Chapter 181

With the Sendai battles over, Yuta chooses to let Ryu and Uro live. The two call him naive, yet a freshly added rule lets him claim their points anyway. Meanwhile, in the Tokyo No. 2 Colony, Hakari crosses paths with a would-be manga artist.

Yuta speaks with the beaten Uro to collect her points. She warns that his strength has a ceiling and that she has seen power beyond the strongest sorcerers and curses, picturing Sukuna's true form as a calamity of pure aggression that disregards all else. Moving on to Ryu, Yuta hears the same scolding about softness; Ryu is surprised Uro survived and blames his weakened blasts on his domain. When he asks what kept upsetting Uro, joking about a lover's quarrel, Yuta says anything he could have told her would only have ended in violence, because he is blessed, a remark Ryu respects without quite grasping. Yuta then asks for Ryu's points, and Ryu's Kogane reveals a new rule permitting transfers between players; combined with his kills of Dhruv and Kurourushi plus Uro's and Ryu's donations, Yuta reaches 190 points.

The chapter flashes back to before the game, when Charles Bernard, a blue-haired young man, submitted a manga at Shueisha in Tokyo, drawing staff comments about a foreigner bringing in work. Told his Japanese was good, Charles, who was born and raised in Japan to French parents, fired the compliment right back. The editor panned his story, tone, and art, citing an over-bent finger, so Charles snapped the man's own finger to match the panel and stormed out, insisting passion outweighs precise realism. In the present, on November 12, Charles rides a Ferris wheel with Hakari and again asks what makes a manga creator. He laments that curses flooding Tokyo have killed off outlets and broken the artists he admired, and he begs Hakari to fill him with enough hatred to kill, since the Culling Game only breeds negative reasons to fight. Hakari obliges by viciously insulting him and his gloomy manga, telling him to quit whining and fight, leaving the tearful Charles asking why he is being so cruel. Akutami's note jokes about being told to breathe with his chest instead of his belly.