Chapter One: Facing Death Twice?
Note: I will change many things and will not follow the original story. In addition, this is almost a crossover novel. The protagonist moves between anime worlds, but he will not move to the next world until the events of the first world are completely finished.
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The forest was drowned in absolute silence, the kind that precedes a storm, or in this case, a bloody feast. The light of the full silver moon pierced through the density of the towering trees, casting long, dancing shadows over the grassy ground. In the middle of this illuminated clearing stood a seven-year-old child, his light pink hair gleaming under the cold light, and his crimson eyes dull, devoid of any spark of life, like two deep wells of indifference.
The child, Tsukiyomi Bakura, was staring upward, fixing his gaze on the full moon. It was beautiful, distant, and clean. The opposite of everything else around him.
Bakura ignored everything. He ignored the foul stench that resembled a mixture of rotting blood and mud, ignored the cold seeping into his small bones, and most importantly, ignored the ring of terror tightening around him.
From among the shadows of the trees, countless eyes gleamed with greed. Deformed creatures, some with multiple limbs, others with melted faces, and others whose ugliness could not be described with words, were staring at the small child. Curses. Dozens of them. Acidic saliva dripped from their mouths onto the ground, and they emitted low rustling and hissing sounds, waiting for the right moment to pounce. They hesitated only because of the dark, dense aura emanating from this small being, the remnants of terrifying battle energy that had just ended.
"You know…" Bakura thought to himself, still staring at the moon, "if these curses had even a slightly better aesthetic sense, maybe dying by their hands would be less annoying. That one over there looks like a pile of moving trash."
Bakura was the youngest son of the Tsukiyomi family, a jujutsu clan that was once mentioned with the same tone of reverence and fear as the three great families (Zenin, Gojo, Kamo). They were famous for the "Moon Demon" technique, the ability to summon a terrifying shikigami said to rival "Mahoraga" of the Ten Shadows Technique.
But "said to" was a deceptive phrase. Reality was far harsher. The clan was on the brink of extinction. Only Bakura's family remained. His fanatic father, his arrogant older brother, and him.
Bakura did not inherit the "Moon Demon." Instead, he was born with an extremely rare and almost forbidden cursed technique: "Super Absorption."
It was terrifyingly simple. He could absorb raw cursed energy from the environment and store it. He could absorb the corpses of shamans to steal the remnants of their energy and perhaps understand their techniques. And most terrifying of all, he could absorb defeated curses and convert them into an energy reserve or even a temporary shikigami.
For any sane family, Bakura would have been a miracle. For his family? He was a tool. A human battery.
Since he was four years old, his father and brother had used him as live bait. They would throw him into curse-infested areas, wait for the monsters to gather around the frightened child, then intervene to kill them. After that came the worst part: "Come on, Bakura, absorb them. Don't waste a single drop." His father's cold voice still echoed in his ears. Day after day, he was forced to consume that filth, his cursed energy growing darker and denser.
They trained him relentlessly, not to become a great sorcerer, but to become the "ultimate weapon" that would restore the glory of the Tsukiyomi clan.
"What a joke," Bakura thought as he slowly lowered his gaze from the moon to the ground. "They wanted glory, but they got their ending instead."
His dead eyes settled on a pile of torn clothes and bloody remains a few meters away. What was left of his father. And a little farther away, the twisted body of his older brother bent at an unnatural angle.
Bakura sighed, and it was not a sigh of grief, but the sigh of someone whose favorite toy had broken. "At least they died before me. I saw the looks of terror on their faces. Should I be happy?"
His ever-growing cursed energy had attracted something beyond their abilities last night. Not one curse, but two special-grade curses. It had been a massacre. Father and son fought with desperate bravery, managing to eliminate one and severely injure the other before being torn apart.
Bakura slowly turned toward the remaining special-grade curse. It crouched in the shadows, slowly healing its wounds, watching him with extreme caution. It resembled a nightmarish hybrid between a spider and a human.
Bakura analyzed the situation coldly. "If I use 'Super Absorption' now… I can absorb what remains of my father and brother. Then, I can try to absorb that half-dead special-grade curse. It would give me a massive boost in physical strength and cursed energy. Maybe enough to tear through all these weak curses and escape."
He raised his small hand and looked at his palm. The energy was there, humming beneath his skin, yearning to be released.
Then he lowered his hand.
"Why should I bother?"
There was no motivation. No anger. No desire for revenge. Not even a desire to live. The only person who had ever touched his hair with tenderness, his mother, had died years ago. What remained was nothing but emptiness.
Bakura closed his eyes, completely surrendering. "I just hope there is no hell. The last thing I want is to meet that trash (my family) there again. That would be awkward."
He opened his eyes again and looked at the ring of curses that was slowly tightening. They had run out of patience.
Bakura smiled, a small, broken, sarcastic smile. "Death as a snack for a group of ugly curses in a muddy forest… what a poetic ending for a miserable life. Please, try to be quick. I don't like pain very much, even though I'm used to it."
He raised his arms in dramatic surrender. "Come on! The buffet is open! What are you waiting for? A formal invitation?"
As if his words were the signal they had been waiting for, one of the wolf-like deformed curses lunged at him at tremendous speed, its jaws wide open.
Bakura closed his eyes, ready for the end. "Do I really want to die?"
At that exact moment, before the curse's fangs could reach him, his head exploded with pain. It was not ordinary pain. It was as if someone was trying to stuff an entire library of information into his small skull.
"Gahhh!"
Bakura lost his balance and fell to his knees, clutching his head with both hands.
The attacking curse stopped abruptly, digging its claws into the ground to halt itself, staring at him in utter confusion. It tilted its deformed head as if saying, "Hey, kid! Didn't you say you wanted to die? Why are you falling and screaming now? You ruined my dramatic moment! You almost scared me to death… figuratively, since I'm already dead."
The pain in Bakura's head intensified. Tears began to pour from his crimson eyes, not out of fear, but from the sheer intensity of the headache.
"Damn it… damn it… why does death have to be this painful even before it starts?"
But amid the pain, images began to flow. Not memories of torture in the Tsukiyomi family basement. But memories… of something else.
Towering buildings of glass and steel touching the sky. Colorful cars racing through clean streets. Bright screens displaying moving advertisements. The taste of hot ramen on a cold winter night. The laughter of friends in an izakaya. The feeling of frustration from a boring nine-to-five office job.
"What is this?" he gritted his teeth, trying not to scream. "These aren't my memories! Whose life is this?"
But they were familiar. Terrifyingly familiar. The feeling of comfort when sitting on the couch after a long day of work, the bitter taste of coffee in the morning.
Bakura ignored the surrounding curses and plunged into the depths of his mind, grabbing those golden threads of memory and pulling them.
"I… I see…"
The pain slowly subsided, leaving behind astonishing clarity.
Bakura raised his head. Tears still streaked his cheeks, but his gaze had completely changed. The emptiness was gone, replaced by realization, shock, and then… a spark.
"Kazuma. That was my name."
He sighed deeply, the sigh of someone who had awakened from a very long nightmare only to find himself in another nightmare, but at least one he understood. "I had a previous life. An ordinary, boring life, but it was… safe. A million times better than this hell."
Bakura slowly stood up, wiping the tears and dirt from his face with the sleeve of his torn kimono. He looked at the curses around him, but this time, his eyes were no longer dead. They were cold, sharp, and analytical. The eyes of an adult in a child's body.
"I wanted to die because I was a broken, hopeless child," he muttered aloud. "But now? Now I have the mind of a grown man. A man who knows the value of life, even if it involves paying taxes and dealing with stupid bosses. I understand now that I can live a happy life… a life I create myself, far away from the shadow of that insane family."
He looked at his small hands again. He felt the immense cursed energy within him and understood it now in a way child Bakura never had. It was potential. It was power.
He smiled. And for the first time in years, it was a genuine smile, even if slightly twisted. "Alright. A new life. A new beginning. Let's do this."
But his smile froze suddenly. He blinked several times and looked around, becoming aware of the immediate reality.
"Wait a second…"
His eyes met those of the wolf curse, which was still standing there, waiting in confusion. He looked at the dozens of others surrounding him. He looked at the special-grade curse that had partially recovered and was beginning to move toward him.
Bakura's (Kazuma's) expression shifted from heroic determination to pure comedic panic.
"Uh… do you guys still want to eat me? Seriously?"
The curses retreated slightly, uncertain about this sudden change in personality. This child who had been begging for death was now standing and looking at them as if he had forgotten he was surrounded.
"Listen, guys," Bakura said, raising his hands in a calming gesture, his voice trembling slightly. "I've changed my mind. I just had a moment of spiritual enlightenment and realized that life is worth living and all that nonsense. So how about we forget what happened, you go back to your holes, and I go on my way?"
The curses growled in response. They did not seem convinced.
"I was afraid of that," he swallowed. "Alright, I'm in big trouble. I have immense power, but I have no idea how to actually fight with it without losing control."
The curses began to close in again, having regained their confidence.
"Great, Kazuma. You recovered your memories just to die again five minutes later. How lucky."
As he prepared for a desperate attempt to use "Super Absorption" as a suicidal bomb, he felt something.
It felt as if the sky itself had split open. An enormous cursed energy, no, not enormous, but "infinite," was approaching at insane speed. It was not dark and disgusting like curse energy, but bright, overwhelming, and strangely arrogant.
Bakura sighed, a mix of relief and new dread. "Hmmmm… this energy? Has my bad luck finally started working in my favor… or is something worse than these curses coming?"
….
(Gojo Satoru's Perspective)
"Ah, seriously? You're out of strawberry mochi?"
I was standing in front of my favorite sweets shop in this small rural town, feeling existential disappointment. I had come all this way from Tokyo for a trivial mission and was looking forward to rewarding myself.
"It's been a long day, and I need sugar to keep my genius burning," I complained to the terrified vendor who was bowing repeatedly.
And just as I was considering buying the entire shop as punishment, I felt it.
A sharp prick in the Six Eyes. Cursed energy suddenly exploded in the nearby forest.
"Oh?"
I temporarily abandoned my dreams of sugar and vanished from in front of the shop, reappearing the next instant standing lightly atop a massive tree branch overlooking the forest.
The scene below me was chaotic.
"Damn, what kind of party is this?" I whistled in admiration. "It's already attracted this many curses! There are two… no, one and a half special grades, and dozens of lower grades."
My Six Eyes focused on the center of the chaos. A child. No older than seven.
Cursed energy was pouring out of him like thick black smoke. It was dark, heavy, and carried the stench of ancient death. But what was interesting was that it wasn't just his own energy; it was a strange mixture of different energies.
"Hmmm. Is he confident in his power, or is he just an idiot waiting to be eaten?"
I remembered myself when I was young. I was arrogant, yes. I knew I was the strongest. But this child… there was something different.
As I analyzed the situation, my eyes fell on the mangled corpses nearby.
"That face… even half-eaten, it's still ugly." I recognized him immediately. The current head of the Tsukiyomi clan. A disgusting man obsessed with the past. "So, this is his son? Is this child the reason behind all those strange rumors that have been coming out of that clan lately?"
This amount of cursed energy… combined with its extremely dark nature, this power definitely comes from a forbidden or heavily cursed technique.
But what really caught my attention was the child's expression. One second, he looked like someone waiting for a bus, and the next, he looked like someone who had suddenly realized he forgot to wear his pants in public. There was panic, but beneath it… a new determination.
And then, something truly interesting happened.
The boy suddenly turned around.
The distance between us was about 100 meters. It was the middle of the night. I was standing atop a tree, concealing my presence expertly (at least for their level).
Yet his crimson eyes, despite the distance and darkness, met mine perfectly behind the blindfold.
"Oh?" I smiled, a wide, amused smile.
How did he notice me? Did he sense the massive cursed energy I had accidentally released? Or was it part of his strange technique?
"This is really interesting…"
I said this out loud as I studied the boy's features. His strange pink hair, his sharp eyes that did not belong to a child his age, and that aura that screamed "I am dangerous and unstable."
"Well then, it seems I found something sweeter than mochi tonight."
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End of Chapter One.