**Chapter 18 – Part 1: False Light**
Xavier left Jujutsu High under the cover of early dawn, his footsteps muffled by dew-kissed grass and silent resolve. The stillness followed him—not just metaphorical silence, but the actual kind that slowed the world into something breathless. Leaves barely rustled. Wind hesitated. The trees didn't creak. The moment he passed the school's outer wards, the air grew wrong.
He didn't care.
There was something in the city that called to him—not a voice, but a weight. Not a dream, but the pressure behind one. It built in his chest like a second heartbeat, deeper than anything human.
When he reached the outskirts of Tokyo, the shift was instant. Sacred tension curdled into the scent of soot and concrete rot. Cursed spirits bloomed like tumors behind broken windows and abandoned cars. A child-like one—long-armed, paper-faced—watched him from a shattered windshield, but didn't move. It didn't attack.
That should've been the first warning.
He moved deeper.
The spirit that found him wasn't subtle.
It didn't crawl or slither or howl. It slammed through a street mural like water through glass. A warped god of appetite—half butcher, half beast—grotesque in symmetry and still smiling, arms too many and too polished. Its body glistened with old grease. A halo of bent kitchen utensils floated behind its spine like a mockery of sacred icons.
**"Thief,"** it said.
The ground ruptured with the word. The cursed spirit lunged, and Xavier barely dodged. His body moved before his mind caught up. Fist met flesh—his own. He punched too late. It was too fast. Too *solid*.
The first hit cracked his ribs.
He coughed red and something *flared* inside him. Not anger. Not fear.
Consequence.
The curse laughed, voice like boiling fat.
**"Wrong place,"** it hissed, circling. "Wrong blessing."
Its domain bled into the buildings—skinned wallpaper, flickering signs, kitchen knives orbiting midair like ritual tools. Every surface pulsed.
The fight wasn't clean. Xavier didn't win. He didn't lose either.
He survived.
Barely.
When he finally struck true—an act of sheer, instinctive will—the cursed spirit *screamed*. The space around it buckled. Not from the blow, but from the reaction. From the thing inside Xavier answering with weight instead of force.
For a second, everything around them *stillified*. The air stopped.
Then the curse began to die. Not burn. Not dissolve. But *unravel*.
Its final words were not a curse.
They were a prayer.
**"Don't let it remember me."**
And then it was gone.
Xavier fled. Not out of fear, but shame.
Behind him, the concrete split in the shape of a flower.