Gojo's Past Arc

Carrying the anime title Hidden Inventory and Premature Death, this fifth storyline winds the clock back to the years when Satoru Gojo and Suguru Geto were teenagers hailed as the strongest pair of their generation. Their job is to bring the Star Plasma Vessel safely to Tengen while curse user factions scheme to wreck the merger. Across these chapters, the series shows how Gojo climbed to the summit of his power and what drove Geto to walk away from the jujutsu world for good.

The protection detail proves anything but routine. Tengen's technique compels a change of body once every five centuries through fusion with a fitting Star Plasma Vessel, and a botched union threatens to turn Tengen against humanity. Two parties hunt the vessel: the curse user collective Q and the religious Time Vessel Association. Gojo and Geto swat aside Q's opening strike with ease and place the girl, Riko Amanai, and her guardian Misato Kuroi under their protection. Honoring Tengen's instructions, they let Riko savor her remaining days, sending her back to school and her friends.

The Time Vessel Association brings in the Sorcerer Killer, Toji Zenin, who sidesteps the two prodigies by listing a bounty on Riko across a dark web haunt for curse users, grinding the escorts down through a stream of expendable attackers. After turning away bounty hunters and pulling Kuroi out of a kidnapping in Okinawa, the group unwinds before heading back to campus, where Gojo, convinced the work is done, drops his guard. That is when Toji strikes, impaling Gojo using a cursed weapon, the Inverted Spear of Heaven, which nullifies any technique. Geto offers Riko the chance to refuse the union, and she tearfully picks her own life, only for Toji to gun her down seconds later. Carrying no cursed energy at all thanks to a heavenly restriction, the unseeable Toji then crushes Geto just as readily, leaving the strongest sorcerers humbled by a man with no jujutsu to his name.

Teetering at death's door, Gojo seizes the essence of cursed energy, mends himself through reverse cursed technique, and unlocks the true depths of the Limitless. He finishes Toji with Hollow Technique: Purple, and Toji's parting words reveal that his son Megumi is destined to be sold off to the Zenin family. A year afterward, Geto cracks under the grinding loop of his duties and starts seeing non-sorcerers as beneath him, a conviction that hardens once his friend Yu Haibara is killed and once he stumbles on two child sorcerers caged and scapegoated by the very village he rescued. He slaughters the villagers, sets the girls loose, and becomes a curse user, vowing to wipe out every non-sorcerer. Unable to cut down the friend he treasures most, Gojo turns instead to the young Megumi, taking the boy in and pledging to look after everything so he can grow into a finer sorcerer than his father ever was.