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What is truth?
Is truth the lies that we tell ourselves when we gaze into the mirror in the morning?
Or
Is it the rigid, fixed definition of truth. The one that's untouched by our emotions?
Do we humans truly see truth in and of itself? Or do we lie, distort reality to protect ourselves from the honest truth of reality. For example, thinking of oneself above others.
But is that wrong?
I, Ren Asano, believe that it is not wrong. As humans we are inherently ignorant creatures. We lie to ourselves and to others constantly over, over and over again. Even if we gain nothing from the lies themselves. And yet, we are the only creatures capable of such deception. The only ones who choose to lie among all life in this world.
So is it, the true human self to lie?
Is lying fundamentally what makes a person?
Is the soul of humanity defined by deception?
Or is it that we simply live within a lie in and of itself?
What is it that makes us, human?
To that, I say... I do not know.
But if I had to answer, it would be the act of choosing. And what I mean by the act of choosing is that a person is given a choice in every single situation they are in and they can choose option A or B within that situation. So is life dumbed down to 1 and 2 or is there more to it?
So going back to the main point. What is truth?
Is it the opposite of falsehood and that every human has 2 choices of 1 and 2. To tell the truth or to tell a lie. Or is it deeper in the truth of humanity of itself is that its a lie, inside a truth. So does that make humanity a lie or a truthful lie?
In science there is objective truth. Some truths exist regardless of feelings. Scientific facts dont change based on opinion's. An example of this is Gravity exists whether you "believe" it or not. Psychology tries to study behaviour objectively.
Does Society influence what it means to be truthful? Does society shapes what we accept as a truth? But if that were the case then people could conform to group believes even if wrong. Is the classic idea: if everyone says something is true, we start believing it as the truth?
But does that not change truth because of our cognitive dissonance with the truth? We change the meaning of truth to avoid the discomfort it brings us. When reality clashes with beliefs the brain adjusts the truth.
And where does justice fit into all of this?
Justice is supposed to be truth with a verdict attached. Someone did something wrong, we determine the truth of what they did, and we punish accordingly. That's the story. That's what the system promises.
But if truth itself is something humans constantly distort, and justice is built on truth, then justice is built on a foundation that shifts every time someone gets uncomfortable with what's underneath it.
The teacher knew this, because he had watched truth being rewritten in real time, watched as a girl with bruises became nothing more than a claim, as what was once undeniable reality was slowly reduced, questioned, and dismissed, even after he reported it, even when the evidence was right there, until the system declared it unsubstantiated, turning a clear truth into something uncertain, something ignorable, something false, and in that moment the lie became the official truth, not because it was real, but because those in power decided it would be, and the kind of truth that exists whether you believe in it or not simply stopped mattering.
My domain runs on truth, where Judgeman knows everything, the evidence is real, the charges are precise, and every verdict is based only on what is truly presented.
But I'm the prosecutor.
And I'm human.
And humans lie.
So what happens when the one part of the system that's supposed to be the voice of truth, me, is a creature that lies by nature?
What if my version of justice is just my version of a comfortable lie?
Ren closed the notebook.
He had been writing for forty minutes. The words spilled out fast and messy, nothing like his law notes, but raw, like something he had been holding in for weeks that had finally broken free. He had not planned to write any of it. He had sat down for his usual evening study session, and the pen had gone somewhere else entirely.
It was mid-May. Two and a half months since the template landed in his skull. Two and a half months of waking up at six, eating right, training with Isaac, swimming three days a week, studying law every evening, practising CE until his reserves bottomed out and his regeneration dragged them back up.
Two and a half months and his template read 2.64%.
Two. Point. Six. Four.
He'd been staring at that number for ten minutes before he started writing. Something about seeing it in his head, precise and unmoving, had made something crack. A quiet fracture somewhere behind his ribs that felt like frustration and tasted like exhaustion.
He was doing everything. Every single day. He hadn't missed a training session. He hadn't skipped a study night in three weeks. His CE reserves had grown from barely holding the domain for three minutes to maintaining it comfortably for twenty. His Decree had gone from two uses to ten if he was being honest with his judgments. His bench press was at 460 kilos. He could run 79 kilometres per hour, fast enough to keep pace with most pro heroes on foot. His regeneration quirk was healing him 80% faster than it had three months ago, and it was accelerating because the CE training was forcing it to adapt and the adaptation was feeding back into everything else. He'd grown another centimetre since April, still six-two but the growth hadn't stopped the way it should have at his age, and he had a quiet suspicion about why that was that he wasn't ready to think about yet.
By any objective measure he was progressing at an insane rate. A rate that would make actual pro heroes raise their eyebrows.
2.64%.
That was all.
At this rate he'd hit 10% in about a year. 50% in five. Full mastery of the Higuruma template in a decade, maybe longer, and that was assuming the rate stayed consistent and didn't plateau.
He wasn't Higuruma. He knew that. Higuruma was a genius whose intelligence was compared to Gojo Satoru's. A man who'd reverse-engineered barrier techniques from his own domain and mastered cursed energy manipulation in twelve days. Ren was a smart kid with good instincts and a work ethic that had only existed for two months.
But knowing that didn't make 2.64% feel like enough.
The philosophy essay in his notebook wasn't about school. It wasn't for anyone. It was for him trying to dig down to the bottom of something that had been bothering him for weeks. A question he couldn't stop circling.
His technique punished lying. His technique rewarded truth. But he was human, and humans lied constantly, to themselves most of all. Every time he used Decree, some fraction of his output was being eaten by the gap between what he genuinely believed and what he wanted to believe. The CE cost of self-deception. It was small on easy judgments and enormous on hard ones, and it meant there was a ceiling on his power that wasn't about reserves or training or experience. It was about honesty.
And he couldn't train honesty the way he trained his body. He couldn't do reps of "believe harder." The subconscious didn't work that way. It held opinions you didn't ask for and fears you'd never agreed to and a whole library of comfortable lies that you didn't even know were lies until the moment your cursed technique tried to enforce a judgment and the cost spiked because somewhere deep in your skull, a part of you whispered that's not true and you know it.
The ceiling wasn't physical. It was psychological. And no amount of deadlifts was going to break through it.
Unless he removed the ceiling entirely.
The idea came to him in the shower the next morning.
Binding vow.
In JJK, sorcerers could impose restrictions on themselves in exchange for greater output from their cursed energy. The tighter the restriction, the bigger the payoff. Nanami had limited his technique's full power to outside of work hours. Other sorcerers had traded range for potency or versatility for raw damage.
The principle was simple: sacrifice something real, get something real back. Cursed energy honoured the contract. Just you and your own power, agreeing on terms.
Ren stood in the shower with water running over his head and thought about what Decree's real limiter was.
Self-deception.
The ability to lie to himself was the single biggest drain on his technique. If he could remove it, not manage it, not train around it, but actually remove it, Decree would operate at full efficiency on every judgment. No wasted CE fighting his own bullshit. No subconscious pushback. Every assessment would be genuine by default because he'd be incapable of making one that wasn't.
The restriction: never lie. Not just through Decree. Not just in combat. Never. About anything. To anyone. Including himself.
The payoff: Decree at full capacity. His subconscious permanently aligned with his conscious judgments. The gap between what he believed and what he wanted to believe, closed. Permanently.
He turned off the shower and stood there dripping, staring at the tile wall.
The cost wasn't mechanical.
It was his own humanity.
He'd written about it last night. Lying was what made people human. White lies, social lies, the small daily deceptions that kept relationships smooth and self-image intact. "I'm fine." "It doesn't bother me." "I'm not scared." "That looks great on you." "I don't mind." Every one of those was a lie and every one of those was necessary.
Remove the ability to lie and you remove the cushioning between a person and the world. You become someone who can't comfort without truth, can't deflect without truth, can't even think a thought that isn't true without your own cursed energy rejecting it.
He'd be sharper. Faster. More efficient. And completely, fundamentally unable to be a normal person ever again.
Ren muttered to himself. "Normalcy was for the weak anyways".
He got dressed, went downstairs, and found his mom at the stove.
"Morning, baby, you were up late last night. I heard you moving around."
"Yeah. I was thinking."
"About?"
He almost said "nothing." The word was right there, the easy, automatic, human response. The lie you tell your parent when the real answer is too complicated for breakfast.
He hadn't made the vow yet. He could still say it.
"About whether I'm progressing fast enough," he said instead.
His mom turned around. She looked at him for a moment with that expression she had, the one that saw more than he wanted her to.
"You're fourteen, Ren. You're not supposed to have it all figured out yet."
"I know."
"Do you?"
"Yeah. Doesn't stop me from wanting to."
She smiled. Squeezed his shoulder. Slid the plate across the counter. "Eat."
He ate.
He didn't make the vow that day. Or the next day. Or the day after that. The idea sat in his head like a stone in his shoe, present and uncomfortable and impossible to ignore.
School. Tanaka-sensei was reviewing modern hero law for the end-of-term exam. Ren sat in the back and half-listened while circulating CE through his body. He'd been doing this for months now. His reserves were deep enough that he could maintain a low-level reinforcement for the entire school day without running dry.
Midoriya was three rows ahead and two seats to the left, and Ren noticed, not for the first time, that the kid looked different, not dramatically different, but his arms had more definition than they had in April, his shoulders were slightly wider, the baby fat in his face was thinning out, his hands now marked with calluses that had not been there a month ago, the kind you got from gripping rough surfaces over and over again, and there was a specific kind of tiredness about him, not the kind from staying up too late, but the kind that came from putting his body through something it was not used to, early mornings, physical work, a routine that was grinding him down and building him up at the same time.
Ren knew the feeling. He saw it in his own mirror every morning.
Deku was training for something. And Ren knew exactly what, even if the details were blank. Bullet point number one in the notebook: Deku gets OFA from All Might. Whatever was happening to Midoriya's body right now was the lead-up to that.
Lunch. He ate on the roof alone. The sky was overcast and the air smelled like rain.
He thought about the vow.
If he made it, he couldn't tell Isaac "good programming" when Isaac asked about his gains. He'd have to say "I'm reinforcing my muscles with an energy you can't see." He'd have to explain cursed energy to someone who had no framework for it and watch Isaac either believe him or think he'd lost his mind.
If he made it, he couldn't tell his mom "I'm fine" on the days he wasn't fine. He'd have to say "I had a bad day" or "I'm frustrated" or "I feel like I'm not good enough" and mean every word.
If he made it, he couldn't talk shit he didn't believe. Couldn't exaggerate. Couldn't bluff. In a fight, in a conversation, in a negotiation, the binding vow would strip him of every social tool that ran on deception.
But Decree would work at full power. Every judgment backed by genuine belief. No CE wasted on the gap between perception and reality. And inside the domain, every prosecution argument would carry the weight of absolute conviction because the prosecutor, him, would be physically incapable of arguing something he didn't believe.
The most honest prosecutor who ever existed. Devastating against the guilty. Useless against anyone he wasn't sure about.
Was it worth it?
Thursday. Isaac noticed.
"You've been quiet," he said between sets. They were at Iron House, which had upgraded to a heavier rack after Ren kept maxing out the old one. Isaac had told the owner it was for "a client with a strength-enhancing quirk" which wasn't technically a lie.
"I'm always quiet."
"No, you're usually reserved. There's a difference. Reserved is you choosing not to talk. Quiet is you not having anything to say. You've been the second one for like three days."
"I'm thinking about something."
"About what?"
"Can't explain it yet."
"Training related?"
"Sort of."
Isaac racked the bar he'd been curling. The gap between them had become absurd, almost comical. Isaac couldn't spot him, couldn't demonstrate lifts at his working weights, couldn't do anything except coach from the side. And he'd adapted to that seamlessly because Isaac had never cared about being the strongest person in the room. He cared about making the strongest person in the room better.
"You know you can talk to me about stuff that isn't training, right?" Isaac said.
"I know."
"Like, I'm not just your coach. I'm your friend."
"I know, Isaac."
"Okay. Just making sure." He picked the bar back up. "Also your left lat is firing late on your deadlift and I think it's because you're sleeping on your right side. Switch sides tonight."
"How do you know which side I sleep on?"
"Because your right trap is always tighter on Wednesdays which means Tuesday night you're compressing your right shoulder. I've been tracking it."
"You're insane."
"I'm thorough."
Friday evening. His mom made curry. She sat across from him at the kitchen table, the one with the wobbly leg and the scratches she'd been meaning to sand out for four years, and watched him eat.
"You've been quiet this week," she said.
Same word Isaac used.
"Thinking about stuff."
"Hero school stuff?"
"Partly."
She stirred her tea. "You know, when I was your age, I spent about six months convinced I was going to be a terrible adult. I couldn't figure out what I wanted to do, I couldn't figure out who I wanted to be, and everyone around me seemed to have it together while I was just making it up."
"What happened?"
"I kept making it up. Turns out everyone else was too." She smiled. "The people who seem like they have it figured out are usually just better liars."
Ren's hand stopped halfway to his mouth.
Better liars.
His mom had no idea what she'd just said. It was a throwaway comment, the kind of gentle wisdom parents drop at dinner tables without realizing they've just detonated something in their kid's head.
Better liars. Everyone was making it up. Everyone was lying. And the people who seemed most put together were the ones whose lies were the most convincing.
And his technique, Decree, punished exactly that. It punished the lie. The more convincing your self-deception, the harder the technique bit back when reality disagreed. Which meant the most "put together" a person seemed, the more vulnerable they'd be inside his domain.
And it meant the most put together REN seemed, the more vulnerable HE was to Ego Collapse.
Unless he stopped lying entirely.
"Ren? You okay?"
"Yeah." He paused. "Actually, no. I've been frustrated with how slow my progress has been and I think I've figured out what's holding me back but the solution is going to change some things about me and I'm not sure I'm ready for that."
His mom blinked. That was possibly the most honest thing he'd said to her in years.
"That's... very self-aware for a fourteen-year-old."
"I've had help."
She didn't ask what that meant. She just reached across the table and held his hand.
"Whatever it is, take your time with it. Some things you can't undo."
"Yeah," he said. "That's what I'm afraid of."
Saturday morning. Early. Before the sun was fully up.
Ren sat on the edge of his bed. The house was silent. His parents were still asleep.
He'd been turning this over for a week. Looking at it from every angle. Trying to find a version of the vow that gave him what he wanted without costing what it would cost.
There wasn't one.
The binding vow was binary. Lie or don't. There was no "only lie about small things" or "lie to strangers but not yourself." Cursed energy didn't do nuance. It honoured the spirit of the contract and the spirit of this contract was total, absolute, unconditional honesty. With everyone. About everything. Forever.
In exchange, Decree would operate without the friction of self-deception. Every judgment genuine. Every assessment backed by the full weight of his belief. The technique at its theoretical maximum for his current level of cursed energy, not held back by the unconscious lies every human told themselves every day.
He thought about his mom. The way she'd held his hand across the table last night. "Some things you can't undo."
He thought about Isaac. "You can talk to me about stuff that isn't training."
He thought about the teacher, dead in a motel room because the truth wasn't enough to save him.
He thought about Judgeman, floating in the dark with its eyes sewn shut, waiting for someone to judge.
He thought about Bakugo on the rooftop. "Your ego convicted you, not me."
And he thought about himself. Fourteen years old. Two and a half months into a journey he didn't fully understand. Holding power he hadn't earned, memories he hadn't lived, and a philosophy of justice he hadn't tested against anything harder than a school bully.
2.64%.
He could keep going at this pace. Grind for years. Hit 10% eventually. Become competent, strong, capable. A good hero.
Or he could cut the part of himself that was holding the ceiling in place and find out what was above it.
He closed his eyes.
The words weren't formal. He didn't stand up or raise his hand or perform a ceremony. He just sat on the edge of his bed in his boxers and a t-shirt and made a decision.
No more lying. About anything. To anyone. Including himself. Not through Decree, not in conversation, not in his own head. Total honesty, unconditional, permanent. In exchange, his judgment becomes real. What he decrees, he believes. What he believes, he means. No gap. No friction. No wasted energy fighting his own bullshit.
He meant it. Every word. And his cursed energy knew he meant it.
He felt it lock.
Like a door closing somewhere deep in his chest. A quiet click, like the latch on a lock that only turns once. Something in his cursed energy shifted, rearranged, settled into a new configuration that felt both foreign and inevitable, like it had been waiting for him to say the words.
He opened his eyes.
The room looked the same. The water stain on the ceiling was still shaped like a boot. His phone was on the nightstand. His notebook was on the desk. Everything was exactly where it had been ten seconds ago.
But something behind his eyes felt different. Clearer. Like a window he hadn't known was dirty had been wiped clean.
He didn't feel the full weight of it yet. He wouldn't for days.
He went downstairs, made breakfast since his parents were still asleep, and ate in the quiet kitchen at the table with the wobbly leg, feeling the faint hum of cursed energy in his body running smoother than it ever had before.
The first sign came on Monday.
Tanaka-sensei was reviewing a question about hero liability law and asked the class whether they thought the current system of hero oversight was adequate.
A girl in the front row gave a long, polished answer about how the Hero Public Safety Commission balanced accountability with operational freedom. It was the textbook answer. The one that would get full marks on the exam.
Ren opened his mouth to say nothing and instead said, "That's not what happens in practice. The HPSC operates with almost no transparency and their oversight is performative at best."
The class turned around. Tanaka-sensei raised both eyebrows.
"Would you like to elaborate, Asano?"
He did not want to elaborate. He wanted to take the words back and swallow them. But they were already out and they were true and the vow hummed faintly in his chest like a second heartbeat confirming it.
"The conviction rate in Japan's criminal courts is 99.9%. That's not because the system is fair, it's because prosecutors only bring cases they know they'll win. The HPSC operates the same way. They don't oversee heroes to protect the public. They manage public perception to protect the system. Oversight implies accountability and there's no accountability when the body doing the overseeing has a vested interest in the people they're supposed to be watching."
Silence.
Tanaka-sensei looked at him for a long moment. "That's a very critical view."
"It's an accurate one."
More silence. Someone in the middle of the room coughed. Bakugo, three seats to the left, was staring at him with an expression that might have been surprise or might have been annoyance or might have been both.
Tanaka-sensei nodded slowly. "Well. It's good to see you're actually paying attention, Asano. Even if your conclusions are... pointed."
The moment passed. Class continued. Ren sat at his desk and felt the echo of what had just happened. He hadn't planned that. He'd opened his mouth with no intention of speaking and the truth had come out because the vow didn't give a shit about social comfort or classroom politics or keeping a low profile.
He'd said what he believed. He couldn't not say it. Because not saying it would have been a lie of omission and the vow didn't distinguish between types of dishonesty.
This was going to be a problem.
Tuesday. Isaac.
"How's the program feeling?" Isaac asked during their warm-up.
"The programming is solid. My body responds to everything you give me faster than it should and we both know that's not normal."
Isaac stopped mid-stretch. "Did you just... actually admit that?"
"Yeah."
"You NEVER admit that. I've been asking about your weird gains for weeks and you've been dodging it every time."
"I know. I'm not going to dodge it anymore."
"So what is it? What's actually happening?"
Ren looked at him. Isaac's face was open, curious, not suspicious anymore but genuinely wanting to understand. This was his friend. His coach. The guy who tracked which side he slept on based on trap tightness.
The truth was: I'm reinforcing my muscles with a supernatural energy from a different fictional universe's power system that nobody in this world has ever heard of.
The vow wouldn't let him lie. But it didn't force him to answer every question. Silence wasn't dishonesty. Choosing not to speak wasn't the same as speaking falsely.
"I can't explain it yet," Ren said. "Not because I don't trust you. Because I don't have the right words for it yet. When I do, you'll be the first person I tell."
Isaac studied him. "That's the most honest thing you've ever said to me."
"Get used to it."
The vow settled into him over the week like water soaking into fabric. Not all at once. Not in a single moment of revelation. Just a slow, steady restructuring of how his brain processed the space between thought and speech.
He stopped saying "I'm fine" when he wasn't. He stopped saying "nothing" when his mom asked what he was thinking about. He stopped shrugging off questions he knew the answers to and started giving answers that made people uncomfortable, not because he was trying to be difficult but because the comfortable version of the answer was a lie and the lie wouldn't form anymore.
His mom noticed by Wednesday.
"You're being very... direct lately," she said at dinner, carefully, like she was handling something fragile.
"I made a decision about how I want to carry myself. Part of that is being honest."
"I appreciate that. I do. But honey, when Mrs. Takahashi from next door asked how her garden looked this morning and you said 'the roses are fine but the arrangement lacks any coherent design philosophy,' she cried for twenty minutes."
"The arrangement didn't have a coherent design philosophy."
"Ren."
"I'm working on the delivery. The honesty part is non-negotiable."
His mom looked at him the way she sometimes looked at his dad when his dad said something that was technically correct but socially catastrophic. A mixture of love, exasperation, and the quiet acceptance that this was her life now.
"Just... try to be kind while you're being honest."
"I can do that."
That one was true.
But the real change was internal.
The thoughts he couldn't think anymore. The small lies of self-comfort that every person ran on like background software. "I'm ready for this." "I can handle it." "I'm strong enough." If they weren't true, they didn't stick. They dissolved before they could settle, rejected by his own cursed energy like a body rejecting a transplant.
Which meant on the days when he WASN'T ready, when he COULDN'T handle it, when he WASN'T strong enough, he felt it. All of it. Unfiltered. No cushioning between himself and reality.
On Thursday night he opened the domain. Twenty minutes, comfortable hold, Judgeman floating behind him in the empty courtroom.
He tried Decree on the podium. This podium is insignificant.
The CE cost was almost nothing. Because he genuinely didn't care about the podium. The judgment was true. The technique responded instantly, cleanly, with none of the friction he'd been fighting for months.
He tried again. The guillotine on the far wall. That blade is insignificant.
Slightly more expensive. A guillotine blade was objectively dangerous. But inside the domain, where violence was forbidden, it genuinely was insignificant. The cost was low because the judgment was honest.
He dropped the domain and checked himself. CE reserves were barely dented. Normally two Decree uses inside a domain would've cost him meaningful energy. This time it felt like breathing.
The vow was working.
The ceiling was gone.
What was above it was going to take a while to explore. But for the first time since the template landed in his head, the path forward didn't feel like grinding against a wall.
It felt like an open road.
He sat at his desk and opened his notebook. Flipped past the philosophy essay. Past the law notes. Past the three bullet points of meta knowledge. To a fresh page.
He wrote: Template: 2.64%. Binding vow active. Decree efficiency approximately doubled. Domain drain reduced by roughly 30%. Psychological cost: still calculating.
He stared at the last line for a long time.
Then he closed the notebook, turned off the light, and went to sleep.
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