[In your original master plan, the idea had been simple: once Riko Amanai’s death was successfully faked, you’d disguise yourself thoroughly and visit the Star Religious Group’s hidden headquarters in person, posing as Toji Fushiguro, to collect the remaining bounty.]

[Money was never the real objective. What you wanted was the chance to walk straight into the lion’s den, to gather intelligence on that mysterious woman with the stitched forehead, and to map whatever shadow network the Star Religious Group was concealing behind its walls.]

[But the savage car accident that had obliterated the backup Star Plasma Vessel along with her entire escort detail hit you like a bucket of ice water. You sobered instantly and shelved the infiltration without hesitation.]

[The web of cause and consequence surrounding this affair had grown far deeper than anything you could fully control at your current stage.]

[Whoever lurked behind the curtain possessed an intelligence network faster than yours and a ruthlessness that recognized no boundaries.]

[You held no absolute confidence that you could navigate every twist of such a vast, uncharted maelstrom and emerge unscathed.]

[Leaning against the cold wall of your dormitory, you ran worst-case scenarios on repeat. If you’d gone to investigate the Star Religious Group’s headquarters alone and stumbled headlong into the mastermind, or worse, an entire organization of them, your current strength might not guarantee a clean escape.]

[Exposure there, death there, would leave you cornered with no recovery. Far too passive a way to end things.]

[So after a ruthlessly clearheaded cost-benefit analysis, you discarded the high-risk reconnaissance in favor of something safer: gathering intelligence through intermediaries.]

[This approach, at least, had been validated across multiple simulations. Hiring peripheral operatives to investigate the Star Religious Group carried virtually zero lethal risk.]

[In those simulated memories, the ordinary private detectives who’d taken jobs digging into the cult’s background were never silenced or harmed for brushing against surface-level information.]

[Beyond that, you had access to a far more covert channel: Mei Mei. Years of working with that woman, someone who worshipped money like a god yet honored every contract to the letter, gave you every reason to trust her.

Through her crow intelligence network, which spanned both the jujutsu world and the black market, enough cash could buy results so clean they’d shine. And with her cunning, there was zero chance anyone would trace the commission back to a Jujutsu High student lurking behind the curtain.]

[Sitting in the dim room, you tapped your fingers lightly against the desk as your thoughts dove deeper, plunging into the long river of history.]

[The enemy’s plan operated on an almost incomprehensible timescale. Centuries of patience and orchestration, measured in five-hundred-year intervals. No handful of individuals, no single generation’s genius, could conjure and sustain something like that out of nothing.]

[Human lifespans had limits. What kind of obsession could endure across hundreds of years without decaying?]

[A possibility surfaced in your mind, natural in its logic yet chilling in its implications. What if the enemy wasn’t a few people at all, but a jujutsu sorcerer clan that had existed since the distant past, one with deep roots and an unbroken chain of inherited purpose?]

[A clan like, say, the Big Three Sorcerer Families who currently sat atop the jujutsu world’s hierarchy?]

[Your mind, precise as a machine, began the process of elimination. The first to be struck from the list was the Gojo Clan. Low probability.]

[After all, piecing together the future trajectories you’d glimpsed across multiple simulations, everything the mastermind had done seemed designed to either target or circumvent Satoru Gojo specifically.]

[If the Gojo Clan were truly orchestrating a centuries-spanning conspiracy, they’d have no reason to go to such elaborate lengths plotting against their own killing machine.]

[Next under scrutiny: the Zenin Clan.]

[This family was no stranger to you. Across past simulations, you’d spent years inside that suffocating, decaying estate. Later, Megumi Fushiguro’s existence had drawn you back into their orbit in ways that cut deep.]

[You’d even engaged in genuine exchanges and tactical maneuvering with the current head, Naobito Zenin. It wasn’t that you looked down on them out of some subjective bias. It was that the rot permeating every level of that household, top to bottom, inside and out, simply didn’t feel like a family capable of pooling generations of blood and effort into a plan spanning centuries.]

[Compared to something as grandiose as a "five-hundred-year scheme," a concept that exceeded their own lifespans and cognitive horizons entirely, the feudal-minded elders of the Zenin Clan were far more invested in squabbling over the clan head’s seat, crushing non-sorcerers beneath their heels, and flaunting their bloodline superiority.]

[In a way, your firsthand experience gave you a more visceral understanding of the Zenin Clan’s nauseating internal ecosystem than you had of the Gojo Clan’s.]

[With the Gojos, you’d only ever met one anomaly named Satoru Gojo.]

[But you’d lived inside the Zenin compound. You’d stood beside Naoya Zenin himself, that swaggering, self-obsessed creature.]

[Given Naoya’s personality, that pathological inability to keep a secret, that desperate hunger for validation and worship, if he’d known his family was plotting something earth-shattering behind closed doors, he’d have been physically incapable of restraining himself. He would’ve swaggered up to you, crowing and posturing, unable to resist the urge to lord it over someone.]

[Complete silence on the matter? That wasn’t his style. Not even close.]

[And so, at last... every thread of suspicion, every dangling clue, drew tight like a closing net and pointed squarely at the final member of the Big Three Sorcerer Families: the Kamo Clan.]

[Your eyes narrowed. A cold gleam flickered through them.]

[You’d harbored deep suspicions for some time. That terrifying entity with the conspicuous stitch marks across its forehead, the one that in a certain future timeline had nested inside Suguru Geto’s corpse in the most grotesque fashion imaginable, absolutely had ties to the Kamo Clan. Threads too numerous and tangled to dismiss.]

[Here, at last, the fog parted enough to reveal a clear heading and a set of core objectives.

First: dig deep into the Star Religious Group.

Second: covertly investigate the Kamo Clan.

Third: comb through the jujutsu world’s historical records.

Fourth: master Domain Expansion as quickly as possible, preparing for the domain-level death matches that were inevitably coming.

And fifth, the most critical of all: find the mastermind and uncover the true reason they’d built Tengen’s "failed assimilation" into their plan as an assured outcome.]

[Amid all that heavy deliberation, the past few days had produced one piece of news that could loosely be called good.]

[Your cold-blooded elimination of a large number of low-ranking Curse Users during the Star Plasma Vessel escort mission in Okinawa, a ruthless clearing of the field, appeared to have barely rippled the surface of the jujutsu world.]

[The chaos at the time had been absolute, and those cowardly Curse Users knew little about the core events of the battle.]

[More importantly, the attention and shock of the higher-ups, of the entire jujutsu world, had been completely consumed by a scandal of nuclear proportions: "Even the invincible Satoru Gojo failed the escort mission, and the Star Plasma Vessel was killed in the explosion." You remained perfectly hidden in the enormous shadow Gojo cast.]

[On the flip side, however, there was an equally maddening piece of bad news.]

[Ever since the Star Plasma Vessel incident had settled, a certain classmate who’d always proclaimed himself the strongest seemed to have awakened some bizarre fixation.]

[Satoru Gojo had become a piece of taffy you couldn’t shake loose. He was stuck to you every single day.]

[Whether you were eating in the cafeteria, walking across the grounds, or resting in your dorm, he’d materialize out of thin air.]

[Behind those sunglasses, those eyes burned with undisguised, almost feral hunger for a fight.]

[He wanted, desperately, to find some desolate stretch of nowhere and go all out against you with zero restraint.]

[That moment in the corridor when you’d removed your glasses and unleashed that suffocating pressure had genuinely gotten under his skin. He needed to see everything you’d been hiding, needed to measure just how deep the well went with this impossible classmate of his.]

["C’mon, c’mon! Touma! I’m dying of curiosity here! That killer intent in the hallway, like you were about to slaughter me and Suguru both, what the hell was that? One fight! Just one!"]

[Gojo planted himself in your path, hands stuffed in his pockets, grinning like a bully who’d already picked his target.]

[Faced with his relentless badgering, you exhaled a quiet sigh. You didn’t even bother looking up.]

["You’re already the universally acknowledged strongest. I can’t beat you. If the outcome’s already decided, why would I waste the energy on something so pointless?"]

[But the same excuse, recycled too many times, was clearly losing its hold on Satoru Gojo...]