There's something about early mornings at Jujutsu High that feels heavier than the rest of the day, like the world is holding its breath before the first shout, the first blow, the first curse crawls out of its hole. The sky stays that shade of purple-blue too long, the trees lean in a little too quiet, and the stones underfoot feel colder than they should.
That's when Taguchi meets me—before the others wake, before Gojo cracks a joke and the other students avoid me with the precision of trained soldiers. He doesn't ask if I'm ready. He doesn't need to. The answer doesn't matter.
I follow him wordlessly past the dorms, past the main hall, through a broken stretch of forest I hadn't explored before. His steps are slow, deliberate. He doesn't look back to see if I'm still there.
We end up at a clearing where the grass has grown wild, but the air hums like it's waiting for something sacred. No shrines, no seals, no cursed energy that I can feel. Just wind, trees, and space. And somehow that makes it more terrifying.
"You know what your problem is?" he says, unwrapping the cloth from around his wrists. "You move like someone afraid of waking up."
I blink.
He doesn't wait for a response.
"You've been reacting to your energy. Letting it drag you behind it like a broken kite in a storm. That stops today. I'm not here to teach you to fight like a sorcerer. I'm here to help you survive as what you are."
I finally speak, voice rough with sleep and dust. "You know what I am?"
Taguchi crouches and presses a palm into the dirt, letting out a low hum as if listening to something beneath it. "No," he says. "But I know what you're not. You're not cursed. You're not normal. And you're not meant to be tamed."
That part sticks with me.
He tells me to sit. I do.
He tells me to breathe. I try.
And for the next hour, he doesn't say a word.
It's not the kind of training I expect. No fighting, no strikes, no drills. Just presence. Just stillness. Just watching how the air shifts when I focus inward, how the strange warmth in my spine pulses in response to thought, not motion. He sits across from me the whole time, unmoving, a shadow cast in morning light.
Eventually, I break the silence.
"What do you think it is?" I ask, eyes still closed.
He doesn't pretend to misunderstand.
"Energy like yours doesn't come from fear or hatred," he says. "It's not born from violence or revenge. It feels like… correction. Like a balancing force. Whatever it is, it doesn't want destruction. It wants restoration."
I think of the cursed spirit that turned to ash when I stood still.
I think of the tree that regrew where rot once festered.
I don't know if that makes me feel better or worse.
By the fourth session, Taguchi starts introducing movement—slow, circular motions, breathing tied to shifts in balance, patterns I can't name but feel like echoes of something ancient, something buried in muscle memory I don't remember earning.
He shows me how to ground myself when the pressure builds.
He teaches me how to sense the edge of the flare, to sit at the border between control and overflow without falling in.
He doesn't teach me to fight.
He teaches me to wait.
And that, more than anything, is agony.
Because I want to move. I want to prove something. I want to burn.
But he stops me every time I try.
Until the fifth day.
It starts small. A test.
A cursed insect—barely a Grade 4. A lump of gnashing legs and dark teeth, thrown from a cage into the clearing like a pebble into still water. I see its hate, its confusion, the way it wants to crawl inside me and hollow me out just because it can.
Taguchi stands ten feet behind me and says nothing.
I don't move.
I wait.
The creature scuttles forward, teeth clattering like nails on glass.
I breathe.
It launches.
I let go—not all the way, not the deep well I drowned in before, just a whisper, just a taste—and the glow dances across my skin like a flicker of sunrise.
The insect bursts midair, not in a flash of fire or force, but in a soundless collapse, like the world remembered it wasn't supposed to be there.
I exhale. My hands are shaking.
Taguchi walks forward and nods once.
"Now," he says, voice calm, "we can begin."
Later, as I walk back to the dorms, I pass the others in the courtyard.
Maki eyes me like I've grown another head.
Toge tilts his head but doesn't speak.
Panda gives me a look I can't read.
Gojo watches me from a balcony, smiling.
But it's not his usual grin. There's no teasing in it.
Just recognition.
Something's changing.
And everyone knows it.
Especially me