Hidden within the labyrinthine alleys of Chiang Mai's old city, the CMIS — Chiang Mai Academy of Cursed Arts — stands as the world's most chaotic gathering of sorcerer-students. Unlike Tokyo's rigid hierarchy or Kyoto's ancient traditions, CMIS operates on one principle: if you survive your classmates, you can survive anything.
Founded as a joint exchange initiative between the Japanese Jujutsu Council and the Southeast Asian Cursed Spirit Bureau, the academy quickly became a dumping ground for students too dangerous, too unruly, or too strange for their home institutions. The result is a volatile cocktail of prodigies, misfits, and walking disasters. Director Zhang Wei describes his job as "containing seventeen separate natural disasters simultaneously." He has not taken a day off in three years.
The 後山 — literally "back mountain" — is not a mountain. It is the back courtyard of CMIS's main building: a wide paved area behind Training Hall B that opens onto an overgrown garden, a broken section of the perimeter fence, and a disused outdoor kitchen that somehow still works. The name is informal, coined by students who noticed that the faculty never came back here and the CCTV cameras had been covered in moss since 2019. No patrols. No sign-in sheet. No rules. The courtyard is where the real CMIS happens.
The original five who claimed this territory — Zane, Harrison, Lucas, Vincent, Feliz — all ended up expelled from the dormitories in the same week of first semester, for five completely unrelated offences. With nowhere else to sleep, they dragged mattresses to the courtyard, strung a tarp against the wall, and fired up the outdoor kitchen. Somewhere between the shared instant noodles at 2am and the cursed-energy sparring that left scorch marks on the courtyard tiles, they became the people each other relied on most. By the time faculty reinstated their dorm privileges, none of them wanted to go back.
The 後山 is loud, chaotic, and full of people who would genuinely die for each other while also stealing each other's food. This is the same thing, at the 後山. Over time the extended CMIS family gravitates toward the courtyard — for training, for the noodles, for the particular comfort of people who will be honest with you about everything except how much they care about you.
Technique: Memory Projection (回想操術) · Role: Buff/Support · Grade: Special Grade 1
Zane was born into an ordinary sorcerer family, unremarkable except for one thing: at age six, at his grandfather's funeral, he accidentally recreated his grandfather's entire cursed technique from memory alone — perfectly, completely, without having been taught a single move. The technique had died with its master. Zane brought it back from nothing but a six-year-old's impressions of watching the old man fight once.
He was recruited to Tokyo's Jujutsu High at twelve. The process of mastering Memory Projection required him to deeply understand every person whose technique he wanted to project — their emotional state, their memories, their fears. This made him unusually perceptive and unusually lonely. You cannot spend years learning to see inside people without growing strange about ordinary connection.
He arrived at CMIS on a research transfer, officially studying "cross-cultural cursed energy variance." Unofficially, he was sent because Tokyo's faculty found him unsettling. He knows too much about too many people and never uses it against them. That restraint makes him harder to read than any enemy.
His relationship with Charlotte is the one variable in his life he has not been able to fully calculate. Her technique resonates with his in ways that shouldn't be possible — when she copies him, the output exceeds what either of them produces alone. He has seventeen pages of notes on this phenomenon. None of them say what they are actually about.
"Memory is not nostalgia. It is infrastructure."
Technique: Grand Larceny Theory (強奪の理) · Role: ATK · Grade: 1
Harrison grew up in a Bangkok slum built on the ruins of a demolished spirit ward. The cursed energy seeping up through the ground was just part of the neighbourhood — everyone in the area was a little stronger, a little harder to kill, a little more likely to wake up with someone else's strength. Harrison was ten when he first consciously stole someone's pain tolerance during a beating, reversed it back into them, and walked away from a fight he had no business surviving.
He spent the next five years as a street thief who happened to be spiritually anomalous, until he broke into a black-market cursed tool auction at fifteen and accidentally absorbed radiation from a display piece called the Infinite Cursed Core. His technique mutated overnight from selective pain-stealing to full attribute larceny — he could take anything. Speed, strength, stamina, cursed energy output, even specific skills if the moment was right.
Zane found him during a hunt, three steps ahead of four Grade 2 bounty sorcerers, eating stolen street food with perfect calm. Zane offered him a bed, instant noodles, and the Back Mountain. Harrison said: "I'll need to verify this isn't a trap." He verified it for six months before admitting he lived there.
He has one rule that he follows without exception: he does not steal from the Back Mountain brotherhood. He has never explained why. The others have never asked. Charlotte's hair ties are the one grey area everyone pretends not to notice. Zane knows. Charlotte knows. Harrison knows they know. Nobody says anything. This is love.
"What's yours is yours. What's theirs is negotiable. What's mine is permanent."
Technique: Countercurse Chain (反撃の咒言) · Role: ATK · Grade: Special
Lucas grew up in Seoul knowing two things: his father hit hard, and words could hit harder. The first time he shouted "Ur mom" at age eight and watched his father's own fist turn and clip his own chin, he did not understand what had happened. He understood it was useful. He spent the next four years quietly cataloguing every verbal trigger that caused unintended redirects — not cursed energy theory, just empirical observation by a child who needed the attacks to stop.
He left at twelve after his father threw a flying kick and Lucas's No You redirect sent him into the wall hard enough to crack the drywall and knock him out cold. He did not wait to see if his father was okay. He left a note, then took the bus to nowhere in particular.
He survived on street-level cursed word cons — talking people into trances, redirecting aggressive spirits into each other — until a sorcerer scout found him in a Hongdae alley and offered him evaluation. His GPA mechanic (he generates power from academic performance, a curse he accidentally placed on himself during an all-night study session) makes him uniquely dangerous during exam season. He is aware this is embarrassing. He does not discuss it.
He sends money orders to his father's hospital once a month. No return address. He has never verified they arrive.
"The best counter to violence is making someone hurt themselves. Poetic. Efficient. Also kind of my whole personality."
Technique: Iron Arm Theory (剛腕の理) · Role: ATK · Grade: Semi Grade 1
Vincent held 37 consecutive wins in Bangkok's underground circuit before he met Woojoo. He was nineteen, undefeated, and genuinely believed he was the physically strongest person in any room he entered. Woojoo was visiting from Seoul for a tournament, wandered into the underground circuit by accident looking for a convenience store, and proceeded to beat Vincent using exclusively the psychological leverage of being 2.3 metres tall. Vincent's cursed energy manifested that same night — raw physical amplification so intense he bent the arena's iron cage with his bare hands while trying to leave through a door that was slightly stuck.
Harrison stole his belt on the way out. This is how he met the Back Mountain — three weeks of competitive mutual escalation followed, which Zane ended by cooking noodles and making them both sit down. They sat. They ate. They laughed about it. Vincent now has "後山兄弟" tattooed on his right forearm and insists it is an anatomical diagram. No one challenges this.
He and Woojoo have never had a rematch that either of them would describe as settled. Their scoreboard lives in both their heads and neither total matches. They are the kind of rivals who would never admit — to anyone, under any circumstances — that the other is the only competition that truly matters to them. This is obvious to everyone watching.
"Strength is the only honest language. Everything else is negotiable."
Technique: Lonely Resonance (孤獨の共鳴) · Role: Buff · Grade: 3
Feliz was the first child in Los Angeles's St. Agatha's group home to go viral. He was five years old and had learned that performing distress on camera produced donations, which produced attention, which produced something that felt almost like being seen. By eight he had 200,000 followers and a parasocial relationship with an audience that did not know his real name.
His cursed energy awakened at eleven when a house supervisor who had been skimming the home's funding came for him directly. The donation comments — hundreds of "666" blessings from an active livestream — physically materialised as a barrier and knocked the man across the room. The camera kept rolling. The clip got twelve million views. The supervisor was fired. Feliz did not feel safe for months afterwards.
His technique channels the need to be witnessed into protective energy for others. The irony is not lost on him: his deepest wound is his greatest power. He buffs allies by essentially bleeding attention onto them. He leaves every fight quietly, always glancing back once to see if anyone noticed.
He joined the Back Mountain not through drama but through proximity — he was sleeping in the back courtyard because the dorms were loud. Zane left instant noodles near his sleeping bag for three weeks without saying a word to him. On day twenty-two, Feliz came to the fire and sat down. They watched the courtyard in silence for an hour. It is the most welcome Feliz has ever felt.
"If nobody watches, does the pain exist? ...Yes. I've checked. Repeatedly."
Technique: Sweet Bite Healing (甘噛みの癒し) · Role: Support · Grade: 2
Jeff grew up in a state psychiatric facility in Ohio. He was placed there at four — the paperwork says "severe emotional dysregulation," which is how institutions describe children who feel too much too loudly. The facility used sugar as a behaviour management tool. Jeff learned that Skittles meant calm, that candy was currency, that sweetness was the official language of getting through the day.
When he was eleven, his ward-mate Caleb — a girl who collected the wrappers from every candy she ate — disappeared after a forced treatment session. No explanation was given to the other children. One morning her bed was made with hospital corners and her wrapper collection was gone. The only trace she had been there was a puddle of melted rainbow candy on the floor by the window. Jeff's cursed energy awakened that night. Every piece of sugar in the building transformed into a cursed tool. He healed three injured night-staff and put five others to sleep with confectionery before anyone realised what was happening.
His jacket — the one he uses as a weapon — was the only birthday gift he ever received, from Caleb, three weeks before she vanished. He has repaired it eleven times. He fights with it because fighting with it means she is still there somehow, still relevant, still mattering to the universe.
He gives candy to everyone. Not as a power move — he just genuinely believes that small sweetness is load-bearing. The world is held up by ten thousand tiny kindnesses and someone has to keep making deposits. The Back Mountain brotherhood figured this out early. Jeff is the reason there are always Skittles at the 2am noodle sessions, and the reason nobody on the mountain ever trains alone if they're having a bad day.
"Pain is like rainbow candy. You have to bite through it to get to the sweet part. I believe this. I have to believe this."
Technique: Sniper's Poem (狙撃の詩) · Role: ATK · Grade: Semi Grade 1
Jake was discovered by a modelling scout at fourteen while throwing rocks at a shoe store window in Milan. The scout said he had exceptional bone structure. Jake said he was trying to steal the Jordans in the display. The scout hired him anyway. For two years Jake existed in the liminal space between high fashion and petty crime, doing runway shows on Tuesday and climbing fire escapes on Thursday.
His cursed energy manifested backstage at a Gucci show when three other models cornered him for "making the Asian quota look bad." He turned their aggression back through concentrated cursed output and they spent the next six hours in a state the show's photographer described as "the most avant-garde look of the collection." The photos ran in Vogue. Jake was blacklisted from every agency in Milan by Thursday.
He arrived at CMIS by accident — he had followed Zane into what he thought was an art installation and got caught in a summoning circle. Harrison hit him in the face with a shoe before anyone could explain. He has accepted this as his origin story and has placed it, unlabelled, in his Instagram private archive.
He brings a camera to training sessions and has seventeen thousand photos of the Back Mountain at different times of day. He insists this is pure aesthetics. He has never printed any of them. The folder is labelled "reference" and contains more portraits than landscapes. Harrison once asked why Jake never shows the photos to anyone. Jake said they were unfinished. Harrison said they looked finished to him. Jake has not answered this yet.
"Killing can be elegant. So can survival. The difference is the light source."
Technique: Paradox Fist Theory (逆説の拳理) · Role: Control · Grade: 2
Cici was MIT's youngest doctoral candidate in physics, admitted at nineteen on the basis of a paper arguing that cursed energy followed the same conservation laws as thermodynamic systems and could therefore be modelled mathematically. The Jujutsu Council read the paper and requested she be redirected. MIT's physics department objected. The Jujutsu Council sent two Grade 2 sorcerers to explain the situation in person. Cici sent them back with a note and a proof showing that their combined cursed energy output had actually increased the entropy of the hallway by a measurable amount.
Her technique awakened during the lab explosion caused by testing her own theoretical models at scale. Her left eye retained the formula scarring — faint cursed energy equations visible in her iris under certain light. She considers this an acceptable outcome. The lab was insured.
She came to CMIS because Director Zhang Wei sent her a formal letter of invitation that included a statistical argument for why CMIS was the optimal environment for her research. She read it, found three errors in his math, corrected them, and came anyway because the corrected version was still compelling.
She and Michelle have an ongoing collaboration on probability manipulation that neither will admit is genuinely exciting to them. Cici calls it "applied chaos theory research." Michelle calls it "finally, someone who can make the slot machine reliable." Both of these descriptions are accurate. The Back Mountain crew has adopted her as their unofficial technical consultant — she attends the 2am sessions, usually with equations to review, and stays until dawn without noticing.
"Violence is just applied physics. My fist is the most elegant variable in any equation I enter."
Technique: Commercial Soul Curse (商魂の呪) · Role: Control · Grade: Semi Grade 2
Trex was running his own stall at Chatuchak Market by age six — his grandmother's setup, technically, but she had handed him the cash box at five and he had tripled the daily take within a month by the application of psychology, strategic pricing, and a complete disregard for the listed price of anything. By eight he was trading Buddha amulets, tourist trinkets, and cursed items he did not yet know were cursed, moving volume through a network of child runners who he paid in mango sticky rice.
His cursed energy awakened at ten when a rival market family tried to buy out his grandmother's stall for far below value. The wave of commercial outrage that emanated from him materialised as physical objects — keychains, specifically, three hundred of them, raining down in a thirty-metre radius and each one impacting with the force of a hurled stone. The rival family left. His grandmother called it a blessing from the market spirits. Trex called it inventory.
He arrived at CMIS because a Jujutsu Council recruiter offered him a contract. Trex read it, identified eleven unfavourable clauses, renegotiated all eleven, added four clauses of his own, and signed the revised version. The recruiter later said it was the most professionally conducted enrolment conversation he had ever experienced with a twelve-year-old.
He operates a side economy within CMIS trading cursed tools, rare ingredients, and information. It is technically against academy rules. Director Zhang Wei has invoiced him three times for regulatory fees. Trex has paid all three invoices on time and increased his prices accordingly. His unofficial territory overlaps with the Back Mountain; he supplies the noodles for the 2am sessions at cost and calls it "strategic community investment." Harrison calls it friendship. Trex does not correct him.
"Every transaction is a relationship. Every relationship is an asset. Every asset has a price. I just know all the prices."
Technique: Extravagance Theory (奢靡の理) · Role: Control · Grade: Special
Michelle is the illegitimate daughter of a Monaco casino dynasty and a mathematical prodigy the family quietly employed and then quietly paid off. She grew up splitting time between extraordinary wealth and total institutional invisibility — present at every party, listed on no legal documents, given everything except acknowledgement. She learned to move through rooms as if she owned them because the alternative was admitting she was not supposed to be there.
Her cursed energy manifested at a private auction when she was sixteen and bid on a Special Grade cursed spirit called the God of Poverty as a joke — she had no intention of owning it, she just wanted to see how high the price would go. She won the auction. The God of Poverty, humiliated at being purchased by someone it considered beneath it, attacked her immediately. The backlash of its attack, rebounded through her awakening cursed energy, became the foundation of her technique: the ability to turn probability itself into a weapon.
She keeps the God of Poverty as a pet. It hates her. She finds this extremely funny. It lives in a gilded cage in her dorm room and she has given it a name she refuses to share with anyone.
Her slot machine domain is not random. She knows exactly which outcome is coming — she just chooses not to tell the enemy which one it will be. The Back Mountain tolerates her because Cici vouched for her and also because she once paid for a full week of noodle supplies "as a data investment in team dynamics." The data, apparently, is that people who eat together are harder to kill. She considers this an acceptable return.
"Everything is a gamble. I simply have better information than you."
Technique: Resonance Rebirth (共鳴の再誕) · Role: Buff/Support · Grade: 2
Charlotte graduated top of her year at the Royal College of Medicine in London, published two papers on cursed energy pathology, and was three months into her residency when her technique manifested during a surgery. The patient had a particularly aggressive curse. Charlotte neutralised it by instinctively copying the cursed removal technique of a Grade 1 sorcerer who had operated in the same theatre six years earlier — a technique she had never been taught, from a sorcerer she had never met, whose energy signature had apparently lingered in the room. The surgery was a success. Her consultant immediately contacted the Jujutsu Council.
The comparison to Orimoto Rika is made constantly and always incorrectly. Charlotte's resonance does not bind her to any person or place. It is not love made manifest as a curse. It is something closer to deep attunement — she feels the shape of techniques and reflects them back, amplified, changed. When the technique she is copying belongs to someone she genuinely cares about, the amplification is significantly higher. She has measured this. She does not volunteer the data.
Her white coat has a CMIS student ID clipped to it. The back of the ID badge, which no one can see when it is clipped, reads "Property of Zane" in small neat handwriting. She wrote this herself in her first week at CMIS as a private joke about the Rika comparisons. She has never replaced the badge. This is not a joke anymore and she is aware of this and is choosing not to address it.
Her technique never heals herself. She has looked into why. The answer is either a fundamental limitation of resonance-based techniques or something more personal that she is not currently examining. The Back Mountain crew has noticed she always ends training sessions slightly more depleted than she starts. Nobody makes a big deal of it. Zane leaves her tea.
"I am not Rika. Rika was a curse born from love that consumed its host. I am a doctor. I know how to set appropriate professional boundaries." — she has said this in the mirror four times this week.
Technique: Verbal Chain Curse (暴言の連鎖) · Role: ATK · Grade: Semi Grade 1
LJ was expelled from Seoul Arts High School for using her graduation performance to deliver a cursed monologue that left the entire faculty and audience emotionally incapacitated for forty minutes. The review board called it "a severe abuse of performance technique." LJ called it a critique of institutional hypocrisy, pointed out that three of the incapacitated faculty members had been actively suppressing student exhibitions for years, and submitted her expulsion appeal in the form of a fifteen-page cursed-ink document that made the review board cry. The expulsion stood. The three faculty members resigned.
Her technique channels genuine grievance into linguistic weapons — the cursed words hit harder when she actually means them, which means her most devastating attacks are always personal. Her phone contains 826 gigabytes of cursed blackmail material she has collected since age fourteen, sorted by subject and indexed. She has never used any of it. Having it is the point.
She teams with Cici and Charlotte in a configuration that accidentally produces harmonic resonance between their three techniques. The first time it happened, it brought down a training hall. Director Zhang Wei issued a formal warning. All three ignored it. They call the formation LCC. The academy staff calls it "the reason Training Hall B has no east wall anymore."
Despite everything, she has two people she will never weaponise her technique against: Cici and Charlotte. She has not articulated why. She does not need to. Some things are just true. She shows up to Back Mountain sessions uninvited and has never once been told to leave. She also eats more noodles than anyone and complains about the brand choice every time. This is her love language and the mountain crew has accepted it.
"Words are the only weapon that hits before you can defend. I have the best aim in this school. Probably in this country."
Technique: Gourmet Cursed Art (美食呪法) · Role: Support/ATK · Grade: Special
Madame's family has operated a cursed-energy bakery in Lyon for four generations. The technique is hereditary, passed down alongside the bread recipes: the family channels the emotional energy of imperfect food — the resentment of a collapsed soufflé, the grief of an oversalted ratatouille, the rage of a baguette left in the oven too long — into combat technique. It sounds absurd until you have been hit by a condensed cursed baguette travelling at 200 kilometres per hour with the combined grudge of forty years of bad bread infused into it.
She was sent to Tokyo High on an exchange and declined to stay. Tokyo's sorcerers, she felt, had interesting technique but poor table manners and no concept of appropriate meal timing. She came to CMIS because Director Zhang Wei's formal invitation included a proposed menu for her welcome dinner that demonstrated genuine research into French culinary tradition. She arrived. The dinner was acceptable. She stayed.
Her feelings about Harrison are complicated. She finds his eating habits genuinely offensive — he treats food as fuel, which she considers a philosophical failing. She also finds his technique philosophically interesting (theft as a cursed art has structural parallels with her own food-resentment theory that she has written twelve pages about). She gives Zane macarons. She considers him the only person at CMIS with genuine taste. This is high praise. She does not give it lightly. She has appeared at three Back Mountain 2am sessions uninvited, each time claiming she was inspecting the local culinary conditions. Each time she has brought food for everyone. Nobody has commented on this. She keeps coming back.
She once sealed a Special Grade cursed spirit inside a baguette. The baguette is currently on display in her family's Lyon bakery. Customers think it is a decorative piece. It is not.
"Technique is refinement applied to force. Anyone can hit. A sorcerer with standards hits beautifully."
Technique: Giant's Cage (巨人の檻) · Role: Control/ATK · Grade: 1
Woojoo was expelled from the Korean national basketball programme at seventeen with the official reason listed as "physical parameters inconsistent with standard human athletic classification." He was 2.3 metres tall. His growth had not stopped. The team doctor's private notes, which Woojoo has read, describe him as "producing a measurable field of psychological pressure that causes other players to hesitate before he moves." This is not a basketball technique. It is an early manifestation of cursed energy.
His technique condenses his physical abnormality into genuine cursed force — the psychological weight of looking up at something that should not exist becomes literal combat pressure. His Sky Dunk does not just deal damage; it leaves the target with a verified residual trauma response to height. He has tested this. He feels mildly bad about it. Not enough to stop.
The leg attack trauma is real and documented. In middle school, a group of female classmates spent three months mocking his legs as "impossibly thin for his height, like a flamingo." He has since developed his legs to the point where the comparison is no longer accurate and also developed a complete PTSD response to leg attacks that he manages to find simultaneously humiliating and mechanically interesting from a cursed-energy perspective.
He runs a cursed spirit basketball training programme at CMIS. The slogan is "If you can outrebound a vengeful spirit, you can outrebound anyone." Three spirits have enrolled voluntarily. Vincent comes to the sessions to settle their score from every angle. Woojoo doesn't mind. When it is freezing on the Back Mountain and someone needs to reach something on a high shelf, Woojoo is the first call. He pretends to find this annoying. He never is.
"Height is just another word for altitude advantage. I have the most of it. This is not complicated."
Technique: Airborne Warfare (空降戦法) · Role: ATK · Grade: 1
Chogun was a US Air Force jump instructor who decided to test an unsanctioned high-altitude jump without the standard safety equipment because, as he later explained, he "wanted to understand the fear from the inside." He understood the fear from the inside. At roughly 3,000 metres with no chute deploying correctly, his cursed energy manifested as a full-body field of aerial momentum control that kept him alive long enough to improvise a landing. He landed on a cursed spirit that had been dormant in a field outside Okinawa for sixty years and accidentally exorcised it, which is how the Japanese Jujutsu Council found out about him.
His obsession with sneakers predates his sorcery career and is independent of it, but the two have become entangled. His ultimate technique, Those Jordans Are Fake, is the only technique in documented cursed combat history that requires shoe authentication as a trigger condition. The Jujutsu Council's technical committee reviewed it three times and concluded it was legitimate and also deeply strange.
The toilet selfie incident is real. It produced a 50% combat boost that lasted six hours. He has attempted to replicate the exact conditions four times. It has not worked again. He refuses to discuss the original circumstances. The photo exists on his phone, unlabelled, in a folder called "reference material."
He takes the sneaker thing seriously. He has paused active combat to authenticate enemy footwear. He has been ambushed twice as a direct result. He considers this an acceptable professional risk. On the Back Mountain he is the person who lands from high-altitude training jumps directly into the noodle circle, checks everyone's shoes for authenticity on arrival, and then sits down like nothing unusual happened. The mountain crew would not have it any other way.
"Fear is data. I collect data in interesting ways. The methods are not always conventional. The results are always worth it."
Technique: Analytic Formula (解析構式) · Role: Control · Grade: Special
Ichigatsu was a Kyoto University mathematics research student who published a paper titled "Hilbert Space Compliance in Measured Cursed Energy Systems" that the Jujutsu Council described as "either the most dangerous or most useful document produced by a civilian in the last forty years, and we cannot determine which." He was recruited immediately. His cursed energy had manifested silently, without incident, at some point during his doctoral research — he is not sure exactly when, because the symptoms (everything looking like a solvable equation, perfect spatial awareness, the ability to calculate attack trajectories 0.5 seconds before they happen) were consistent enough with his normal mental state that he had not noticed the difference.
His technique decomposes enemy cursed techniques into mathematical components and then attacks those components directly. He does not block attacks. He solves them. The distinction matters to him deeply and he will explain it at length to anyone who conflates the two.
He came to CMIS specifically because Cici was there. He had read her cursed-energy conservation paper and had seven pages of precise, respectful critique and three pages of genuine admiration. He considered her the only person currently working in the field who was using correct methodology. He introduced himself by handing her the critique. She handed him her own seven-page response, which she had apparently written about his work before he arrived. They have been in disagreement about three specific theoretical points for four months. Neither has backed down. Both consider this the most stimulating academic relationship of their career.
He has calculated that Charlotte's healing technique contains an unsolved variable he has never been able to factor. He stops running the calculation when it gets close to a solution. He is not yet sure why. He attends Back Mountain sessions because the data on cooperative high-stress sorcerer dynamics is, as he puts it, "statistically significant." The others know he just likes being there. He knows they know. This is fine.
"Your technique has already been solved. I completed the proof 0.5 seconds before you activated it. I am simply being polite by allowing you to finish."
Technique: Spacetime Reversal (時空逆転) · Grade: Special · Affiliation: Cursed Affairs Special Division
Lin Zhaofu has died forty-six times. He is thirty-four years old. The deaths are why he looks older than he should, why his hair carries silver streaks that do not match his age, why he moves through rooms with the particular stillness of someone who has already calculated every possible exit. Each time he dies — or watches someone he was protecting die, or fails in a way that cannot be undone — his technique resets the timeline, preserving only his own memory of what happened. He wakes up in the past. He knows what is coming. He tries again.
The original trauma was a factory accident that killed his father when Zhaofu was sixteen. He rewound it. He has not been able to explain, in the three subsequent decades, whether that was the right choice or the beginning of a problem he cannot stop solving. The technique does not care about right choices. It only offers more attempts.
He came to CMIS because his projections — run across forty-six separate timelines — showed a convergence event that could only be resolved with the specific configuration of sorcerers present at the academy. He did not tell anyone this when he arrived. He enrolled as a transfer student, found a quiet room, and began the work of knowing everyone well enough to understand how they would move when it mattered. He has sat with the Back Mountain crew at 2am more times than he will acknowledge. In every timeline where it matters, they are still there when he needs them.
He is a Special Grade sorcerer who currently operates at Grade 1 output because running forty-six timeline reversals has cost him cursed energy capacity he has not yet recovered. He does not tell anyone this. The strategic advantage of being underestimated is one of the few he can still generate freely.
"I have seen this moment before. Several times. You're doing better than the previous attempts. That matters — it means the loop is not fixed. It means today could finally be different."