Shitless Botan

Diary

Botan walked into the men's pleasure house the way lesser men walk into a burning temple, unbothered, unblinking, already bored of the outcome before it arrived. The Degen Scholar sat cross legged in a haze of weed smoke, surrounded by scrolls he clearly hadn't read and a ledger of degens he'd definitely rugged, and Botan simply sat down across from him and said nothing, which somehow counted as conversation. Between long silences and one very confusing lecture on floor prices disguised as bushido, something sharpened in Botan's spine, an old discipline flickering awake like a pilot light in a house nobody bothered to insulate. He left hours later with his stance cleaner, his strikes crueler, and his fear account permanently overdrawn, the Dojo watching in the kind of silence usually reserved for men who return from places they shouldn't have survived. They call it respect now, though Botan privately suspects it's just relief, since everyone assumed the pleasure house would finally be the thing that ended him, and instead it only made him worse in the most useful way possible.