Gojo Satoru had never experienced his own Infinite Void, so he didn’t really know what it felt like for someone else. Did it vary from person to person? He was a little worried at the moment.

The boy’s figure was already submerged in the dark domain, suspended in midair. His wet hair lifted, revealing those blank, unfocused gray-green eyes staring at nothing.

The domain seemed to be working on him, but Gojo still felt uneasy. It was like adding a new reagent into a test tube already filled with a chaotic, unpredictable liquid. While Gojo knew what his Infinite Void was supposed to do, the unpredictability of the boy’s mind made him unsure of the result.

He had no clue how the flood of information entering the boy’s twisted, peculiar brain would be processed.

Gojo couldn’t know. He couldn’t even guess.

What Yuan Shanxiao’s brain was processing was something far more terrifying, more overwhelming, and on a higher level than he could have anticipated—

————

One second after Infinite Void expanded, inside Yuan Shanxiao’s brain.

“If you have 256 main escape routes in front of you, each branching into 19 or 37 paths… If the routes are numbered 1 to 250, and the time to escape for each is as follows: 3.7s, 47.3s, 4.6s… Please calculate the fastest escape route.”

Operations research.

“If there are 999 escape routes in front of you, and after successfully escaping the first stage, you can proceed to the second stage. The probabilities of success for the first stage are as follows: 0.78, 0.92, 0.87… The second stage routes are numbered 1 to 1000, and the probabilities are 0.34, 0.89, 0.63… Please calculate the route with the highest overall chance of survival.”

Probability theory.

“If you’re about to encounter a group of Cursed Spirits arriving within 24 hours, and their numbers follow a normal distribution, calculate…”

Calculus.

“If you and a Cursed Spirit are locked in a room and must make decisions with incomplete information on whether to open the door, your payoff matrix is… You need to make 999 decisions in a finite repeated game. Please calculate the optimal strategy.”

Game theory.

The overload of information flooded into Yuan Shanxiao’s brain, which automatically broke it down into manageable pieces. It was like converting base-10 information into binary.

Buildings became hiding spots, roads turned into escape routes, people and objects were obstacles.

When Gojo expanded his domain, Yuan Shanxiao had been briefly terrified. His teacher had suddenly made a strange hand gesture, said something cryptic, and the sky turned dark. His Fear Value shot up, and he was about to flee, but before he could escape, the flood of information overloaded his mind.

Fear and his technique were already activated, so his brain began processing the information, preparing his escape.

Thus, the boy was now facing the most terrifying, dreadful, and nightmarish entity in the world—

Mathematics.

Math might not lie, but if you didn’t understand it before, you didn’t magically start to understand it now. However, with the omniscience granted by Infinite Void, not knowing wasn’t an option—he had to know now.

He could perceive that there were three dead cockroaches under locker number 204 in the changing room, four Cursed Spirits 2.4 kilometers away, and billions of microorganisms in the bathwater. Thanks to Infinite Void, Yuan Shanxiao, who had always feared everything he saw, was now afraid of everything because he could see everything.

Thus—

Was it just Gojo’s imagination, or was smoke coming from the boy’s head? Gojo Satoru: …Is his cooling system malfunctioning? Wait, this is a human brain, not a computer!

Gojo cautiously snapped his fingers, retracting the domain. The boy immediately slumped, but his gaze remained unfocused—and was his head still smoking?

Gojo approached carefully and picked the boy up.

“C(256, 999) = 256! /… P(a1/b1) = P… penalty coefficient needs to be set… convert to standard normal distribution… escape route should be…”

He shook the boy lightly, seeing that the smoke persisted. For a moment, he considered dunking him back in the bath to cool him down but worried the water might short-circuit him. After some thought, he pulled out his phone to search for nearby computer repair shops.

“Hey, Shoko? Do you know any good computer repair shops near Jujutsu High?”

“What? No, my computer isn’t broken. If it were, I’d just buy a new one, not fix it.”

“…I’m not flexing. It’s not my computer—it’s Yuan Shanxiao’s—well, it’s his brain—”

“…No, I’m not out of my mind. I just need to fix his brain. It seems like he—”

“…”

“…My brain hasn’t short-circuited, so why would I need fixing?”

While trying to explain to Ieiri Shoko, Gojo absentmindedly gave the boy’s head a good pat—then,

“I’ve got it… path constructed… escape—”

Gojo quickly grabbed the boy by the collar.

He couldn’t help but smile.

“Fixed.”

“Turns out, hitting any brain can fix it.”

————

Yuan Shanxiao had never felt this exhausted before. Not even when he had nearly gone on an Antarctic expedition did he feel this—tired.

He had no idea what had happened while he was trapped in Gojo’s domain, but it must have been terrifying, because now he felt like he could just fall asleep on the spot.

He dangled limply in Gojo’s grip, his hair still wet, bangs pulled back, revealing his forehead and wide gray-green eyes. He frowned in mild confusion, lost in thought. His gaze, clear and direct, followed Gojo as he walked, his body swaying in the air.

That look would’ve made perfect sense if Yuan Shanxiao were a husky.

“No way… this human really is strong.”

Gojo noticed the look but pretended not to. Even though he acted like he didn’t see it, his Six Eyes picked up on the boy’s audacity. Stop staring at me like that!

There’s a difference between suspecting the boy didn’t think he was strong and knowing it!

“…You little brat.”

“Huh? What?”

Yuan Shanxiao blinked, snapping out of his thoughts. “Sensei, what was that move? It was amazing—I couldn’t see anything and then I blacked out—”

Gojo: You didn’t just black out, your brain started overheating.

“Well—” Gojo said dismissively, shaking the boy by his collar. “You’ve still got a lot to learn.”

“You’re far from being the strongest—”

“I don’t want to be the strongest…” Yuan Shanxiao mumbled quietly.

Gojo: “I meant, you’re far from catching up to me.”

“Keep practicing. If you lose in a month, Sensei’s going to take you to fight some Special Grade Cursed Spirits.”

Yuan Shanxiao, who was already mentally checked out, felt like he might as well just give up and lie down. But when he heard about fighting Cursed Spirits, he couldn’t help but squirm again, struggling like a worm.

“…Before I passed out, I think I heard you say something about a domain…”

Gojo: You sure have a knack for catching the important bits.

“Yeah. That was me expanding my domain.”

“Wait—can I learn to expand my own domain?”

Gojo’s footsteps halted. He looked at the boy dangling from his grip, lifted him slightly to meet his gaze, and paused before answering.

“To be honest—”

Yuan Shanxiao’s heart raced as Gojo’s drawn-out tone heightened his anxiety. He swallowed nervously, lips tight.

“To be honest—”

“I can’t even imagine what your domain would look like! Hahaha, maybe a hamster wheel or Domain Expansion: Speedrun to Antarctica – Wild Edition!”

Yuan Shanxiao: …

Silent, stone-faced, born-to-not-laugh.jpg

Despite Gojo’s teasing, he quickly became serious again, looking into Yuan Shanxiao’s eyes. “But, based on what you said during your fight with Megumi, it seems like you’ve already figured out how to use your cursed technique in an extreme form—even if it’s passive. So, having a domain or not might not matter much.”

“But there’s something else I’m curious about.”

Gojo brushed aside the boy’s wet bangs, which fell back into his eyes as he clumsily covered his face. Once the hair was tucked behind his ear, Gojo leaned in. “Your strange space—are you the only one who can enter it?”

Gojo, being so close, could see Yuan Shanxiao’s eyes widen for a moment, pupils contracting before he answered.

…

“No.”

He heard the boy’s quiet answer.

Then quickly added, “But I don’t think I’d ever want to let anyone inside.”

End of discussion.

————

It felt like a bad flag had just been raised. You know, the kind where someone says, “I’d never let anyone in”, only for the story to twist so that they end up letting someone in later. It’s like when a character confidently says, “We’re definitely going to win,” and then the plot takes a drastic turn. That’s how movies usually go.

So, Yuan Shanxiao didn’t give a firm answer and was a bit worried Gojo would ask follow-up questions like, “Why?” or “Can I come in?”

However, Gojo’s Six Eyes seemed to understand the reason behind Yuan Shanxiao’s reluctance to let anyone into his space, so, for once, Gojo acted like a proper teacher and tactfully let the matter drop.

Yuan Shanxiao’s reason for not letting others into his space was simple—fear. His space was like his personal bedroom and the door had facial recognition that only allowed him inside. If he ever let someone else in it meant the door would remember that person’s face too.

If Yuan Shanxiao ever needed to make a quick escape, someone else with facial recognition access could get in before him. Making his once safe haven no longer secure.

In the end, it was just like deciding whether or not to give someone a spare key to your house. The house still belonged to him and only he could modify and control the space, but that key shouldn’t be given out lightly.

“But.”

Gojo, circling back to the previous conversation, continued carrying the boy back to the dorms. “Hm?”

“I guess I might let you into my space someday, Gojo-sensei—”

“Whoa, don’t let go! I’m going to fall! So scary!!”

Gojo coughed lightly into his hand, averting his gaze as he quickly grabbed the boy’s collar again, preventing him from falling. “Mm… cough, cough…”

“Cough… uh…”

“Mm…”

Yuan Shanxiao: …

“If you want to ask something, just go ahead and ask, Gojo-sensei. Don’t tell me you’re more timid than me.”

Gojo Satoru getting called out for being timid, “Alright, so why? Doesn’t your space technique have that… recognition thing?”

So, he knew!

Yuan Shanxiao pouted. “Because you’re the strongest, Sensei. I trust you—”

Gojo let out a breath, a look of relief and satisfaction briefly crossing his face as if a burden had been lifted.

“You thought I’d say that?”

“Of course not. It’s because I just raised a flag with you, and according to horror movie logic the flag is bound to break later and you’ll end up in my space anyway. That’s just how horror movies go.”

Gojo’s hand twitched, veins bulging as he clenched his jaw tightly, but his face still wore the same calm, serene smile.

“So, forget your horror movie protagonist persona—”

“I’m just the unlucky cannon fodder—”

“It’s all the same.”

“Wait—no, no, don’t let go, Sensei, I’ll fall—”

“Sensei, I was joking! I trust you because you’re strong and responsible, so—”

“Thud.”

Yuan Shanxiao face planted on the ground, “So, I hate you.”