No, hold on—no matter when Itadori's mom's original body died, there's absolutely no way she could be a middle schooler! At the very least, before Itadori's mom and Itadori's dad fell in love, his mom definitely hadn't had her body hijacked yet… so what on earth is going on?!
Mahiru was genuinely dumbfounded.
And then a possibility occurred to her. Oh no. Could it be… that this lock of Kaori Itadori's hair wasn't cut from her at the time of her death?
Right—a normal Spirit-Calling Technique extracts information from the corpse, so the information extracted is naturally the person's state right before death. But the soul-and-body information Mahiru had extracted from the hair was entirely the soul and body from the exact moment Kaori Itadori cut off these few strands—so the hair had actually been cut back in her middle-school days!
You were preparing your own burial grave-goods this early on?!
You really are something else!
"...Mn?" Feeling the sensation beneath her, Kaori Itadori slowly opened her eyes, saw the blue-haired girl before her, and put on a blank, bewildered expression. "...?"
"Uh… Ita—no, wait, little Kaori?" Mahiru wore a subtle, slightly awkward smile and waved at Kaori Itadori. "Um… hello?"
Now this had gotten awkward.
"!!!" The girl gave a violent start and shrank back into the covers. "Who are you people?!"
She glanced left and right again.
"And where is this place?!"
Poor little Kaori—her memories had surely frozen at the very instant before she cut her hair. One second she'd snipped off the hair, the next she was waking up in front of Mahiru.
Even getting hit by a giant truck and reincarnating into another world wouldn't be this abrupt.
So she just blanked out completely, sinking into confusion: "This is… this is…"
"Uh… so, little Kaori," Mahiru tried to put on a meaningful, weighty face, "do you believe in time travel?" "Time… travel?"
"That's right—and very unfortunately so, little Kaori." Mahiru leaned down and spoke earnestly, even patting the girl on the shoulder. "You've traveled into the future."
By rights, if Mahiru wanted Kaori's Technique, all she had to do was extract the information from Kaori Itadori's body. But in that case, the vessel she chose would have to be something that already possessed a soul.
She didn't want to test it on herself, nor on anyone else, so her only option was to craft a doll herself.
And a doll has no soul, so Mahiru pulled Kaori Itadori's soul down along with it.
By rights, Kaori should have been a sorcerer herself, and a sorcerer would surely understand souls and spirit-calling and all that messy business, so communicating with her shouldn't pose any obstacle… If she wanted to stay, she could stay; if she didn't, then she'd be free to leave.
All of the above was Mahiru's plan.
But what she hadn't expected was that the one she'd summoned would turn out to be a little Kaori… and what's more, that she wasn't even a sorcerer.
Now that was a problem.
So Mahiru thought it over and over and decided to use "time travel" to hoodwink her. There was no other way to explain the phenomenon before the girl's eyes anyway.
"You mean to say, I've traveled to the future?" Kaori stared blankly with wide eyes, looking at herself in the mirror and at Mahiru behind her. "...Some kind of UFO-like supernatural phenomenon?"
The girl had long hair, but only half of it was long. She'd probably been in the middle of cutting her hair when she got transported. So Mahiru was now finishing the job, cutting the girl's hair all the way into a short style.
Back when Kaori was in middle school was probably right when UFO legends were all the rage.
"That's right, you can understand it that way," Mahiru said.
And honestly—believe it or not, Jujutsu Kaisen really does have aliens in it. Though that's a matter for sixty-eight years down the line.
Let's see… Kaori had now, in one fell swoop, jumped some thirty-odd years into the future.
In truth, the world had long since changed beyond recognition.
"Wow!" Once her haircut was done, the short-haired girl held up a phone and let out an astonished gasp of admiration. "Is this a handheld game console of the future? So amazing!"
Kaori… how to put it—she was soft and sweet, very gentle and well-behaved, yet at the same time very strong-willed. She quickly accepted the fact that she'd traveled here and could never go back, without throwing a sobbing, wailing fit.
To have a son with as wonderful a personality as Itadori, Kaori was probably a person with a wonderful personality too.
After all, Itadori's old man was, frankly, a bit unhinged. Itadori turned out fine purely thanks to his mom's genes hedging things out.
The girl was just very lost, frightened by everything unfamiliar around her.
But once Mahiru handed the girl the phone, the girl grew interested and forgot her bewilderment.
A phone really is great medicine.
Jogo pulled Mahiru aside. "Come over here." "What's up?"
"I'm guessing you absolutely won't have the heart to watch her Cursed Energy run dry and have her vanish from this world." Jogo's eyebrows trembled. "So you're not planning to just keep her here forever, are you?"
"Why not?" Mahiru blinked her eyes.
"Once or twice is fine," Jogo narrowed his eyes, "but you'd better not get carried away in the heat of the moment and go do something idiotic like [Resurrect Everyone]."
Jogo knew Mahiru liked humans, and he didn't care about that. On the contrary, it was precisely because Mahiru liked humans that Jogo had given up on the "Old Humanity Eradication Plan."
But there are limits even to fondness.
This time, hearing that Mahiru had gone and squared off head-on against a black hole just to save people, Jogo had been utterly stunned. She'd been beaten up by Satoru Gojo, so she knew how strong Satoru Gojo was—if Satoru Gojo couldn't deal with the black hole, then how could Mahiru possibly deal with it?
—Wasn't that super dangerous?! The main thing is, Mahiru isn't some guardian of humankind either… she's a Cursed Spirit!
Looking at Mahiru through the lens of how one regards a Cursed Spirit, this gal's fondness for humans honestly carried a touch of mental illness and sheer unreasonableness—so right now Jogo seriously suspected that Mahiru would, down the line, launch a grand scheme called "Bring Every Dead Human Back to Life Again."
That would be downright terrifying.
Even though Jogo was a Cursed Spirit, even he knew how badly that sort of thing would turn out.
"Oh man." Mahiru's eyes went wide. "Jogo, you're a flat-out genius."
So there was a way to play it like that?
But come to think of it, it really was true.
The original Spirit-Calling Technique strictly adhered to the principle of "one for one": to resurrect—or rather, to call back—a single person, you had to sacrifice another person's soul and turn that person's body into the vessel. But the way Mahiru played it… she could make her own vessel, and therefore she could completely ignore the "equivalent exchange" principle of the Spirit-Calling Technique…
So doesn't that mean… she can resurrect whomever she pleases!
Oh man, if she really can resurrect people unconditionally, then she really would be able to muster a whole army at the graveyard!
All right, it's actually not quite that exaggerated. The Technique Mahiru learned from the Spirit-Calling Granny is only a "rubbing"—Mahiru can't use it again after a few times, so she has to be careful.
There's one point worth noting, though: Mahiru had in fact preserved some of the "Spirit-Calling Granny's" body tissue on her person.
What does that mean?
It means that if the Spirit-Calling Granny dies, Mahiru can use the Spirit-Calling Technique to call back the "Spirit-Calling Granny," and then yank the Spirit-Calling Granny's Spirit-Calling Technique right off of her.
So no matter what, Mahiru is guaranteed to end up obtaining the "Spirit-Calling Technique" in the end. The next time she meets the Spirit-Calling Granny, she could open with a killing move right off the bat.
It counts as a clever little trick for nabbing the Spirit-Calling Technique.
But note: the materials for the Spirit-Calling Technique can only be taken from the most original body, not collected from a possessed vessel. And once you've called back a given person, if you then want to call them back again, the amount of material information required doubles.
Therefore Mahiru can resurrect people, but she can't repeatedly resurrect the same person—the infinite-resurrection card exploit isn't something she can pull off for the time being.
Mahiru hadn't yet gotten her hands on the "Anti-Gravity Technique," but in fact she could grab it whenever she wanted.
The current Kaori wasn't a sorcerer yet—probably the Cursed Energy in her body was so minuscule that she herself hadn't noticed it and couldn't use her Technique; she still needed to grow. But Kaori's Technique had great potential, and later on Mahiru might be able to use her own Technique to force-ripen Kaori's a bit.
"So, you're just going to keep her around like this?" Jogo curled his lip and sighed. "Fine, just don't take it too far."
It had always been Mahiru making demands of Jogo.
This time, surprisingly, it was Jogo making a demand of Mahiru.
The tables had turned, too.
Beep-beep. Mahiru's phone suddenly chimed.
"Hm? Itadori?" Kaori looked at the message that had popped up on Mahiru's phone and turned her head to call out to her. "Big Sis Mahiru… someone saved as [Itadori] has sent you a message!"
Uh? This was just too ill-timed.
Fortunately, though, the current Kaori didn't yet recognize the surname "Itadori." Her cover hadn't been blown yet.
Mahiru went to grab the phone and saw Itadori's message.
"Uh… Itadori… says he's coming to find me tomorrow, asking where I am right now…" Mahiru's mouth twitched, and her gaze couldn't help drifting to the side, meeting Kaori's clear, limpid eyes. "Uh..."
So it turned out the awkward business wasn't over at all—rather, had it only just begun?
____
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