Stepping out of Jinichi's room, Kira wiped his hands. There wasn't a speck of dust on them, yet he still drew his handkerchief and cleaned each finger meticulously, working the cloth into every crease beneath every nail.
He had no intention of exterminating the entire Zenin Clan. No intention of killing again every sorcerer he'd already killed in the previous cycle.
Because he wasn't a person who enjoyed conflict.
When it came down to it, the rank-and-file sorcerers who'd opposed him were merely following orders. That fact wasn't particularly important to Kira—he didn't care whether they were innocent or not.
What mattered was that the jujutsu world still needed its sorcerers, and the Zenin Clan was a central pillar of that world. Kira had no desire to break the balance.
Leave it at that.
He knew his assassination had been far from flawless. Riddled with holes, in fact.
The estate was warded by Zenin barriers, and Kira had bulldozed his way through them with brute force. It wouldn't be long before the clan realized an intruder had breached the perimeter.
The only reason no one had come knocking yet was that Killer Queen had reduced its targets to ash. For now, the Zenin Clan hadn't noticed the two heirs were missing.
Discovery was only a matter of time. The retainers would trace the residual cursed-energy signatures and eventually identify the culprit. Being found out was inevitable.
But none of that mattered. In four days, time would reset.
And fate could not be changed. The dead would die again.
Let them find out. Let them put a bounty on my head. No need to care about anyone's judgment.
No need to suppress who I really am.
Perhaps that was another reason Done Again had awakened.
For these four days, he'd be a killer.
Night deepened. Cold wind gusted, though the day's lingering heat hadn't fully surrendered. Fireflies blinked in and out of the pale glow of garden lanterns.
Muramasa yawned deeply. The past few days had worn him out. It wasn't even eight o'clock, but he was already fighting sleep.
Guarding the archive was spectacularly boring work.
He was one of the Zenin Clan's outer-family retainers. When you got right down to it, he was nothing more than a dog the Zenin kept on a leash.
He yawned again, covered the desk lamp with its shade, shutting the cloud of suicidal moths outside the ring of light. At once, the vast archive dimmed, the amber glow shrinking to a shallow circle.
Every ancient tome sank into the embrace of darkness.
Creak—
The wooden door swung open. Moonlight spilled through.
"Who's there?"
Muramasa shot to his feet, drowsiness half-purged in an instant.
The doorway was empty. Not a soul in sight.
"The wind?"
He kept his guard up—he was a professional sorcerer, after all. Cursed energy pulsed through him in a slow, deliberate flow. His left hand formed a quick succession of seals; his right gripped the alarm bell.
One cautious step at a time, he approached the door.
"Nothing. Nobody here."
He exhaled with quiet relief and turned around—and his world went black.
Kira looked down at the sorcerer crumpled on the floor, the dark cursed energy fading from his hand.
He shook out his fingers and walked deeper into the archive.
Corridor after corridor unfolded before him, the shelves lined with texts so ancient they were crumbling. Some were riddled with worm-eaten holes—marks of history.
Kira had no interest in any of it. He kept his eyes forward and pressed on.
The Zenin Clan's collection was organized by category. Records pertaining to Cursed Spirits occupied one section; Cursed Tools another. Unofficial histories, miscellaneous accounts, local legends—each sorted into its own area.
Kira entered the Cursed Tools section and pushed deeper. The further he went, the older the records became.
There was something he needed to understand.
The Arrow.
Or rather—fate itself.
What was the Arrow made of? Where did it originate?
And was there truly only one?
He had a persistent feeling that his shikigami, Killer Queen—despite having awakened Done Again, a technique that could reverse the flow of time—still hadn't reached its full potential.
It could become even more perfect.
The jujutsu world's records on the Arrow were sparse. The texts classified it as a Special Grade Cursed Tool of extreme danger, originating from a meteorite that had fallen centuries ago. It was held in the Shrine Repository of Kyoto Jujutsu High. Everyone pierced by it had died.
That was the full extent of the information.
Not a word about the mysterious spirit-form shikigami.
Where the meteorite landed, when exactly it was discovered—none of it recorded.
But perhaps a family like the Zenin Clan, with their centuries of unbroken history as one of the Big Three Families, might hold such intelligence. Even the slightest fragment would be valuable.
Well, I'm already here...
Kira's primary objective tonight was the archive itself—to study, to expand his knowledge, to broaden his horizons. Much like a diligent engineering student at Tokyo University rising at dawn to hit the library.
He'd merely killed a few people along the way.
The main purpose was studying.
He wound around a shelf, carefully navigating through dust-caked tomes. His thumb rose slightly, then pressed down.
Click.
In a distant wing of the estate, Jinichi Zenin—who had just drifted off to sleep—stared into the dark with wide-open eyes and crumbled to ash.
Kira's expression grew ever calmer.
He dusted himself off and began working through the ancient texts one by one. It was getting late.
The Zenin Clan would have noticed something wrong by now.
If a confrontation erupted, a lot of people would die.
Done Again or not, Kira hadn't let it go to his head. He wouldn't kill indiscriminately.
Conflict was the most tedious thing in the world.
Page after page of yellowed, dust-laden paper was turned. The deeper he ventured, the fewer the books—and the more decrepit they became. Bamboo slips appeared, surfaces dense with worm-eaten pits.
He'd reached the very back of the archive, and he still hadn't found what he was looking for.
Footsteps outside. Frantic shouting. Cursed energy fluctuations growing sharper by the minute.
Retreat? He was reluctant.
The night deepened.
Kira cast one last look into the depths of the archive and sighed quietly.
Use the remaining four days to check the Gojo and Kamo archives. I'll find it eventually.
Wait. Rounding a corner, his steps halted.
Why had the Arrow been classified as a Cursed Tool?
It could attack people on its own. In ancient times, wouldn't sorcerers have categorized it as a form of curse? Might they have regarded it as something alive?
He checked his watch. Late. The Zenin Clan had almost certainly discovered the two missing successor candidates by now. The estate would be crawling with searchers—but they wouldn't have reached the archive yet.
He made up his mind. Turned on his heel and walked into a different wing of the collection.
Ten minutes later, in a text so weathered the characters were barely legible, Kira found what he was looking for:
"Its body is dark yellow-black. Like a dart yet not a dart, like an arrow yet not an arrow. It thirsts for human blood..."