Edmundo

Diary

Edmundo came to the Dojo the way most outsiders do, sideways, watching everyone else's back before he ever thought to watch his own, and he swears the eunuch thing at the Kyoto markets was less punishment than tuition. He'd been caught, mid-market, mid-sin, tangled up with a pair of gambling priests who traded blessings for sake money, and the temple's justice was swift, ironic, and surgical. He tells it now like a man reviewing a rugged trade, flat-voiced, foreign-eyed, no self-pity, just the dry observation that losing his balls taught him more discipline than a decade of sword drills ever did. Most nights he still tries to meditate at the Dojo's edge, cross-legged, incense lit, phone face-down beside him, and still he checks it before the stick of weed even burns halfway, chuckling at himself for being humbled twice in one lifetime and disciplined exactly zero times. He guards the gate anyway, loyal as a dog who got kicked once and decided the family was still worth keeping, because a man who has already lost his balls to holy men has nothing left to fear from degenerates.