[Over the months that followed, even under the crushing weight of hunting the puppet master and pushing your own strength higher, you carved out time like clockwork to visit that hidden training ground and work with Megumi.]

[He was still young. Expecting him to complete every drill you assigned with perfect execution was unrealistic, which meant hands-on guidance remained essential.]

[You didn’t blame him for it. Everyone had been that age once. It was normal.]

[Your development plan for Megumi was deliberate, measured, and clear-eyed.]

[You’d even been holding him back on purpose, preventing him from attempting deeper fusions between Divine Dog’s merged form and his other shikigami.]

[The reasoning was practical. Megumi’s total cursed energy reserves exceeded yours, but chasing raw individual power by stacking the Ten Shadows Technique’s fusion rules would drain the boy dry. The cursed energy consumption would be enormous.]

[That kind of approach would gut his margin for error in real combat and crush the already narrow operational space a child his age had to work with.]

[Rather than an invincible monster that could only exist for three minutes, you needed him to master the tools that would keep him alive in a prolonged fight.]

[So you’d taken another unconventional path, tailoring a method that bordered on outright cheating: equipping his shikigami with cursed tools.]

[You weren’t about to hand a sword or spear to a small boy with no arm strength and tell him to go toe-to-toe with Cursed Spirits.

The shikigami would wield the weapons. It was an approach that shattered conventional jujutsu thinking, a trick so unorthodox it qualified as heresy.]

[Nue, for instance, would seize a heavy special-grade cursed tool in its talons and climb to altitude. Then, like a bomber locking onto a target, it would release the payload from hundreds of meters up, the weapon screaming earthward with terrifying gravitational acceleration before hammering into the ground.]

[In that perfect window of opportunity, the target reeling in a freshly carved crater, Megumi would time his seal and summon a powerful shikigami directly from the crater’s shadow, catching the enemy at its weakest to pin it down and finish the kill.]

[Between your surgical one-on-one coaching and the firepower of a luxury-grade cursed tool arsenal, Megumi’s subjugation campaign had progressed at a pace that defied belief.]

[In a matter of months, he’d torn through every shikigami available to him. All of them, conquered in sequence, except for the one absolute taboo that no wielder of the Ten Shadows Technique had ever subdued throughout history: Mahoraga.]

[With the remaining time, you didn’t throw him into live combat. Instead, you stepped onto the field yourself, conducting ruthless one-on-one sessions with each of his shikigami.]

[Fists and techniques served as your teaching tools, forcibly correcting blind spots in their attack patterns, carving your battle experience into their instincts.]

[Beyond the shikigami, you’d also begun systematically teaching Megumi the deeper applications of shadow itself: how to use shadows as concealed storage for weapons, how to leverage them for short-range stealth movement and instantaneous repositioning.]

[Watching that small figure flicker through the darkness with growing fluency, you allowed yourself, for the first time, a faint measure of confidence.]

[While time slipped quietly forward, Mei Mei’s intelligence network finally delivered results on the Star Religious Group investigation.]

[The findings were nothing like what you’d anticipated. Mei Mei had been thorough in tracing the Star Religious Group’s funding chain, the one fat enough to float a bounty worth tens of millions. The money came entirely from non-sorcerer benefactors: wealthy zealots, politicians, and socialites who’d bought into the cult’s promise of immortality and were hemorrhaging cash to keep it alive.]

[What caught you off guard, what actually irritated you, was the Kamo Clan. You’d flagged them as your primary suspect among the Big Three Sorcerer Families, yet in these exhaustively detailed financial records, they were spotless. Clean as a blank page.]

[Not a single substantive connection to the Star Religious Group. Not one trace of funds exchanged, not even a fraction of a coin.]

[You dropped the file onto the table with more force than necessary, closed your eyes, and pressed your fingers against your throbbing temples.]

[This result had physically demolished your original plan.]

[The idea had been to follow the money’s hidden currents, uncover a covert link between the Star Religious Group and the Kamo Clan, and use that as corroborating evidence to confirm your theory: that the mysterious figure with the stitched forehead had embedded himself within Kamo territory.]

[But the trail was severed.]

[What you were dealing with was a monster far more cunning and far more patient than you’d imagined.]

[And so, through the quiet rhythm of daily refinement, relentless training, and covert waiting, time’s wheel ground forward in silence. Cherry blossoms drifted down once more, and you found yourself entering your third year at Tokyo Jujutsu High.]

[In the middle of a quiet moment spent mapping your next move, a sound rang through the depths of your mind: a crisp, unmistakable chime you hadn’t heard in a long time.]

[Congratulations. Card obtained: Forever Seventeen [SSR]]

[Card description: Exactly as the name implies. Once equipped and influenced by the concept of "Forever Seventeen," your physical functions, cellular vitality, and peak condition will be permanently locked at their seventeen-year-old state. This does not grant immortality. Your natural lifespan remains unchanged. But until the final moment arrives, you will maintain this apex condition without a single day’s erosion.]

[You sat motionless in your chair, eyes locked on the card and its exclusive SSR halo, and said nothing for a long time.]

[This was your first SSR-tier pull from the system. Based on everything you knew, an SSR should have been some world-ending ability, or an absolute cheat that could rewrite causality itself. And yet this...]

[Was it valuable? Without question. Immensely so.]

[Every Jujutsu Sorcerer, no matter how powerful, was still human. Age would erode their body eventually, dragging performance down whether they liked it or not.]

[This card meant that no matter how many brutal, life-or-death battles you endured over the coming decades, no matter how many injuries you accumulated, your body would always reset to the golden peak of seventeen: a Jujutsu Sorcerer’s most perfect physical state, unburdened by a single lingering wound.]

[For a war destined to stretch across long, cruel years, that was a strategic trump card of enormous significance.]

[Still, you found it somewhat surprising. By the system’s ruthless standards, merely eliminating physical wear and tear, an auxiliary effect that couldn’t even directly increase combat power, had been rated at SSR rarity.]

[You stared at the card a moment longer, then quietly filed it into your inventory.]

[Perhaps, at some point down the road, this body that would never age and never weaken would prove to be a critical ace. But that moment wasn’t now.]

---

Note:

On the ambiguities of Forever Seventeen:

1. Toggling it on and off does not heal existing damage. Injuries already sustained persist in the form of old wounds.

2. It merely resets the body’s baseline parameters to their seventeen-year-old values. The user can still be injured with no innate regeneration, though physical training performed on this foundation does take effect.

3. It has only ever done exactly what its name suggests. No hidden bonuses. No extended effects.

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