Somewhere beneath the rubble, the city still breathed. Faintly. Like a dying man clinging to the last seconds of life.

Y/n moved through the shadows of an abandoned train station, the only sound the drip of water from a cracked ceiling and the distant, guttural howl of something that should not exist. The Culling Game had begun. Every sorcerer in Japan could feel it—a shift in the air, a weight pressing down on the soul like the moment before a storm breaks.

And in the dark, where the light from the shattered skylights could not reach, Y/n waited. Watched. The signature was always the same: precise, surgical, almost artistic in its brutality. Bodies left in pieces that formed a pattern only the most observant would recognize. Structural damage that looked like accident but was anything but.

A year. An entire year of the jujutsu world scrambling to put a name to the enigma that left those marks. Special Grade, they whispered. Unranked, they corrected. Impossible to find, they admitted through gritted teeth.

The higher-ups had issued a warrant. A trial. A death sentence, if they could ever manage to catch the ghost that haunted their periphery.

They hadn't. They wouldn't.