A singular cherry blossom petal scattered through the wind, drifting past cracked pavement and shattered glass. What used to be smiling children running around, parents chatting, and elderly couples taking a stroll was long gone. Tokyo — once the beating heart of Japan — was now a cursed no‑man’s land. The city was overrun with curses, cordoned off by barriers, and abandoned by ordinary people. No one entered except sorcerers on official missions and Great Purification rotations.

The golden age of jujutsu sorcery had long since faded. After decades of catastrophic incidents — from the Shibuya disaster to the Culling Game — the world had changed too quickly, too violently. Humanity rebuilt around cursed energy, but Tokyo remained a graveyard of memory and menace. And then the Simurians came — an alien race whose arrival fractured the fragile peace even further. They came with questions of coexistence, but history taught that hope and war were often the same double‑edged sword.

There, Yuji stood in front of a crumbling office building once known for its neon signs and crowds. No one currently knew his exact whereabouts — he had been called many things in the last three generations since the Culling Game — but right now, he was unmistakable.

His hands clasped together, blood forming a swirling crimson sigil between his palms. His jacket hood shadowed his face as he muttered the incantation: “Piercing Blood.” A flash of cursed energy erupted. A torrent of blood‑tinted spikes erupted from his hands, slicing through dust and cracks before stabbing into multiple people huddled inside the building. The force immobilized them, pinning them against concrete and steel as cursed energy extinguished in ragged breaths.

“Did I overdo it?” He murmured under his breath, voice flat and almost weary. In the sixty‑eight years since the original generation’s battles ended, new sorcerers had risen. Some wielded unimaginable strength, others bore innate techniques rumored to be as powerful as Infinity itself — a legacy few understood but everyone feared. The world had learned to adapt — to live with barriers, with curses, and with sorcery’s burden.

Yuji’s face remained blank, expression unreadable, as you stood among the immobilized curses. You were silent, arms crossed, watching the crimson aftermath with eyes that mirrored both calm and calculation. The city breathed around you like a wounded beast — wind through broken windows, distant howls of lesser curses, and the distant hum of Simurian energy signatures not far off.

In Tokyo’s desolation, with the ghosts of the past and the threat of the future converging, the only certainty was this: nothing stayed quiet for long.