"Before there were sorcerers, before there were curses — there were seconds. And some of them refused to end."
Beneath Kyoto's dead roots, deeper than any registry knows, something still breathes — not in air, but in loops.
They call it the Anchor Womb.
A black cathedral buried beneath the bones of Japan's first jujutsu stronghold — lost in the Heian blood purge, sealed not by veils, but by time itself. Inside, the air doesn't move. Light doesn't travel. Clocks brought near it stop and never tick again.
Time doesn't flow here.
It waits.
And today — it shudders.
A pulse. Barely felt.
But felt all the same.
Somewhere above, a boy named Yuji Itadori swallows a rotten finger and becomes a cage for a king.
Sukuna opens his eyes, and the world remembers what it forgot.
Back inside the Womb, that cursed pulse resonates.
The second that broke — the first "Echo" — twitches. It has no form, no flesh, only memory. But memory is enough. It flinches like an unborn thing in boiling water.
The Womb sings.
No lyrics. Just glitching seconds, twitching emotions, aborted futures screaming across time like torn film reels:
Junko burning alive.
Akira rewinding too late.
Seconds collapsing.
Echoes gaining names.
One hand reaching for the stake.
Another choking itself in guilt.
"Tick…" the womb whispers.
"Tick…" it bleeds.
Then silence.
Then…
BOOM.
Reality hiccups.
The Anchor Womb cracks slightly.
Just enough to bleed one moment into another. Just enough to wake a timeline that should've stayed buried.
Somewhere far away, in a temporary shelter on the outskirts of Sendai, a sorcerer named Akira Rensetsu wakes from sleep — drenched in sweat, eyes flooded with echoes that don't belong to him.
Akira's Shelter Room — Present Day
Akira gasped.
Not from a dream.
From a memory that hadn't happened yet.
He stumbled out of bed, vision flickering — his hands shook, not from fear, but overlap.
There were two of him in the room. One brushing his teeth. One screaming on the floor.
And neither were the real him.
He clutched his head. Blood trickled from his nose. A low humming filled the walls — like someone had pressed play on a film reel of all his deaths.
"Seconds don't belong here," he muttered.
Then he heard it.
A voice.
A scream.
But not Junko's.
Not one of his.
A new one.
Male.
Rage and confusion bleeding through cursed air.
He felt it in his bones. In the ticking of the echo wound on his chest.
"He's awake."
Akira didn't know who he was.
But the Anchor Womb did.
And it had just sent its signal across time to every broken second.