Timeframe: 11 months before Yuji's emergence
Location: Private Hall, Jujutsu Headquarters
The room was carved from old obsidian, lit only by suspended braziers. Shadows crawled like breathing things across the walls, fed by cursed incense.
At the center sat a table — circular, with three empty seats filled now by bloodlines. The clans had gathered.
Zenin. Kamo. Gojo.
Technically, the Gojo seat remained unoccupied — Satoru Gojo never attended these meetings, not in person. His place was represented by an unblinking paper charm floating just above the chair, pulsing with limitless cursed energy like a passive threat.
Across from it sat Naobito Zenin, drinking slowly from a flask. His eyes never left the flame.
Beside him, Noritoshi Kamo's father — a man with sharp eyes and a colder presence — tapped his knuckles on the wood.
The silence dragged until the Zenin patriarch spoke.
"The boy's footage resurfaced again."
The others didn't need context. There was only one "boy" whose technique couldn't be classified. One ghost who wasn't supposed to exist.
Akira Rensetsu.
Erased from the records. Survived Shibuya. Relocated to Kyoto. Marked unstable.
Noritoshi's father sighed. "There are rumors even among non-sorcerers now. A cursed user in the Kyoto mountains who warps memory, slips between seconds, appears in dreams."
Naobito chuckled. "Sounds like bullshit."
"No. This is worse. Surveillance from the Kyoto branch picked up a cursed fluctuation. Then the footage looped itself. Security said the timestamps duplicated."
"That can't happen," murmured a young auxiliary rep in the corner.
"It shouldn't happen," Noritoshi corrected. "Unless the curse affecting it isn't external."
Naobito leaned forward. "You think it's the boy?"
"No. I think it's something born from him."
The room shifted.
The term echo hadn't reached them yet, but the concept was spreading — incomplete cursed identities left behind in the fractures of CE trauma.
"He's not unstable," Kamo's father said. "He's splintering."
They reviewed reports quietly:
The sealed file from Tokyo's subway mission.
The comatose sorcerer named Junko Himura whose vitals hadn't changed in eleven months.
The black-box record showing Akira healing mid-fight with a technique he had never been taught — raw, primal RCT not learned, but stolen from a version of himself that did.
"He's borrowing cursed techniques from aborted timelines," someone said.
Naobito's drink paused mid-air.
"Dangerous," Kamo's father whispered. "He's not copying. He's rewinding damage and remembering healing. His RCT is reflex, not control."
"Instinctual recovery… without consent from his own body," muttered an older woman in robes. "What happens when one of those recoveries isn't from this reality?"
They all went quiet.
Then, for the first time, a single name was whispered.
"...Could this be tied to that ancient failed technique? The Time Mausoleum?"
Kamo's father stiffened. "That's Heian folklore."
"Still, his cursed energy signature aligns… it mimics echoes. Decay patterns, recursive loops."
Naobito sat back. "This isn't a curse technique anymore. This is ancestral memory theft."
The Gojo charm flickered. For a second, it shimmered — as if amused.
Kamo's father stood. "I propose we escalate surveillance."
"Containment?" one asked.
"No," Naobito said. "Let him grow. Let him think he's hidden. It's better to track a walking faultline than trigger it early."
"Agreed," the others muttered.
Across the sea, far from the clans and their secrecy, someone else had already taken notice of Akira.
Not through records.
Not through energy.
But through resonance.
A faint heartbeat that didn't belong in this world.
Kenjaku, still wearing an older host, stared out over a graveyard and whispered:
"Tick... tick..."