Junichiro Reborn

Diary

They say Junichiro Reborn died once already, and the man himself neither confirms nor denies it, only smiles the smile of someone who has read the ending and found it agreeable. On a morning thick with mist, the kind that swallows blades and reputations alike, he crossed steel with a clan of ninja who moved like rumors and struck like debt collectors, and somewhere between the third parry and the fifth insult he caught a disease no shrine could name. He did not curse the fever. He welcomed it the way a degen welcomes a rug, already composing the legend where getting wrecked was the plan all along. Back at the dojo he vows, between sips of shochu and hits from a joint shaped suspiciously like a wakizashi, to return to the old discipline, cold baths, dawn kata, silence, and every single morning that vow gets aped into snooze buttons and worse decisions. Still he grins through the chills, insisting the sickness is proof he was alive enough to be touched by it, and that in itself, he says, is a kind of victory no doctor will ever properly diagnose.