Jujutsu Kaisen season 3 episode 8 adds yet another layer to Kenjaku's sinister endgame

The true purpose behind the Culling Game is more sinister than it seems

Jujutsu Kaisen season 3 has consistently ramped up its stakes with the Culling Game, a battle royale tournament meant to shake the foundations of jujutsu society. Kenjaku, the orchestrator, harbors complex motivations in Gege Akutami’s acclaimed manga, which has been adapted into a smash-hit anime by MAPPA. The enigmatic nature of Kenjaku’s schemes paints him as a shadowy antagonist puppeteering key events that will end up shaping Japan and the world at large.

Episode 8 of the anime, titled “Tokyo Colony No. 1, Part 2,” spends a significant amount of time introducing the freshly-awakened sorcerer, Hiromi Higuruma, and then cuts back to the aftermath of the tense Episode 7 cliffhanger. Amid this chaos, we glimpse Kenjaku pulling some strings behind the scenes, revealing shocking details about his endgame. It looks like the goal of the Culling Game is not what we understood.

[Ed. note: This article contains spoilers for Jujutsu Kaisen season 3 episode 8 and Gege Akutami’s source material]

At Shinjuku, the sorcerer Remi lures Megumi Fushiguro into an ambush. Her co-conspirator, Reggie Star, offers an alliance while asking if Megumi is aware of the true purpose of the Culling Game. While Megumi is careful not to mention Master Tengen, he shares that the tournament is a ritual to harness cursed energy and bring civilians to the other side of the barrier and turn them into something inhuman. Once Reggie mentions Kenjaku, he goes on to explain that the “ritual” aspect must be a secondary goal, as it doesn’t line up with the number of players, the difference in skill level between them, and the convoluted rules of the game.

To illustrate his theory, he reminds Megumi that the difference in skill levels suggests that players like Hajime Kashimo and Higuruma are significantly stronger, as they’ve already eliminated about 60 players in just 12 days. Megumi silently agrees, as he realizes that Tokyo Colony 1 has been eerily quiet since he and Yuji Itadori entered. Essentially, in each colony, weaker players were quickly eliminated, leading to a deadlock between the strongest sorcerers. This contradicts the Culling Game’s apparent purpose of gathering cursed energy for a long period of time.

This is when Reggie touches upon Kenjaku’s endgame. (Warning, manga spoilers follow!) As revealed later, this involves bringing about a second awakening of cursed techniques among modern-day sorcerers. Such an extreme scenario can only be triggered with a wild card or an event catastrophic enough to uproot the foundations of civil society. Reggie likens this chaotic vision to a nuclear devastation powered by cursed energy. This metaphorical “bomb” will ensure that only the strongest remain.

The episode ends with the most sinister reveal: Kenjaku is in the process of meeting high-ranking government officials in China. While a post-Shibuya Japan is no longer oblivious to the concept of curses, the world doesn’t seem to be privy to the truth, yet. Jujutsu sorcerers are mostly concentrated in Japan, so Kenjaku’s audience with high-ranking non-sorcerers overseas means he could expose the truth about jujutsu society to further his goal.

While Akutami’s manga has already fleshed out Kenjaku’s endgame, the anime is still in the process of unraveling possible motives that might fuel his grand scheme. There’s a faint idea of an endgame involving the merging of humanity with Master Tengen and triggering the next stage of evolution, but we don’t know why he wants to do this. This episode reveals that while the Culling Game rules are fairly rigid, that doesn’t mean that Kenjaku is being completely honest. There is still a lot more to understand about his twisted plans.

---

New episodes of Jujutsu Kaisen season 3 release every Thursday on Crunchyroll.