Chapter 140: Purple Haze
Interested? How could he not be interested?!
In fact, the moment Emiya Shirou said that Suguru Geto's corpse was being utilized by a certain Cursed Spirit, the expression on Gojo Satoru's face changed instantly. He was no longer acting as shiftless as before.
If he weren't currently unable to discern Emiya Shirou's stance; and if these words spoken by Shirou were true, then who exactly was using Suguru Geto's body? And where was that Cursed Spirit using the corpse now?
All these various questions required information from Emiya Shirou's mouth. Otherwise, with Gojo Satoru's personality, he probably would have already tucked Megumi Fushiguro under his arm and rushed back to the place where he had originally buried Suguru Geto's body.
...No, as a person filled with absolute confidence in his own strength, while he couldn't determine if Emiya Shirou was friend or foe, he wanted to confirm whether this intelligence was true or false—and he wanted to obtain the follow-up information.
Faced with this string of troubling questions, what would Gojo Satoru do? It was simple. Wouldn't it work if he just subdued Emiya Shirou?!
As expected, he really was a genius. Gojo Satoru, having quickly untangled the logic in his head, thought so. And he acted upon it.
Tossing the souvenirs in his hand accurately into Megumi Fushiguro's grasp, Gojo's figure vanished from everyone's retinas in an instant. By the time he reappeared, he had already crossed the distance between himself and Emiya Shirou, arriving right in front of him. His palm reached out to...
"?"
"As I thought, you can keep up."
Gojo's grabbing motion hit empty air. If someone had been filming with a high-speed camera nearby, they would have seen clearly that at the very instant Gojo's palm was about to touch Emiya Shirou, Shirou had reacted with lightning speed, dodging the grab in advance.
Rather, for Emiya Shirou—who had activated his life-detecting flames long ago—no matter how fast Gojo Satoru was, or how elusive his spatial teleportation (a repulsion-based movement similar to curvature acceleration brought by Cursed Technique Reversal) might be, Shirou could react to the slightest disturbance within this fifteen-meter radius.
"Come on, I'm in front of my students, at least let me act a little cool."
The battle plan failed... if you could even call it a battle plan.
However, on Gojo's face, which was covered by a black blindfold, his mouth curled into a visible smile. "By the way, is that your Cursed Technique? A Shikigami that can generate high heat and stay invisible?"
Gojo looked toward the [Pseudo-Magician's Red] beside Emiya Shirou. Of course, since Gojo wasn't a Stand User, he couldn't actually see it. But much like an Assassin might rely on rich experience to vaguely sense something was there, Gojo used the "Six Eyes"—the Gojo family's ancestral trait with insight reaching into the microscopic realm. He could clearly see the high heat dissipating from [Pseudo-Magician's Red] and its effect on the surrounding air, thereby judging that "something" was standing there.
"If you want to understand it that way, I suppose it works."
Emiya Shirou didn't over-correct him. Instead, he followed Gojo's logic to provide a backstory for his spoilers: "To put it in terms you can understand, my 'technique' allows me to possess multiple Shikigami with different abilities.
And among my Shikigami, there happens to be one whose ability is information gathering. That's how I know the corpse of the Curse User named Suguru Geto was stolen by a Cursed Spirit.
Furthermore, the technique of that Cursed Spirit occupying Suguru Geto's body allows it to retain and use the original owner's techniques after possessing the corpse. Cursed Spirit Manipulation—a technique with a growth ceiling that is practically infinite. That Cursed Spirit went to great lengths to seize Suguru Geto's body and even used Sukuna's finger to set this trap today."
Because earlier, while preventing Itadori Yuji from swallowing the finger, Emiya Shirou had taken it into his own possession. So, while saying this, Shirou waved Sukuna's finger in front of Gojo.
"What do you think would have happened if I hadn't appeared and you, Gojo, were late?
What would your students have done when faced with an unbeatable Cursed Spirit?"
Emiya Shirou, possessing memories of his past life, always had a strange feeling when recalling the plot of Jujutsu Kaisen.
The classic two-boys-one-girl trio, plus a white-haired teacher wearing a blindfold. A protagonist with a powerful monster sealed inside him. And a mastermind who had lived for over a thousand years, planning to resurrect someone...
If it weren't established beforehand that this was Jujutsu Kaisen, many people would probably mistake that description for Naruto.
Of course, looking at the later plot of Jujutsu Kaisen, it would have been better if it had just kept referencing Naruto.
At least in Naruto, even though Kishimoto lost that feeling of a "poor kid changing his fate" and shifted into "bloodline theory" the longer the manga went on, Jujutsu Kaisen was...
To use a metaphor from Part 5 of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: it would be like if in the final battle, after Bruno Bucciarati was sliced in half by Diavolo's [King Crimson], his soul didn't thank Giorno—saying Giorno allowed him to become his true self and gave him the courage to do what he always wanted, so Giorno needn't feel guilty.
Instead, he said to Diavolo, "I'm sorry I couldn't make you go all out."
Then, without a moment spent mourning Bucciarati's death, Giorno arrives on the battlefield with his Stand evolved into [Gold Experience Requiem], only to be instantly killed by Diavolo anyway. Finally, Fugo—who had been absent for a long time and appeared on the battlefield for no clear reason—uses [Purple Haze]'s ability to insta-kill Diavolo...
That was the later plot of Jujutsu Kaisen. It was the kind of thing that, when Emiya Shirou recalled it based on his past-life memories, made him wonder if he had remembered it wrong because it was so baffling.
However, because of this—the plot of Jujutsu Kaisen, which inherited the inspiration of the [Purple Haze] memes and mixed in many elements of Naruto—as long as one single link in the middle went wrong, the schemes of Kenjaku (the Jujutsu Kaisen version of Black Zetsu) simply wouldn't hold up under scrutiny.
It was a classic case of: once exposed, it's all over.
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