Your Life As A Tokyo Jujutsu High Background Student

Chapter 24 - To grieve and live on

A burst of laughter from nearby park-goers jostled you from your memory. Your mind refocused on your present assignment with Nanami in Hokkaido.

After wolfing down those steaming-hot, buttery little spheres of potato perfection, you cleaned up the mess like the responsible adults you were supposed to be. With your stomachs fortified, you began strolling eastward through Odori Park, the crisp Hokkaido air filling your lungs. The path led toward the unmistakable Sapporo TV Tower piercing the sky ahead, marking where the park ended and a stupidly wide street cut through the city grid like an artery pumping traffic.

You had to admit, this mission sounded just like your kind of fun. It all started with Ijichi stumbling across this sketchy website called Yomotsu Hirasaka while crawling through the darkest corners of the internet. The site was hosted on an independent server to avoid detection. But Ijichi had been getting freakishly good at this dark web shit ever since the whole Shoko Incident. Not much got past his hacker eyes these days.

As it turned out, this sketchy site was basically an online black market for selling one very particular, totally batshit insane "service" – resurrection of the dead.

Y'know, just your everyday, run-of-the-mill violation of the fundamental laws of nature and reality as we know it. No biggie.

The website let folks fill out a little request form about whose rotted corpse they wanted reanimating, and it would kindly display the address to mail their payment. Because nothing says "completely legitimate business" quite like random P.O. boxes, right?

According to Ijichi, the site cycled through twenty different drop-off locations for these "orders." Your snark-o-meter was ringing off the charts. These scumbags were clearly running some kind of grief-profiting scam, preying on desperate people who fell for their "resurrection doll" mumbo jumbo.

Though, even a 1% chance that this creepy curse crap was legit meant the big guys had to take it seriously. Couldn't really ignore blatant reality-unraveling now, could we? That's why they sent Nanami, a first-grade badass on this mission.

You had a lot of beef with the higher-ups, but they were right to be paranoid about this situation. If some asshat really did unlock the secrets to defying death itself, it wouldn't just be a world of pain – it could straight-up shatter the universe as we know it. Kinda important to avoid that wholesale apocalyptic-level clusterfuck if possible.

The whole resurrection scheme got even weirder though – this shady business only claimed to raise babies from the dead. Your faith in humanity was already circling the drain, but resurrecting infants? That took this cursed operation's plausibility and flung it straight into the sun. Whoever was behind these so-called "resurrection dolls" – let's just call them the Doll Maker – was either completely unhinged or running one hell of an elaborate con.

Either way, you and Nanami's marching orders were to investigate the Doll Maker's hideout. No amount of skepticism could justify ignoring even a tiny chance that this freaky business was legit.

As you headed toward the location, Nanami filled you in on the urban layout. When cities maxed out their surface real estate, they started pumping outward underground too. Sapporo was no exception with its sprawling subterranean network of tunnels and facilities spanning all the way to the Susukino neighborhood.

"An underground shopping mall straight out of a Kafka novel," you muttered, picturing the weird subterranean amenities Nanami listed off – hair salons, bookstores, fortune tellers. Who needed sunlight when you could wander an artificial cave system forever?

Nanami gave you a look. "The curse user is supposed to be operating around here. Think you can track them?"

Sapporo was a distinctive city, without the clearly delineated personality districts like you'd find in Tokyo. Here, youth culture, nerd dens, seedy shops, and the red-light district's smorgasbord of desires all jumbled together in close proximity.