Chapter 158

After much pushing, Hakari and Kirara are finally persuaded to hear out Yuji and Megumi. Floored by the Shibuya news, Hakari signs on, but only if the debt is squared away later. With these powerful recruits aboard, the team starts laying out how to break into the Culling Game.

Hakari settles in for the full account and is stunned to learn Satoru Gojo was sealed, then that Masamichi Yaga died fighting a higher-up once Shibuya ended. Although Yaga was practically Panda's father, Panda insists he is fine, while Hakari grieves that everyone who once cared for him has now slipped away. He commits to fighting the Culling Game but frames it as a bargain, demanding revisions to jujutsu regulations as repayment. The moment Megumi discloses that he heads the Zenin clan, Hakari is rattled more than by anything before, figuring that with the Big Three families behind it, those revisions become trivial, so he angles to get friendly with Megumi and keep the Zenin off his club. Neither man knows Maki will wipe out the clan the following day.

As talk turns to which colony each will take, the shikigami Kogane materializes above Yuji with a piercing ring and reports that a player has installed a rule opening up everyone's data, names, point totals, rules added, and present colony included. Hajime Kashimo authored it, an elite competitor steamrolling the Tokyo No. 2 Colony, who scoffs at today's fighters as feeble next to those of four centuries past and asks where Sukuna might be. Kogane then presents itself as Yuji's personal liaison, baffling Megumi since Yuji counts as a player already; Yuji ties it to Sukuna and how the curse came to be a cursed object.

Working from the new roster, Megumi pinpoints Kashimo and Hiromi Higuruma as the only two holding enough points to add rules. The aim is to skip killing by pressuring one of them into changes, first a rule that cancels the nineteen-day cursed technique removal clause by permitting point transfers, then one letting players cash out points to leave the game entirely, perhaps with a non-player taking their place. The gamemaster decides such things, but the team finally has a heading. While searching for the Angel to break the Prison Realm's seal, the two marks they intend to run down are Higuruma and Kashimo.

This nineteen-page Volume 18 chapter, split across anime Episodes 53 and 54, gives Hiromi Higuruma his first appearance alongside Hajime Kashimo. It also formally introduces the shikigami Kogane as the Culling Game's liaison and launches the team's two-target plan, while slyly foreshadowing Maki's slaughter of the Zenin clan.