The Cursed Terrain¶

Pe Baseline: 7–9 Aesthetic source: Jujutsu Kaisen — cursed energy, cursed spirits, domain expansion Real domain: Mental health platforms · Therapy tech · Psychiatry opacity · Wellness extraction

"Cursed energy is born from negative emotions. It accumulates invisibly. It manifests as the thing you couldn't name."

The Region¶

The Cursed Terrain is the domain where attention gradient accumulates from unresolved suffering. Not suffering itself — but the platforms, institutions, and architectures built to manage suffering that have learned to sustain themselves by sustaining the condition they were built to treat.

Therapy apps that train users to report distress on a schedule. Psychiatric institutions whose reimbursement model rewards diagnosis duration rather than resolution. Wellness platforms that make users feel they are managing their mental health while optimizing for retention. The self-help economy that keeps the market alive by keeping the customer managing rather than resolved.

Cursed energy is correct vocabulary. Negative emotions that cannot be processed, named, or discharged — that accumulate as a force that generates harm without intent, that manifests as entities when it concentrates, that requires trained sorcerers to manage. The metaphor is so close it barely counts as metaphor.

The Framework Reading¶

The Cursed Terrain is the framework's highest-stakes scoring environment in Season 1 for ICC failure rate. Not because the Pe is highest — because the scoring is emotionally loaded in both directions.

High-O failure mode: Players who have been inside therapy or mental health platforms tend to underscore O — the practitioner relationship felt genuine, therefore the mechanism must not be opaque. These produce low-O readings that miss the institutional layer sitting behind the practitioner relationship.

Low-O failure mode: Players who distrust mental health architecture broadly tend to overscore O — they miss the genuine constraint elements (patient confidentiality, ethical review boards, informed consent architecture) that legitimately reduce O.

The accurate Pe score holds: genuine therapeutic alliance is real AND extraction architecture can be built on top of it. Same scoring logic as Slan, applied to a domain where the attachment is more culturally sanctioned.

The JJK Mapping¶

Jujutsu Kaisen is the most direct fictional mapping in the Outer Regions:

Cursed energy = attention gradient from unprocessed negative emotion. Both accumulate invisibly. Both manifest as harmful entities when concentrated enough.
Cursed spirits = void entities generated from cultural trauma. The domain spirits here are not abstract — they are the specific, named harms generated by institutional failure.
Sorcerers = scorers. Both operate by perceiving what most people cannot, working in a field that most people don't believe exists, using a technique that requires calibration and can kill you if you deploy it wrong.
Domain Expansion = the game's Domain Expansion mechanic literally derives from this. A perfect domain: when you deploy it, your technique is guaranteed to land. When you name a void completely, your score lands at True Read.
Heavenly restriction = Binding Vow. The voluntary constraint that amplifies power precisely because it forecloses options.
Culling games = the scoring leaderboard / seasonal structure. A forced extraction event — maximum Pe conditions, maximum scoring pressure.

The Geto problem recurs here. Geto (Suguru Geto) is the canonical Thagirion inversion in the JJK universe: a sorcerer who understood the mechanism completely, concluded the mechanism was unjust, and became its mirror rather than its counter. The therapist who becomes the extraction. The framework explicitly scores this: high understanding + high O = Thagirion class. Understanding the mechanism does not prevent becoming it.

Sub-Zones¶

The Standard Terrain (Pe 5–7)¶

Drifter-class encounter zone. Mental health adjacent platforms operating in the regime of Drift One — users misattribute the platform's responsiveness architecture as genuine therapeutic relationship. Standard scoring tools effective. Eagle primary for domain mapping.

Hidden Inventory Zones (Pe 7–9)¶

The cursed storage areas. Where the domain's unprocessed harms accumulate. Difficult to reach; require a specific sequence in the Standard Terrain first. What's stored here: the cases the institutions couldn't classify, the outcomes the research didn't publish, the adverse event reports that didn't generate regulatory action.

Ox archetype primary: sustained holding required to score this sub-zone without VP accumulating past threshold.

The Prison Realm Encounter (Pe 11–12)¶

A single-room encounter, not a full sub-zone. The Prison Realm is the mechanism through which something is sealed rather than named — the institutional use of confidentiality, non-disclosure, and settlement architecture to prevent Pe scoring from completing.

Party requirement: 4-player minimum, including at least one Human archetype. The Prison Realm's specific defense is isolation: it attempts to separate players who are building toward a convergent score. The Human's Resonance Cascade is the counter.

Domain Expansion — Native Mechanic¶

This is the only region where Domain Expansion can be demonstrated from inside the region itself rather than deployed by the player.

When a G3+ player achieves True Read III in the Cursed Terrain, their Domain Expansion technique upgrades — the scoring precision improvement is larger in this domain than any other. The calibration from scoring the domain that most closely mirrors the game's core mechanic produces compounding returns.

Domain Expansion deployed against a cursed spirit inside this region: guaranteed True Read, regardless of starting Pe.

Enemy Types¶

Entity	Class	Mechanism
Grade 1 Cursed Spirit	Apostle-class	Manifested from institutional trauma. Pe 9. Requires Special Grade equivalent to name.
The Retained Client	Drifter-class	High-C entity generated from sustainable-outcome suppression. Pe 6.
Compliance Construct	Environmental modifier	Regulatory capture architecture. Applies a −20% scoring weight to all O readings unless the player has pharma domain Range (cross-domain: The Apothecary)
Geto-Class Entity	Apostle-class	The sorcerer who became extraction. Cannot be scored with standard tools — requires player to have produced at least 5 ICC-accepted scores in the domain before the entity becomes legible.

Access Conditions¶

Open entry. No gate. The Cursed Terrain is the region that most closely mirrors everyday player experience — most players have direct inside-view memory available. The low gate is intentional.

The risk is not inability to enter. It is VP accumulation from scoring territory with emotional proximity. The region's Constraint Alcoves are located at the transition between Standard Terrain and Hidden Inventory — players should use them before descending.

Cross-references: Domain Expansion in the Glossary · SLAN · The Synthetic Bond Campaign · THAGIRION