Chapter 2: Time Stands Still
How do you measure eternity?
For a normal human being, time is a physical construct tethered to the rotation of the earth, the rising and setting of the sun, the slow, inevitable decay of cellular matter, and the rhythmic, rhythmic thumping of a heart. But in the Prison Realm, the sun was a myth. The earth was a distant, unreachable memory. And cellular decay had been paused by the absolute, overriding rules of the cursed object that held him.
Satoru Gojo sat cross-legged in the center of a necropolis, his hands resting lightly on his knees.
He had started by counting his heartbeats. It was a desperate, entirely human attempt to anchor himself to the reality he had been violently torn from. One, two, three, four. He matched the beats to the seconds he remembered from the outside world. Assuming his resting heart rate was a calm, steady sixty beats per minute, he could calculate the passing hours.
Three thousand, six hundred beats. One hour.
Eighty-six thousand, four hundred beats. One day.
Sixty-four million, eight hundred thousand beats…
He had lost count somewhere around the three-month mark. Or what he perceived to be the three-month mark.
It was a maddening, suffocating realization. The human brain was not designed to process absolute stagnation. Even the strongest sorcerer in history, blessed with a mind capable of running infinitely complex spatial calculations on a subconscious level, was not immune to the creeping rot of sensory deprivation.
Except, it wasn't deprivation. Not for him.
If it had been pitch black and utterly silent, he might have slipped into a meditative coma. But the Six Eyes made sleep impossible. They made peace impossible. His glowing, unnatural blue eyes were wide open, casting a haunting, ethereal luminescence over the landscape of calcified bone and pulsating meat.
To the Six Eyes, the Prison Realm was not empty. It was a chaotic, deafening symphony of cursed energy.
He could see the microscopic, atomic-level friction of the dust motes settling on the femurs of the long-dead. He could trace the sickening, sluggish flow of the blackish-red fluid pumping through the pythons of veins embedded in the fleshy, cubic walls surrounding him. He could see the residual sorrow, the ancient, fossilized fear trapped in the marrow of the millions of skeletons beneath him. Who were they? Victims of Kenjaku from the Heian era? Unfortunate sorcerers who had triggered the sealing conditions centuries before him? Or simply a physical manifestation of the cursed realm's inherent malice?
It didn't matter. They were dead. He was alive. And he was trapped.
Gojo slowly uncrossed his legs and stood up. His movements were deliberate, precise, and entirely silent, save for the dry, chalky crunch of a skeletal ribcage fragment beneath the sole of his boot.
He looked down at his hands. They were large, powerful, wrapped in the pristine dark fabric of his Jujutsu High uniform. There wasn't a speck of dust on him. The passive layer of Limitless—the Infinity—still hugged his skin like a second atmosphere, filtering out the foul stench of ozone and rotting meat, stopping the chill of the realm from touching his flesh.
"Time doesn't pass," Gojo murmured aloud.
His voice was a physical shockwave in the stagnant air. It echoed against the distant, fleshy walls, bouncing back to him distorted and mocking.
He brought a hand to his stomach. He wasn't hungry. He hadn't eaten anything since a sweet red bean mochi he'd casually devoured on the bullet train to Shibuya. That was... outside. Minutes ago? Years ago? It didn't matter. His stomach was completely empty, yet he felt no hunger pangs.
He touched his throat. No thirst.
He stretched his arms, rolling his shoulders, feeling the thick, densely packed muscles of his back shift and flex. No fatigue. No lactic acid buildup. No physical degradation whatsoever.
The entity known as Satoru Gojo was caught in absolute stasis. The Prison Realm had frozen his physical state at the exact millisecond the sealing was completed. He was a photograph trapped in a box.
And then, the second soul—the reader, the man from Earth—spoke up within the merged consciousness, bringing with him the cold, hard facts of the manga's canon.
If physical time doesn't exist here... if my body cannot degrade, cannot starve, and cannot tire... then the physical limitations of cursed energy expenditure are entirely nullified.
Gojo's brilliantly bright blue eyes widened a fraction as the implication struck him.
In the outside world, jujutsu sorcery was a marathon. Even for him. Yes, the Six Eyes reduced his cursed energy consumption to infinitesimally close to zero. Yes, he could keep Infinity active 24/7 by constantly running Reverse Cursed Technique (RCT) through his brain to heal the burnt-out neurons. He was, for all intents and purposes, a perpetual motion machine.
But he was still human. A perpetual motion machine housed in a biological chassis that required sleep, calories, and hydration to maintain its baseline functions. If he fought Sukuna in the outside world, the physical toll of domain clashes, the sheer physical exertion of moving at supersonic speeds, the biological stress of healing severed limbs—it all eventually added up. The brain could only take so much structural rewiring before it began to bleed from the nose.
But in here?
Gojo raised his right hand, extending his index and middle fingers.
Let's test the hypothesis.
He closed his eyes, shutting out the horrifying visual of the meat-cube walls and the skeletal wasteland, and turned his infinite perception entirely inward.
The Six Eyes shifted their focus from the macro to the micro. From the universe to the soul.
He saw his own cursed energy. It was a terrifying, breathtaking sight. For the earthly reader, whose only concept of cursed energy had been black-and-white ink on a page or bright animations on a screen, seeing the reality of it was like staring into the heart of a nuclear reactor.
It started in his gut. A swirling, bottomless vortex of dark, volatile power, born from the negative emotions that currently saturated his merged soul. The grief over Suguru's desecrated corpse. The terror of what Sukuna was going to do to Megumi. The white-hot, homicidal rage directed at Kenjaku. The despair of his own impending, canonical death.
Normally, a sorcerer had to carefully siphon this volatile energy, routing it through their body like water through a fragile pipe system.
Gojo didn't siphon it. He opened the floodgates.
He commanded the energy to rise. It surged upward through his chest, a roaring, turbulent river of dark blue and black power. It flooded his limbs, saturating his muscles, his bones, his nervous system.
More, he commanded himself.
He pushed the output to a level he rarely reached outside of life-or-death combat. The air around him in the Prison Realm began to hum, a deep, resonant baritone that shook the skeletal ground. Dust vibrated and floated upward, caught in the sheer gravitational pressure of his aura.
Then, he pushed it to his brain.
He took that dark, negative energy and slammed it together, multiplying negative by negative. The mathematical impossibility of Reverse Cursed Technique bloomed in his mind. The dark river violently transmuted into a blinding, golden light of positive energy. It flooded his synapses, healing, soothing, and supercharging his gray matter.
He created a loop. Negative energy rising from the gut, converting to positive energy in the brain, radiating out through the body, and cycling back.
Faster.
He accelerated the loop. In the outside world, doing this at maximum capacity while standing completely still would eventually cause his core body temperature to spike. It would cause a physical strain that, while manageable, was uncomfortable.
Here, there was nothing. No heat. No sweat. No elevated heart rate.
He was pushing enough raw cursed energy to power the entire Tokyo metropolitan grid, cycling it through his body at a speed that would vaporize a Grade 1 sorcerer on the spot, and he felt absolutely nothing but the intoxicating, electric high of infinite power.
He opened his eyes. The blue of his irises was so bright it was nearly white, casting a blinding spotlight across the dark expanse of the realm.
"I have no physical limits in here," Gojo whispered, a slow, dangerous smile curving his lips. "My brain cannot fry from exhaustion. My reserves cannot deplete because I am not expending energy into the environment; I am keeping it entirely contained within the absolute zero stasis of this box."
He looked at his hands, watching the golden sparks of RCT dance across his knuckles, weaving seamlessly with the blue hum of standard cursed energy.
"This isn't a prison," the amalgamation of the earthly reader and the Jujutsu God laughed, a sound that was rich, dark, and utterly devoid of his usual playful arrogance. "Kenjaku, you stupid, arrogant bastard. You didn't lock me away to remove me from the board."
He clenched his fists, the cursed energy snapping with the force of a thunderclap.
"You put a god in a hyperbolic time chamber with an infinite battery."
The realization shifted the entire paradigm of his existence. The sheer, suffocating panic that had gripped him upon waking—the knowledge of Chapter 236, the horror of being bisected by Sukuna's World-Cutting Slash—began to recede, replaced by a cold, calculating, and terrifyingly sharp focus.
He knew the future. He knew the exact mechanics of the enemy's attacks. And now, he had an undefined, potentially endless amount of time where he could practice cursed energy manipulation at 100% maximum output without requiring a single second of sleep or recovery.
He could do what the original Satoru Gojo never had a reason to do.
The original Gojo was a genius, yes. He was blessed by the heavens. He mastered his technique because he had to, because Toji Fushiguro had put a knife through his throat and forced him to evolve or die. But after that? After he became the absolute pinnacle of the world?
He coasted.
He was so vastly superior to everything on the planet that he never needed to push beyond the perfection of the Limitless. Neutral, Blue, Red, Purple, and Unlimited Void. That was his arsenal. It was an arsenal that solved 99.9% of the universe's problems. Why invent a new technique when Hollow Purple erased matter on an atomic level? Why theory-craft defensive barriers when Infinity automatically filtered out any threat based on mass, speed, and cursed energy?
He had no equal to push him. No reason to innovate.
Until Sukuna.
Sukuna, who lived for jujutsu. Sukuna, who treated sorcery like a divine art form, dissecting it, adapting to it, and evolving his own understanding of it mid-battle. Sukuna hadn't just overpowered Gojo; he had out-learned him. He had used Mahoraga as a blueprint to fundamentally understand how to target the coordinate plane of reality itself.
"He wasn't even giving it his all."
The phantom echo of his own voice from the afterlife airport stung his pride. The earthly reader's soul boiled with indignation at the memory.
"Never again," Gojo vowed to the silent, fleshy walls. "I will never look up to someone else's strength. I will not die satisfied. I will live."
He let the massive aura of cursed energy dissipate, drawing it back into his core until he was completely silent, completely still. Only the passive, invisible layer of Infinity remained.
If he wanted to survive the World-Cutting Slash, he couldn't just rely on higher output. Sukuna's attack didn't care about output. It didn't care about the infinite, converging fractions of space that Gojo placed between himself and the blade.
To understand the solution, he had to completely deconstruct the problem.
Gojo sat back down, folding his long legs beneath him. He rested his chin on his knuckles, his glowing eyes staring out into the vast, macabre expanse of skeletons.
"Let's break down the Limitless," he spoke to the empty room, using his own voice to ground his thoughts.
"The Limitless is the concept of infinity brought into reality. In its neutral state, it divides the space between me and an object infinitely. The closer the object gets, the slower it moves, because it has to cross half the remaining distance, then half of that half, then half of that half, forever. It never reaches me."
He raised a single finger. "Cursed Technique Lapse: Blue. I amplify the Limitless, creating a concept of 'negative distance' or a vacuum in space. The world naturally tries to correct this impossibility, rushing in to fill the void, which creates a magnetic, crushing gravitational pull."
He raised a second finger. "Cursed Technique Reversal: Red. I pour positive energy into the Limitless, reversing the effect. Instead of a vacuum, I create a localized point of infinite repulsion. A repulsive force that explodes outward."
He brought the two fingers together. "Hollow Purple. I smash the concept of negative distance and infinite repulsion together. The clash of absolute pull and absolute push creates an imaginary mass that simply deletes everything in its path."
He dropped his hand.
"It's a perfect, flawless system of spatial manipulation. Offense, defense, and mobility, all dictated by the control of distance."
Gojo's brow furrowed, the white hair falling over his glowing eyes.
"But the World-Cutting Slash doesn't travel a distance," he muttered, his mind visualizing the manga panels. He saw Sukuna standing in the rubble of Shinjuku, his hands forming the Enmaten sign, chanting the incantations. Scale of the Dragon. Recoil. Twin Meteors.
"Sukuna didn't throw a slash at me. He projected his cursed technique onto the very fabric of existence. He looked at the three-dimensional grid of reality that my body occupied, and he commanded that specific coordinate to be severed. It didn't matter if there was an infinite amount of space between his blade and my skin, because he wasn't targeting my skin. He was cutting the canvas my infinity was painted on."
Gojo closed his eyes again, his brain spinning up into a hyper-calculated frenzy of jujutsu theory.
"How do you stop someone from cutting the canvas?"
Option One: Dodge.
If he knew the incantations, if he watched for the spark of cursed energy, he could teleport out of the way using Blue.
Flaw: Sukuna could fire it without incantations if he used a Binding Vow, as he did in canon. Furthermore, relying entirely on dodging against an opponent with an equal or greater combat IQ was a loser's game. Eventually, Sukuna would corner him or create a scenario where dodging meant letting the slash hit a student behind him. No. Dodging was a tactical maneuver, not a win condition.
Option Two: Overpower it.
Could he shoot a Hollow Purple to intercept the slash?
Flaw: The slash was invisible and nearly instantaneous. Intercepting a coordinate-severing attack with imaginary mass was a gamble of timing and physics that he couldn't guarantee would work. Plus, Sukuna's output was monstrous.
Option Three: Change the properties of the canvas.
Gojo's eyes snapped open. The brilliant sapphire light pierced the gloom.
"Change the canvas," he breathed, his heart rate—or the phantom sensation of it—spiking with adrenaline.
"The Limitless manipulates the distance of space. But what if I manipulate the state of space?"
He looked at the space exactly one millimeter above the palm of his hand. It was where his passive Infinity rested.
"Right now, my Infinity is a paradox of motion. It allows space to exist, but forces anything traveling through it to decelerate infinitely. It is dynamic. It responds to mass, speed, and cursed energy. It is an active equation."
He stared at his palm, his hyper-perceptive brain zooming in on the atomic structure of the air trapped within his aura.
"But what if I remove the motion entirely? What if I take the concept of the Limitless and apply it not to distance, but to the flow of time and space itself on a localized scale? What if I introduce the concept of Absolute Zero to my technique?"
Absolute Zero. The theoretical temperature at which all atomic motion stops.
Gojo wasn't talking about thermodynamics. He wasn't talking about freezing water like Uraume. He was talking about spatial stasis.
If Sukuna's technique required a spatial coordinate to be targeted and severed, it meant the space itself had to be malleable. It had to be capable of being altered by a cursed technique.
"If I can use the Limitless to infinitely condense the density of space around me, locking its coordinates into a state of absolute, unchangeable stasis... then Sukuna's slash cannot sever it, because the space itself refuses to be altered."
He was talking about creating a localized, passive Domain around his body. Not a Domain Expansion that trapped an opponent, but a Domain of self-preservation. A closed-barrier armor of perfectly stagnant space.
It was an insane theory. It contradicted the fundamental, dynamic nature of the Limitless. He was essentially trying to take a technique defined by infinite expansion and division, and force it into infinite compression and immobility.
It would require a level of cursed energy manipulation that was quite literally impossible for any sorcerer in history. It would require identifying the exact "spark" of Sukuna's technique, calculating the exact spatial coordinates being targeted, and instantaneously locking the fabric of reality in that precise area before the slash manifested.
"Impossible," Gojo said, a feral, terrifying grin stretching across his face, revealing his perfectly white teeth. "Good thing I'm the strongest."
He didn't waste another second.
He didn't need to sleep. He didn't need to eat. He had a literal eternity to figure out the impossible.
Gojo brought his hands up, resting them in his lap. He focused entirely on the millimeter of space above his right index finger.
Step One: Stop dividing space. Start condensing it.
He pushed a microscopic amount of cursed energy into his fingertip. He activated the neutral Limitless. He felt the familiar sensation of the Achilles paradox forming, the invisible barrier of infinite fractions.
Now, he tried to alter the equation.
Instead of letting the space divide, he tried to squeeze it. He tried to force the fractions to freeze.
The cursed energy immediately destabilized. The invisible barrier violently snapped, generating a microscopic, razor-sharp backlash of spatial pressure that sliced a hairline cut directly across the pad of his index finger. A single drop of ruby-red blood welled up.
Gojo didn't even flinch. His brain automatically routed positive energy to the cut, healing the microscopic wound in less than a tenth of a second. The blood vanished, the skin knit together perfectly.
"Too aggressive," he noted clinically, his Six Eyes recording exactly why the energy had failed. "I treated the space like a physical object. Space isn't an object. It's a medium. You can't squeeze water with a net."
He reset his posture. He focused on his finger again.
Attempt number two.
He poured the cursed energy in, but this time, he layered it. He tried to weave his cursed energy into the very fabric of the space, attempting to act as a metaphysical anchor rather than a physical vice.
He held it for a microsecond. Then, the spatial tension collapsed, resulting in a tiny, popping explosion that bruised his knuckle.
RCT flared. The bruise vanished.
Attempt number three.
Attempt number four.
Attempt number one hundred.
Attempt number ten thousand.
Time did not exist in the Prison Realm. The man who sat in the center of the skeletal wasteland had lost all connection to minutes and hours. He fell into a state of pure, unadulterated obsession.
The original Satoru Gojo had never possessed this kind of singular, monastic devotion to training. He had never needed it. But the soul of the reader, the soul that had watched characters bleed and die on ink-stained pages, provided the fuel.
Every time his focus wavered, every time the sheer complexity of the calculations threatened to give him a headache—despite the constant flow of RCT—he forced himself to remember.
He remembered Yuji Itadori's face, battered, bruised, and weeping in the crater of Shibuya, his spirit shattered by Sukuna's massacre.
He remembered Megumi Fushiguro's soul, sinking into the pitch-black abyss of his own innate domain, carrying the agonizing weight of Mahoraga's adaptation wheel, crying out for a salvation that canonical Gojo had failed to provide.
He remembered the feeling of being cut in half. The phantom severing of his spine.
Attempt number fifty thousand.
His finger exploded. A localized spatial collapse detonated the entire top digit of his right index finger, vaporizing bone, flesh, and nail into a fine red mist. The pain was sharp, intense, and immediate.
Gojo didn't scream. He simply narrowed his glowing blue eyes.
A pulse of golden energy rushed from his core. The blood vessels rapidly knitted together, the bone extruded and calcified, the muscle fibers twined, and the pale skin reformed. In less than two seconds, his finger was completely restored.
"The anchor is too heavy," he muttered, his voice hoarse from disuse. "I'm pouring too much cursed energy into the coordinate. It's causing a localized singularity. I need to balance the input perfectly. The Six Eyes can see the atomic structure, but my execution is sloppy."
He sighed, dropping his hands to his lap. He leaned his head back, staring up at the distant, fleshy ceiling of his prison.
For a brief, fleeting moment, the isolation pressed down on him. The absolute silence, broken only by his own voice and the occasional wet slosh of the walls. It was a maddening, sensory deprivation nightmare that would have broken a lesser man's mind centuries ago.
"Are you watching this, Suguru?" Gojo asked the dark, his voice barely above a whisper.
The memory of his best friend rose unbidden. Not the stitched, mocking face of Kenjaku, but the real Suguru. The boy with the dark hair and the tired smile, sitting on the steps of Jujutsu High, drinking a vending machine soda.
"Are you the strongest because you're Satoru Gojo? Or are you Satoru Gojo because you're the strongest?"
The question that had haunted him for a decade. The question that had defined his isolation.
Gojo closed his eyes, a sad, terrifyingly calm smile touching his lips.
"Neither, Suguru," he whispered to the ghost of his past. "I'm the strongest because I am the only one who knows how this story ends. And I refuse to let it end that way."
He opened his eyes. The momentary vulnerability vanished, completely submerged beneath a glacier of absolute resolve. The human element, the grief, the fear, the hesitation—it was all being burned away in the crucible of the Prison Realm, leaving behind only the pure, crystallized essence of a god preparing for war.
He raised his hand again. He focused on the millimeter of space above his finger.
Attempt number fifty thousand and one.
He poured the cursed energy into the void. He did not squeeze. He did not anchor. He simply... commanded it to stop.
A microscopic hum vibrated through the air. For a fraction of a millisecond, the space above his finger didn't just slow down. It ceased to be dynamic. The dust mote floating through the millimeter of his aura didn't decelerate infinitely—it abruptly, violently locked into place, frozen in absolute spatial stasis.
Then, the energy destabilized, and the dust mote was vaporized by the backlash.
Gojo Satoru's eyes widened.
He had done it. For one ten-thousandth of a second, he had achieved Limitless: Absolute Zero. He had locked the canvas.
A low, dark chuckle rumbled in his chest, echoing out into the vast, macabre wasteland of the Prison Realm. It wasn't the arrogant, playful laugh of the Gojo Satoru who had entered the box. It was the chilling, merciless sound of an anomaly realizing its own limitless potential.
"Okay, Sukuna," Gojo whispered, the brilliant blue of his eyes flaring like twin supernovas in the absolute dark. "Let's see who adapts faster."
He raised his other hand. He had achieved it on a microscopic scale for a fraction of a second. Now, he needed to maintain it. He needed to expand it to encompass his entire body. He needed to make it entirely passive, hardwired into his subconscious like his neutral Infinity.
It would take millions of attempts. It would take what felt like decades, perhaps centuries, of perceived time. He would blow off his own fingers, his own limbs, fry his own brain thousands of times in the pursuit of perfection.
But time was the one thing he had an infinite supply of.
The King of Curses was waiting in the outside world, expecting to fight a man bound by the rules of the Heian era, a man who relied on the standard applications of the Limitless. Kenjaku was waiting, arrogant in his belief that he had successfully removed the anomaly from the board, free to orchestrate the merger and plunge the world into chaos.
They thought they had trapped him. They thought they had won.
They didn't realize they had simply given a god a quiet room to sharpen his knives.
Attempt number fifty thousand and two.
The slow burn continued. In the infinite dark, Satoru Gojo forgot the sun, forgot the sound of the wind, forgot the concept of hours and days. He became nothing but the math, the cursed energy, and the singular, burning desire to tear the King of Curses from his throne.
He was going to be unsealed. And when he was, the world would shatter beneath his feet.