Part II - The First Sin of the Saviour

Tell me, my friends, if a man has to become a monster to save humanity, at what point does his salvation cease to justify his very existence?

And if the world kneels before him, not out of fear but gratitude, who will even have the courage to tell him that he has gone too far?

Perhaps the biggest tragedy of Ryuk's story is that his downfall did not begin when he first abandoned goodness, but when he discovered that goodness alone could not give him the world he dreamed of.

It began with a cold winter.

The eastern provinces had suffered their worst harvest in centuries. Children we're starving in the streets while governors locked away in their remaining grains, waiting for desperation to raise its price tenfold. Ryuk meanwhile ordered the granaries opened. The governors refused, arguing that preserving their reserves was a necessary step to protect the kingdom against similar famine of such scale in the future.

Ryuk summoned them to his chambers later. He listened to their arguments, looked over their figures and stared deeply at the map of the starving provinces long after his advisers had left. He could easily seize the grain but the coming winter might prove their warnings quite correct. He could negotiate but every day of hesitation meant another child might die of hunger.

For the first time in many years, Ryuk did not know which decision would save the most lives.

Then he remembered the faces of those who had come to him begging for a single piece of bread.

By morning...he governors were lying dead, and their grain belonged to the people.

By spring, thousands had survived who otherwise might have perished overnight.

The people called him a just ruler. The priests called him merciful. His soldiers called him a king worthy of their sweat and blood.

And Ryuk, watching a child receive bread that morning, believed what he had done was the right thing.

Perhaps he had,

But there is one question humanity rarely asks when justice produces a desirable outcome: does a good consequence make a decision truly righteous, or just makes us willing to forgive the person who did it?

Ryuk had killed his own men to save childrens. Yet beneath that noble and pure justification lay a ver dangerous precedent: if the outcome was good enough, maybe the method no longer even mattered.

His first sin was not really murder,
It was discovering that murder could be justified by a rightful cause.

When a minister questioned his decision that night, Ryuk asked him whether he would have preferred to let children starve to death. No one could answered Or perhaps they did, but their answers became too difficult to defend when the person questioning them had already saved everything they loved.

Ryuk had learned something truly extraordinary: people rarely judge power by what it actually does, but by what they believe would happen without it.

And so his authority grew even further, not merely through conquest, but through sincere gratitude.

Years passed. His kingdom prospered further, its enemies weakened, and its people grew accustomed to a peace they no longer could remember living without.

They had once trusted Ryuk because he had proven himself worthy of their faith and devotion. Now they considered him worthy because they had already placed their faith in him and were unable to question it.

That was how a saviour became unquestionable: not by silencing every doubt against him, but by making doubt itself feel like a betrayal to their very self.

Then came the rebellion...

Its leader was a man named Arthur, a boy Ryuk had once found dying in the snow storm during the famine. Ryuk had personally given him bread and water, ordered his wounds properly treated, and personally ensured his family survived the winter without any issue. Arthur had grown into a really capable commander who admired the king enough to truly understand exactly what he was fighting against.

When their armies finally faced one another, Arthur sent Ryuk a letter first.

You saved my life when the world had forgotten it even mattered. I have never forgotten that debt I owe you. But you saved me so that I might live, not so that you might decide how I must live every second of my life. I will always be grateful for the man who gave me hope in my final moments however I cannot surrender my freedom to the man who now demands it.

Ryuk read the letter twice with a calm gaze.

He remembered the starving boy on death's door. For a moment, he even wondered whether the kingdom he had built had become something its people needed to be actually saved from.

Then he looked at the reports of murdered soldiers and ravaged villages.

He folded the letter in half.

The rebels had chosen uncertainty over submission to his rule. To Ryuk, this was absolute madness. He had witnessed the true horrors of a world without order; how could they willingly risk returning back to it?

"Yet perhaps freedom had never meant living without any fear. Perhaps it meant having the right to decide which fears was worth enduring and which were not."

Ryuk could understand their suffering and grief but What he could no longer accept was their refusal to let him resolve it like he always had.

He offered the rebels peace, provided they surrendered their weapons and swore never to challenge his rule ever again.

The council members praised his mercy,

But considering the cruelty hidden inside that offer. Ryuk was willing enough to forgive any crime except the one that threatened his authority. He would tolerate disobedience only if it promised never to happen again by any means.

"Was he actually protecting his people, or had he begun protecting his right to decide what protection truly meant"

In the royal capital, a royal guard dragged an elderly baker from his shop for questioning about his taxes. His daughter watched from the doorway, her hands trembling around a single loaf of bread. She knew the arrest was unjust but She also remembered the winter Ryuk had fed her family and saved them form starvation.

So she said nothing and kept quite.

The guard quietly disappeared with her father, and the girl returned inside, grateful for the king who had once saved her family and terrified of the king she could no longer even question.

Ryuk had not ordered her silence. He had simply created a world in which she believed silence was the price of gratitude.

And that, I think is where the most dangerous transformations truly begin: when love becomes ownership, when responsibility becomes control, and when a man mistakes his inability to tolerate another person's suffering for the right to govern their souls.

Ryuk still believed himself to be a good and righteous man.

But his goodness had acquired a condition: the world was free to choose, provided it chose him.

He no longer viewed resistance as evidence that his judgment might be flawed. He saw it as evidence that people could not be trusted with their own freedom.

The rebellion would be crushed sooner or later. The kingdom would survive and grow further, and its people would continue to praise the man who had brought them everlasting peace.

Yet Ryuk had discovered something he could never entirely unlearn: he could justify almost anything and everything if the alternative frightened him enough.

His first sin was not that he spilled innocent blood. It was that he was able to find a reason to call it necessary, then mistook the world's gratitude for proof that he was right.

And somewhere beneath his golden crown, a question he refused to answer was slowly beginning to take shape.

If a man must reshape the meaning of freedom itself to preserve peace, what exactly is he saving?

Ryuk would find his answer quite soon enough,
And this time, the price would not be paid by the men who defied him, but by the man he had once been.

To be continued.

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