The convenience store was warm and smelled like coffee that had been sitting too long, which was comforting in the specific way that only mundane, slightly unpleasant things can be when everything else about your situation has left the realm of the normal entirely.
Shin walked the aisles. Two onigiri, salmon and kombu, a bottle of water, a can of black coffee. He reached into his jacket at the register and found a wallet that hadn't been there on the bridge. Inside: a national ID with his face and his name, a health insurance card, and forty-seven thousand yen in mixed bills.
The system handled logistics. Good.
He paid without a word, walked back out into the drizzle, and found a bus stop half a block down with a bench and a plastic overhead cover that kept most of the rain off. He sat down and ate his onigiri in the dark like a man who'd done this a thousand times before, because he had, just in a different city and a different life and a body that was currently at the bottom of a river.
The salmon was good. Better than it should have been, probably, or maybe dying and coming back had recalibrated something in him and everything was going to taste slightly more vivid for a while. He ate the second one more slowly, washed it down with water in careful sips, and thought.
He needed to learn suppression tonight.
Not tomorrow, not eventually, tonight. If his cursed energy reserves were really Special Grade, then right now he was broadcasting his location to every curse and sorcerer in the city like a signal fire on a dark plain. He didn't know who monitored Sendai for the jujutsu world, didn't know if there was a local sorcerer or a window or some institutional mechanism that tracked anomalies, but he knew that a new Special Grade signature appearing from nowhere would generate a response, and he had no interest in being on the receiving end of that response until he chose to be.
He finished eating, pocketed the trash, and started walking.
Twenty minutes brought him to a construction site on the edge of a half-developed commercial block. Chain link fence, padlocked gate, a skeletal concrete structure three stories tall with rebar jutting from its unfinished pillars. No security, no cameras. He climbed the fence, and his body moved well, better than he expected, the kind of baseline coordination that suggested the system had built this vessel with at least some minimum standard of physical competence.
Second floor. Open on two sides, sheltered on the others by poured concrete walls with no windows. Dusty floor, construction debris, the smell of wet cement. He cleared a space, sat cross-legged on the cold concrete, and closed his eyes.
Finding the energy took forty minutes.
He didn't force it. Sat with his awareness turned inward, patient and open, breathing slow, waiting the way you wait for something you know is there but can't see yet. And then it was there, not arriving so much as revealing itself, a frequency his senses had always been capable of receiving but had never been tuned to until now.
It was enormous.
Flowing through channels that mapped onto his circulatory system but weren't quite the same, pooling in his core, extending to his fingertips and the soles of his feet, dense and heavy and charged with a quality he could only describe as weight. Not physical weight but something deeper, the gravity of a force that mattered on a level flesh and blood did not. And the volume of it was staggering, a reservoir so deep he couldn't find the bottom.
He was radiating all of it outward, constantly, uncontrolled. Broadcasting.
He started pulling it back.
Not all at once. Section by section, starting with his fingertips, coaxing the energy away from the surface of his skin the way you'd redirect a current of water by adjusting the angle of a surface rather than trying to dam it. It resisted, the energy wanted to flow outward, that was its nature, and holding it in required constant conscious effort like carrying a weight you could manage but never quite set down.
Fingertips. Wrists. Forearms. Shoulders. He worked inward methodically, sealing himself off one piece at a time, and it was tedious, painstaking work that required patience rather than power.
Two hours.
By the end, he was contained. Not perfectly, micro-leaks at his joints and along his spine where the energy was densest, but the difference between now and before was the difference between a searchlight and a candle seen from a mile away. Detectable if someone was looking carefully. But not the beacon he'd been.
He leaned against a pillar, cracked the can of coffee he'd been carrying, and drank it lukewarm and bitter in the dark.
His body was tired. Not from physical exertion but from the sustained mental effort of suppression, a drain that would be constant until it became automatic. Days, maybe. A week.
The sky beyond the structure's open walls was lightening. Charcoal grey pushing out the black. Sendai waking up beneath him, traffic sounds and distant trains and the slow mechanical pulse of a city that didn't know it existed inside a story.
Thirty-one days.
He finished the coffee, crushed the can, put it in his pocket because littering felt wrong even in a fictional universe, and climbed down to find the apartment the system had arranged.
---
The wallet now contained a key and a folded slip of paper with an address. Fifteen minutes north. Third floor, unit 302. One room, tatami floor, small kitchenette, a bathroom barely large enough to stand in. Closet with bedding and two sets of plain clothes.
He laid out the futon and lay down and stared at the ceiling.
The ceiling had a crack running from the light fixture toward the corner, the kind that appears in old buildings and never gets fixed. He'd stared at a lot of ceilings in his life. Different apartments, different years, same activity. He was world-class at it.
But tonight his mind had something to work through that wasn't its own emptiness.
Shin knew about jujutsu kaisen. Every detail, every character, every arc and twist and betrayal and sacrifice, laid out in his memory with the clarity of something he'd read multiple times and thought about often, because he had read it multiple times and thought about it often, during the long empty stretches of his previous life when fictional worlds were the only ones worth spending time in.
The question was where he fit.
system's mission was straightforward: survive Sugisawa, make contact with the jujutsu world. Survive implied threat, which meant he was expected to be present during the incident itself, close enough to the action that survival was not guaranteed. Make contact meant exactly what it said, establish a relationship with the institutional framework of jujutsu society, which in practical terms meant being noticed by the right people in the right way.
The right people, in this context, were Gojo Satoru.
Not the higher-ups. The higher-ups were bureaucrats and conservatives who viewed everything through the lens of institutional control and would see a new Special Grade with no lineage and no affiliation as a threat to be neutralized rather than an asset to be cultivated. Gojo was the only person in the jujutsu world with both the power and the inclination to protect an unknown quantity, because Gojo's entire philosophy was built around disrupting the existing order and cultivating the next generation, and a new Special Grade appearing out of nowhere was exactly the kind of disruption he'd find interesting.
Be interesting to Gojo without being threatening to the institution. Show enough power to be taken seriously. Don't show so much that they decide killing you is easier than managing you.
It was a narrow path. But Shin had something most people navigating this world didn't have, which was the complete inability to feel afraid of the consequences of failure. Fear was a luxury of people who valued their own continued existence, and he'd made his position on that question very clear on the Koyo Bridge.
His eyes were getting heavy. The ceiling was beginning to blur.
Tomorrow. Start with the body. Physical conditioning, energy control, learn to move with cursed energy reinforcement until it's as natural as walking. Then start exploring the city, mapping the cursed energy landscape, finding the places where curses congregate. Build familiarity. Build competence. And when the time comes, be at Sugisawa, and do whatever the situation requires.
He closed his eyes.
Sleep came faster than it had in years, which was either the body's unfamiliarity asserting itself or the simple biological reality that dying and being resurrected in a fictional dimension was tiring, and he didn't bother determining which before consciousness left him entirely.