Inside a different space filled with darkness and floating debris, space swirled and a nude human figure appeared in the midst of a ruined city.
On one of the floating columns, displaced from gravity, Ryota with his clothes burned off, let out a breath as he stood in the vast emptiness.
"Not exactly how I planned my dinner to go..." He said with a wry smile as he looked at his naked form before taking a look at the cash at hand.
"It seems... leaving home isn't all that bad at times..." The boy thought.
Of course that confession was for him and the endless space alone to hear. He would rather ingest one of Sukuna's fingers before saying this in front of anyone, lest his mother get wind of it.
He was sure she would hound him to no end. That aside, his mind couldn't help but return to the image of the civilians in the diner, all going up in flames, him included.
'Twenty people dead because I chose not to get involved.' He thought, surprisingly unbothered by the mental image of charred corpses. 'I could have stopped Jogo the moment I sensed their power levels. Hell, I could have ended the whole thing before the first person died.'
The fact didn't particularly disturb him—he'd made his choice with full awareness of the consequences. What did annoy him was how the situation had escalated beyond his expectations.
'I wanted to observe what they were capable of. Information gathering, you could call it. I just didn't expect the volcano head to be quite so... theatrical about it.' He stretched, working out a kink in his neck. 'Twenty deaths for intel on Special Grade cursed spirits and whoever that stitched-face bastard was. Not exactly a fair trade, but not my problem either.'
He thought with a slightly contemplative mood. It had been seventeen years since he came to this world.
During this time, he had spent the vast majority of his time at home, secluded, keeping to himself. He knew very little of the Jujutsu Kaisen world.
Nothing beyond YouTube videos of Satoru Gojo and evaluations on who were stronger and information on character abilities.
Characters like Gojo, Sukuna, Yuta, Megumi, Yuji, and some guy named Itadori who between him and Gojo, should be the main character. Although the Itadori, strangely looked like Sukuna for some reason he couldn't quite understand yet. Perhaps they were twins or something.
Unfortunately, that's as much as his meta knowledge spanned. Everything else he knew was from the accumulation of his new life experiences and knowledge since the day he was old enough to understand what a fictional world and a transmigrator was, and how both went hand in hand to explain his current situation.
Most people would be happy at a second chance at life and would go on to live it to the fullest, developing relentlessly before amazing the world with their accumulated power and strength.
Ryota however, was a different case.
For sure, he was happy at a second chance at life and would cherish it deeply. It's just that the method of cherishing was a bit different from what others would expect. Watching movies, reading novels, playing games, basically doing what the academic overachiever in his last life gave up doing just to get into the best college and meet guardian expectations.
Why?
For many reasons actually. One, he wasn't a fan.
No, not that he wasn't an anime fan in general. Rather, Ryota Fujimura wasn't a fan of Jujutsu Kaisen. As part of the older generation, his childhood days were spent on Naruto and Attack On Titan occupying the top spots of his favorite anime. And Cartoons like Avatar The Last Airbender, and Movies like DC and Marvel taking up favorite interests.
He never read manga, and by the time Jujutsu Kaisen came out, he had long since begun slaving away at a standard soul-crushing nine-to-five job.
Lacking any real knowledge of its characters, the urge and zeal most of his kind would gain to explore the world and interact with characters of their favorite movies while conquering all their favorite female supporting characters and gaining a huge unrealistic harem, didn't apply to him.
He didn't even have an idea of who the female supporting characters were. Perhaps his aunt Utahime was one of them. Should he attempt to seduce her?
The very thought sent a chill down his spine.
How unsettling. Too creepy.
He thought with a shiver. Nevertheless, the point was made. This wasn't Naruto where beautiful female leads he was familiar with abounded everywhere.
More than half of his desire in that aspect was sealed away. As for power? The urge for that was even lesser than for women. Why?
Simply because he already had power. Probably more than he could ever ask for.
His cursed technique—Nexus—was something that defied conventional understanding. It wasn't just a technique; it was a fundamental aspect of his existence as a transmigrator.
The ability allowed him to reach across the infinite multiverse and retrieve anything physical that he could remember or conceptualize. From simple items like clothes and food to complex artifacts like devil fruits, super soldier serums, or even cursed objects from other realities.
The technique operated on several principles:
**Memory Clarity:** The clearer his memory of an item, the easier it was to retrieve. Simple, mundane objects required almost no effort—he could pull out chairs, books, cars, even gold with barely any strain.
**Conceptual Understanding:** For items he'd never seen but could theoretically exist, he needed to understand their fundamental nature. Cancer cures, advanced technologies, theoretical weapons—if he could grasp how they might work, he could find a reality where they existed and pull them through.
**Power Level Scaling:** The more powerful or complex an item, the more strain it placed on him. Devil fruits were manageable but taxing. Legendary artifacts or weapons of mass destruction required significant effort and preparation.
**Exact Replication:** Everything came with its original properties intact—weaknesses, limitations, and all. A devil fruit would still carry its sea water weakness. A cursed object would retain its malevolent properties.
The technique also allowed him to send objects to other realities, essentially using the multiverse as an infinite storage system or disposal method.
But perhaps most importantly, Nexus had already provided him with the foundation of his current strength. Over the years, he had used this power in the best possible ways he could think of and retrieved several key items:
The **Super Soldier Serum** from Marvel realities, enhancing his physical capabilities to superhuman levels. The **Heart-Shaped Herb** from Wakanda, further boosting his strength and reflexes. **Compound V** from the world of The Boys. A Devil Fruit from a one Piece universe where his ideal fruit hadn't been eaten yet, Granting him additional abilities. And most crucially, the **Hōgyoku** from Bleach.
The Hōgyoku was the key to everything. Using its reality-warping properties, he had been able to guide his evolution in specific directions. Using compound V, he'd gained abilities similar to Homelander—flight, enhanced strength, heat vision, and near-invulnerability. But unlike the original, his powers had been refined and controlled through the Hōgyoku's influence.
He had also used it to get rid of the weaknesses in the Devil Fruits while making his Compound V powers alongside the devil fruits, permanent and more potent.
The result was a seventeen-year-old with strength that easily placed him beyond Special Grade territory. His cursed energy reserves were massive, his physical capabilities superhuman, and his technique gave him access to literally anything that could exist across infinite realities.
Like he said, power handed to him on a silver platter.
The moment he realized he had this ability, Ryota had essentially won the cosmic lottery. He could become stronger than anyone in this world without breaking a sweat. He could amass wealth beyond imagination. He could solve world hunger, cure diseases, or become the most influential person on the planet.
But therein lay the problem that plagued many overpowered individuals: lack of purpose and motivation.
When you could have anything, nothing seemed particularly valuable. When you could solve any problem, no challenge seemed worth the effort. When you could become the strongest being in existence, the journey toward strength lost all meaning.
Hence, with no real desire for power and his mental age being far beyond his physical appearance, after a few adventures in his earlier years to fulfill a certain bucket list, Ryota had degraded to a life of anime, novels, and video games. His technique was used primarily for convenience—retrieving snacks, entertainment, or dealing with the occasional cursed spirit that wandered too close to home.
Nine years later, it had gone beyond second nature and replaced whatever the hell was his original behavior and character.
He rarely stepped out of the house, lived on pizza and ramen (both retrieved from realities with the best versions), found human interactions troublesome and unnecessary, and was an avid homebody, otaku, and anime geek.
Initially attributing his antisocial life to being a precocious little genius with a mind above his body and the loss of his father, his mother indulged his whims and watched him fall deeper and deeper into depravity to the point where she could no longer extricate him from it by herself.
If this continued, her son might lose all interest in women altogether. How would she hold her grandkids if that happened?
Forget about having a girlfriend, in her view, he hadn't even touched a girl's hand, and his verbal reassurances that he actually had a girlfriend was far from comforting.
Technically speaking, the last time she saw him talk to a girl was six months ago when he decided to step outside his home to the convenience store.
Fearing her son would end up alone at fifty alongside other worries, Reika Fujimura began to take drastic measures to ensure the survival of her bloodline before it was ruined in the hands of her deadbeat son.
One, a threat.
Get a girlfriend of your choice, or face an arranged marriage of her choice with a stuck-up daughter of a famous Jujutsu Sorcerer clan.
Just this alone was enough to get him moving. The latter option was enough to end whatever peaceful life he envisioned for himself for good.
Two, hand him over to someone who could handle him.
As despite being a Special Grade Sorcerer, Ryota's mother knew her son was stronger than she was. Plus, she didn't have the time and energy to focus on him every day.
Thankfully, there was someone who could.
The strongest Sorcerer in modern Jujutsu, Satoru Gojo. Best of all, enrollment was free of charge.
Judging from Gojo's character and his title, if anyone could get her son a working social life, then it was him.
Initially, Ryota had thought that Jujutsu Tech was meaningless to him. After all, he already had strength, speed, and hax abilities that surpassed most of what this world had to offer.
However, his previous encounter with Jogo made him reconsider some things. Not about morality or saving people—that ship had sailed long ago. But about the practical implications of his lifestyle choices.
'The problem wasn't that I couldn't save them,' he mused, idly manipulating the space around him. 'It's that I chose not to get involved until it directly affected me. Twenty people died, and I only acted when my clothes got burned.'
He paused, considering this.
'From a purely strategic standpoint, that's... inefficient. If I'm going to be forced into social situations at Jujutsu Tech, I'll need to develop better protocols for when to intervene and when to stay out of things. Can't have every minor incident escalating into a massacre just because I'm feeling antisocial.'
The feeling of mild inconvenience at having to think about such things was about as close to regret as Ryota was likely to get.
Now, he had to place his thoughts elsewhere.
Perhaps attending Jujutsu Tech wouldn't be completely pointless. Not for power or moral development, but for practical social intelligence. Understanding when intervention was worth the hassle and when it wasn't.
"I could just hide out here for the rest of my life..." The thought crossed his mind as he looked at the infinite dimension.
His current location wasn't a personal dimension of his own, but rather a dimension that existed in another universe altogether.
Its ruined state was because it had been destroyed by a being of immense power. Of course, that being wasn't here anymore and was highly unlikely to come back.
The name? Azarath.
The being? Trigon.
Moving on to important stuff.
Deep in thought, Ryota eventually shook his head, eradicating the thought as quickly as it appeared. His mind returned to his current predicament.
Today had been all sorts of wrong.
"Well, at least something went right tonight."
He thought, counting the cash in hand. Money meant little to him nowadays, but who would refuse more? Plus, the fact that he'd gotten compensation for his clothes was oddly satisfying. At least someone had recognized the principle of taking responsibility for property damage.
Then he looked at himself.
'Can't return outside wandering naked. Mom will kill me if I make the news like this. Better return to get some clothes before I'm called to meet Gojo. First impressions and all that.'
The fact that he'd just killed a special grade cursed spirit didn't seem to bother him in the slightest. After all, it had been self-defense. Sort of. And the clothes really had been expensive. Plus, Jogo had murdered twenty innocent people right in front of him—if anything, the world was probably better off without the walking volcano.
He thought, focusing his technique. The space around him began to fold and distort as he prepared to step through dimensional boundaries back to his room.
A moment later, he materialized in the room he was familiar with.
His room back in their home back in Sendai.
"Alright, let's get some..." His voice came to a halt instantly. Those blue eyes inherited from his mother staring straight ahead.
Right into the eyes of the same woman who was bending down by his bedside, with his comic books in hand. It didn't take him two seconds to realize his mom was rummaging through his stuff, most likely checking for anything that might prove he had developed to the level of having a change in sexual orientation so she could take even more drastic measures if need be.
"I thought I told you not to come back home until five."
"That's the Tokyo villa. Mom, what are you doing going through my stuff?"
"Checking for warning signs to see if you are developing interest in men."
The woman admitted without a care.
Several black lines emerged on Ryota's forehead. He was about to speak when he saw her eyes narrow, revealing a dangerous gleam as she scanned him.
Conveniently, the cold wind just happened to brush against his bare buttocks, causing his hair to stand on end as he realized he was still naked.
She stared at him. He stared back.
"…I can explain." He said quickly, raising his hands in surrender.
Her eyes narrowed. "Start talking."
...
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