Chapter 208

Kenjaku seizes the advantage against Yuki Tsukumo, driving Choso to consider throwing his life away to save her. Rather than let that happen, Yuki and Tengen hand Choso a path to survive as a human, then spend the last of their strength on a desperate bid to finish the curse user for good.

A bar scene Tengen once hosted lays out Choso's reasoning. Unsure whether he qualifies as human, he chose existence as a curse, certain that people could never accept the warped bodies of Eso and Kechizu. Guilt over the Shibuya killings and his brothers' deaths weighs on him, and he feels he failed Yuji by taking the simple road out. Yuki countered that his death would strand Yuji alone, yet Choso believed he could not remain at Yuji's side after slaughtering in cold blood.

Back in the present, Choso readies a slicing disk to die in Yuki's place, but she orders him to perish as a curse and instead carry on as a human. Tengen shatters the barrier floor under Choso, both rescuing him and yanking him out of the battle. Kenjaku then fires his gravity power and splits Yuki in two. A proxy of Tengen materializes, amusing Kenjaku because it looks like Sukuna, and the distraction lets Yuki clamp onto his ankle. He throws her own parting words back at her, telling her to perish as a human. With no ceiling on the virtual mass Star Rage can pile on, Yuki crushes herself into a black hole to haul Kenjaku into ruin. The blast stays strangely limited, wiping out a large chunk of Tokyo Jujutsu High in the upper levels around the Tombs of the Star and leaving Tengen's chamber bare. Kenjaku drags himself from the wreckage alive, revealing that his old vessel Kaori Itadori bore Antigravity System as her innate technique, and that he turned his body into a domain to skirt the limits on unstable output and activation time. He credits his survival to the barriers Tengen raised and the willpower Yuki summoned, which together boxed the black hole in. After thanking them for the warmup, he unseals the tree caging Tengen's real body, says farewell to his old friend, and takes Tengen once and for all.

This Culling Game arc chapter, collected in Volume 23, ends the clash of Yuki Tsukumo and Choso against Kenjaku and marks Yuki's death. It traces the source of Kenjaku's gravity power to the Antigravity System inherited from Kaori Itadori, and seals his capture of Tengen, a crucial move toward the merger. Choso's Slicing Exorcism and Yuki's Star Rage feature alongside Kenjaku's Antigravity System.