Sixty-eight years after the death of Earth's most prolific cursed spirit, Ryomen Sukuna, a monolithic spaceship carrying nearly fifty thousand aliens appeared in the upper atmosphere above Nevada, in the United States. The beings aboard called themselves Samurans, and they had come seeking peace with Earth.
On the ship, a horned Samuran asked a younger one why they were conducting diplomacy with Japan instead of with the United States. From everything he had been able to tell, he had assumed the Americans were the strongest nation on the planet. The young Samuran confirmed that they were. However, he explained, the United States had delegated all authority for diplomatic missions with otherworldly beings to Japan. The reason was simple. Japan had humans with powers similar to their own. Here on Earth, they were called jujutsu sorcerers.
Ten years earlier, in 2076, a six-year-old Yuka Akatsu was spending the afternoon with her grandfather, Yuta Akatsu. There was still a line of stitching around his neck where his head had been sewn back on, and he wore it the way other men wore an old scar, without comment.
While the two of them were sitting together, Yuta decided to give her his ring. Yuka was reluctant at first, because the ring was his treasure and she knew it. Yuta explained that he only worried about her because she was reckless. The ring would offer her some form of protection until she became a fully fledged jujutsu practitioner.
Thrilled, Yuka vowed to work hard and become a jujutsu sorcerer.
Four years later, Yuta passed away.
At his funeral, Yuka reaffirmed her promise to her deceased grandfather. After the service came to an end, Yuka's mother took her aside and ordered her to give the ring to her brother, Sudugi. The ring, her mother said, was a cursed object registered to the Gojo clan's warehouse, and therefore not something Yuta could simply give away. On top of that, according to her mother, Yuka had no right to have it at all. Only Sudugi was suited for it.
When Yuka later confronted Sudugi and demanded that he return the ring, Sudugi just told his sister to calm down, since he was not the one who had made the call in the first place. Furious that he would not give it back, Yuka attacked him. It was over before it had properly started. He put her down without any apparent effort.
Later, remembering her mother's words, Yuka refused to let them rule over her, and she began training in the hope of growing stronger and one day reclaiming the ring.
Elsewhere, in another part of Japan, a man sat playing a retro shooting game with a boy inside a warehouse. Talismans covered the entire expanse of the building, every wall and every beam.
The child complained about his parents restricting his screen time, and said he envied his friends, who were allowed to play all night. As the boy died in the game, the man wondered aloud whether the contents of the video game were really suitable for a boy of his age. The boy dismissed his concern, saying that it was normal to die in a game.
The man then said, in a voice that was not quite a joke, that he supposed the boy would not complain if it happened to him for real.
In Kyoto, a tall man in a suit who held himself like a lawyer stood in front of two young sorcerers. His name was Usami, and he had come to inform a now seventeen-year-old Sudugi and a sixteen-year-old Yuka about the recent cases of Japanese citizens being abducted and used as energy sources.
He assigned Sudugi, Yuka and a mysterious third person to investigate the disappearances that had been occurring in Kyoto. Because the police could not track the culprits down, Jujutsu High suspected that sorcerers might be involved.
When Yuka asked who the third person was, a young man appeared from behind Usami and introduced himself as Marulu Valvon Yelvori, or just Maru for short.
Yuka immediately found it odd that they had teamed up with a sorcerer from another country, mainly for the fact that cursed energy was a sort of emotional energy tied to the Japanese people. There were exceptions, but sorcerers were usually born in Japan. Usami elaborated that it was also the reason Japanese people sold for a higher price in the human trafficking world.
Sudugi could not get over how little Maru actually knew about any of this, and said he felt too uneasy about going on a mission with him. His sister tried to remind him that they were not even fighting curse users in the first place. Still, he insisted that they could never know what might happen.
Maru, who honestly did not have a clue about anything at all, danced around the two arguing siblings while begging for some kind of breakdown on why they called them curse users and not jujutsu sorcerers.
In unison, the pair of them turned and screamed at him that curse users were bad jujutsu sorcerers, and that if he did not shut up already, they would leave him behind.
Usami tried backing up the newcomer, explaining that he was only a visiting official representing a state party, here to see what Japanese sorcerers were like. That rang a bell in Yuka's mind, and she remembered how he had mentioned that there would be inspectors after the security treaty was signed.
Maru, meanwhile, was running his own thoughts in his head. He knew he needed to gauge how similar their powers were to his own, and whether the two peoples could really coexist — whether humans could coexist with the Samurans. Composing himself, Maru tried to tell the others not to rely on him, since he was under strict orders from his higher-ups not to interfere.
Feeling as though he was already in the way, he watched the siblings take off without him, throwing a few insults back over their shoulders as they left him in the dust.