INKBLOTS, gojou satoru

prologue. gojou satoru

     BLOOD is what gets you across the river. If the right blood is in your veins, you're born there. If you've seen enough, if you've spilled enough—you've earned your right to cross. If you've nowhere to go, the ferryman will take you. You—you have the right blood, you've seen it be shed, and you've nowhere to go—and yet! You must pay the toll. It is not cheap, the boatman tells you, and you do not understand—you board being charged no coins and your soul intact. You think to yourself, this passage is my birthright. But the boatman tells you, you will know soon, and his ominous tone makes your first step onto the other side feel like sinking quicksand.

And as he said, you learned soon enough.

The price was heavy indeed. You are not a jujutsu sorcerer, despite your lineage. You inherited no cursed techniques, no natural talent, and no aptitude for the job that was sorcery. Nothing but a frail physique and a nose good for sniffing out residuals and a stomach overly sensitive to changes in cursed energy. The toll you paid to exist on this side of the world was a deal bartered with the undead, a trade between the world of humans and the world of curses. It was a Heavenly Restriction that confined you to spaces outside the battlefield, leaving you behind in the dusty storage rooms of the college. You have no place in this world.

Gojou Satoru, on the other hand, does. He too is not of this world, but he is not like you—this you've long acknowledged. A man who possesses the infinity is no man at all, rather a deity who has seized the powers of the divine. He is the man who has been chosen to ascend to godhood, and you are nothing more than a pebble beside his feet. A spectacle, the sole heir of the Gojou clan. You hate him with vehemence you didn't think yourself capable of.

You paid your toll, and you paid it dearly. The gods forgave his debt, and in fact took what you gave and showered it upon the blue-eyed boy. You clawed tooth and nail to enter a world that was supposed to be your birthright, struggling to barely scrape the bottom of the barrel. He was incarnated as the new coming of god, a rise so significant and immediate you needed only to be born to know of his existence. He, most of all, had everything you ever wanted: power at his fingertips, heavenly dominion if he so wished. For you, even an innate technique was unachievable. For him, it wasn't something to even blink at. The fault splitting the ground you stood upon ruptured Earth to its very core, and that was the difference between you and him.

Yet you were wrong once again. At sixteen, despite your incapacity to become a sorcerer, you were sent to the Tokyo Metropolitan Curse Technical College. Every day, you walked through those gates, the entrance into Master Tengen's barrier inducing nausea and vomiting until one day there was nothing left to puke. But you were suffocated and disgusted not just by the sudden shift in cursed energy that was the barrier, but also the self-torturous cycle that was walking into the school only to be smothered by those who could be what you simply could not.

When you made eye contact with Gojou Satoru for the first time, you nearly puked on the spot, because in that moment you realized the difference between you was not simply a canyon of molten rock, but a tear in the milky way, in which the limits of infinity were undefined and stretched beyond human comprehension. You could chase after him all your life, and yet, just like his powers and those math equations of x approaching infinity that you hated learning in your homeschooled calculus classes, there's an asymptote. In simpler words, you'd never reach him.

Your lives should have never intertwined. But greed is twisted, as is jealousy. Hatred even more so. Enough to bend fate.

"It isn't like you to be late."

The door is slightly ajar, enough to see his right eye peeking over his black spectacles. You can only sigh.

"No," you agree.