[When Tsumiki Fushiguro, her face streaked with tears, threw her arms around a still-dazed Megumi Fushiguro in the entryway and kept sobbing as she checked him for injuries, you stood quietly outside the door and watched them with gentle eyes.]

[You reached out and lightly ruffled both children’s hair. After murmuring a few instructions, you considerately pulled the apartment’s slightly worn security door shut behind them, leaving their fear, relief, and reunion sealed safely inside the warm room.]

[The door clicked closed.]

[You turned away, and the softness on your face receded like the tide, replaced by something deep and unreadable.]

[You walked to the end of corridor outside the apartment and braced both hands on the rusted railing. Your gaze drifted toward the distant mountains, toward the hidden stronghold of the Zenin Clan, a place that stood at the peak of rotten authority and old power.]

["Click."]

[You took out a lighter, cupped the flame with practiced ease, and lit a cigarette.]

[Then you tilted your head back slightly and exhaled a stream of smoke into the endless night.]

[Through the haze as it slowly scattered, you turned to look at Mei Mei beside you. She leaned against the wall with her arms crossed.]

[In a voice nearly soft enough to be a murmur, you asked, "Miss Mei Mei, do you think... I’m selfish?"]

[Mei Mei’s sharp, calculating eyes shifted slightly.]

[She didn’t answer right away. Instead, she reached out with slender fingers tipped in polished nails, took a cigarette from the pack you had left on the railing, and held it between her red lips. She lit it with the lighter you offered.]

["Selfish? Are you referring to the way you used that scheme of yours to drag me onto your war chariot and force me to choose a side?"]

[She flicked ash from the cigarette and gave a light laugh.]

["It wasn’t that bad. The price you offered, and the ’future’ you showed me, were tempting enough. I have to admit, I was interested."]

[Clearly, she still had some lingering dissatisfaction with the domineering way you had laid all your ambitions and truths bare in the car, all but forcing her to pick a side.]

[But compared to the enormous potential gains of a plan that could overturn the structure of the jujutsu world, that dissatisfaction amounted to little more than a minor annoyance.]

[You heard both the teasing and the probing in her words. Taking back the cigarette pack she handed over, you gave a bitter smile and shook your head. Your gaze returned to the deep night in the distance.]

["No. I don’t mean you. I mean Megumi."]

[For once, your voice carried a tiredness and bitterness too difficult to name.]

["For my own goals, and to pave the road toward reform, I used him as a piece to break the stalemate and forced him into that stinking, decayed swamp. For him, that feels far too selfish."]

["..."]

[The corridor fell briefly silent after that confession.]

[Mei Mei did not answer at once. She took a deep drag from the cigarette.]

[Only after a long while did she slowly exhale a ring of smoke. When she spoke, her tone was clear and measured, as if she had already seen through the nature of the world.]

["To be honest, I don’t know how high your personal standard for the word ’selfish’ is. But if someone had been willing to devote themselves to teaching me how to develop my Cursed Technique when I was six, if someone had allowed me, before the age of ten, to gain the terrifying strength to ride a Shikigami straight into the headquarters of one of the Big Three Sorcerer Families and beat those arrogant Special Grade 1 sorcerers into the ground, and if that person had also clearly told me that one day I would inherit the position of clan head with full legitimacy and hold supreme power and wealth..."]

[Mei Mei drew out the final words on purpose. A hint of genuine longing and grievance even appeared in her eyes.]

["Then I’d honestly feel regretful. Why didn’t I meet someone as ’selfish’ as you when I was a child?"]

[From Mei Mei’s half-joking, half-serious answer, you understood what she was implying.]

[She had not denied your claim of selfishness from some moral high ground, because using someone was still using someone.]

[But through her pure view of equivalent exchange and value, she was reminding you that compared with your so-called selfishness and calculations, the real strength, survival, and brilliant future you had given Megumi as compensation were nowhere near equal on the scales of practical benefit.]

[You had given him far more than you had taken from him.]

[You didn’t argue. Silently, you brought the half-burned cigarette to your lips and took a long drag.]

["There are many things that can’t be measured or compensated for through ’equivalence.’ Once something happens, it has happened. Once someone has been used, they’ve been used. Compensation, in the end, is nothing more than a false excuse those in power use to soothe whatever tiny scraps of guilt remain in their hearts."]

[Mei Mei stood quietly beside you and watched.]

[As a top information broker who had seen all kinds of people and moved between both light and shadow, she had met countless villains and hypocrites. Yet in that moment, she realized she couldn’t see through the true thoughts hidden behind your glasses at all.]

[She couldn’t describe what quality she sensed from you.]

[It wasn’t simple cruelty, nor was it pure madness. It was something twisted and hard to explain, an extreme tenderness and absolute cold-bloodedness kneaded together until they became inseparable.]

---

[As facts proved, your grasp of the Zenin Clan’s old foxes was painfully precise.]

[Everything unfolded exactly as you had predicted through countless simulations. The "attack on one of the Big Three Sorcerer Families" from last night, an incident that should have shaken the entire jujutsu world, caused no public disturbance at all.]

[After holding an overnight meeting, the Zenin Clan leadership even released a unified official explanation, absurd yet extremely dignified.]

[Last night, a deeply hidden and powerful unregistered Special Grade Cursed Spirit had recklessly forced its way into the Zenin Clan’s main estate.]

[The family’s elites fought desperately. When the Cursed Spirit tried to flee in panic, the current clan head, Naobito Zenin, personally intervened and exorcised it with overwhelming speed.]

[No outside force investigated the truth.]

[Within the Zenin Clan, regardless of what different factions thought of Megumi, their various goals and interests led them all to the same decision. Some needed to conceal the humiliation of a group of Grade 1 Jujutsu Sorcerers being beaten by a child only a few years old. Others wanted to hide Megumi, their secret weapon, and cultivate him in silence.]

[For the first time, both sides reached an unprecedented understanding. Without coordination, they chose to guard the secret and conceal Megumi’s existence.]

[After that absurd night, the Zenin Clan’s attitude toward Megumi underwent a subtle chemical reaction, gradually splitting into three groups.]

[The first group consisted of the low-ranking servants and weak, untalented clan members who made up the vast majority.]

[They were numb and largely indifferent. For people whose blood and spirit had long since been drained by the clan’s hierarchy, no upheaval within the main family would truly change their miserable, ant-like lives. Whether the future clan head was Naoya or some illegitimate son, their suffering would remain the same.]

[Of course, if the rumored young master who had awakened a godlike technique could lead the family to greatness and let them bask in some reflected glory outside the clan, they would be happy to see it.]

[The second group consisted of those who had witnessed the battle firsthand, or even suffered through it personally, along with the fanatics who had seen the terrifying potential of the Ten Shadows Technique and completely bowed before absolute power.]

[They now regarded Megumi as the sole savior who could wash away the family’s humiliation and lead the Zenin Clan to rise in the future, even suppressing the Gojo Clan.]

[This group had one extremely contradictory trait. Most of them were older and, by their original views, should have been conservative to the core, deeply concerned with bloodline, legitimacy, inheritance, and all the old feudal rules of the family.]

[So why call them originally conservative?]

[Because after witnessing Megumi merge with that black demonic dog with lightning wings, after seeing him perfectly inherit and wield the legendary power of their ancestors, those people had already gone mad.]

[What illegitimate birth and impure bloodline?]

[What Fushiguro surname from outside the clan?]

[Even his father, Toji, a non-sorcerer who had been an unbearable disgrace and heretic to the Zenin Clan?]

[None of it mattered before the Ten Shadows Technique, which was powerful enough to rival the Six Eyes.]

[If Megumi had not been so young, and if you had not stood behind him as an unfathomable teacher, those fanatical old men might already have spent last night plotting to overthrow Naobito, the current head they had once personally supported, and carry Megumi onto the Zenin Clan’s supreme throne in a grand procession.]

[The third group consisted of the stubborn opposition, or rather, those vested interests who coveted the position of clan head themselves.]

[The laughable part was that no matter how much resentment and venom they carried, they now looked like frostbitten eggplants, completely subdued by Megumi’s overwhelming, unreasonable violence from the night before.]

[More than half of the elites in this faction had tried, in their arrogance, to intercept Megumi last night. They had all enjoyed a deeply memorable encounter with that rampaging fused Shikigami. To be more accurate, they had been beaten and crushed one-sidedly.]

[So in the face of those old men’s fanatic praise, they could grit their teeth all they wanted, but they kept their mouths shut. Not one word of objection could make it out.]

[The bandages wrapped around their bodies and their broken ribs were proof no one could dispute.]

[In the jujutsu world, where power stood above all else, those weaker than a child deserved to shut up.]

[Regardless of which group they belonged to, all of them restrained themselves the day after the incident under the highest order issued by the current clan head, Naobito.]

[Without a direct written order from the clan head, anyone who dared privately search for or contact Megumi outside the clan would be treated as a traitor.]

[As for Naobito himself, his shift in mentality was far more complicated.]

[Originally, he stood somewhere between the second and third factions. The clan head position belonged to his branch, so of course he wanted to pass it to his own son.]

[But after that terrifying night, and especially after witnessing the abyssal depth of your strength and intimidation, something changed.]

[Whenever he held a small dish of sake and coldly watched his foolish son Naoya, freshly healed yet still swaggering in front of the servants with his usual vile behavior and not a trace of self-reflection, the scale called family interest tipped further and further toward the second faction in the depths of his heart.]

[Naobito was stubborn, but he wasn’t stupid.]

[He realized, with bitter sorrow, that even if he was old and no longer intended to make sweeping changes for this rotten family, he still could not sit back and hand the position of clan head to Naoya.]

[That arrogant, twisted, overreaching fool would lead the entire Zenin Clan toward an obvious future where the Gojo Clan crushed them to pieces.]

[The boy who possessed the Ten Shadows Technique was their only hope of breaking the deadlock.]

[Of course, you didn’t gain an omniscient view of these tangled family secrets and psychological struggles on the very night they happened.]

[Instead, over the period that followed, Naobito personally sent discreet intermediaries to contact you and test your attitude. Through them, and through your analysis, you peeled back the truth layer by layer.]

---

Next target 200PS :)