The wind was dry, not cold.
Not anymore.
It scraped at the husk of a dead orchard with all the gentleness of bone against bone.
Yuta sat with his back to a withered tree, hands open on his knees like he was waiting for something to be placed there. But nothing came.
He watched the horizon for hours.
"Not Japan," he muttered. "Not even Earth, I think..."
He didn't know where this place was.
The sky was the same. That bothered him.
It was blue the way home had been, scattered with clouds like rice paper ink smudged with water.
If he didn't look down, if he didn't breathe the ash, feel the silence that came with death, he could almost lie to himself.
But his cursed energy whispered otherwise.
There were no curses here.
None of that bitter pressure that leaked from trauma, from loss, from the festering human soul.
He reached for it sometimes, out of habit, and felt only the echo of himself, thin and flickering.
A candle in a city drowned in disease.
That should've been good news.
A world without curses. That should've meant peace.
But this wasn't peace.
It was... erosion.
The kind of quiet that didn't feel earned.
No prayer had made it. No sorcerer had exorcised it.
This world simply bled itself empty.
Slowly. Quietly.
Like people forgot how to scream.
Yuta clenched his hands.
Infected. That's what they called it, right?
The black crystals, the coughing.
The tremors in Kuro's sleep.
It felt familiar, not in shape or name, but in weight.
He'd fought spirits that latched onto despair. He'd seen humans twisted by their own regret.
This was different, colder.
Not emotional.
Biological.
Worse.
There were people here, too.
He'd seen them in the distance.
Cities behind walls.
Soldiers with guns.
Children that didn't cry when they scraped their knees, because they already knew pain couldn't be helped.
He didn't understand the factions.
Rhodes Island. Reunion. Ursus. Kazimierz.
They were just words, half-heard through cracked radios or whispered from dying mouths.
What mattered was the silence between them.
The way no one helped.
No one trusted.
Everyone just moved, like insects under a falling boot, hoping not to be the next crushed.
In another world, he had been called strong.
In another world, he had stood behind Gojo Satoru, smiled through blood, and believed that maybe, he could protect someone.
But here?
Yuta looked at his hands again.
They trembled faintly.
Not from fear.
From use.
From pulling too hard on cursed energy that barely answered him. From digging graves. From keeping warm.
"...If this world has no curses," he whispered, "then why does it feel even more cursed than mine?"
No answer came.
Just wind.
Just silence.
And the sound of Kuro coughing inside the shelter.
Kuro's cough started small.
Barely a rasp in the back of his throat.
He covered it well, drinking extra water, turning away when it came.
But Yuta noticed.
Not because it was loud or strange.
But because of what it wasn't.
It wasn't the sound of fatigue.
It was the sound of something blooming wrong inside the body.
Yuta had heard it before.
He didn't say anything at first.
Instead, he watched.
Watched Kuro get tired faster when they gathered brush.
Watched Ayane press her hand to the boy's forehead when she thought no one was looking.
Watched her fingers linger for too long.
Watched the way her eyes refused to meet his.
Watched those crystal growing.
That night, long after they had eaten in silence and laid their things down, Yuta sat outside again, under that twisted orchard canopy that hid the stars.
He didn't reinforce his body.
Didn't raise a barrier.
He let the cold in.
And that's when the memory hit him.
Not like a vision, not like a curse.
But like something sacred.
Yuta opened his eyes.
The wind had stopped.
The night was colder.
And he was alone again.
But the weight on his chest remained.
...
In the days that followed, Kuro's cough worsened.
Ayane said nothing about it.
She moved slower.
Cooked more food, even when their rations dwindled.
Sat longer beside Kuro's mat before sleeping.
Yuta watched it all.
It feel like... she is trying to make memories with Kuro...
Waiting for time to consume whatever the family have left.
Yuta aware of what's happening.
But he kept telling himself it's okay.
That his reversed cursed technique will work normally again.
And he could save them.
Buy more time...
He offered to scavenge further.
Ayane agreed with a look that was both gratitude and resignation.
"No roads west" she said. "Collapsed years ago. But the rivers used to carry caravans. Might be something near the old dam."
Yuta nodded.
He left at dawn.
The air felt heavier than cursed energy.
...
It took him two days.
He found old campsites.
Rusted crates.
One building half-sunk in the ground, flooded and filled with black algae.
He reinforced his legs, held his breath, dove.
No medicine.
But something worse.
A corpse.
Small.
Wrapped in a coat far too large, holding a doll in its arms.
Yuta surfaced, gasping, and retched into the reeds.
When he returned to the orchard on the third day, he was muddy, bruised, and empty-handed.
Kuro met him at the edge of the field.
He was thinner.
His eyes tired.
Still, he smiled.
"You found it?"
Yuta knelt slowly.
"...No..." he whispered.
"Oh."
Kuro looked down.
Then up again, still smiling.
"That's okay. You came back!"
Yuta opened his mouth.
Nothing came out.
Kuro reached into his coat and pulled out another drawing.
This one was a shield.
Cracked, but still standing.
Behind it, two smaller figures huddled together.
The shield had no name.
But Yuta understood.
And in that moment, the memory of Gojo's words returned, not like a comfort, but like a wound that never really closed.
"To be the strongest... is to be the one who stands when no one else can."
Even if your hands shake.
Even if your heart breaks.
Even if you already failed once.
...
Morning didn't arrive the way it used to.
There was no warm light spilling through shoji screens, no birdsong beyond the thin glass of a dormitory window.
Here, morning arrived like a wound that never closed.
Just gray light, heavy and cold, creeping in sideways through a split in the wooden wall of the abandoned orchard shack.
Dust hung in the air like ash.
Breath steamed faintly in the cold.
Yuta was already awake. He hadn't truly slept.
The floor was hard. His back ached. His eyes felt dry, like they'd been left open too long.
He sat upright, drawing his legs in, arms loose over his knees.
Listening.
There it was again.
Kuro's cough.
It used to be rare.
A tickle.
A dry sound that barely lasted a breath.
Now it came in slow, shuddering clusters.
Each time it returned, it burrowed deeper.
It sounded like something trying to leave him from the inside.
Ayane stirred next, already curled around her son in the corner of the room.
Her hands gently shifted the thin blanket higher over Kuro's chest, as if that would protect him from the inevitable.
She didn't speak.
Neither did Yuta.
The silence between them had grown familiar.
Not comfortable. Just understood.
They were all pretending.
Ayane didn't ask if Yuta could try again.
She hadn't asked in two days.
She knew the answer now, even if it hurt more than hope.
Yuta's reversed cursed technique no longer responded.
Not in full. Not where it mattered.
Not on others.
He could feel it.
The buzz of cursed energy beneath his skin.
The tiny spark still clinging to his soul like an ember.
Enough to reinforce his own limbs, to keep moving, fighting, barely surviving.
But the deeper current, the warmth that had once flowed into others and brought them back from the edge, it was missing.
Broken. Fading.
Or maybe just no longer enough for this world.
Yuta stood slowly.
His legs felt like they belonged to someone else.
Too stiff. Too slow.
He reached for his blade, no Rika, not anymore, just a rusted length of steel he'd reforged from the remnants of a mining tool.
Still, it held cursed energy well enough.
"I'll check the western ridge again," he murmured.
Ayane nodded without looking at him.
Her hand never stopped stroking Kuro's back.
The outside was no better.
The orchard had once been lush, maybe.
Yuta saw the ghosts of it in the gnarled branches, the rows of skeletal trees now stripped of all color and fruit.
The ground was cracked and dry.
Originium dust clung to everything, not glowing, not active, but always present.
A reminder.
He moved quietly between the ruins. His senses sharpened.
Eyes flicking toward broken fence posts, collapsed sheds, and distant movement that could've been wind, or worse.
The cursed energy in this world was faint, twisted, almost non-existent, but his instincts hadn't dulled completely.
Something was out there.
Always.
Still, he pushed forward.
He returned with little.
A dented canteen, half-full.
A brittle stalk of something greenish-purple that might have been edible.
His fingers bled from a brush with coiled wire, but he didn't notice until the blood smeared on the wood of the shack's doorframe.
Inside, Kuro hadn't improved.
Ayane looked up at him.
She didn't speak.
But the question was there in her eyes.
Yuta sat down beside them.
Close, but not too close.
He pressed two fingers to Kuro's forehead, feeling the heat beneath the skin.
Then he closed his eyes and tried again.
Cursed energy gathered at his fingertips.
He called it gently.
Tried to guide it into healing.
The way he once had with broken ribs, crushed lungs, ruptured veins.
But this world was not Japan.
Not the battlefield where he'd once fought alongside Maki, Toge, Panda.
Not the rooftop where he'd stood beside Gojo.
This world didn't listen to cursed energy.
The spark faded.
Yuta pulled his hand back slowly.
Silent.
Ayane watched him.
Her lips trembled, but she didn't cry.
She hadn't cried since the first week they met, she know well what Yuta can do can't removed all of the infection, and she is putting more responsibility on the boy's shoulder.
But... she want to see Kuro smile...
That night, Yuta stepped outside.
The orchard wind had picked up.
Leaves rattled like bones on the trees.
The moon was hidden behind thick clouds that never moved.
He sat beneath the largest tree, its trunk splitting like a scarred mouth.
His breath fogged in the air.
He stared at his hands.
They had once carried so many lives.
Held so much power. He had been a curse user, a special grade, Gojo Satoru's student.
He had stood at the edge of annihilation and been trusted with everything.
"If I lose, even if you want it or not, everyone will start to replace me with you"
The words returned like a whisper through bone.
"Although i sure can beat that old man... it's just... i hope you'll be ready even at the worst outcome."
"..."
"...Heh, don't worry too much Yuta. I got this" (B/ro was cappin ToT)
Yuta breathed in.
Shaky. Quiet.
He had tried.
Gods, he had tried. He had held Gojo's body, blood pouring from every wound.
He had summoned every technique, every ounce of cursed power, tried to pull his soul back to where it belonged.
He had failed.
Now he sat in a dying world, watching a child cough himself to pieces while the last of his strength slipped away.
"If this world has no curses," he whispered to the dark, "then why does it feel more cursed than mine ever did?"
No answer came.
Only the cough.
And Ayane's quiet humming.
And the brittle ache of another morning drawing near.