Spirit Detective Saga

After dying and being resurrected, delinquent Yusuke Urameshi becomes the Underworld''s Spirit Detective and takes on his first supernatural cases.

The series opens with one of the most memorable inciting incidents in shonen manga: Yusuke Urameshi, a fourteen-year-old delinquent dismissed by nearly everyone around him, dies suddenly while saving a child from an oncoming car. His selfless act surprises even the Underworld, which had not prepared an afterlife for someone like him. Offered a chance to return to life, Yusuke completes a series of trials overseen by Koenma and his assistant Botan, and is reborn with a new purpose as a Spirit Detective tasked with investigating supernatural threats to the human world. The arc establishes the foundational cast and rules of the series. Yusuke learns to harness his Spirit Energy, channeled most iconically through the Spirit Gun. He clashes with and then befriends his former rival Kuwabara, and encounters the demons Kurama and Hiei, who begin as antagonists in a case involving three stolen Underworld artifacts before becoming key allies. Yusuke also begins training under the legendary master Genkai, winning a tournament for the right to inherit her techniques and learning the Spirit Wave. By the end of the Spirit Detective Saga, Yusuke has grown from an aimless brawler into a committed protector. The early cases — the artifact thieves, the psychic Genkai tournament, and a rescue mission on Maze Castle — gradually raise the stakes and reveal a larger demonic world pressing against the human one. The saga functions as a complete origin story while planting the seeds for the far more punishing battles to come.