Chapter 5

  The world of curses had existed for millennia, according to my tutors. Our family traced our lineage all the way back to the Asuka period, back when this country was still called Wa. Our founder was born in 601 AD, first born son of a litter of them, seven in total.

  Even back then, the Swarm Queen’s Antennae had predated them. According to myth, they were bequeathed unto them by a ‘benevolent spirit’ of some kind known as the Swarm Queen. My tutors had subtly informed me that this story was a myth, and that there were no documented cases of ‘benevolent spirits’ because humans didn’t leak positive energy.

  It had to do with the nature of emotional energy in general—people were more willing to hold onto their positivity while subconsciously divesting themselves of negativity, for their own peace of mind.

  I didn’t know what to believe, personally. My insight into cursed energy hadn’t reached such a level that I could make any conclusive statement on the subject.

  I stood beneath the roof on the edge of the courtyard, waiting for the Grand Poobah to make his way in, sandwiched by his honor-guard of enforcers—curse experts that, for one reason or another, didn’t have access to the inherited technique. Some of them were no-doubt ‘crippled’ from a Juchū battle, while others had just been born with cursed energy, but no technique. That wasn’t uncommon.

  Clan head Hibana Sosuke walked in with two enforcers to his front, and two to his back, and then I saw them: the Antennae, two hair-pins holding his bun together on the back of his head, polished black with silver engravings on them.

  According to the histories, not even Kenzo—the last man to have been able to use the Reverse Cursed Technique—had been able to activate them. In fact, even back in the Heian era—the golden age of curse expertise—where a user of the Reverse Cursed Technique was born every generation in our clan, it was apparently quite rare for them to be able to make use of the Antennae.

  I wondered if, once I unlocked the technique, Sosuke-sama would surrender the Antennae to me, or force me to have to take them from him.

  That would be a tall ask. I was, perhaps, a Bear-grade, given how easily I had been able to dispatch that Wolf-grade curse months ago. Sosuke was Demon-grade, the penultimate grade of curse expert as far as we measured these things.

  I still had a long way to go before I could challenge him.

  000

  Hibana Sosuke held his head high, ignoring the masses of his adoring clansmen, as he returned from one of his yearly missions: recovering some Cursed Tools from the so-called Jujutsu Society.

  Behind him, some servants carried a large chest containing several good finds—a pair of knives known as the Hornet Stingers, and a shield called the Atlas Buckler. Over the years, the so-called Jujutsu Society had stolen many things from the Hibana Clan. Sometimes by directly raiding their ancestral home. Other times, by looting the corpses of their cursed experts.

  The Hornet Stingers were a particularly good find. They had been locked inside the protective barriers of Jujutsu High for over a century, and had been Kenzo’s weapons of choice back in his day. The only reason they had been able to recover it was because they had ambushed a Jujutsu Sorcerer for it.

  That cretin would live, of course. There was no use making an enemy of the Jujutsu Society in this age. With the Six Eyes in play, this entire generation was a lost cause.

  Even if, by some miracle, the clan produced another user of positive energy, it wouldn’t improve their situation appreciably. The underground had been dealt a crippling blow with that blue-eyed monster’s arrival. Even the Yakuza were seeing an unprecedented downturn in profits and recruitment.

  Useless. It’s all useless.

  Sosuke caught sight of one girl standing deep into the crowd, almost entirely obscured by eager bodies welcoming him back.

  It was her. The cursed child. The plain-faced, impassive young girl—who didn’t even have the courtesy to be cute despite her age and gender. Stubbornly uncrippled. Iemon had removed her from the general population of students, and Sosuke had allowed it, because the plan to have her crippled and betrothed to his son Sadakuno had failed.

  She couldn’t lose.

  And the clan would never stand for a woman with Juchū being betrothed to a man without. He could not stand to put his crippled son through such an indignity.

  How many Juchū did she now possess? Seventy-six. That was enough for even seasoned experts to feel a harsh burden from their Sense Expansion. She probably wasn’t even able to use half of her Juchū effectively, let alone all of them. To have numbers comparable to an elder, wasted on a precocious brat…

  And it wasn’t like the clan could spare all that many Juchū, either. The clan needed to recover those bugs one way or another. She would have to be tested one day. Not… challenged, but tested.

  Among the children, no one could stand against her. No one had been able to cripple her. In a battle of one singular Juchū against three opponents pooling thirty-one of theirs, she had still won.

  Among the adults, things would be different. The only problem was that anyone challenging her would stand to lose a massive amount of face. If they won, it would appear as if an adult had forcibly severed the potential of a child that showed much promise. If they lost, that would be the end of their credibility as a curse expert. Losing would be worse than dying, because even their memory would be tarnished for as long as they would be remembered, even after death.

  As such, the only way to give the young girl her just dessert would be to use the pretense of education, to test her.

  What if one of the teenagers challenged her to a full-contact Juchū battle?

  That would circumvent having to use adult skill to put her down. A teenager would technically be in her bracket of power, and with full-contact rules, the six-year-old could never prevail.

  That was a good plan. The only issue was figuring out which lucky young man would be allowed to take her bugs from her. Ideally, Sosuke would have nominated another of his sons, but Sadakuno had been the oldest, and now that he was a cripple, he was next to useless, his only purpose in life using his body to protect a Juchū user.

  Mitsuzuka’s progeny were old enough, but Sosuke was leery on giving that old man any more power than he already had. Perhaps it would be best to gift these Juchū to a struggling power bloc, then.

  Aizawa had been particularly obsequious and pandering to Sosuke as of late. He had sired children with low cursed energy, and his best prospect was a nephew that he had adopted and trained—a nephew aged sixteen.

  This… yes, this would prove an excellent gift to a subordinate that knew his place, and it would cement his own reign in the face of Mitsuzuka’s growing popularity.

  And Iemon wouldn’t mind, of course. If anything, the man would welcome a reduction to his responsibilities. He had done an admirable job containing and hiding that cursed spawn away from the clan. That, too, should be rewarded.

  000

  I was out in the woods, next to a stone cliff face, training my Black Flashes.

  I came here alone.

  Well, I came here with Michiko, but she was such an excellent underling that I almost counted her as an extension of myself. There was a technique that everyone could use, known as ‘Binding Vows’, and I had sworn Michiko to secrecy regarding everything that she saw me do.

  I stood in front of the cliff face, my Juchū surrounding me in a sparse aura of bugs six feet wide, and slowly let my mind melt away as I opened myself up to the world itself.

  The clan archives didn’t have much information on the Black Flash, other than that it was an incredibly fortuitous phenomenon, and that it had the potential to upgrade any expert’s usage of cursed energy by way of providing an insight into said energy.

  Claims differed when it came to the mathematics of how the technique bolstered a strike, but the magnitude was massive.

  It took me almost fifteen minutes before I reached the zone.

  My body barely felt like it was mine as I moved, cocking my fist back and focusing on one particular spot on the cliff face.

  I struck it.

  Bump.

  I adjusted my energy ever-so-slightly, and struck it again.

  Bump.

  Then… again.

  Black lightning exploded from the contact, and I cracked the stone in a six-inch wide circle.

  Again.

  Black Flash.

  Like ripping the tab on a chainsaw.

  Black Flash.

  Or starting up your car in winter.

  Black Flash.

  It took preparation to get to this point.

  Black Flash.

  But once I was there, I was there.

  Black Flash.

  I still couldn’t do it at will.

  I waited for a window of opportunity. A moment.

  Black Flash.

  If my cursed energy was the only relevant factor of this equation, then perhaps, it would have been easier for me to use this technique.

  Black Flash.

  The first Black Flash I had hit, against that cursed spirit, had given me a hint. My subsequent training had heaped hint upon hint until I could finally make out the bigger picture.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  I was a microcosm of the world.

  And the world was a macrocosm of me.

  We were one.

  The world was the other relevant factor of the equation. I couldn’t always hear her whispers, and it took time to sharpen my ears enough for me to be able to listen.

  But even in this zone, I had to respect her. I had to wait my turn.

  Black Flash.

  Interval: two seconds.

  Black Flash.

  Half a second.

  I waited.

  Black Flash.

  Three seconds.

  Not random, never random. There was a pattern. There always was.

  My job wasn’t to figure it out. It was just to listen.

  Black—

  Bump.

  A failure. I took a moment to collect myself.

  Had I gone wrong somewhere? Was it wrong for me to anthropomorphize the world? Or was it that I was ceding too much power to the world?

  Maybe I should figure out the pattern instead?

  I cocked my fist back and struck, irritated by my failure. Irritated at the world.

  Black Flash.

  Loose rocks exploded forth, pelting my face. I would have been cut hadn’t it been for my cursed energy protecting me.

  When you hit the world, the world hit back. Newton’s third law.

  I sensed that I was approaching a proper conclusion at the memory of that aspect of physics.

  Maybe all this philosophizing was training wheels? After all, if ascribing flowery poetry and subjective meaning to cursed energy was a measure of understanding, then wouldn’t all those thousands of scholars in the clan’s past have been able to unlock the Reverse Cursed Technique?

  Human language was my only avenue towards conceptualizing cursed energy, and thus positive energy. Once I had gotten the ‘feel’ for it, I had to consider ditching it all and getting… eldritch with it.

  Artistic. Expressive.

  Above all, I would need to abandon language itself.

  There was a way for me to think in that way—to not use words, but attacking the concepts directly.

  I just had to still my mind and feel.

  Black Flash.

  Alright then, Taylor. Teira. No more thinking.

  Black Flash.

  Just do it.

  Black Flash.

  Positive energy.

  Black Flash.

  000

  The Bear-grade before me looked almost like Crawler. It was purple, had six limbs, a long tail, and a face with multiple, red eyes, and big, square teeth with exposed gums. It even had a mane of yellow hair. All six of its limbs, including its tail, were bound to the floor of the basement, and Iemon was standing between us.

  “This one is stronger than the usual,” Iemon said. “I almost debated on labeling it as Tiger-grade. It is difficult for an expert on my level to judge what is or isn’t doable for weaker experts. I may have underestimated its threat to you, therefore.”

  I already heavily suspected that I, myself, was a Bear-grade, and had some slight delusions that I could even pass for a Tiger-grade in a pinch. And according to Iemon, cursed spirits were ranked differently from experts. A Bear-grade expert could reliably put down a Bear-grade spirit, and could even hold their own against Tiger-grades.

  Those were all just suspicions and delusions, however. I had no interest in staking my life on them, which was why I was content in fighting this creature.

  It was almost twenty feet long from head to tail, though its legs were ten feet from the head. It was massive. I forced myself to not begin the arduous process of getting into the zone until the monster was freed. I had to approach this as though it were a random encounter.

  “Having second thoughts?”

  “No. Free it.”

  Iemon approached the wall of the basement and did exactly that. I stood twenty feet away from the monster, fists balled.

  The manacles fell.

  The monster’s slavering mouth opened as it ran after me.

  I released my Juchū.

  Seventy-six points of sensory inflow, and suddenly, the monster’s frantic pace felt slower.

  But if I slipped, even once, it would kill me. This monster would end my life if I let it, and I doubted that from this distance, Iemon could save me.

  My fists loosened. My hands opened.

  I let it come to me. It stretched its front most arm back in a bid to rip me apart.

  000

  Iemon watched with all his Juchū as the Bear-grade was about to reach Teira. His stomach fell in shock. This is how she dies?

  The Bear-grade stretched its arm back.

  Teira’s open hand flickered.

  Half a second later? A flash of black lightning and sparks.

  The arm flew into the air, spinning.

  Teira jumped, spun and kicked her heel to the cursed spirit’s face, sending it careening back, before calmly walking under the spinning arm and raising her hand. She didn’t even look as the arm fell hand-first into her waiting grasp.

  She kept her eyes on the cursed spirit, readjusting its stance to run at her again.

  She brought the arm down on the monster’s head.

  Its chin hit the ground as it fell.

  She then kicked it upwards.

  Black Flash.

  She threw the arm at the exposed belly of the Bear-grade while it was still in the air.

  A Black Flash originating from her hand caused the limb to shoot forward faster than he could track it.

  It caught the spirit stomach-first and launched it into the wall, pinning it in place.

  It slid out from the arm, shattered as it was, and landed heavily on the ground. Teira walked towards it without any urgency. Once she reached its form, struggling to get up, she raised her tiny leg and stomped the creature’s skull with yet another Black Flash.

  With the spirit now dead and dissolving, Teira turned her gaze towards Iemon, freezing him in place utterly.

  Those eyes were empty. Like she could perceive nothing but curses. Like they, themselves, were cursed. It made perfect sense. Anyone this blessed by the sparks clearly operated on another level of mentality.

  Tiger-grade.

  No. Demon-grade.

  Stronger than Iemon.

  Iemon shook himself out of his shock and schooled his nerves. “Listen, Teira. The clan head is planning on having you fight in a duel against a sixteen-year-old. It’s a full-contact Juchū battle. Martial arts is permissible.”

  “Ah,” she said. Her eyes remained eerie. “How strong is he?”

  “He’s… Wolf-grade.”

  “Oh,” she said, slightly disappointed.

  “Don’t fight him. Just… avoid him. You should be able to do that.”

  “I’m supposed to avoid him until the battle ends—when all the wagered Juchū have been subsumed.”

  Iemon nodded. “Precisely. Don’t… attract too much attention. Not yet, at least. You show promise. So much promise. But the clan head wants you punished, and if you make too much of a spectacle—“

  “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down. I understand.”

  “Ideally, you should just—” Iemon said, but stopped himself.

  Stopped himself. Why? How could this girl cause him to feel like he had to hold his tongue?

  “Should just what?”

  Iemon warred against whatever instinct had caused him to hesitate, and groaned, scratching the back of his head with a frown. “Just lose, Teira. Wager fifteen to thirty, and let them be taken. You have enough as it is and you can always just win them back in the future. At least this way, you end up appeasing the clan head.”

  “Ah.”

  Iemon opened his eyes to look at Teira, and narrowed them. She didn’t look like she was internalizing the necessity of having to lose at all. There would be more disappointment in her frame if she did.

  “I’m being serious,” Iemon said. “You should lose.”

  “Should lose,” she said. “And will you protect me, Iemon-sama, should I win?”

  Iemon sighed. This damned brat. “Why do you even want more Juchū? You’ll be approaching your limit, soon. Even I don’t care to use more than fifty at a time!”

  Teira raised an eyebrow. “And why should you decide where my limits lie?”

  This brat. Was there anyone in this world more proud and conceited?

  He consoled himself with the knowledge that his future payout would be far higher than the present capital that he would have to spend on covering for the brat’s ambition.

  000

  This battle was going to be in one of the courtyards. Roughly half the clan, hundreds in number, had shown up. The clan head was on a balcony on the first floor, and from the looks of things, he had nothing but rancor to spare to me.

  The people had shown up to see a certain bastard audacious enough to challenge a six-year-old to a no-holds-barred slugfest.

  And truth be told, I too was curious to see who it was.

  The lanky teenager had a big nose, round eyes, and his brows were pinched in constant discomfort. He wore a black kimono like I did, though his was far less pretty. Over the months, I had spent my capital with Iemon to upgrade my wardrobe drastically. The kimonos were one of the few ways that I kept myself sane—that, and the music. As such, my robes had many more details in white, pink and purple. Flowers, butterflies, and birds.

  His had some bees in them, but were otherwise quite unadorned.

  Hirotada-sensei actually strode into the courtyard, ground packed with sand, wearing a hat that made him look all official. “This is a full-contact Juchū battle. That means that all techniques, whether martial or cursed, are allowed in this battle. Yoshino, as the challenger, what are you willing to stake?”

  “All of my Juchū,” Yoshino frowned, glaring at me. “All thirty-two.”

  Murmurs arose from that.

  All this fuss just for thirty-two.

  “I suggest you wager thirty-one,” I said. “But it’s all the same to me.”

  Hirotada glared at me.

  “Thirty-two,” Yoshino growled.

  “The challenger proposes an all-in stake. As Teira possesses more than thirty-two Juchū, she will be required to cap her output to thirty-two as well.”

  That’s overkill.

  Whatever.

  “Do you accept this challenge? Or will you pay the penalty of declining: thirty-two Juchū?”

  “I accept.”

  The courtyard grew quiet as death itself.

  I could hear trees rustling distantly.

  “Summon your Juchū,” Hirotada announced coldly.

  Yoshino gaped and let them pour out of his mouth. I raised my hand as usual and had them fly out. My swarm were black flies, while his were a purple and eclectic mix of specializations. I spotted some hornets, a few atlas beetles, dragonflies, and a pair of flies.

  “On my mark,” Hirotada said as he backed away from the grounds.

  “Go!”

  I enforced my body with cursed energy and attacked his swarm.

  In seconds, he reached me with a punch to my face that threw me back. He reached my fallen form and started pummeling me. He didn’t even hesitate to straddle my stomach and rain blows down on my face.

  I let him continue to do that well after the match had ended.

  In truth, it had ended sometime between his second and third strike. While he was busy hitting me, thinking that it might distract me from the Juchū battle, he obviously hadn’t considered how distracted he would be from frantically trying to kill a six-year-old.

  Hirotada lagged behind on announcing my victory.

  I raised my foot, hitting Yoshino in the back of his head. While he was stunned, I rolled away, got on my feet, and backtracked away from him. “Why do you still fight me?” I asked.

  Yoshino roared. “Your Juchū are mine!”

  I blinked. “You still can’t sense it? The match is over.”

  Yoshino’s eyes widened. He looked around at the swarm of black insects surrounding us. “No,” he whispered. “No, no, no, no—“

  He fell on his knees.

  I felt at my cheek. None of that had hurt, really. I had felt the slightest sting at a certain point, but even that was barely a fleeting memory to me now.

  Just the way I liked it. I would never let another grown-up bruise me.

  “The winner is Teira,” Hirotada announced quietly.

  The clan-head was already turned around, leaving his balcony. The last that I saw of him was the hair-pins holding his bun up.

  000

  A hundred and eight Juchū. The number was auspicious, according to the Buddhist traditions that our clan only slightly upheld.

  According to the myths, a hundred and eight represented how many sensory states one could experience. You multiplied the six senses—smell, taste, hearing, sight, touch, and consciousness—by whether what they were sensing were pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral experiences, and then again by whether they were internally generated or externally occurring experiences, and then again by whether they occurred in the past, present, or the future.

  Six times three times two times three. A hundred and eight.

  A hundred and eight states of sensory experience. A hundred and eight Juchū through which I could interpret the world and become further merged with it.

  “Are you even listening?”

  I sat in seiza before Iemon’s raised futon in his official room—though not his bedroom. My Juchū weren’t out, but they were active, inside of my spirit.

  “I am listening,” I said. “I’m just embroiled in something more important.”

  “Then what did I say?” Iemon fanned himself with his hand-fan, glaring at me. Over time, I had understood that the Turning Point in our relationship had completely changed our dynamic, and that subconsciously, Iemon viewed me as his superior.

  Because he knew that I stood a decent chance of being able to master the Reverse Cursed Technique, which would make my succession a sure thing.

  “The clan head is irate, Aizawa-sama—the boy’s uncle—is plotting revenge against me, and you’ve been told to stop covering for me. Ordered to do so by Sosuke, in fact, which is why you’re considering marrying me off to Mitsuzuka’s child, in order to merge our power blocs so that we can oust Sosuke.”

  “O-oh.”

  “I hear every word you’re saying. I’m simply focusing on my cursed energy.”

  I was finally about to find what I had been looking for: the singular unit of cursed energy. My view into my own energy had magnified so drastically that compared to before, where I was operating with a looking glass, I had the sensory abilities of an electron microscope.

  I could see it now. The indivisible unit of cursed energy.

  The negativity.

  It spun. It vibrated. It… it did things.

  And it could do just the opposite, too. Of course it could. That was the Reverse Cursed Technique.

  “I decline,” I said.

  The energy needed to collide with itself in some way. Multiplying negative with negative. That was the answer. But the collision had to be perfect.

  “W-what? Teira-chan, this is a good opportunity.”

  “Then I suspend my decision,” I said. “For three more years. What’s the rush?”

  I was in the experimentation phase, now. I knew what worked. I just had to execute on that perfectly. And thanks to the Queen Administrator, I could take control over these individual units of energy soon, the more I learned about them, the more I could grasp them in my mind, and thus my hands. That was the entire point of that shard—now a cursed trait: to control countless minions.

  “Is that fine?” I asked.

  “That’s… well, these things do take much time, but the situation is sensitive. We need Mitsuzuka’s protection.”

  “Offer him a tentative yes, then,” I said. “Though I have no intention of meeting his children. I’m in a critical juncture of my development.”

  “You mean…?!”

  I placed the full weight of my focus on Iemon. “Cover for me. Just a little while longer. Please.”

  Iemon’s face looked like he had bitten into a lemon. He swallowed and nodded. “Fine.”

  A/N: In case anyone missed it, I snuck in a cheeky ‘Tenjou, tenge, yuiga dokuson/Throughout the heavens and the earth, I alone am the honored one’ reference in this chapter.