Jujutsu Kaisen: Tragedy Life Simulator-Chapter 108 - Nobody Believes You When You Tell the Truth [bonus]
From a distance, he could already hear the indoor court. The thump of a basketball. Sneakers screeching over polished wood.
He pushed open the double doors and stepped inside.
Gojo and Geto were in the middle of an absolute mess of a one-on-one game, the kind where neither side was pretending rules existed.
Before Hayase could say a word to Geto, Gojo, who was already in the air for a clean fadeaway three, caught sight of him in the doorway.
His whole body locked up.
Like he’d grabbed a live wire mid-jump.
Thud.
The ball slipped from his hand and bounced away across the floor.
Through the Six Eyes, Gojo saw it instantly.
Hayase’s cursed energy, which had been unremarkable before, had jumped again. Roughly another twenty-five percent. It looked like someone had pumped pressure into a sealed tank.
It was the exact same kind of jump as the day they first met.
Gojo landed with a face like he’d just swallowed a bug.
Everything he knew said total cursed energy was one of the clearest measures of innate talent. You were born with it. That was that.
But this guy, Touma Hayase, some classmate he’d known for a handful of days, kept doing the impossible. His reserves had started out mediocre, nearly pathetic, and now they kept spiking upward at a ridiculous pace.
What the hell was he?
Gojo blurted it out before he could stop himself.
"You’ve gotta be kidding me. What the hell..."
Geto, who obviously didn’t have anything like the Six Eyes, hadn’t caught on yet. He smoothly stole the loose ball, spun past an imaginary defender, and dropped in an easy layup.
Only after the shot went in did he follow Gojo’s stare toward the door.
And even without cheat-code eyes, once Geto actually focused on Hayase, that much of a jump in cursed energy was impossible to miss.
The sheer scale of it jammed the scolding he’d been about to give Gojo right in his throat.
"Satoru, don’t talk like that in pu... what the hell?!"
That was it. Gojo’s self-control fully died.
He flashed to Hayase’s side and started circling him like a giant cat that had found something deeply suspicious.
Looking clearly wasn’t enough.
He poked Hayase’s stomach. Pressed at his arms. Tried to pull his mouth open like he was checking a horse’s teeth. Then he planted both hands on Hayase’s cheeks and kneaded them with shameless enthusiasm.
Gojo looked genuinely offended by reality itself.
"You’re screwing with me. Who grows their cursed energy like this? Every couple days, like drinking water? What are you? Are you even human? Are you some curse stuffed into a human skin suit?!"
Geto saw Hayase’s soul visibly leaving his body and finally snapped out of it. He stepped in, grabbed Gojo by the collar, and dragged him backward.
"Stop that. That’s rude, Satoru."
Gojo flailed in protest, pointing accusingly at Hayase while Geto hauled him away.
"Are you blind, Suguru?! This isn’t even the first spike! At this rate, in six months his cursed energy alone is gonna get him labeled Special Grade by the higher-ups! You think this is normal?!"
Geto paused.
Then he let go of Gojo and looked at Hayase again, this time with a lot more focus.
If the growth kept going at this pace with no hard limit, then yes, that curve was ridiculous.
Gojo immediately took advantage of his freedom, jabbed a finger to within an inch of Hayase’s nose, and adopted the tone of an interrogator who had already decided the suspect was guilty.
"Nope. You’re confessing. Right now. What have you been doing behind our backs? What kind of cursed nonsense makes your energy jump like that?"
The two of them staring at him together was giving Hayase a headache.
He rubbed his sore cheeks and looked back at Gojo, whose face was practically glowing with rabid curiosity.
"Do I really have to answer that?"
Gojo’s reply came down like a guillotine.
"Yes."
Hayase sighed to himself.
Fine. Half-truth it was.
He chose his words carefully and spoke in an even voice.
"Sometimes I dream."
Gojo’s face instantly collapsed into pure disbelief.
"Huh?"
Hayase ignored that and kept going.
"I dream about the future. In those dreams, things happen that feel completely real. I spend long periods fighting. Then I wake up here, and my cursed energy has increased. It’s like the experience from the dream gets carried over."
"...That’s your explanation?"
Gojo looked like Hayase had just tried to sell him haunted discount nonsense.
He did not believe a single word.
The look in his eyes practically said it for him: I’d believe a curse tap-dancing in a school uniform before I’d believe that.
Even Geto, who had been defending him thirty seconds ago, was now wearing an expression that very clearly read Not Buying It.
Hayase’s shoulders sank a little.
Amazing. The one time I tell the truth, nobody buys it.
Since honesty had completely failed, his brain immediately changed tracks and pulled together a lie that at least fit within the jujutsu world’s existing logic.
Keeping the same expression, he said, "Fine. I’ll be honest. My Innate Technique is a weird one. When my analysis and mastery of it pass certain thresholds, my maximum cursed energy permanently increases as a kind of feedback."
Privately, Hayase braced for impact.
Without Life is Like a Play cushioning things, what he’d just described sounded suspiciously like leveling up in a game. He expected the two geniuses in front of him to tear it apart in seconds.
Instead, both of them accepted it so fast it nearly gave him whiplash.
Geto let his hand fall from Gojo’s collar, touched his chin, and muttered thoughtfully, "I see... a principle of equivalent exchange."
Gojo, who had looked like skepticism made flesh a moment ago, was suddenly nodding like he’d cracked the case.
"I knew it. Based on my unmatched, world-famous expertise, that’s obviously a strict Binding Vow built into your technique. It all lines up. No wonder your cursed energy was trash-tier when you enrolled even though your technique was weird. You paid for this growth system with your starting reserves."
"..."
Hayase stared at them.
Actually stared.
The two of them had managed to sprint all the way to a conclusion they built themselves, and somehow they looked proud of it.
His eye twitched.
"Hold on. You’re listening to me describe something that sounds exactly like grinding experience points to level up, and neither of you thinks that sounds weird?"
Gojo and Geto exchanged a look.
Then both of them turned back toward him with the sort of gentle, tolerant expression older students used on a clueless first-year.
Great. Now they were going to explain reality to him.
"Right," Gojo said. "You came into this world late. You’re not from a sorcerer family, so you wouldn’t know this stuff."
He laced his hands behind his head and rocked on his heels.
"In the jujutsu world, there’s an absolute law called a Binding Vow. Think of it like a cost. You give something up, and in exchange you get power that’s equal or even greater in value. The most extreme example is Heavenly Restriction. Some members of the Big Three are born with it. Their cursed energy gets completely stripped away, and in return they get physical ability way beyond what humans should have."
Geto picked it up from there, sounding warm, patient, and maddeningly earnest.
"So your situation, where cursed energy unlocks as your technique develops, is unusual, but not impossible. Jujutsu is rooted in curses. Power almost always comes tied to a cost. And for a technique as extraordinary as Phantom Night Parade, carrying a heavy Binding Vow like this isn’t something to be discouraged by. If anything, it shows your potential runs deeper than people can measure."
Don’t be discouraged?
Hayase went completely silent.
This was not how he’d pictured any of this going.
He had meant to throw out a disposable excuse.
Instead, somehow, he’d ended up cast as the bright-eyed rookie being gently reassured by two prodigies who thought they understood his problem better than he did.
The role reversal hit so hard he genuinely had no idea what face he was supposed to make.
Gojo, clearly delighted with his own reasoning, lifted his chin and moved the conversation along.
"Anyway, why’d you come here?"
Hayase shoved the lingering absurdity aside, nodded once, and looked toward Geto.
"Yeah. You both saw it, right? My technique proficiency improved again, so..." He paused, then finished plainly. "Geto, I wanted to ask if you’d spar with me. A guided match. I need to know where I stand."
---
A/n: Approximate cursed energy values for reference.
[0: Baseline ordinary human]
[10: Average sorcerer tier (Maki pre-Restriction, Miwa)]
[20: Inumaki, Nobara]
[30: Grade 1 threshold]
[60: Special Grade threshold] 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚
[80: Yuta Okkotsu]
[120: Sukuna]
