A Bizarre Adventure That Begins in Jujutsu Kaisen

Chapter 92 Spells and Magic - Part 1 (7/10)

At 11:00 a.m. on June 3, 2018, inside the cabin, as the flight became more stable, Tsukumo Yuki began to introduce the background information of the trip to Theo and his entourage.

Hiromi Nichisha and Junpei Yoshino adjusted their postures, their expressions focused as they prepared to listen.

Miguel leaned back in his chair, his eyes half-closed, seemingly asleep but not quite, yet he had his ears perked up.

"The power system we are familiar with is called 'curse magic' in our country" (呪術, じゅじゅつ), which is also the official and unified name worldwide.

In other parts of the world, due to different cultures, there are different understandings of curses and their derivative technologies, and each region has its own internal naming conventions.

For example, in the historically significant Zhengguo, its system of incantations is also known as "Fangshu" or "Daoshu".

In Europe, where we are about to arrive, sorcerers generally define sorcery as "Thaumaturgy".

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This word comes from ancient Greek and literally means "the method of creating miracles".

The land of Europe has never been truly ruled by a single, lasting, and unified authority. Even the Church of Christ, which venerates the same imaginary deity, has seen the emergence of distinct branches in different regions.

This long-standing political and religious divide has profoundly shaped the unique character of its sorcery environment.

The phrases "small country with few people" and "vast land with few inhabitants" are not romantic pastoral scenes here, but rather a true reflection of a security vacuum and a dispersion of power.

Sparse human settlements are scattered among the vast forests, wastelands, and mountains. Those with a population of one million are considered to be continental metropolises.

This is incomparable to the megacities in East Asia that often gather millions or even tens of millions of people in terms of population density and city size.

Compared to the development path in East Asia, which relied on highly intensive agricultural civilization and subsequently gave rise to ultra-dense urban forms, European history has more often presented a pattern of coexistence of manor economy, autonomous towns and scattered city-states.

Even after the wave of industrialization, most of the population and economic activities are still widely distributed in relatively small towns and settlements.

According to rough estimates from the European Union, about 70% of the population lives in small and medium-sized towns with fewer than 1 inhabitants.

The density of curses is directly related to the density and intensity of human emotions.

With a relatively dispersed population, it is difficult for collective negative emotions to continuously accumulate and ferment in a single location to generate a concentration of powerful curse.

Therefore, the overall density and intensity of curses in Europe have long been lower than in the East. In modern times, it is probably only one percent or even less than that of curse hotbeds like Japan.

The overall output of European sorcerers and the activity of naturally occurring cursed spirits have historically lagged behind those of the East.

According to incomplete statistics, even if the European Psychic Federation absorbed a large number of high-level psychics from colonies and underdeveloped countries in the Third World, and included non-psychics who wielded magical tools and performed magical rituals, their total number of psychics was only slightly over four thousand.

With a population twenty times larger, the number of sorcerers is less than half that of Japan, and their quality is generally poor. This is the result of the low-density curse.

Moreover, these four thousand sorcerers are each affiliated with local governments, secret societies, or work alone, lacking a powerful central management agency that covers the entire region, like the Japanese Sorcery Supervision Department or the relevant departments of the State Council.

Knowledge was passed down in a fragmented manner, resulting in numerous schools of thought.

The European sorcery community exhibits an ecosystem characterized by "low density, high diversity, and weak centralization."

It was in this environment that European sorcerers, or rather, magicians, embarked on a development path that leaned more towards systematic research, theoretical construction, and technical standardization.

Eastern sorcerers generally tend to pursue the ultimate improvement of personal combat power. Their spells often have the intuitive characteristic of "great power, great force, and flying bricks," relying on the expansion of the domain to ensure the effect hits.

European magical systems, on the other hand, place greater emphasis on analyzing the nature of curse power and developing a wide range of application techniques.

They developed a vast technological system that embodies and utilizes the concept of "LeyLines"—hypothetical pathways for the flow of natural energy on Earth.

By periodically injecting human pillars into specific leyline nodes, negative emotions within the area are gathered and channeled, with the leyline network itself serving as the natural foundation and energy conduit for the ritual.

In ancient times, "human sacrifice" was often used for human sacrifice. Later, due to its inefficiency and the risk of generating super-level cursed spirits and disasters, it was replaced by specially made cursed remains that were replaced periodically.

This is essentially a curse node that carries and anchors negative emotions.

In this way, the curses scattered by ordinary people in a large area can be partially guided to the earth's veins for a certain degree of public storage and preliminary harmless treatment.

Even more astonishing is that, through this continuous ritual that covers the entire continent, even non-magicians who cannot see the curse can recognize the existence and danger of the "curse" and "magicians" on a cultural level!

The witch hunt craze that swept across Europe in the Middle Ages, as well as various legends and stories about sorcerers and magicians, were not entirely unfounded.

This general public's understanding of magical arts is like a sophisticated emotional funnel, which in turn helps to collect negative emotions in a targeted manner, effectively reducing the natural proliferation of wild, undirected cursed spirits.

At the same time, the curse energy, after being initially processed by the ley line network and cognitive memes, can also be transformed into a relatively stable, publicly available clean energy source.

The ritualistic magic performed by this collective energy that permeates the fabric of culture is equivalent to a remarkable development of human collective wisdom into its own potential spirituality.

Its technical principles are highly universal, and in theory, everyone can participate in it through systematic knowledge transmission and study.

These non-magicians who manipulate magical power through specific rituals are similar in nature to non-magicians who use magical implements.

However, what they "borrowed" was transformed from concrete objects into a more abstract ritual—or what could be called a "manifestation of the earth's veins."

Of course, "learning" and "mastering" are two completely different things.

The performance of magical rituals follows strict rules and requires paying a corresponding price.

This is what we often call "binding," or in a more classical sense, "oath and constraint."

The more powerful the ritual, the stricter its rules, and the heavier the price to be paid.

Furthermore, the depth of the practitioner's observation of the laws of the world and their understanding of the principles of the ritual are also fundamental factors that determine the power and success rate of the ritual.

As is well known, the origin of "barrier magic" can be clearly traced back to the magic system of the Tang Dynasty.

In the homeland of Zheng Kingdom, the skills possessed by sorcerers go far beyond this.

They are better at surveying and utilizing the terrain to set up complex and ingenious formations.

Some academics believe that the early prototypes and core ideas of European earth vein ritual techniques were likely transmitted from the Zheng Kingdom to China via the Silk Road a long time ago, and underwent a long process of localization, integration and development.

Despite countless cycles of civilizational rise and fall and technological discontinuity, Zheng Guo's theoretical depth and historical accumulation in curse technology are still recognized by the global esoteric academic community as the pinnacle of the world today.

According to legend, the first and only recorded Great Cursed Spirit was born in Zheng Guo.

Or rather, it is precisely because of these terrifying legends, which are difficult to distinguish between true and false yet have been passed down for five thousand years, that the space for imagination and the fear of reality regarding the existence of the "Great Cursed Spirit" have been maintained.

If the information provided by Amakusa Shiro is true—

Therefore, the "Great Cursed Spirits" that emerged from the cultural soil of Europe are probably more likely to resemble, in form and name, archetypes rooted in the local collective unconscious, such as "devil," "evil," or "the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse."

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