"Is this freedom? After a thousand years, I finally smell fresh air."
Perfectly playing the role of a demon lord trapped for a millennium, Utaha—no, Sukuna—looked at this Cursed Spirit.
"Grade 2, no, a Grade 3 Cursed Spirit. To think I have to deal with such small fry..."
The previously arrogant Cursed Spirit suddenly froze under this pressure, every movement becoming sluggish and weak. Its roar abruptly turned into a trembling, low whimper, like the panicked sound of a victim discovering a hunter's arrival.
It instinctively felt its life being tightly throttled. Despair spread rapidly, driving it to suddenly turn around and charge toward a nearby window without hesitation, attempting to smash through the glass and escape this death trap.
"Oh?"
Sukuna, controlling Utaha's body, narrowed his four eyes simultaneously. The corners of his lips curled into a cruel and playful arc, and the voice he produced was deep and raspy, completely different from Utaha's original voice.
"Is your sense of smell that keen? You want to run after sensing my presence?"
He lightly flexed Utaha's slender fingers, as if adapting to this temporary vessel.
"However..."
Sukuna's voice carried a cat-and-mouse playfulness. "...isn't it a bit too late to think of escaping now, you beast?"
Just as the Cursed Spirit struggled to rush toward the window, "Utaha" lightly raised her right hand. There was no flash of light, nor any surge of energy. The entire movement seemed silent and still, so calm it was almost imperceptible.
But that ugly Cursed Spirit, which had already thrust half its body out the window in its haste to escape, felt as if it had touched some invisible blade.
Its massive body was suddenly and precisely divided into several pieces by an invisible force. Each cut was extremely smooth, as neat as if a sharp scalpel had passed through—not a rough mechanical split, but rather like a masterpiece finished in a single stroke by an artist.
The Cursed Spirit's body split rapidly, emitting a crackling sound of breaking, yet no blood or organs spilled out. Its rotting shell seemed not to be composed of flesh, but of several stitched-together dark phantoms. As the severed body slowly drifted apart, a scorched smell mixed with rot lingered in the air.
Instantly, the fragments of the Cursed Spirit evaporated and disintegrated in the air, dispersing into invisible black smoke and finally vanishing completely without a trace, as if that terrifying monster had never existed.
Dead silence fell over the room once more, with only a few traces of a sickening scorched smell left in the air to remind the three people present that this terrifying ordeal was no hallucination.
Eriri and Megumi slumped on the floor, their legs too weak to support their bodies, their eyes filled with an unbelievable hollowness. Their mouths were wide open, and their faces were incredibly pale, as if they had lost all sensation.
"What... what... on earth was that thing..." Eriri whispered, her voice shaking and helpless.
Megumi gripped her wrist tightly, seemingly trying to use it to bolster her courage, but the trembling of her hands betrayed the panic in her heart. "I... I've never seen such a monster... am I really still alive?"
As for Utaha's consciousness, the moment control of her body was returned, she felt the weight and sensation of her body once again. Her legs went soft, and she could barely stand, managing to steady herself against the nearby wall.
The extra eyes on her face had closed, and her blood-red pupils had returned to their normal wine-red, but the fatigue and shock originating from her soul surged up like a tide.
Utaha leaned against the cold wall, barely supporting her weakened legs. The feeling of her soul being temporarily stripped away and being washed over by Sukuna's violent power still left her with lingering fears.
Her mind was in chaos—Tomoya's disappearance, the stench in the room, the hideous monster on the ceiling, and the terrifying changes in her own body...
Countless questions and fears intertwined, nearly drowning her.
And the culprit behind all this, the "tenant" residing within her, seemed unusually... calm?
Even carrying a hint of lazy satisfaction after a bit of exercise.
"Hey..." Utaha gulped with difficulty.
She tried to communicate with Sukuna through her thoughts, afraid of startling her two companions who were on the verge of a mental breakdown. "Just now... that thing... what exactly was it?"
She was referring to the monster that Sukuna had instantly shredded.
"Hmm?" Sukuna seemed to have just woken from some sort of reverie, his tone carrying a hint of impatience. "A Cursed Spirit. A low-level thing, not even worth calling small fry."
"Cursed Spirit?"
The unfamiliar term made Utaha knit her brows.
"What's that? Some kind of Yokai? Or a ghost?"
She tried to understand it using concepts within her own knowledge.
"Yokai? Ghost? Heh, close enough. They're all names you humans give to things you can't understand." Sukuna sneered, seemingly finding her analogy superficial.
"However, to put it more accurately..."
He paused, as if searching for a metaphor with enough impact for a "normal person" like Utaha to understand instantly.
"Ah, I've got it."
Sukuna's voice carried a malicious playfulness. "You can think of it as a collection of human excrement."
"Ex... excrement?" Utaha's pupils shrank abruptly, her face showing an expression of extreme disgust and disbelief.
"You, you mean... like... like feces?"
This crude and disgusting comparison almost made her vomit on the spot. Although that monster just now was hideous and terrifying, connecting it to "feces" exceeded her range of acceptance.
"Calling it the feces of the human spirit isn't wrong."
Sukuna seemed satisfied with her reaction and continued to explain in a tone that sounded like an academic discussion yet contained shocking content, "Listen, little girl, this world isn't as clean as it looks. Humans, as creatures, are constantly producing all kinds of negative emotions—fear, anxiety, hatred, jealousy, despair... these things aren't just thoughts that go away."
"These negative emotions breed an invisible energy we call Cursed Energy. Just as you exhale carbon dioxide when you breathe, humans cannot control the production and dissipation of their own Cursed Energy. This scattered, filth-ridden Cursed Energy piles up in the corners of the world like trash."
Sukuna's explanation was cold and direct, tearing away the warm facade of the world to reveal its hideous and bizarre interior.
"When this trash accumulates to a certain point, or becomes highly concentrated due to a strong negative emotional event, it will condense and mutate on its own, forming something with a fixed shape and a certain consciousness—the Cursed Spirit you just saw."
"So, the essence of a Cursed Spirit is the condensation of human negative emotions, a crystallization of filth from the spiritual world. Is it wrong to call them 'excrement'?"
"Condensation of... negative emotions..."
If what Sukuna said was true, didn't that mean everyone was unknowingly "manufacturing" these terrifying monsters? Could every corner of the city be hiding this "excrement" birthed from human malice?
"But... why couldn't Eriri and Kato... see these things before?" Utaha thought of the key point.
If Cursed Spirits were so common, why had they lived normal lives before today?
"Normal people naturally can't see them." Sukuna answered as if it were a matter of course.
"Cursed Energy and Cursed Spirits are 'non-existent' objects outside the perception of normal people without 'talent.' Their eyes and brains automatically filter out this information. It's a protection mechanism to keep fragile creatures like you from going mad living in fear all day."
"Then why did they just now..."
"Extreme fear." Sukuna interrupted.
"In a life-or-death crisis, strong emotional stimuli can sometimes temporarily pry open that protective shell, allowing normal people to catch a glimpse of a corner of the real world."
"However, once they calm down, their brains might automatically blur or rationalize this memory, like treating it as a nightmare or a hallucination. Of course, if the stimulus is too strong or if they see it repeatedly, that protective shell might shatter completely. When that happens..."
Sukuna did not continue, but Utaha already understood his meaning. It meant that Megumi and Eriri might never be able to return to a "normal" life.