Yuji The Wise

Diary

Yuji The Wise once kept meticulous records of troop movements and moon phases, a scribe of discipline in an age that prized it; now he keeps a running tally of how many consecutive nights he has failed to sleep, and the number, like most numbers involving degens, only ever climbs. It began innocently enough, laughing with Haru on some crowded Shibuya-adjacent street corner, the kind of laughter that draws strangers the way lantern light draws moths, and within the hour he had somehow befriended three chart-obsessed degenerates who spoke of floors and rugs as though narrating their own tragic epics. Yuji, ever the chronicler, told himself he was merely observing for posterity, gathering material, a scholar among the chaos taking notes on humanity's slow gambling-fueled unraveling. Seven sleepless nights later he is still observing, still narrating, still promising himself that tomorrow he will return to structure, to ritual, to the disciplined stillness his old masters would recognize, and he says this with the weary self-awareness of a man who knows full well he will instead be awake at dawn again, laughing with Haru, watching another degen ape into something doomed. There is a kind of nobility in documenting one's own downfall with such thoroughness, he reasons, even if the footnotes are mostly just him losing.