Stepping back for a moment, Tsurugi once explained how this land, the place he had been born, had been deeply tainted. From what he had heard from his grandfather, his father's mother had sacrificed herself to save her son. It was something the parents of this bloodline had historically done for generations. Not for tradition, and not because they were forced, but because they decided to do it on their own. Because of this, the lifespans of the men and women inside the family were extremely short after they married.
Years ago, Kaato had decided that she would be the one to break that mould.
While she was pregnant, she had enjoyed a peaceful family picnic with her children near the lone pine tree and the shrine beneath it. Terrified for her son's safety after seeing him climb too high, Kaato begged him to climb back down to earth.
Sometime later, a teenage Jobin prepared to head out on a trip with a local scouting group. Just as he was about to leave, Kaato noticed that one of his shoelaces had come undone, and, being the mother she was, got down to tie it despite Jobin's embarrassment.
At this point in his life, the family's rock disease had already begun to take root in Jobin. Jagged stone cracked his skin, and the illness had started causing him severe memory loss. Knowing his condition, Kaato lovingly gave him a list of exactly how to use everything, along with his medication and her emergency contact information.
Unfortunately, Jobin's vulnerability made him a prime target for the other kids. Later, during the scouting trip, the older scout leader, a cruel loser of a boy, dragged Jobin away from the safety of the group to beat him. They stole his pocket money and aggressively demanded to know whether he had retrieved the stuff for them.
Under these bullies' horrific orders, Jobin had been forced to steal his own mother's underwear. Not just that. They had also demanded he take a photograph of her in the shower, which, surprisingly, he did.
Suddenly a young girl scout wandered over to check on Jobin, but the terrified boy remained completely silent as the bullies smoothly and falsely reassured her that nothing was wrong. Later on, the girl scout apparently reported the incident to both the school and the police, putting the main bully's future in serious jeopardy.
Furious over this, the bully cornered Jobin once again. Jobin tried telling him that he had not said anything, but the kid did not listen. He instead dragged Jobin around in an attempt to force him to break into the girl's house and set it on fire. Not hearing him properly while being dragged around, Jobin got him to repeat what he had just said.
Obviously, after hearing it a second time, Jobin refused, something that baffled the older bully. Checking the surroundings, the bully hit Jobin a few more times before he started to douse him in flammable oil. Peeved that he had defied him time and time again, he flicked the lighter on and held it inches away from his skin.
In that moment of absolute terror, Jobin's stand awakened.
The moment his fingers made contact with the bully's neck, the boy's blood started to boil. Shooting through his body, the expanding vein reached his brain and exploded, causing an aneurysm and subsequently triggering a massive, instantaneous stroke.
Back at the house, probably a few hours later, Kaato heard the door close and turned around to see a battered Jobin walking back in. Determined to protect her son at any cost, she immediately kicked into gear. They located the kid, carried his unconscious body to her car, and loaded him inside. As Jobin panicked, crying and asking why they were putting him in the boot, Kaato calmed him right back down. She looked him in the eye and told him that he had done absolutely nothing.
She would not be calling an ambulance, so she needed to know the truth. He had not done anything.
Refusing to be a woman whose life was decided by men, she drove Jobin out to the lone pine tree by the shrine. She dragged the disabled scout leader out into the dirt a few metres away from the tree.
Looking out over the land, Kaato said she believed that not every place was equal. You could not choose where you were born, but people climbed to try to find happiness in those places. From today, she told Jobin, he was going to start climbing. And the bully was someone who by his nature was at the bottom, and now he was going to sink into the depths of the earth where he belonged.
Moving into a deep, cave-like hole, she instructed her son to drag the bully into the hidden crevice behind the shrine and start covering him with soil, just as they had with every other family member when this had been done before.
Obviously, that sacrifice ended up working. Ever since that day, Jobin grew into a healthy, outgoing teenager.
Years later, Norisuke brought up how long it had been since Jobin had had a physical checkup for the family disease. Jobin simply smiled, reassuring his father that he was perfectly healthy. As Kaato stood in the background taking care of the family, Norisuke cast a suspicious glare towards his wife.
Tsurugi explained that in the autumn of that same year, a couple of biologists who were out looking for turtles stumbled across the body. The examiners quickly figured out who the body was, since the kid had run away from home five years earlier. It was judged to be a homicide, due to the contusions found on his skull and the trail of DNA evidence that led directly to Kaato. Even though everyone knew Jobin was the one with the motive here, the physical evidence they found only ever matched Kaato. Despite being a model prisoner during her sentence, the time was never reduced, and she willingly served all of it to protect her son.
Back in the present day, Josuke and Yasuho boarded a city bus heading out of town to track down the classified plant appraiser.
Dolomite's parting words about the Locacaca weighed heavy on Josuke's mind. He had explained to them that in the grand scheme of this underworld, Jobin was no more than a low-level gopher. Dolomite himself had not cared about the politics of any of it. He had only ever wanted to use the fruit's power to heal his shattered body so that he could finally reunite with his old girlfriend.
He had told Josuke that he should give up on the fruit. It was only an assumption of his, but there was a far more dangerous faction hunting the Locacaca, a shadowy elite who had deliberately left Dolomite alive because he knew absolutely nothing about them. To this group, the fruit was a priceless, invaluable commodity. And because Josuke was the living result of a completely new variety of that crop, Dolomite's final advice was simple. Back off while he still could.
As the bus rattled down the road, Josuke remembered the nuance in Dolomite's voice, and realised that the rock human probably had not just been talking to them.