walked for too long.
"I’m too old for these climbs," the old man grunted, while Yuji held his arm with extreme, almost fearful delicacy, as if he were handling a crystal relic on the verge of shattering.
Itadori took his seat beside him. They sank into a long, dense silence, broken only by the whistle of the freezing breeze lashing their faces. From that height, the calm of the city was an almost mystical vision—a redemption of lights that knew nothing of the butchery Yuji carried in his memory.
"It was great, Grandpa," Itadori said. His voice was an undecipherable vibration, laden with a peace so absolute it was hurtful.
"Yes, it was," the man replied, exhaling a plume of white vapor that quickly dissolved into the night.
"I missed this. I’m very happy here, with you," Yuji whispered. This time, he allowed the tears to roll free, tracing hot furrows over his cold skin. There was no shame, only the surrender of a soldier who finally finds his way home.
"We’ll come back next year," his grandfather declared with a serene smile, fixed on the horizon.
"Yes, Grandpa. Next year," Yuji lied. The smile he gave in return was a slash of sadness; he knew that in the world of the living, time had stopped—that there wasn't a single calendar left to mark in that wasteland of ash.
Silence reclaimed its space once more, but this time it was his grandfather who fractured it. He turned heavily to look at his grandson. His expression, forged in decades of hardness and discipline, softened to reveal a vulnerability Yuji had never dared to imagine.
"You know, Yuji..." he began, his voice raspy, carrying the weight of the years. "When your parents left, and when I lost my wife, the world became too vast and empty. I thought it would just be the two of us, waiting for the end in that old house. But having you around, watching you grow... that was the only thing that gave my days meaning. I’ve done what I could, even if sometimes my only way of speaking to you was through shouting. You make me happy, boy. Simply by existing. Simply by being you."
He paused, shifting his gaze toward the festival bonfire which, from a distance, looked like a heart beating in the darkness.
"That is why the future terrifies me. I won’t be around forever, and my only wish is that, once I’m gone, you don’t become an island. You are strong, Yuji, but strength without company is just another form of solitude. I hope you surround yourself with people who value you—friends who will put their lives on the line for you, just as you would for them. Die surrounded by people, do you understand? Don’t end up like this stubborn old man, alone with nothing but his memories."
Itadori heard every word as if they were stabs of light in his chest. This speech was an almost identical echo of the one he had received in the shadows of a hospital room, but here, under the open sky of Sendai, the words didn't weigh him down like a curse; they enveloped him like a belated blessing.
"I will, Grandpa," Yuji replied, his throat tight with a feeling he couldn’t quite name. "I promise."
He looked down at his hands. Those palms, now clean and resting beneath the soft texture of cotton, had carried the weight of death and had been soaked in the iron heat of blood far too many times. Suddenly, the memory of his friends hit him with the violence of a black tide; he saw their faces, recalled the warmth of their final smiles, and then witnessed once again the exact instant the light vanished from their eyes. He remembered his teachers—men and women who stood like walls before him to take the blow intended for his soul, surrendering their existence for a future that he, in the end, had been unable to rescue from the ashes.
"Grandpa..." his voice broke, trailing an anguish that seemed to have no shore. "I failed."
He curled inward on the wooden bench, digging his fists into the blue fabric of the yukata. The guilt, which had remained crouched beneath the peace of the festival, emerged with devastating ferocity.
"I met wonderful people. People who... who gave me everything without asking for a thing in return. I promised them I’d be there, that I’d look after them until the end. But it didn't matter how fast I ran, or how hard I fought; in the end, I couldn't save anyone. I watched them fade away one by one until only silence remained. It’s a weight that crushes my lungs, Grandpa. I feel like a traitor just being here, sitting in this peace, when they can no longer see the light of this world."
The tears fell now without resistance, soaking his traditional clothes. He felt miserable for enjoying his grandfather's warmth while the rest of the world was a silent graveyard.
"I feel so... wretched. I wish they could forgive me. I wish they knew I put my soul into every attempt, but it wasn't enough. I was too slow. Too weak. How am I supposed to carry this void? I feel like I failed everyone who believed I’d be capable of protecting anything."
His grandfather did not interrupt. He remained silent, allowing Yuji's pain to flow like a river breaking its banks, letting those words—laden with an ancient sadness that did not belong in a body so young—dissolve into the freezing air. The old man placed a heavy, warm hand on his grandson’s shoulder, a steady anchor in the middle of the storm of self-loathing that threatened to pull him under.
"I don't know what you lived through in that 'dream' of yours, Yuji," the old man said, his voice like oak—hard and sure. "But if those people were as you say, the only forgiveness you’re missing is your own. They didn't give you their lives so you could waste them carrying their ghosts."
"I don't know if I can do it, Grandpa," Yuji whispered, his shoulders shaking with a hollow sob that seemed to rise from his very gut. "I don't know if I can ever forgive myself. It should have been me. I should have died instead of all of them. If I hadn't been there, if only I’d been stronger from the start... it's my fault everything ended in ashes."
The old man tightened his grip on the shoulder, a physical pressure that forced Yuji to abandon his posture of defeat and straighten up. The old man’s eyes, clouded by years but ignited by a spark of sudden authority, cut through the freezing air between them.
"Listen to me, Yuji," his grandfather decreed, his voice an echo of stone striking stone. "If you truly feel guilty, if you believe the world collapsed because you weren't enough, then you only have one way out. Don't let anything or anyone else break you. If you’re going to carry the weight of those who fell, you have to become their pillar. You have to be that strength that others look to, so they know—without a shadow of a doubt—that the ground will not give way. You have to be the strongest."
The strongest.
The words resonated in Itadori’s mind with the vibration of a bronze bell in an empty temple. Immediately, the image of Satoru Gojo emerged from the shadows of his memory. He remembered that back—always straight, always relaxed—projecting a security that seemed to defy the laws of nature. When Gojo was there, fear became an abstract concept; his mere existence was the guarantee that the sky would not come crashing down upon their heads. He was the roof of the world, the man who accepted the solitude of the summit so that, below, others could afford the luxury of a smile.
Could I be that man? Itadori wondered, watching his hands, marked by scars that only he could see in the twilight. Could I carry that weight? Be the vertex where the storm finally breaks?
The prospect of inhabiting that summit was terrifying; a frigid solitude, distinct from the one he felt in that moment. But his grandfather wasn’t asking him to achieve perfection. He was asking him to be immovable. To be the fixed point in a world that never stopped spinning toward chaos.
"If they gave you their lives," the old man continued, lowering his tone but hardening his gaze, "it was so you could be the last man standing. If you are going to be a survivor, make sure you are one worth following. Be that pillar, Yuji."
Itadori took a deep breath, feeling the air of Sendai—pure and cold—fill his lungs as if it were the first time he had truly breathed. The guilt did not evaporate, but its nature shifted: it ceased to be ballast and became the foundation of his will. He looked at his grandfather and nodded with a determination that no longer belonged to a child.
"I will be the strongest," he declared, and his voice did not waver. "I won't let anyone else suffer."
"I’m ready, Grandpa. Let’s head back," Itadori said.
He stood up with a resolve that had previously seemed extinct, a vitality reclaimed from the rubble of his spirit. His movements regained the steadiness of steel, and from his figure emanated a quiet strength—a tide that no longer sought to destroy, but to sustain. His grandfather watched him in silence, studying the metamorphosis in his grandson’s eyes, and nodded with a raw, elemental pride.
"Yes, let’s go. It’s time to rest," the old man replied, a smile flickering across his face that was almost a blessing.
They walked back under Sendai’s starry vault, leaving behind the echo of the flutes and the dying glow of the bonfire. As they crossed the threshold, the house greeted them with an organic warmth; it was an absolute refuge, a space where the laws of tragedy held no jurisdiction. Itadori headed to his room—that sanctuary of clutter and normalcy—and collapsed onto the bed. He felt exhaustion envelop him, but this time it wasn't the weariness of blood; it was a light, peaceful, almost sacred heaviness.
"You can leave the light on if you’re scared, Yuji," his grandfather said from the doorway, maintaining that raspy tone that hid an inexhaustible tenderness. "I’ll be in the next room if you need anything."
"It’s fine like this, Grandpa," Itadori replied, his voice a whisper of gratitude that seemed to fill every crack in the room. "Thank you for everything. I love you so much... and I’ll never forget you."
The old man let out a dry laugh, a click of affectionate disbelief as he shook his head.
"You talk as if I were already dead, brat," he grunted softly. "But thanks. Get some sleep."
Itadori listened to his grandfather’s heavy footsteps receding down the hall and the familiar creak of the door closing. He remained alone in the twilight, surrounded by the scent of clean blankets and the comforting silence that exists only in homes where love dwells. He surrendered to sleep with crystal clarity, understanding that this journey—this final gift before the abyss—had been an act of mercy far beyond anything he could have imagined.
If I had a second chance... he thought as his eyelids yielded to the weight of fate, I wouldn’t let anyone suffer. I would be the pillar they all need.
With that promise seared into the very fibers of his soul, Itadori closed his eyes and gave himself over to a darkness that, for the first time in his life, did not feel cold or hostile, but like the warm threshold toward the beginning of something more.