By the third day, Xavier understood that most of Jujutsu High wasn't on Gojo's side.
Not really.
He had a room. He had food. He had access to training. But the stares were different now—longer, sharper, loaded with questions people didn't want to ask out loud. He was watched constantly. Not just for protection, but containment.
A ghost walking through sacred halls.
He sat at the edge of the practice yard that morning, stretching the tension out of his legs as the sky lightened above the trees. The first few days had been slow—meditation, light drills, sparring with Maki under supervision. But after yesterday's outburst, everything changed.
Now they wanted answers.
He saw it in the way Principal Yaga had narrowed his eyes when the golden light faded from Xavier's skin. Saw it in the way Toge no longer smiled when passing him in the hallway. Even Panda was quieter now, like he wasn't sure how close was safe.
The sacred energy—the force inside Xavier—was too clean. Too unnatural.
Too unknown.
And in a world where power was measured, trained, and catalogued, being an anomaly meant you were a threat.
The first test was simple.
An empty training room. Four instructors. Gojo watching silently.
They gave Xavier a task: block a cursed puppet's attacks without the use of any tools, weapons, or known cursed energy.
The puppet wasn't subtle. It moved like a person wearing rage like armor, hurling itself at him with grinding joints and seared rope limbs. Every strike came fast and low, too fast for someone without training.
Xavier didn't win.
But he didn't lose either.
He dodged enough to frustrate them, bruised but breathing, relying on instinct and momentum more than skill. He felt the energy flare twice—small, barely enough to spark, but real—and both times the puppet recoiled. The watchers took notes.
They didn't clap. They didn't speak.
They just wrote.
That night, Gojo joined him on the school's rooftop, where Xavier had been watching the clouds roll over the mountains. The sky was violet with dusk, heavy with the scent of coming rain.
"They're afraid of you," Gojo said casually, plopping down next to him.
Xavier didn't answer. He didn't need to.
"They're afraid because you're not cursed. You don't fit the mold. They can't control what they can't define."
"You're not afraid."
Gojo smiled. "I'm intrigued. That's worse."
They sat in silence a while.
"You showed restraint today," Gojo added. "That's good. But sooner or later, someone's going to try and force a reaction out of you."
"I figured," Xavier murmured.
"Try not to kill anyone."
Xavier gave him a look. "That supposed to be a joke?"
"Only if you want it to be."
The second test came two days later, without warning.
It was a mission. Not a real one. A mock setup created by instructors to test judgment under stress. They dropped Xavier and two second-years—students he hadn't met before—into an abandoned shrine outside Kyoto and told them to locate and contain a "cursed object."
What Xavier didn't know was that the object was real.
A semi-grade 2 cursed spirit had been sealed inside one of the shrines. Weak enough to survive, strong enough to wound. It hadn't been fed cursed energy in months. It was starving.
They gave Xavier the lead.
The other students didn't argue. They smiled too easily, stepped too far back, let him walk ahead like bait.
He found the spirit by accident.
It burst from the shadows with a scream like boiling blood, limbs jagged and malformed, mouth stretching too wide for its head. Xavier reacted purely on instinct—ducked under its claws, rolled, and let go.
The burst of sacred energy knocked it sideways into a tree. The tree snapped in half. The spirit wailed, writhing, but didn't flee.
It charged again.
Xavier tried to dodge, but it moved differently this time, more like smoke than flesh. It struck him across the chest. His shirt tore. Blood hit the ground.
He stood again. Wavering. Angry. Scared.
Reach for it, Gojo's voice echoed in his memory. Before it reaches for you.
So he did.
This time, the glow wasn't small. It flared around his arms, not bright but absolute. The cursed spirit shrieked like it was being dissolved from the inside. He didn't move. Didn't strike. Just stood there.
The spirit collapsed to ash.
Silence followed.
The second-year girl watching from the edge of the shrine turned pale.
"You didn't even touch it," she whispered.
The boy beside her said nothing.
They didn't walk next to him on the way back.
Yaga spoke with Gojo that night behind closed doors.
Xavier only caught part of it through the crack in the library wall:
"He's growing too fast."
"Or he's waking up."
"He's not one of us, Gojo. He doesn't belong here."
"Then maybe we're not the ones he belongs to."
At dinner, Maki didn't say a word to him. Neither did Toge. Panda gave him a nod, but it was stiff.
Gojo still smiled.
But Xavier felt it.
The gap growing.
The questions multiplying.
And somewhere in the dark, the blessed womb pulsed quietly—its golden shell starting to flake, light stirring within its heart.
It would not remain silent forever.