Have you ever been in a completely dark room?
Not the kind where your eyes eventually adjust, but a room so dark there's no difference between opening your eyes and closing them. I blinked anyway, more out of habit than hope.
Somehow, it felt darker than that. Not sure how that works, I thought distantly, blinking again. But sure. Let's go with it.
There was nothing here. No sound, no smell, no sense of direction. No up or down. I couldn't feel a body, couldn't tell where I ended and whatever surrounded me began. I only knew that I was. Existence without shape, awareness without form.
"Huh," I thought. "So this is death?" I waited for something else to happen. A light. A voice. Anything.
Nothing came.
"I kind of figured there'd be an afterlife," I mused. "Or at least… something to look at." The thought lingered, then drifted. "This is kind of lame. Is this really it? Just waiting until you stop thinking and… exist?"
No answer. Just the void.
So I just floated. And floated.
And floated
Time lost meaning without anything to anchor it. Or maybe it never existed here at all. Memories began to blur—not all at once, but selectively. The more personal they were, the harder they became to grasp.
"What was my name again?" I wondered. "Ja—Su—Si—no… Tom? Nah."
That should've bothered me more than it did. "My mom…" I tried. "Shel—Clai—Ca—Cat… Cathy?" The name felt right, or close enough that my mind accepted it. Still, certainty slipped through my grasp like smoke.
I noted, distantly, that I wasn't panicking. Maybe I should have been. But whatever emotional weight those thoughts carried felt… far away. Like they belonged to someone else.
Hard to be rattled about forgetting names when you can't even remember your own, I reasoned.
So I drifted. Or existed. Or whatever passed for time here.
It was during that idle awareness—while I was exploring the boundaries of my own nothingness—that I felt it.
A tremor.
The entirety of me—and there was a lot of me, I realized—began to vibrate violently, as if pressed against something foreign. It was tiny in comparison. Really tiny. But it was something that wasn't me, and in a place like this, that mattered.
I barely had time to register excitement before—
I collided with it.
The impact was instantaneous. Catastrophic. Whatever that smaller presence was shattered on contact, fragments scattering into the void like broken glass. And then—
I opened my eyes.
Actual eyes. Physical ones.
"Oh," I breathed. "Wow."
The world flooded in all at once—sight, depth, solidity. I was standing in a cramped, dark gray apartment, concrete walls bare except for a few sparse decorations. Spartan. Ugly. Beautiful.
Anything was better than nothing.
I almost laughed. "Man, I'd stare at just about anything after that. Even—" I froze.
Someone was standing in the middle of the room.
Light gray hair fell messily around his face, soft strands framing wide, attentive eyes that locked onto me with unsettling focus. Dark, stitch-like seams ran across his face and down his limbs, as though his body had been cut apart and crudely reassembled. He smiled—easy, casual, almost friendly—but the tilt of his head and the loose, careless way he shifted his weight made my chest tighten. Wrong.
Everything about him was wrong.
I swallowed hard.
And only one thought surfaced, loud and undeniable:
Fuck me. Why him?
Mahito Pov
'well', I thought, grinning, 'this is new.'
The boy in front of me was tall—remarkably so for Japan. His hair, once black, now fell past his shoulders in silver strands, parted just enough to reveal bright yellow eyes ringed like something predatory. He looked at me the way prey looks at a predator when it knows running won't help. Interesting.
What fascinated me most wasn't his fear—it was what had happened the moment I touched him.
Five Minutes Earlier
Kenjaku's errands were dull lately.
"I still don't get why he wants all these humans transfigured," I muttered cheerfully as I approached the apartment door. But who cares? A grin stretched across my face.
"Yuji's night is going to be wonderful." The door was labeled 108.
"Knock knock," I chimed, rapping my knuckles against it.
The door shattered inward.
The occupant scrambled up from the couch, terror written plainly across his face. Short black hair. Unremarkable build. He smelled… unpleasant.
"WHAT THE SHI—MY DO—"
I touched his chest.
He should have transfigured instantly. Instead—
"Oh?"
Inside him were two souls.
One was small. Fragile. Human.
The other was enormous.
Shaking.
"That's odd," I mused. "Sukuna was more like a parasite. This is…" I tilted my head, grin widening. "Different."
Curiosity bloomed.
I activated my cursed technique and removed the barrier between them.
The boy convulsed, screaming as his body began to change—hair lengthening, paling, his frame stretching under his hoodie. The process stalled, though. The larger soul didn't assimilate the smaller one. It just… vibrated against it.
Fascinating.
"Wait—please—I don't kn—"
I slammed the larger soul into the smaller one.
The smaller ceased to exist.
The recoil threw me off balance. The larger soul slipped free of my grasp, vibrating too violently to hold. The boy staggered back, growing again—taller, broader. His hair darkened to steel gray. His eyes burned gold, a ring forming within the iris.
Then his presence exploded.
A wave of raw, cursed energy tore through the apartment, rattling walls, flinging decorations, and distorting space itself.
His eyes shifted—gaining a depth only awareness could give.
They locked onto me.
'Ah', I realized. 'He remembers'. My grin stretched impossibly wide. "It's just too interesting."
Shinji Pov
"Oh fuck."
Mahito stood right in front of me, smiling. 'Okay. Okay. Calm down.'
I was in the Jujutsu Kaisen world. I had died—or something like it—and now I was here, staring down a special-grade curse with no idea how to use the power system.
I'm dead. Again.
Mahito stepped closer. "Well," he said lightly, "this hasn't happened to me before."
Everything about him screamed wrong. Human, but not. Playful, but predatory.
My body moved before my brain caught up.
I punched him.
My fist slammed into his chest with everything I had.
He didn't even flinch.
"Oww!" he laughed, delighted. "That could have hurt, you know? That was so not nice!"
My stomach dropped.
Yeah. I'm screwed.
His hand rose toward my face.
I backed up until my shoulders hit the wall beside my overturned couch. 'Huh. I have a couch.' I dully noted in spite of my situation.
His fingers were inches away.
I don't want to die. Not again.
I Just got a new life free from that void. I refuse to let my one ticket out of that void hellscape get oblitorated by this fucking thing.
Something snapped.
Rage surged up from somewhere deep and unfamiliar. 'How dare he? I WANT TO LIVE DAMMIT!' I yelled in my own head. That tremor I felt in my very core returned with a vengence.
My hand lashed out again.
It didn't touch him.
It hit the space in front of his face.
And cracked it.
Reality shattered outward. A violent, invisible force erupted from the point of impact, obliterating the apartment wall and hurling Mahito—and everything else—into the distant city skyline. Silence followed.
"…Well," I muttered, silver hair falling into my eyes. "That happened."
I looked at the gaping hole where my apartment used to be.
Then I ran.
Because whatever I had just done, I was not sticking around for Mahito of all people to spin back, while I didn't even know how to use cursed energy consciously.
Fate, however, had other plans.
Outside, the street was crawling. Transfigured humans. Curses. A swarm of them. Judging by the looks of it, I might have been the last place Mahito visited.
"Oh, fuck that," I muttered, scanning desperately for a way through. Maybe—just maybe—I could slip by unnoti—
Crash.
Yeah. No.
They were all staring at me now. One of them had already slammed into the balcony in front of me.
It was a hulking mass of vibrant flesh, arms snapped and regrown wrong, eyes bulging unevenly from either side of its skull. A massive lipless mouth stretched open, teeth too large, saliva pouring out like a broken faucet.
"Mnegn… hjraahh… prekkks…" it moaned, reaching for me with something that might once have been a hand.
"Yeah," I said weakly, trying to remember how I'd punched Mahito, "me too, bud."
'Man,' I thought as my pulse roared in my ears, 'I really hate my new life.'
.
.
.
Author's Note:
Aaaaand I hope you enjoyed this is my first time ever writing a fanfic so i'm just experimenting with it for now let me know how you like it and how I can improve!