The Multiversal Tourist: 3 (Patreon)

The first thing Haruto Amari learned about being human was that humans were incredibly loud.

Not just their voices—those were manageable. It was their souls. His power had barely been sealed away when the sensory input overwhelmed him.

To the consciousness of the energy being, a human soul felt like a frantic, flickering candle trapped in a gale. They radiated heat, fear, love, and a constant, low-frequency hum of "wanting."

Beeping monitors, rolling carts, hushed voices that still felt like thunderclaps, and the rhythmic thump-thump of his mother’s heart against his chest.

Meanwhile, in the world outside his hospital room, the spiritual realm screamed.

Satoru Gojo had been born only a few months prior. The world was still reeling from the existence of the Six Eyes and Limitless appearing simultaneously. The fragile balance of power, which had kept curses and sorcerers in an uneasy truce, had shattered into a thousand pieces. Cursed spirits everywhere were evolving, growing stronger and bolder to compensate for the coming of "The Strongest."

Then, a second sun rose in Shibuya.

The magnitude of the energy spike was so intense it overshadowed even the glare of the infant Gojo.

__

Jujutsu High, Tokyo - Observation Room

The cursed energy detection array exploded.

Not metaphorically. The carefully calibrated instruments that monitored spiritual fluctuations across Japan literally caught fire, their circuits overloading as they tried to process the impossible.

"What—what is that?!" A young auxiliary manager stumbled backward, clutching his head as the pressure wave hit.

Across Japan, every sorcerer above Grade 2 felt it simultaneously.

In Kyoto, an elder performing a tea ceremony dropped his cup, the porcelain shattering on the tatami mat as his hands trembled.

In Sendai, a Special Grade curse that had been stalking a family for weeks suddenly fled, burrowing into the earth like a terrified animal.

In Osaka, a first-year student at the satellite school collapsed, blood trickling from her nose as her cursed energy sensing was forcibly shut down by her own body's survival instinct. And in Tokyo, in a private estate where the Gojo clan resided, an infant with snow-white hair and blindingly blue eyes began to wail.

__

Jujutsu High - Emergency Assembly

"WHERE IS IT COMING FROM?!"

The shout echoed through the war room as sorcerers scrambled to make sense of the data. Or rather, the complete lack of coherent data.

"We don't know!" An analyst slammed his hand on the table, papers scattering. "The readings are everywhere! Hokkaido, Kyushu, Shikoku—every monitoring station in Japan is registering the same spike simultaneously!"

"That's impossible," an older sorcerer rebuked. "There must be some general location. Unless ..."

"Unless it's so powerful that it's saturating the entire spiritual plane," finished a woman in traditional robes, her expression grim. "The energy signature has engulfed all of Japan. It's everywhere."

"Then find the location with the greatest density for crying out loud."

"We can't! The equipment isn't working!"

The elder's face turned dark. How massive must this cursed energy capacity be? With the monitoring equipment destroyed, manual sensing was all they could manage. But that would also be useless. With such an oppressive force, anyone not strong enough, trying to pinpoint an exact location would only harm themselves.

A younger sorcerer pulled up a map, his hands shaking as he marked locations the monitoring devices signified before blowing up.

"The strongest readings are clustered around Tokyo, specifically Shibuya and the surrounding districts, but even that's not precise. It could be anywhere within a fifty-kilometer radius. Maybe more."

"Is it a curse? A cursed object?"

"We don't know."

The room fell silent.

Then, just as suddenly as it appeared, the presence vanished.

Not gradually. Not with a fade. It simply stopped, like a switch being flipped.

The instruments stopped smoking. The spiritual pressure evaporated. Across Japan, sorcerers gasped for air they didn't realize they'd been holding.

"It's ... Gone .." The elder's face darkened even more..

In the war room of Jujutsu High, the analysts stared at dead screens. The oppressive weight that had threatened to crush their lungs was gone, leaving behind nothing but the smell of scorched electronics and the sound of panicked breathing.

"Search squads," another sorcerer, and older woman ordered. "Now. I want every maternity ward, every private clinic, every back-alley birth within fifty kilometers of Shibuya checked."

"Maternity ward?"

"Yes. This feels exactly the same as what happened when that brat from the Gojo clan was born." The realization struck like a lightning bolt.

"... Elder Tsunade. You can't mean .."

"Yes I do." The old woman replied. "It would seem the balance of the world has onde again been broken with the birth of another sorcerer."

There was a pause. Then,

"Find them. If a child was born with that much power, they will leave a residue. They must leave a residue."

That night, every sorcerer in Tokyo was dispatched to search. Be it standard Jujutsu Sorcerers or cursed users, every faction and force fixed their sights on Shibuya, Tokyo, searching for the origin of the cursed energy flare.

They searched. For three months, the "shadow" of the Jujutsu world scoured Tokyo. They checked every infant born that hour. They interviewed doctors. They even used cursed tools to detect residual CE in the air of hospital rooms.

It was a dead end. The area fifty miles within Shibuya had experienced all sorts of phenomenons, making it difficult to pinpoint anything solid.

When that bore no fruit, they began searching the alleys, sewers, forests. Like that, days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months. More than a full year passed, and ther was no result.

For some time, the Jujutsu world thought this had been a fluke of sorts.

The Higher-Ups eventually designated the event as Anomaly 000: The Shibuya Flash. They theorized it was a temporary tear in the Veil, a freak cosmic alignment, or a cursed spirit or child that had self-destructed or died upon birth.

And they would have been right, if the surge of powerful cursed spirits that followed from that day nine months after Satoru Gojo's birth didn't triple in numbers.

Across Japan, the "intelligence" of curses shifted. They couldn't find the source either, but the world didn't care. The "Disaster Curses" began to stir in their gestation, growing larger, meaner, and more complex. If the world had produced a second sun, the shadows had no choice but to grow deeper.

__

Nine Years Later - The Amari Residence

"Honey, what are you doing?"

Hana Amari leaned against the sliding door leading to the small balcony, a soft smile on her face. Her son was sitting cross-legged on a cushion hunched over with a strong focus.

He said he was like that whenever he was "Working seriously" on a specimen.

Haruto didn't look up immediately. In his right hand, he held a blue plastic toy scalpel—a prop from a "Junior Doctor" play kit he’d requested for his birthday.

"Huh?"

He stopped making tiny hacking motions at what appeared to be empty space. "Oh? I'm researching, Mama," Haruto said, finally glancing back.

His dark eyes were bright, filled with that spark he usually had when he found something interesting. "There's an interesting specimen here. It's quite fascinating to work on."

Hana giggled, pressing a hand over her mouth. "An interesting specimen? Did a beetle wander onto the balcony?"

"Something like that," Haruto replied, turning back to his 'work.'

Hana Amari, formerly Hana Yoshida before marriage, raised and eyebrow, dish towel in hand and studied her son.

"Something huh?" He always looked so cute whenever he was like this. It had been nine years since she gave birth to her son, and she could only say he never ceased to surprise her. "Does it have a name?"

"I haven't thought of one yet for this particular species."

Haruto answered. The boy was tall for his age. Delicate features, blond hair that fell just past his ears, and pair of dark brown eyes.

His most outstanding feature however, wasn't his cute face but rather, his personality.

To Hana, Haruto had always been a quiet child. Yet one with a highly active imagination and a love for playing serious games of pretend.

While other kids his age watched cartoons and loved to run and play, he preferred time alone playing with himself. He would watch documentaries on science, asking why humans needed to sleep if energy was supposedly constant, and refusing to play tag because "running without a destination was pointless and tiresome."

It had given her some worries initially, but the pediatricians just called him 'exceptionally gifted.' Something he had also displayed over the years.

He'd learned to walk at eight months. Early, but not alarmingly so. He'd started speaking in full sentences at fourteen months, which was even more alarming, but the doctor chalked it up to advanced development. From the age of three, he had begun asking questions most his age wouldn't bother with.  By now, his desire for knowledge and general curiosity was so great that he even carried a notepad wherever they went out to document anything he found interesting.

There were a few more quirks here and there but every child was different. Ultimately, she and her husband had grown used to them over the last nine years.

His Saturday afternoons were mainly spent performing imaginary surgeries on the air. A quirk she could live with. She’d even peeked into his notebook once only to find it filled with sketches, story ideas, and complex-looking diagrams.

When asked, he said it was a mix of research ideas and variations of the bedtime stories she told him. A very dense "Dungeons & Dragons" world he was building.

‘What a hyperactive mind,’

In reality, Haruto wasn't waving the toy at nothing.

Pinned to the balcony floor by a localized domain was a Grade 4 Cursed Spirit that looked like a cluster of pulsating, translucent grapes with needle-like teeth. Haruto had imbued

the plastic toy with a razor-thin edge of Cursed Energy, turning the cheap plastic into a blade capable of shearing through spiritual matter like butter.