[Megumi tilted his chin up as your words settled over him, heavy and deliberate.]

[For a boy whose mind still inhabited the landscape of childhood, fully grasping the tangled web of interests binding the Big Three Sorcerer Families, or the darkness coiled behind a contract that traded a son like property, was simply beyond reach.]

[But that sharp, perceptive child, held steady under the weight of your gaze, latched onto the one word at the heart of everything you’d said.]

[Choose.]

[He might not understand how vast the Zenin Clan truly was. But he understood, that the man standing before him, the one who’d stepped into the space his absent father had left hollow, genuinely wanted him to seize the reins of his own fate with those small, still-growing hands.]

[So Megumi pressed his lips tight. He nodded once, solemn and not entirely comprehending, but committed all the same.]

[That look in his eyes, pure and trusting, sent a needle of pain through somewhere deep behind your ribs.]

[You mocked yourself in silence. Calling it mercy was generous. Saying you’d done all this out of some noble desire to hand Megumi Fushiguro the freedom to choose his own life... that was the polished version. The honest version was uglier.]

[The real reason you’d poured this much effort into the boy’s training came down to one ruthless necessity: you needed Megumi, at some critical juncture in the future, to unleash the full, terrifying extent of his potential and the absolute power of the Ten Shadows Technique before the Zenin Clan’s eyes.]

[You intended to weaponize that display. A demolition charge planted at the foundation of the Zenin Clan’s existing power structure, enough leverage to fracture it, reshape it, or seize control of its future outright.]

[And so, to guarantee that this covert bid for power would succeed without a hitch... or perhaps, in some quieter part of yourself, driven by a thin thread of guilt toward the child who trusted you without a shred of doubt... you’d wrung every last drop from your mind to prepare for every conceivable contingency the future might throw at you.]

[You understood a brutally practical truth. Training a child this young to master sophisticated combat was, by any reasonable standard, inhuman.]

[Kids his age were supposed to sit in bright classrooms learning basic arithmetic. Not studying how to read a battlefield while blood sprayed and bones broke around them.]

[Expecting a grade-schooler to analyze an enemy’s technique for weaknesses under crushing pressure, then command multiple shikigami in coordinated assault with high-level tactical thinking... it was a fantasy. Lunacy dressed up as a training regimen.]

[You’d stripped down Megumi’s workload in live combat to the bare minimum. Under your intervention, he didn’t need to think about tactical positioning. Didn’t need to predict an enemy’s next move.]

[All he had to do was something as simple as a children’s matching game: identify the enemy’s general type, then summon the shikigami best suited to counter it.]

[What happened after the summoning? You’d already paved that road for him.]

[Using your own Cursed Technique, Phantom Night Parade, you’d personally summoned mirrored versions of Divine Dog, Nue, Toad, and the rest, then drilled Megumi’s shikigami through brutal, one-on-one Spartan combat sessions, your copies teaching his originals hand-to-hand.]

[Drawing on battle experience refined across countless simulations, you’d hammered devastatingly efficient tactics, vicious counterattacks, and defensive patterns into muscle memory, burning them so deep into each shikigami’s instincts that they became reflexive.]

[Put more plainly: you’d become a senior programmer writing pre-loaded combat scripts for every one of Megumi’s shikigami, each tailored to specific enemy types.]

[Megumi only needed to serve as the ignition switch, supplying cursed energy and calling them forth at the right moment. Once deployed, the shikigami would execute like automated killing machines running optimized code, launching seamless coordinated suppression on their own.]

[For a young child, it was something he could pull off without thinking.]

[Of course, you knew the drawbacks of this hothouse approach. Long-term, it was nothing more than a specialized countermeasure designed for one specific scenario: the Zenin Clan showing up to collect what they believed they’d bought.]

[Leaning on these auto-pilot scripts indefinitely would do little to help Megumi internalize and truly master the deeper essence of the Ten Shadows Technique. Worse, it risked stunting the creative instincts he’d need when his back was against the wall and no script could save him.]

[But reality didn’t deal in hypotheticals. Expecting a child this age to grow naturally and steadily over a handful of years until he could single-handedly stand against the accumulated might of the entire Zenin Clan was a pipe dream.]

[This wasn’t a failure of your teaching. It was the hard ceiling of human biology, the physical limits of a body and mind still in the process of growing. No miracle could change that.]

[Still, setting aside the tailored scripts targeting the Zenin Clan’s known weaknesses, just the shikigami roster Megumi currently commanded was enough to send chills through the jujutsu world.]

[Following your meticulously crafted, obsessively detailed 1:1 custom subjugation guide, Megumi was taming shikigami at a pace that defied reason, pocketing in months what previous wielders of the Ten Shadows Technique had spent years or decades to achieve.]

[Against any sorcerer his age, that head start was the kind of gap that inspired despair.]

[Setting aside the once-in-several-centuries anomaly that was Gojo, a freak of nature who’d tipped the world’s balance simply by being born...]

[You were absolutely certain that among the current young generation of all three Great Families, in this age when kids were supposed to be playing in the dirt, you could count on one hand the peers capable of standing toe-to-toe with Megumi Fushiguro.]

[After all, fully tamed shikigami carried devastating combat power and monstrous reserves of cursed energy all on their own. Even if Megumi’s control was still rough around the edges, even if his tactical instincts remained green, the moment those towering beasts and savage raptors were unleashed, the raw physical avalanche of force and speed they brought would overwhelm anything a child his age could hope to block.]

[You stood in the wind, gaze distant and heavy, watching Megumi kneel at the center of the training ground, running his hand along Divine Dog’s dark fur with quiet affection. Beneath your sleeve, your fist clenched slowly.]

[Whether or not you could trace the thread back to its source in time, whether or not you could find the puppeteer lurking in history’s shadow, the one with those eerie stitch-marks across his forehead, one thing remained non-negotiable.]

[Seizing control of the Zenin Clan, positioning your pieces before the board was even set, that wasn’t optional.]

[It was essential.]