Chapter 12: The Library Fairy (Part 1) (Patreon)

Chapter 12: The Library Fairy (Part 1)

...

A trace of fear still lingered inside Arisu Sakayanagi.

But she quickly shook it off — being afraid now wouldn't help. Even with a chairman for a father, Advanced Nurturing High School didn't answer to his word alone.

As for the information about "Heavenly Restriction," Satoru Anjouin had asked Kento Nanami for it himself.

He knew a few things, but certainly nothing as detailed as what an actual jujutsu sorcerer would know.

Though it wasn't clear exactly how technique awakening worked at Advanced Nurturing High School, a congenital defect could apparently be classified as "Heavenly Restriction" — enough for Sakayanagi to form a rough understanding.

"Heh heh~"

A restriction forcibly imposed at birth, trading some cost for formidable power in a particular area.

That was Heavenly Restriction.

Sakayanagi increasingly felt like fortune's favorite in this era.

A born prodigy, and the loneliness that came with it— cough cough. Clutching her chest, Sakayanagi nearly collapsed, badly startling Masumi Kamuro beside her.

"Sakayanagi, why are you getting worked up again?!"

After all, Kamuro had been brought to heel with Sakayanagi's "my dad is the chairman" card — and after lunch, that chairman father had even gone out of his way to meet Kamuro personally and ask her to look after his daughter.

Clearly, the chairman knew exactly how willful and reckless his daughter could be.

Honestly, if Advanced Nurturing High School hadn't undergone this kind of upheaval, Sakayanagi had originally intended to approach Kamuro as an ordinary student.

But while everyone else's impromptu interview was with an instructor sent by the jujutsu world, Sakayanagi had met directly with her own father and learned a great deal of inside information from him.

The worldview she'd built up since childhood was shattered in an instant.

Even keeping a composed face on the surface, Sakayanagi was anything but calm inside.

Especially since she considered herself a genius, and yet she happened to be a non-sorcerer — while lurking in this world's shadows was a whole class of jujutsu sorcerers who could snuff out a life without effort.

Jujutsu sorcerers who wielded real "power" were clearly the true prodigies.

Sakayanagi craved more proof that she was still a genius, and set her sights on the jujutsu world's [Strongest].

"Just learned a few happy things, that's all."

The corners of the young-looking girl's mouth curved upward, lending her an unusually alluring, seductive air.

Even though Kamuro was a girl herself, her heart raced a few beats faster despite herself.

—

After sending Sakayanagi that information, Anjouin headed straight for the library.

Though Class A had students scouting the library for information too, the library at Advanced Nurturing High School was massive — nothing would turn up any results in a hurry.

One girl had even posted in the class group chat that she'd seen a book fairy in the library.

The claim was so absurd that no one believed it.

After all, the girl had gone off to eat right after and hadn't taken a single photo.

By the time lunch was over, the Class A students who went looking for the fairy found nothing at all.

Anjouin's reason for going to the library had nothing to do with hunting for any book fairy — he genuinely intended to build up his own strength.

Jujutsu Kaisen — which fans jokingly nicknamed "Sukuna Continent," a pun on the popular web novel Combat Continent — didn't earn that name simply because the main plot amounted to beating up Sukuna.

It was also because, in certain respects, the series resembled that other "Continent" saga: it was every bit as devoted to bloodline determinism.

In Jujutsu Kaisen, few sorcerers ever bothered researching universal applications for cursed energy, since awakened cursed techniques could be passed down through bloodlines.

As long as you refined your own technique and let your descendants inherit the results, even if the applications were stolen, a sorcerer without the matching technique couldn't use them anyway.

So researching universal moves anyone could use brought nothing but the risk of arming your enemies.

Meanwhile, a family's own technique, refined and passed down generation after generation, accumulated a wealth of applications far beyond what other sorcerers possessed.

That was exactly why the Three Great Families were so powerful.

Centuries of inheritance had let their families amass an enormous stockpile of technique applications.

So an ordinary sorcerer, if they hadn't awakened a technique — or if the one they'd awakened had no offensive power — was left with nothing but hand-to-hand combat and cursed tools.

Anjouin felt a pang of regret — if he'd known this world had been stitched together from so many pieces, he shouldn't have focused on academics; he should have trained himself into an athlete instead.

Even with his physical talent, he might never have become a true athlete, but at least he'd have had some foundation for combat.

"First, let's find some books and see if there's any fighting technique I can pick up fast…"

After all, he couldn't guarantee that whatever technique he awakened would even be useful.

When that time came, he'd definitely have to rely on hand-to-hand combat to throw down.

Still, once he actually reached the library, Anjouin was surprised — Advanced Nurturing High School's library was no smaller in scale than some university libraries.

Besides books covering all sorts of specialized knowledge, there were also plenty of entertainment magazines and light novels.

Anjouin thought the whole "meritocracy" philosophy at Advanced Nurturing High School was a bit of a joke — in the monthly special exams, the winners were rarely the students who won fair and square through sheer ability; more often it was whoever played dirtiest and had the least shame.

Granted, "strength" covered a lot of ground — not just academics and physical ability, but also sharp thinking, teamwork, scheming and calculation…

But at the end of the day, Advanced Nurturing High School was still a high school, enrolling boys and girls aged fifteen or sixteen.

Inter-class competition easily bred distrust of other classes, and the expulsion exams went further, sowing distrust even within a class.

Betrayal, acting purely on self-interest — it was all too easy for that to warp school life into something alien.

If you called it an experimental school, well, it certainly lived up to that.

In any case, he didn't think Advanced Nurturing High School was going to produce much in the way of real talent.

Still, it was a national project, after all, and in plenty of respects there was nothing to fault — countless surveillance cameras, cutting-edge equipment, top-notch teaching facilities, and so on.

From security to the quality of instruction to post-graduation follow-up — even a student who failed to graduate in Class A would have their enrollment transferred to another school, and if they genuinely worked to improve themselves, graduating from Class B, C, or even D was still enough to get into whatever university they wanted.

If anything, graduating from Class A meant you could pick your destination freely, but without the ability to back it up, even getting into the University of Tokyo might not save you from failing out in the end.

That was why Class A's baseline quality was higher than the other classes from the very start, and lower-ranked classes rarely overtook them — especially since the school controlled both the point values and the format of the special exams.

Whichever class the school wanted to graduate, it could always design a special exam suited to that class.

In a way, it wasn't actually a bad thing that Advanced Nurturing High School had turned into Jujutsu High.

At least now, there was no telling which of Class A, B, C, or D was truly the best.

It fit the "meritocracy" philosophy better too.

And then.

Anjouin ran into the book fairy—

It was in a nook formed by several bookshelves — a silver-haired girl sat quietly on the floor, a pair of pale purple eyes fixed on the book resting in her lap.

Gray thigh-high socks were generally hard to pull off, but on this girl — who looked every bit like a fairy out of a book — they only made her legs look whiter.

From a lack of exercise, those legs looked just a touch soft.

It was a dreamlike kind of beauty, fragile in a way that made you hesitant to disturb her — as if any careless move might scare the book fairy off.

If Sakayanagi was Alice from a dream-wandering Wonderland,

then this quiet girl was, without question, a fairy born straight out of a book.

Anjouin paused for a moment, caught off guard.

He found himself a little drawn in by her beauty too.

Of course, he'd recognized the quiet, book-reading girl right away — in fact, the moment that girl posted in the class group chat about running into a book fairy in the library, he'd already guessed who it might be.

The girl's name was Hiyori Shiina, a first-year student in Class C.

In the original story, she was also the girl who'd made the pseudo-protagonist's heart skip — reportedly his first love, no less.

Anjouin thought the pseudo-protagonist fit the mold perfectly: "An absolute powerhouse, and the loneliness born from it — the one who taught him love was…"

After all, if you stripped Classroom of the Elite down to its bones, it was really just the story of the pseudo-protagonist coming to understand, recognize, and experience emotion at Advanced Nurturing High School.

Though knowing that character's personality, even if he did figure out what love was, it wouldn't shake him in the slightest.

"Whew…"

Anjouin quickly composed himself.

All he could say was that the sight of the girl sitting on the floor reading hit harder than the impression she'd made at the entrance ceremony.

That was also because she fit the library so perfectly.

But Anjouin hadn't come looking for fairies, and once he'd steadied himself, he left right away.

He went off to search for guides on physical training and combat, and asked in the class group chat which ones any classmates who knew how to fight would recommend.

Afterward, he figured he might swing by the gym too.

If it came down to it, he might join a club related to hand-to-hand combat.

The school only had 480 students total — fewer, actually, once you accounted for upperclassmen who'd been expelled — but there was still no shortage of clubs.

On the physical side there was basketball, soccer, track and field, karate, judo, kyudo, and more; on the cultural side, a literature club, art club, tea ceremony club, chess club…

Every club seemed to be top-tier, apparently stocked with plenty of national-level teams or athletes.

Maybe thanks to the intel he'd brought earlier, plus Kohei Katsuragi vouching for him in the group chat, the classmates' replies were unusually enthusiastic.

Someone even suggested he take up Jeet Kune Do or Baji Quan.

A while later, Anjouin noticed he'd gotten several private messages.

"Morishita: Where are you?"

"Morishita: Where are you?"

"Morishita: Where are you?"

Since he was in the library, Anjouin had put his phone on silent, which meant he was slow to reply.

So he messaged her back, saying he was in the library.

While fiddling with his phone, Anjouin noticed it could show a friend's location — on the digital map, the little red dot marking Ai Morishita was making a beeline for the library.

About half an hour later, his adorable little tail arrived at the library.

Worried she might get lost inside, Anjouin went to meet her at the entrance himself and led her to a quiet corner of the library.

"Wow, so many books."

"Mostly just some guides."

Anjouin didn't actually believe that solid martial skill could be built out of books.

Aside from physical talent, martial technique required the same slow, steady accumulation over time as academic study did.

At the same time, training had to be measured carefully — there was an old saying that scholarship suited the poor while martial arts suited the rich, and if nutrition couldn't keep pace, it was easy to run the body into debt.

Without proper guidance, training could also do serious damage to muscles and bones.

"I'm planning to head to the gym after this."

"Eh? Why not just learn old-style martial arts from me instead? Little Ai here holds the full transmission license in the Little Ai School of classical martial arts."

Morishita puffed out her chest.

"No need — the Anjouin family has had its own style since ancient times, one that counters every school of classical martial arts. Rumor has it the Anjouin style has trillions of techniques; no classical martial art stands a chance against it."

"What a shocking revelation—!"

(ÒωÓױ)!!

Morishita's eyes went wide with shock.