Jujutsu Kaisen: Time Wheel

Something was wrong.

This world was wrong.

In 2009, at Sunflower Children's Home, eight-year-old Ren Kamishiro stood in the dark and stared at the orphanage that should have felt familiar.

Tonight, it felt alien.

The children were gone. So were the adults. Everyone who should have been inside had vanished, and beneath that unnatural gloom, even the buildings seemed to have warped into something unfamiliar.

Ren thought back over the life he had lived so far: ordinary on the surface, and anything but underneath.

In his last life, he had been an ordinary person in another world. He had fallen terminally ill while he was still young and died when treatment failed. When consciousness returned, he was already a small child in Japan, with almost no trace of his parents in his memories. As far back as he could remember, he had lived at this orphanage.

Maybe it was because he had been reborn, but everything from his previous life felt like an impossibly clear dream. It was real, yet separated from him by a thin line between truth and illusion. From the little information he could gather, he had also learned enough to understand that this world was not the same as the one before. There were plenty of similarities, but the two worlds were fundamentally different.

'Was this what people called a parallel world?'

The first and most important piece of evidence was simple.

Ren had a "superpower."

He called it psychic power, though the name hardly mattered. For now, its main use was strengthening his body. Thanks to it, even as a small child, he could do things that should have been impossible.

He did not use it often. His body was still growing, and he had no idea whether overusing that power might damage him before he had a chance to mature. 'What if the ability itself was still developing, and pushing it too hard harmed my body along with it?'

Most of that was guesswork, of course. There was no one around to teach him.

Besides, life at the orphanage was peaceful. Quiet. There were almost no situations where he needed to use his "superpower," so he only used it from time to time. Even that had been enough to make him the undisputed leader among the children.

His psychic power usually appeared as a pale blue force. Aside from that, Ren could occasionally move at speeds that were almost teleportation. The problem was that every time he used that part of the ability, something felt wrong afterward, so he had never dared to push it too far.

When he moved like that, everything around him seemed to freeze. At first, it reminded him of all the speed-based powers he had seen in stories, and he had been excited for quite a while.

The second piece of evidence was this:

"Ghosts" existed in this world.

Honestly, Ren had considered the possibility that he was not the only person with a superpower. Maybe there were others out there, hidden from normal society, like in movies and novels. But he had never expected this world to have actual ghosts.

Over the past few years, he had seen at least five or six of them. They were different from the ghosts he remembered from his previous life. They were misshapen creatures, nothing like Sadako or Kayako from horror movies.

They also seemed weak, and ordinary people could not see them. Once, for example, a couple had come to the orphanage hoping to adopt a child, and something strange had been hiding beside them. It looked like an oversized mosquito, though Ren had only called it that because of its hand-like wings, needle-sharp proboscis, and general shape.

He had seen the creature from a distance. After the shock wore off, he realized none of the other children or adults could see it.

'Could only people with superpowers see them?'

Now, Ren suspected he had finally run into a stronger one.

After all, whatever it was had changed the entire environment.

Frustration, fear, anger, and a dozen other emotions surged up inside him at once.

'Why did this have to happen while I'm still weak? I haven't even grown up yet. No. I can't give up. I finally got a second life, and I even have a superpower. I am not dying here.'

Ren drove the psychic power inside him as hard as he could, forcing his body past normal human limits. His speed, strength, and durability all climbed sharply. Right now, he could probably take down several grown men with ease.

In this unknown place, his only chance of survival was to stay alert and use every bit of strength he had.

...

"Mm-hm. Got it. Don't forget the payment you promised. It's a confirmed Grade 1 cursed womb, possibly Special Grade. If anything comes up, I'll let you know, Satoru. That's all."

A striking white-haired woman stood not far from Sunflower Children's Home.

Dense cursed energy and an ominous aura coiled over the place, twisting together before her eyes. Yet there was no fear in her expression. If anything, she looked as if she had just found something she loved.

"Emerge from darkness, blacker than darkness. Purify that which is impure."

As the woman recited the incantation, a gray-black layer resembling rippling water or a hanging curtain spread from a single point in the sky. It expanded rapidly, enveloping the entire orphanage.

Then the white-haired woman walked inside, graceful and unhurried, and vanished from sight.

...

'This is bad.'

Ren stared at the small, misshapen body dissolving on the floor, and those were the only words that came to mind.

Five minutes earlier, he had encountered his first "ghost" inside this place. It had looked like a fusion of a dog and a young child, and it had rushed him while crying.

After his initial panic, he tried attacking it with his body strengthened by psychic power. The result was better than expected. A few punches were enough to kill the little thing.

Which meant the scene had turned into a child beating a deformed little monster to death.

The way outside had vanished.

Ren had tried to find an exit, but no matter where he went, he could not leave the orphanage, now twisted beyond recognition. It was as if the place kept looping him back on itself. With no other choice, he could only head deeper inside and see whether destroying the source of the "ghosts" would let him out.

That was how he had run into the little thing. After killing the first one, he encountered several more along the way. None of them looked the same, but they all had one thing in common.

Every one of them had some trace of a small child in its shape.

Ren wondered if they had been born from some kind of resentment tied to children. That was how it usually worked in movies and novels, wasn't it? The smaller ghosts were still hideous, but at least they were closer to the ghosts he remembered. The first sight of them had scared him. Once he realized he could kill them with his superpower, that fear faded quickly.

When someone had the power to destroy monsters, monsters became a lot less frightening.

"Uu... uu..."

As Ren moved down the hallway of the staff dormitory, he suddenly heard the faint sound of a child crying.

His first reaction was that he had found another ghost. He was on guard at all times now. But after a few moments, he realized he was wrong.

The broken sobbing was coming from a cabinet.

It sounded different from the monsters.

'Could there be survivors?'

With that thought in mind, Ren prepared himself to strike and carefully pulled the cabinet door open.

A scream tore out at once.

Two tiny figures were huddled together inside, trembling in each other's arms. They were not ghosts. They were two unlucky children trapped here, just like him.

"Hey! Stop screaming. Do you want to draw the ghosts over here?"

At the sound of Ren's voice, the two children realized the person who had found them was not one of those horrible creatures. His voice was familiar, too. Their cries stopped.

"R-Ren?"

Ren looked them over. One boy, one girl. He did not remember much about the boy, but the girl was familiar. Her name was probably Kumiko. She was the girl that couple had nearly adopted last time. In the end, they had not gone through with it because of the birthmark on the left side of her face.

It made sense that they recognized him.

Sunflower was a decent orphanage. At least from Ren's perspective, the staff had kind hearts. But there were a lot of children here, and the adults could not manage everything.

Because of his power, Ren had once beaten down a little clique that had been trying to lord over the other kids. After that, he became the one child in the orphanage no one wanted to provoke. Naturally, that made him famous among them.

The reason he had not been adopted yet was his own choice.

After all, a cute, clever child whose looks already stood out despite his age would have no shortage of potential adopters. Ren simply did not think he could fit into a stranger's family.

The director, a gentle and kind woman, had even considered adopting him herself or asking her family to do it, then sending him to school. The orphanage could only educate children through elementary school. Some children had already gone out into society with support from the orphanage and the director. Many came back to repay the place, and some even returned to work here.

But that was beside the point.

After calming the two children, Ren tried asking them what they knew. They were too frightened to make much sense. Fear had tangled their words into a mess.

Once he pieced the story together, he found there was nothing useful. Neither of them knew how they had ended up here. They had seen the wandering monsters from a distance and hidden inside the cabinet.

Not long after that exchange, a burst of frantic noise came from somewhere nearby.

Ren's expression changed. He quickly told the two terrified children to hide inside the cabinet again.

If they had gone unnoticed in there this long, hiding was at least safer than following him.

He could kill the smaller ghosts, but protecting two helpless children at the same time would be difficult.

Once they were hidden, Ren listened as the noises drew closer. Then he rose and ran in the opposite direction.

His footsteps rang out sharply in the empty hallway.

Very soon, strange cries followed him, mixed with the sound of limbs skittering across the floor.

The corridor was too narrow. Judging by the noise, there were a lot of them.

Ren needed open space to fight.

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