Junichiro Reborn

Diary

They say Junichiro Reborn died once already, and the man himself never bothers to correct the rumor, only smiles that flat unhurried smile as if death were a rank he'd simply leveled past. So when a gang of bandits he was fool enough to lead into a sake house met the business end of a table, a fist, and gravity all at once, and his arm folded backward like a bad omen, he barely flinched, just studied the wrong angle of his own forearm with the mild curiosity of a man reading tea leaves. Someone shouted for a medic; Junichiro waved them off and asked instead for a fortune-teller, because bones can wait but the question of what a twice-lived man is supposed to do with a third act cannot. He'd promised himself, after the war, after the first death that wasn't quite a death, that discipline would be the thing he carried forward, no more brawling in sake houses, no more bandits mistaking charisma for command, and yet here he was again, arm broken, dignity rugged, asking the universe for a sign instead of asking his own hands to simply stop reaching for chaos. Still he sat there calm as a monk on a floor that had just collapsed beneath him, sipping sake through a straw someone handed him out of pity, already composing the next chapter of a myth he swears he isn't writing on purpose.