Modulo Chapter 22

To force Mahito into service, Maru returns the curse to his full strength. Mahito immediately turns on Yuji but is beaten with ease, leaving him bound to the harmony scheme. With every component now in hand, Yuji and Maru talk through how to remake the world into a better place.

Yuji grasps Maru's intent at the sight of Mahito: to boost the curse's Idle Transfiguration with the Naunax's mul and Yuta's cursed energy, then rewrite the souls of Japan's population so curses can no longer be born from them. Maru confirms the feat is achievable with Mahito's cooperation and offers to subdue the curse, but Yuji takes the job himself. Because they stand in the pathway of souls, where only the two of them hold physical bodies, defeating Mahito means binding him rather than killing him.

Stung by Yuji's scorn, Mahito strikes and warps the realm into Shibuya, twisting the surroundings into monstrous eel-shaped forms that pin Yuji inside a ball of rubble before he tries to open his domain. Yuji breaks free untouched, carving Mahito and the whole landscape into cubes. Thoroughly beaten and ridiculed for his weakness, Mahito is gathered up by Maru and turned into glittering particles.

Yuji frets that Mahito may have damaged the souls of his dead friends, but Maru assures him souls cannot interfere so deeply within the pathway, and that Mahito only briefly regained power through the Harmony technique. The pair move into a chamber styled like a child's bedroom, where Maru lays out everything required for harmonization: Yuki Tsukumo's soul notebook, Yuta's ring, mul fragments, and Mahito reduced to a plush toy. Yuji explains that curses arise from cursed energy leaking out of people and appear chiefly in Japan, so preventing them means either turning every Japanese person into a sorcerer or removing their cursed energy entirely. Maru rejects the sorcerer route as a breeding ground for curse users and instead chooses to erase cursed energy from both the Japanese and the Simurians. He frames the act as atonement, a positive legacy for the trouble his people brought to Earth. Yuji counters that the plan is still a grave sin, since it deletes future possibilities such as cursed energy as a power source and alters humanity without consent, yet he ultimately insists they proceed and bear the consequences. Maru clarifies he will only strip cursed energy from future generations, sparing current sorcerers and Simurians. Yuji then warns that curses might still surface even after the purge, leaving Maru puzzled.