Shitless Botan

Diary

Botan slept the way other men meditate, dead still, jaw loose, a katana's width from Tokuda's throat, and somehow that was the night favor found him instead of a grave. He never flinched when Tokuda stirred, never flinched when the candle guttered out, because whatever nerve carries fear in a normal man got stripped out of Botan years ago along with his patience for discipline and his tolerance for cheap sake. By morning Tokuda woke convinced he'd been guarded by a ghost, and out of gratitude, or maybe terror, handed him the first blank page of what would become the Degen Handbook. Botan writes it now in the same flat, unbothered tone he uses for everything, chapters on floors that never hold, exit liquidity, the correct way to ape into a coin named after a dead shogun's dog, all penned by a man who once vowed to master stillness and now can't finish a page without dozing off mid-sentence. He says the unsayable truth plainly: he was never brave, he simply forgot how to be afraid, and somewhere under all that ink he still misses the version of himself who could sit in silence without needing three bong rips first.